Limelight

Paizley: Memory

(It's been way too long, I'm sorry...! It's been hard to find the time to write without falling asleep at my laptop lately. The TV series fic hasn't been updated in ages... I'm struggling to figure out episode 4, but hopefully it'll be coming soon. And I recently came up with a new, very angsty story idea involving Zephzo. It'll be a while before I get to that, tho. Oh, and I'm sorry about this but there won't be any more Hazabelle. The ship kind of lost its momentum and I can't find a way to make it work with the characters I have for Izabelle and Hazen, but krut09 might write a sort of AU for Hazabelle at some point. I'll be rewriting their one-shot when I get the chance so they're friends instead, I should be able to work with that

Onto this one-shot! I love me some angst and I've had ideas for angsty stuff for 2 of my 3 fav BGZ, Izabelle and Alonzo, but I couldn't find a way to make my other fav, Paizley, anything but a little ray of sunshine. Krut09 suggested an idea and it spiralled into this mess. Paizley's tragic backstory. I'll apologise now)

AZALEA: the zombie cleaning off the graffiti outside Eliza's house in My Year (Eliza's older sister)

____________________________________________

Paizley was a beacon of positivity in Zombie Town. A slightly weird big-sister-figure to all the zombie teens (though even more so to Zed and Zoey); cheerful, friendly, creative and just a little bit eccentric. But everyone remembered the one day, years ago, when they saw her broken seemingly beyond repair, crying and screaming in the street. Nothing more than a child and yet so cruelly hurt. Everyone remembered.

Everyone but Paizley herself.

Her love for the old and unusual began with her parents – they both worked at Seabrook's recycling plant, one of the few in-town jobs offered to zombies by the humans. In fact, it was an exclusively zombie-only job. And since so much of what they came across was unwanted, despite being perfectly usable and just in need of a quick fix, because of the town's horrendously high standards, they would bring things home often.

There was nothing Paizley loved more than seeing a new pile of miscellaneous objects on the kitchen table when she got home from school. Every so often, they might let her help with fixing the broken items and it fascinated her. They taught her about all the intricate little details that went into their creation and it became a passion of hers that would last for the rest of her life.

What few things did end up unusable in the end, Paizley would recycle herself into an ornament in her room. Sometimes, she even turned them into sculptures that, despite confusing the other zombies her age, she loved with all her heart. She poured everything she had into her work. Studying their history and uses, crafting her masterpieces and arranging them just so in her bedroom. The rest of the house was filled with the things her parents fixed up but her room was her treasure trove. They were comforting, a constant in her life she could always rely on. Whenever Zed came over with his parents, she would try to show him and teach him how everything worked, or how they were made or where they came from, but he never seemed interested. He didn't understand why all these old things were so precious to her. But they were.

They were...

- LIMELIGHT –

The day it happened started out perfectly normal, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Paizley had been home from school for an hour or so and was tinkering away at her latest project up in her room when she heard a knock at the front door, loud and authoritative. She ignored it, knowing her mom or dad would answer it and besides, she was busy. But then came the sounds of arguing, one of the voices being her mother's, and Paizley paused to listen.

"You can't ju-"

There was a slam as the door hit the wall. Footsteps. More voices. Her mother's desperate pleading. Her father asking what was going on. It was enough to bring Paizley out of her blissful state and send her running to the top of the stairs. The sight she was met with made her freeze and she dropped the screwdriver she didn't even know she was still holding.