powerless // f.w

Stress, Press, and A Lack Of Light

Once she reached her trailer undetected, she closed the door behind her and immediately fell into the couch.

It wasn't that Declan didn't like people.

She loved people. She found them endlessly interesting and intriguing. The individuality. The thought. The expressions. Declan wanted to know and experience and capture it all.

And people liked her. There was a reason she was in so many projects. She was talented and funny and thoughtful and artistic. But most of those people were adults, or those older than her.

At age 17, with a primary interest in 80s and 90s rock and punk bands, lazy 90s fashion, film photography and video, and documentaries about normalcy and horror and American teenage life, she wasn't like most of her peers.

She didn't shop at Brandy Melville or own jeans that weren't black. She was plenty skinny but she was no size two. She didn't have blonde hair, if anything she had dyed it nearly the rainbow over the past few years—red and black were her favorites, she despised having her picture taken, she didn't have social media or a smartphone for that matter, she didn't live in a nice house, she didn't have much of a family, she didn't do press, she hated the spotlight, she had no interest in the drama of other people's lives, and she desperately hated and tried to avoid living a fake life.

She wanted authenticity over everything. She wanted to create. She wanted her life and her work to mean something more than reviews.

This made it hard for her to ~connect~ with the peers of her generation... at least that's what Cameron said.

So while Declan came off to most people as cold and calculative and apathetic—Millie being the exception of course because she was an angel without a bad word to say about anyone and you couldn't help but adore her—she really wasn't. She just didn't get along with people who indulged in their fame and attention. She loved what she did—she was in all kinds of films, TV shows, and now music videos—but she was a private person, she always had been. She didn't want every part of her life out there for people to see. Older people in the business understood this much more. It was why her best friend was 20 when she was 17, it's why she got along well with Charlie and Natalia and Maya and Winona. This was the first thing Declan was doing that had more than two other kids in the cast.

All of this—her privacy, her interests, her goals, and the projects, often darker, that she had chosen to take part in—made her the black sheep of her generation. Made it even more difficult for her to connect with her peers because they didn't know how to approach her. At a young age, she figured the world must not have really liked who she was, so she toughened up. And whenever she had to let that hardened guard down—to talk to someone or act or promote her projects—it took a lot out of her, to constantly be "on", to be right and kind and true. It's why she often wasn't. Being away was easier. Out of the light and of the danger zone.

She admired Millie and others like her for their ability to shine in the spotlight, she just crumbled.

"Long day?" Cam asked from the doorway after a minute.

"Eh" She smirked before going to sit beside him. "So press?" She sighed.

"So press" Cameron nodded, "There are 17 stops on the tour. LA, San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Seattle, New York City, Houston, Miami, Chicago, Pittsburg, Washington DC, Vancouver, Paris, London, Sydney, Barcelona, and Tokyo" He winced at the list as he read it out loud.

He looked up slowly and his locked eyes with Declan's for a brief moment before they both started laughing.

"Oh fuck" Declan chuckled, huffing and rolling her eyes.