pyrite shore. one. resub.

  

pyrite shore | twenty-eight | basket-case wife of kellan fray
aries | career trainer | buy 4 rehab sessions get one free!

With parents like Mr. and Mrs. Shore it's no wonder she drank so much.

Raising their children for slaughter, the Shores transformed their home into a live-in Career training facility by the time their twin daughters turned three. All they knew was discipline, discipline, discipline, and when the biological Shore children didn't make the cut they started fetching more children from the orphanages, slapping their surname on their foreheads, and trained them some more. Money could buy houses and power and respect, but it couldn't buy a Victor. The only thing better than winning the Hunger Games was winning it over the Fray family, and Pyrite ate up hatred for their rivals for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

She was a wicked, wild girl. Dark hair and scolding blue eyes and a permanent glare, a jawline that could cut diamonds - they weren't sure where the black hair came from, but it grew fast, in thick impatient waves, no matter how many times she tried to cut it short. And that scowl, that came from within. She made teachers cry and kids bawl their eyes out and she held in her own tears, too proud to every show weakness. At thirteen she stabbed a girl through the hand with a compass for calling her Pyrite Whore - the screams just made her laugh. Everything and everyone she loathed, save for Addison Deveraux next door, who could make her smile so brightly it was almost as if she were a stranger. From toddlers to teens they were the best of friends, and although the joy in her life was a rare luxury - it always came from the same source. 

As the oldest Shore by a whole two minutes (she wasn't ever allowed to mention Emerald, the once-favourite now-dead sister, and she didn't want to) she had a responsibility to uphold. A legacy to build. A victory to strive for. Her parents put her in charge of training the new ones, correcting their stance, forcing them to balance on one hand and throw knives blindfolded and tell the difference between nightlock and blueberries. Useless, almost all of them. Pyrite would scream at her siblings until her lungs gave out and her throat dried up and even at fifteen, lying in a bed in the medical center with bronchitis, her parents looked down upon her with disgust. 

She did not know how to love, to truly love, without hurting. So she drank herself under the table and kissed Kellan Fray in the dark until it wasn't her parents shame that kept her under, it was her own. Even then, she hurt the only other person she ever loved by kissing him. Loving him. Not that she'd ever know, but she broke Addison's heart into pieces with every day that she loved Kellan Fray. And even as she loved him secretly they hurt each-other, waking up in his brother's arms and he, kissing her sisters, it was a game they played. Who could be the strongest, most ruthless, most awful. They killed each-other every night with heartbreak, never wanting to lose. To admit they felt something more. To admit the other didn't.

Because that's how she loved. Painfully, with chaos and destruction.

Opal Shore, more green-fingered than red-handed, walked out of the arena alive and shed her false surname for one of Eleven. Then Justice Fray won the games and his siblings followed suit into glorious death and that was that - the Frays had won. Furious in their defeat, Mrs. Shore slapped a nineteen year old Pyrite clean across the face and said that if her daughter couldn't beat them, she'd join them.

But the Shore parents lost again. What was meant to punish their failure of a daughter was a blessing in disguise. She sobbed and screamed and punched a hole in the wall by the staircase, because all she had left that was hers, truly hers, was the secret that she loved Kellan Fray. So Pyrite went to him, and imploded, and thought she'd lost. Because she loved Kellan, and she didn't care if he didn't feel the same way, they were bound to each other by their wicked parents and she was so damn tired of playing the game.

Turns out, he loved her too. In front of cameras and strangers and flashing bulbs they exchanged words written by other people and snuck out the back of the after party, pulling up to the bar where it all started in a suit and tie and a wedding dress. Drunk on scotch and love she said goodbye to her parents, her siblings, her pain. They all paid her visits from time to time, the latter being the most cruel, but she had tumbler glasses and Kellan Fray and a job perfect for her, and that was enough.

For a while.

Every night was another glass, another, another, some nights her anger spewed from her chest and into the toilet and other nights it shattered against the wall. She could hold down her liquor, but the mixing was what kept her bed stricken. Not that she gave a fuck, both her last names kept her in the role even if she called in hungover three times a month. She had loved Kellan Fray from the moment he ordered her a drink and she loved the drink from the moment he sat down next to her and it was one in the same, loving Kellan. Drunk. Drunk, in love. In love with being drunk.

She ended up back at the medical center eight years later, a drip in her arm and a bucket in her arms and her stomach pumped. Her husband looked down at her and Pyrite saw the same disappointment in his eyes that her parents had held. So she hid the drink from him. Kept in in her locker at work, in her handbag, in Addison's closet. The kids were driving her crazy and one of them had the nerve to scream back at her that morning and she sat in the work showers, flask in her hand, punched the tile so hard her knuckles bled and the bones in her hands snapped like twigs.

It's a new kind of shame, knowing exactly how you're destroying yourself and yet being unable to stop it. The doctor smelt her breath the moment she walked in and asked her how many a day. He didn't let her leave until she answered. Four, she muttered, five, on a good day. Hours and hours and hours later a therapist told her she couldn't separate love from hate, that she was building herself up just to tear herself down, that what she wanted most was destroying her from the inside out. Naturally she told them to go to hell, holding Kellan tightly at night and telling herself that she didn't want to hold a glass instead.

"You're a good person," Addi told her, handing her a cup of tea. She always made it just right. Pyrite just scoffed at that, rolled her eyes, took a long sip and it stung the back of her throat as she swallowed, still raw from stomach acid. Her hands shook when she stopped moving. It'd been three days since she'd had a drink and she hadn't gone this long in-between for three, maybe four years. "You can beat this."

"How?" she spat, furious and exhausted. Addi was the only person she'd told about this and yet she still couldn't help being a nasty bitch. At least I'm keeping it consistent, she thought bitterly. It wasn't fair to be this awful to Addison Deveraux, one of the only people who truly did believe Pyrite was a good person. It's the alcohol, she told herself - or the lack of. She hated herself a little less when she was drinking. But she wanted to get better, she did. It's what she demanded of herself, trembling on her best friends couch trying and failing to keep her tea down for the eighth time that morning.

But she knew better than that.

Addi just smiled. "One day at a time."

The next day, it got a little easier. And then it got worse, so much worse. But she went home, flushed all her alcohol down the toilet, crawled into bed and cried. If she didn't get out of bed then she wouldn't leave the house, and if she didn't leave the house she wouldn't go to the store, and if she didn't go the store she couldn't buy scotch and if she didn't buy scotch she wouldn't get drunk. For a while it worked, and she re-adjusted to life sober. And things got a little easier, one day at a time, and fourteen weeks had gone by - just as Addison had said. But she demanded too much of herself, as she had been raised to do. Work got stressful. Her parents breathed down her neck for grandchildren and after a particular nasty conversation with her mother Pyrite grabbed a bottle of wine from the kitchen she'd grown up in and downed half of it in one sitting.

She passed out on the floor, woken up in her old bed, screamed at her parents to leave her alone but it was too late, they'd already called the doctors and paid them enough money to get the overview on her file.

"Don't tell Kellan," she begged pathetically, still drunk and slurring on regret. "Please. Don't tell him, Mom, I'll do anythi-"

That earned her another slap to the face. 

"Tell him yourself."

Down the drain, all of it. Yet she didn't have the courage to tell him. But the damage was already done, in her skin and the walls and their marriage, so she slunk home and wrapped her arms around her husband and wept all her apologies. He still loved her, it turned out. She didn't understand why - she never had - but it was enough.

One day at a time.