Extra Ordinary (Riddle Era)

Chapter 26

Lucy's head was a jumble of pieces that didn't fit together. It was a mix of pieces from too many different puzzles and she couldn't solve any of them. She was frazzled and frayed and furious. But she also wasn't surprised. She knew she'd brought it on herself. She knew she'd been foolish. Because at the end of the day, she knew better than to look at the shadow that lurked in the corner. Knew better than to open the door for it. Knew better than to think about him. About what he had done. To her. To the world. To himself.

And yet she had. Worse, she had said it out loud. Spoken words that made it all the more real. And God she wanted to take them back. Wanted to swallow them and lock that door and fix her gaze elsewhere so she could go on pretending the world was always as full of sunshine as she had spent a lifetime imagining. So she could go on pretending that door didn't exist and he darkness beyond it was as imaginary as magic had once been to her.

Usually, she was good at this. Very good. But right now... right now she couldn't seem to manage it. She hadn't been able to in that room with Tom and now it was far too late and God she hadn't slipped so badly in so long but... But every word out of Tom's mouth had made it worse.

It was her own fault too. She'd forced him into the conversation, she knew that. She'd pressed him, like a teacher pressing a child to admit their wrongdoings. And she'd been so sure that when faced with that pressure, when faced with lying to her face and knowing she would catch him, Tom would admit what she'd been so certain he knew: that the only reason he'd found her words insulting at all was because he was terrified of being just like everyone else. That the only thing wrong with ordinary was less the condition itself and more the fact that it meant that he had to lump himself in with the masses he had spent a lifetime pretending he didn't belong to.

But he hadn't admitted that. He hadn't understood it. And for all her pressure, all her leading questions and pointed comments, all aimed at pushing him headfirst into the moment of realization, all she'd managed was to push him until he snapped.

She should have seen it coming. She knew that. And she wasn't a complete fool; she had see it coming, at least in the sense that she'd thought the snap was possible. But she'd been a fool not to realize what his snapping would look like.

What's wrong with ordinary? It had been a simple question. The culmination of this conversation. But his response...

Everything!

For a moment, Lucy hadn't been able to breathe. Not because the response was unexpected. But because she'd heard it before. About her own ordinariness. About all the ways it had been, in her father's eyes, her greatest failure. The reason she and her mother had needed to be discarded. Because she had been, and always would be, painfully, beautifully, simply, ordinary. And in her father's head, there was everything, everything, wrong with that.

Her response had been automatic. Poorly thought through. If her head had been on straight, if her eyes hadn't been blinded by the realization that that shadow that usually kept itself to the corners at Christmastime and birthdays was lurking right in front of her, if she had just... thought, she might have realized that her answering question was dangerously close to crossing a line. That she had spoken with the detached calmness that had become habit. That sounded like a scolding. That would only make him angrier. And God it had.

And from there, the greater goal, the realizations she'd been trying to push him towards, any semblance of a plan had been out the window. All she'd wanted, all she'd needed, was to make the shadow go away. To shove down those memories, beat back the darkness, lock the door and erase the voice in her head that kept screaming over and over and over again everything everything everything.