A/N: New story. Ends a little but there is more to come.
There are three sides to every battle. There’s the fight for good, there is the bad and then there is reality, when in order to protect everything good, you become the one thing you have tried so hard to fight; evil.
When Dad and I moved here, it was supposed to be for change. A new house, new town, new everything but I didn’t believe that anything had really changed. It was a fresh chance to live without the haunting of our past. Thoughts of my last moments before we came here played and flickered in my mind like a movie.
I looked blankly out of the window as I watched us pass the empty house which was once our home. I watched the patch of azaleas that had cushioned my fall when I first learnt to ride a bike. I watched my tyre swing sway in the wind. I watched as everything I had ever known, my memories, and my childhood; passed me by. Leaving nothing but a shell of what once was.
“Georgia, stop worrying. Everything will be fine. You’ll make new friends, and you will feel back to normal in no time. I promise.” Mr Bradley said, quickly glancing over his shoulder to look at me. I could feel his stare but I ignored him. If I hadn’t, I would have probably thrown a fit, telling him how stupid he sounded. “Georgia?” he said waiting my response, but turned to face the road again. “I know you can hear me and it’s rude to ignore people Georgia.”
“My name,” I spat, “is Yuri.” The car suddenly came to a halt and Mr Bradley turned sharply to face me. His face was a bright red, I could tell I was pissing him off, but it was all part of the fun. I saw him count mentally to ten before speaking to me.
“Listen, I’m not the enemy here. My job is to keep you safe and I can not do that if you keep fighting me. I’m on your side Geor…Yuri.” I sighed. He was right, I was just annoyed and I was taking it out on him.
“He’s right darling,” Dad said, speaking for the first time since we got in the car. “Nothing matters more than your safety, our safety.” I stared into his ice blue eyes and I begged myself to believe what they were telling me, but this was just another bunch of words to me.
“Okay Dad, But I’m not changing my name.” Mr Bradley checked his watch and started up the engine again, looking at me through the mirror. I knew what he wanted, he wanted me to beg. Dad still stared at me hopelessly. “Please, Tom. Please.” He breathed a breath of hidden contentment and surrender.
“I’ll see what I can do, but for now can you just think of another name? If not Georgia, then something else, but I need to make sure. What about Hana?” I shook my head. My best friends name was Hana. She was one of our family friends. We didn’t speak anymore but I always thought about her, and not long after that, thoughts of Mum soon popped into my head.
“Oh I’m sorry Yuri; I didn’t mean to bring it up. I-”
“No,” I started smiling slightly at the faded image of my mother. “I don’t mind. I mean she’s gone isn’t she, not much I can do about that.”
“Who’s gone?” Dad asked. Mr Bradley’s grip on the wheel got slightly tighter. I forced Dad to look me in the eye. They were cold and vacant and slightly grey. I rubbed at his hand gently, it wasn’t his fault.
“Mum, she’s gone. Do you remember her?”
“Ai?” his eyes searched mine for answers.
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” was all he managed. “May I ask who you are?” I froze and quickly shot a look at Tom.
“Tell me more about Ai, Mike. I bet she was a stunner!” Tom jumped in quickly. I sat back in my seat, fighting back the tears that always stopped me from being strong, for Dad.
We may have bought a house that was just built, located in ‘beautiful’ Sunny Vista but that didn’t mean that the people living in that house were new. Heck they may not have even been ‘good’. You can buy all the new clothes you want but the people wearing it will still be the same. You can paint a sickly smile on their faces to try and fool everybody, but their mind, the memories and the scars are still there. You can’t erase the past and I was sick to death of people telling me that’s what we were going to do. Then again what happened wasn’t something I wanted to relive either. .
I wiped at the stream of tears that fell of their own accord. There was no point reminiscing about the past, the one thing I couldn’t change. I looked across my room to the poster that hung there with an innocent pride. I left it there because it reminded me every day of the promise I made myself when we first moved here. As soon as I was eighteen I was going to pack us up and get the heck out. As long as that was up, the window for my escape was still open. The dull thud of the front door closing snapped me out of my spell. Tom was here, which meant I had to be walking on eggshells and holding my tongue, or one of us was going to be at the bottom of the river that ran through the town. It wasn’t so much that we hated each other it was more the fact that I despised him with every breath in my body and he did everything in his power to have this impossibly strong hold on me. He had since I was young… I didn’t even want to think about it.
I took in a breath and marched down the stairs to see Dad and Tom both looking over the same letter.
“What’s that?” I asked, avoiding eye contact with Tom who knew how uneasy his presence made me.
“A letter from the university, they offered me a place as a professor starting this term.” I stood staring at him for a good minute trying to get my words together.
“Are you…can you…but…?” I then turned to glare at Tom. “You, this is your doing isn’t it? You know very well that he can’t do something like this!” He held out his hands in surrender.
“I’ll have you know that this was none of my doing.”
“He’s right Ri-Ri. I applied for this job before we moved out here.” Both Dad and Tom looked at me awaiting a response.
“Well, since no-one thinks that my opinion is worthy I might as well just leave right?”
“I’m sorry this is news to you but I intend to go ahead with it.” There wasn’t much I could say after that, so I just scoffed, grabbed my keys and left.
The road outside was quiet and still. The town itself didn’t seem bad, it just wasn’t me. I followed our road around the houses in the area through a sparsely crowded wood and right to the school road. So this is where she was expected to spend thirty hours of her week, Yuri thought. She noticed that every house on the black looked alike or the same. The same wooden fence around the garden, the same white painted bricks as well as the same cars parked in the drive way. How people could sit in their homes and be satisfied that it was unique, that it was practically identical to the one next door and the one next door to that was hard to understand. Yuri’s dad had been very picky about what he was going to buy. It was on the same street as the doppelgangers but definitely in a different league.
Unlike the other houses this one had some character, life almost. Its three story build made it soar about the bungalows. It was a mixture of crazy new and old frozen in time; a grand building that had a sense of wisdom and secrets that were seeping through the bricks. It was the one thing that made the whole move exciting
The wind whistled through the trees, playing a tune in time to Yuri’s stroll. She turned down a hill that was deserted but weirdly comforting. She like the quiet, it was a place to think. She then found herself outside a basketball court where six boys ran, dodged and jumped about. She stood outside the gate not too far from where a group of little girls ogled them. Yuri followed the ball with her eyes until she could no longer see it when the ball came over the fence, hitting her squarely on the head. The power of the blow knocked her to the ground. Everything from her satchel spilled around her and she was left lying, surrounded by the girls laughter.
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Hope you like it :D
