Title: >>tears, [[fears]] and trials
Description: Kendra//Gavin
christina bones - July 27, 2007 01:11 PM (GMT)
Sometimes Christina hated nothing more than coming home because home was full of all the things she was trying to avoid. She had spent the day out with CJ, just sitting around and talking, kissing and catching up, and she had been quite tempted to accept his offer of dinner at the Frost mansion just to avoid coming home for a few hours more. However, she was no more in the mood for dinner with Bambi Pratt than she was for dinner with her family and so she had found herself shrugging and telling CJ that she had to go home to spend time with her family. He had understood, family time had become a lot more important to everybody since the war. So instead of eating a rather hectic, but delicious, meal at CJ‘s Christina found herself standing at her front door. As luck would have it she came home just in time to see her mother go out for the night, dressed in what Fred and Christina now dubbed her ‘on the pull‘ outfit. It had once been the dress her mother wore on anniversaries but now it was the dress she used to help her in her misguided attempts at getting over her grief.
Christina couldn‘t bear to look as her mother walked past, ignoring the ‘night sweetie‘ that issued from her mother‘s lips. She hated that her mother was now rivalling Bambi for the biggest slut in town spot, hated the fact that people had started to shake their heads in disapproval at Leah Bones when they met her in the street, hated that some people were claiming that her mother had felt trapped in her marriage and now she was making up for lost time. Even thought Christina knew that they were lying she couldn‘t bear to think that people would say that about her father and her mother. To Christina her father had been practically canonised in her mind after his death, she knew that he had done wrong but she didn‘t like to think of those things anymore. She didn‘t want her memories ruined. She stayed on the doorstep for a good five minutes after her mother left, staring at the door as she tried to compose herself. She simply refused to cry in front of everybody, these days only Fred was allowed to see her cry and then only when he was sad or angry too. It was her way of coping, with it all.
Finally she pushed open the front door and stepped over the threshold, “I’m home.” she said quietly, hoping that no one would come and ask her what she had been up to. She was having a hard enough time remaining composed without someone coming up to her and trying to talk. She knew how much of a burden she must be to Kendra in particular and she hated that, but in her darker moments she simply didn’t know what to do about it. Whenever those moods cleared she was always as helpful as she could possibly be but that didn’t make up for how she acted when she was feeling down. She didn’t know how to make it up to them all. Sliding into the dining room she tried frantically to avoid her cousin as Evan moved through the room. Thankfully her cousin was wrapped up in herself and what she was doing and Christina managed to make it past her with only a nod of acknowledgement. One down, three to go. A glance over her shoulder at the coat rack told her that both of her brothers were out, Fred was probably with Sabrina or one of his other female fans and Jacob was probably with Jenny. In that moment Christina wished that Fred was back here, just so that she could have someone to hang on to. Instead she slunk out of the dining room, hoping to make her way up to her room unnoticed. It was, unfortunately that moment that Evan decided to say hi. Christina’s response surprised even her, the voice that issued from her mouth was so full of cold and full of something that felt like malice. She couldn’t even make out the words she used, she just knew that her voice was louder than normal and she made it perfectly clear that she wanted to be left alone. The look on Evan’s face was enough to make Christina push past her and run, up the stairs, past the boy’s room and into her own. Slamming the door behind her she slid down it in defeat. Resting her head on her knees she angrily blinked back the first tears. She knew it was futile, the tears were going to come and she couldn’t stop that, but it was the last actions she had to prove that she was in control of herself.
She gave up this attempt at self control only a few seconds later and cried the quiet tears she was so accustomed with now. Hearing footsteps approaching her room she leant her head back against her door and spoke in a perfectly controlled voice, “I said I want to be left alone.” If she spoke like that maybe whoever it was wouldn’t realise she was crying and hopefully they’d take heed from her words and let her cry in peace.
kendra furrows - July 27, 2007 03:30 PM (GMT)
The kitchen was a mess, food had already been cleared and Kendra Furrows, aunt to three and mother to one, had placed food in a container for whenever Christina decided to return. It could be microwaved, the thirty-three year old beauty was washing dishes as she heard her sister shuffle about in the next room. Something about ear-rings but she wasn't paying attention. Leah's actions had been cause for concern but even more so she knew the morning after was the time for fighting and lectures, Leah was always a little to joyous before then. Kendra knew tonight would be another night of staying up and making sure strange men weren't dragged into the house. She was all for helping but it was as though she was a mother of six instead of one. As she wiped down the last plate her sister emerged and while drying her hands she glanced over her shoulders. Leah was placing in ear-rings, sighing Kendra returned her focus to drying her hands which she suddenly found all the more interesting. Her light, red hair slipped across her silken caucasian cheeks and her lips where pursed with disapproval. She was the youngest Furrows sister, and she was acting more mature, "Leah. We should talk." As she had guessed, it was non-effective as Leah gave her a brisk hug and smile before leaving the room.
Rolling her emerald eyes she followed her for a bit, before shrugging and deciding to wait to morning. Evan, her daughter, strolled around her focus clearly on the iPod as Kendra pulled the earphones from her ears. "Too loud," she said simply, "I can hear it too." Sighing she returned to the kitchen as she sat down with a book she had been given by Atticus while striking a conversation on literature, which she had little interest in. The Great Gatsby. She had always thought it had been a made up book for movies but it was real and she now sat at Chapter Three. Quite content in her own little world, stroking the top of the page with her fingers she was snapped out of it by the sound of banging. Looking up in shock she gathered her wits while walking briskly to the door, "What the...?" Jacob was out with whatever Jennifer Linkin was to him and Freddy had just left with Sabrina. So either Evan was banging around or it was Christina, who had returned. Entering the dining room she saw Evan standing in shock, as she walked off towards her own bedroom. "Christina," muttered Kendra as she moved towards the foot of the stairs. Taking her breath she walked up them, her footsteps reverberated off the walls and she knew Christina would need to talk. Evan could be handled later. Walking slowly, for fear of being hit by an oncoming object she listened to the muffled sobs that left the room.
Standing by the door Kendra wrapped it with her knuckles, her ear-rings dangled around her face. The air causing them to fluttered, an open window at the end of the hallway. "Chris?" she called through the door when she got no response, "are you okay?" Contorting her face she felt foolish, obviously something was wrong. She was crying. No answer but the crying continued, taking her chances she reached for the handle, "I'm coming in." Pushing open the door she took her first step in and saw Christina, trying not to cry but failing miserably.
christina bones - July 27, 2007 10:13 PM (GMT)
There was only one thing worse that your mother being too wrapped up in herself to act like your mother and that was watching someone have to take her place. Christina didn’t know if she hated Kendra for doing so or Leah for being in such a state that Kendra was forced to do so. One thing was for certain, Christina wasn’t very happy with either her mother or her aunt and it was simply a case of who was around to bear the brunt of her unhappiness. The thing that annoyed her most was how well Kendra was coping with them all, her own mother hadn’t been able to last a single day with all the grief that surrounded her and yet Kendra had managed to stay afloat. Christina loved her aunt, she really did, but she didn’t want her to be her mother. She wanted her real mother back and she wanted her father back too, it was so much harder to move on when you all you wanted to do was move backwards. Because backwards meant going to a time when everything was happy and everything was sorted out in the way it should be whereas forwards was change, disorganisation and emotion running high. Forwards was so far out of Christina’s comfort zone she didn’t know how to find her way into it again.
She didn’t answer when Kendra tried to speak to her through her door, it was part of the whole thing about crying alone: you didn’t go and start having a heart to heart half way through. Unfortunately Kendra was apparently unfamiliar with said rule and pushed open Christina’s bedroom door anyway. Chris wished she’d taken the precaution of locking the door but it was too late now, instead she just made sure that her face was well and truly hidden and hoped that her aunt would take the hint and leave. The problem was that the minute Kendra came in Christina became more and more uncomfortable; she hated crying in front of people and she especially hated crying over something so trivial in front of people. Finally, after what felt like an age of silence, she raised her head and murmured thickly, “I said I wanted to be left alone Aunt Kendra, that wasn‘t an open invitation to come on in.” She hated the person she became when she got like this but she couldn’t help it, cutting people out was the only way she knew how to cope and so she did so on a regular basis. Even thought it was rude and despicable and she hated herself afterwards. She let her red rimmed eyes meet her Aunt’s clear ones, hoping that this would placate her Aunt, make her think that Christina was trusting her that little bit more than she did the day before. She did, sort of, but she wasn’t going to vocalise that.
Like everyone in the world Christina looked awful when she cried: her eyes puffed up and shone as red as her nose, her cheeks turned a hideously ghostly white upon which the tracks of her tears remained visible until she washed her face. Thankfully she wasn’t one for the mucus, but all the same she looked pretty bad. Not quite as bad as she felt thankfully, Christina wasn’t one to wish that sort of thing on the world. If people could see the turmoil of emotions that raged within her right now…well there was a reason she preferred not to indulge in that kind of thing. As she sat there in the silence she couldn’t help but ask a single question, one that found its way out of her mouth before she knew what was happening, “Don‘t you even try and stop her from going out anymore?” she didn’t need to say who she was talking about, it wasn’t as if she’d object to Evan going out partying all night and whilst Kendra might care about that kind of thing it certainly wasn’t at the top of Christina’s top worry list. That was already occupied by things she didn’t think she’d ever work out how to shift.