Hide & Seek | Roman Godfrey • Hemlock Grove

01; Prelude • Welcome Back

A/N: To keep the note short and sweet, I own nothing from Hemlock Grove. Fawn is mine, as are any other unrecognized characters. Let me know what you think, pretty please?

- - -

She is fourteen years old the first time she feels her heart shattering in her chest.

He is standing in front of her with a smug grin plastered lazily across his full lips, his arms crossed over his chest. He has just told her that what happened last weekend in the woods meant absolutely nothing to him, was just a little fun for both of them, and by the cold look in his eyes, he means it.

In hindsight, she likes to think she might've seen that coming, had she been a little older. Fourteen year old girls are naïve in that way, though; the way the world works is a difficult lesson to learn without getting your heart broken first.

In that moment, however, she is ultimately crushed. Her head had been filled with delusions, lovely thoughts of going steady with the boy every girl wants - Roman Godfrey.

After all, he'd told her how much he liked her, how pretty and special she was, right before they went 'all the way'. All the charming things smooth-talking teenaged boys say to get a girl's pants off a little easier.

She can't form words through the stillness that fills her, freezing her from the bottom up as she stares at him, mouth agape.

"I'm not your boyfriend, Fawn. Just get over it, okay?" he laughs, rolling those beautiful green eyes at her. "Who's going to believe you, anyway?"

When he says it, she believes him. She isn't popular or cool like him, just a nerdy girl with glasses and inky, box dyed black hair. She'd felt like the luckiest girl in the world when he'd so much as looked at her, let alone when he'd kissed her...

The hatred that replaces all of the rose tinted infatuation is a burning heat in her chest and if he was not significantly taller and stronger than her, she would take her chances at landing a punch to that squared jaw.

"You're ugly, Roman. Inside, I mean," she grinds out, cursing the tears that slide down her cheeks. "You've got an ugliness inside you that nobody can love."

She means the words when she says them, more than she's ever meant anything in her entire existence and her blue eyes burn with seriousness. Whatever or whoever listens in the universe, she's silently praying that they hear her words and that they sink in to every inch of his soul.

"Better ugly inside than pathetic, like you," he dismisses her insult, lighting up a cigarette and turning to leave.

- - -

She grips the steering wheel until her knuckles turn white, humming along with the radio and trying to ignore the familiar tingle of dread that tends to creep up any sane person's spine as they pass the sign that reads, 'Welcome to Hemlock Grove' in worn white letters.

It's been years since she's stepped foot in the tiny, backwards town - almost four, to be exact. Her mother hadn't given her fourteen year old much grief when she complained of missing her father and expressed a sudden desire to move to Newark to stay with him.

It had always been easier to visit Fawn in what had quickly become her home, where school and her friends surrounded her, rather than to drag her out to Hemlock Grove.

Part of her can't believe she's even coming back, although much of the misery the town caused is entirely behind her.

There are no animal attacks in Newark and it has been years since she's allowed any boy close enough to break her heart, the memories of both events fading into something far away for the now nineteen year old.