Fic - Hit the Ground Running (Lyla, Tim/Lyla) pg, 1/1
Title: Hit the Ground Running
Summary: Daddy told her once, the first time she put a Dillon blue ribbon in her hair and grasped those pom-poms in her hands, Baby you're destined for greatness, you know that right? Maybe it was true once.
Rating: pg
Author's Notes: 1,793 words. Post season two finale. I'm pretty sure this is rendered AU after season three premieres this week. Con crit is always appreciated. Feedback is a lovely, lovely thing. Enjoy.
Daddy told her once, the first time she put a Dillon blue ribbon in her hair and grasped those pom-poms in her hands, baby, you are destined for greatness, you know that right?. And Lyla supposes sometimes that it was true once, because she’s got the brains and the looks and the cheering and she really could have done anything she had wanted to do if she had tried. But things change, people change and Jason got hurt and lost his legs and she somehow managed to lose her faith, and things just kind of felt irrevocable after that.
And maybe that’s how it happened, she thinks sometimes, her and Tim.
When God closes one door, he opens another.
Isn’t that what they always told her in Sunday school and Church? That week after her granddaddy died and she couldn’t stop crying for days?
Maybe her and Tim grew a beginning from an ending and it was more about holding on than trying to let go. Maybe the fall that ensued was a trial, a test, a step closer to the God she’d forgotten along the way within the five steps of grief that had become her life.
Somewhere along the way she starts regarding her life as being separated into two different entities: before the accident and after the accident, and she thinks that’s odd, selfish almost, because it’s Jason’s cross to bear, not hers.
Lyla can’t help but feel as though it defined her, too.
+
She applies to FSU and UCLA in the fall. Continues this thing with Chris (one day, his hand in hers, perfect and secure, safe and Lyla never wants to let go) and chooses the latter because she wants nothing more than to put distance between her and the her of yesteryears she tries so desperately to forget she ever was.
(God’s forgiven her, she knows, because our God is a forgiving a God to those who repent and lord has she ever, but some days, it’s just so hard to forgive herself.)
+
I love you, Tim says and she half believes him, half loves him back, but she’s not the same girl he fell in love with, and he can’t be the guy she needs so it’s all sort of negated.
He shows up to church, and it’s an invasion, a setback and the security the stable walls and the sight of the cross used to bring her starts to slowly ebb away.
That first day, the preacher speaks of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, original sin, and Lyla shifts in her seat and remembers that night in the rain, the first mistake in a long list of many. She knows about regret, can taste it’s bitter essence on the tip of her tongue, but can’t help but feel thankful for it all in the same breath.
Without Tim she wouldn’t be here.
It’s both a blessing and curse, she muses.
+
“I can’t believe you have a baby,” she says to Jason one night - they’re sitting in his apartment, football on the TV, coke in her hands, beer in his and it’s nice, relaxing.
She misses Jason some days. His touch, his companionship, him, and when she’s low and blue she’ll sometimes wish for three years ago, sitting around in the pre-season, twirling a bottle of beer between her fingers and taking stock in things like Texas Forever. It all just seems so stupid now.
“I know,” Jason smiles and it crinkles the edges of his eyes. Her heart warms at the sight. “Who would have thought?”
He’s right, who ever would? For so long her forever included Jason and babies, and it’s a shock, an adjustment to see him working on his own forever, completely independent of her (even now, after everything. Old habits and all that).
That’s Jason though, you knock him down and he just keeps going. Lyla smiles towards him and wishes she could see more of that in herself.
+
Sunday afternoons after Church Chris will pack a picnic and Lyla will pack a blanket and they sit at the park, knees touching, all smiles and soft laughter that makes her heart beat something lovely. It’s easy with him, oh, so easy, and a part of her she refuses to acknowledge can’t help but think that’s where this starts and ends.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he tells her one afternoon, all sheepish eyes and flushed cheeks.
It’s the first week of spring and there are kids running around, carefree and happy, and she can’t help but wonder if he thinks about that, about the future, a future with her, with the 2.5 kids and the white picket fence. She tries to imagine her own, five, ten, fifteen years down line and knows it doesn’t include him.
She should tell him this, be honest, and end it before he gets hurt.
Instead, she merely leans forward and brushes her lips against his.
+
Tim gives her a ride home from school one day when her piece of crap car decides not to start. It’s silence mostly, filled with fleeting looks and small smiles. Her hand brushes his when she reaches for the volume on the radio.
Tim smiles when she just doesn’t pull back as if branded like she so often does.
Lyla’s fingers on the door handle, and his voice stops her.
“What?” She asks over her shoulder when he stalls, falling short like he so often does.
He shrugs. “I just miss you is all.”
It takes everything in her to push open the door and slide out of the truck.
When she gets to her front door, she looks back.
He’s still waiting.
+
Graduation’s a blur of hugs and kisses and promises of see ya later that she never intends to keep.
Lyla takes one last look around with her diploma underneath her arm and feels proud, accomplished.
There’s nothing about this place she’s going to miss, she muses mirthlessly, and starts counting down the days until she can hit the ground running and never look back, a slash through each date on the calendar the equivalent of another step towards the salvation she’s been so desperately searching for.
+
“Baby, eventually you’re gonna have to choose,” her Daddy tells her one Sunday.
He’s taken to accompanying her to church, and she kind of likes it, this time shared between the two of them. He’s made mistakes, sure, but who hasn’t? Lyla knows better than anyone.
Lyla thinks maybe she’ll miss him the most.
Chris’s voice floods the church, certain and sure, preaching the book of John like he was born to do so. She sneaks a look out of the corner of her eye and sees Tim two rows down and up, staring intently straight ahead. Her heart does that thing it so often does when he’s around; she’s too tired to ignore it.
“I know,” she sighs, her index finger tracing the lines and edges of the cross engraved on the front of her prayer book. “I know.”
+
“I can’t,” she says, barely a whisper, tears in her eyes and it’s harder than she thought it would be.
Chris just looks at her for the longest time. Lyla thinks he knew it all along.
+
She lets Tim take her out to dinner a week before she’s set to leave. It’s Applebees (there isn’t much else, this is, after all, Dillon) and he still wears a nice shirt and combs his hair and brings her flowers. They eat and talk and he smiles at her in that way only he can and her heart does that silly little thing and she wants so badly to wish for a future that includes him in it.
Afterwards, he opens the door to his beat up truck and she slides into it and counts the beats until the ignition turns over.
It’s taken her all night, weeks really, to work up the courage to say what she needs to say, so as soon as the driver’s side door shuts, she turns towards him.
It says everything, Lyla muses, that all they’ve had between them these days is distance, but this thing between them is still there, too. An undercurrent pulsating between them, binding them together.
“What I really wanted to tell you tonight,” she starts, and the parking lot hums with activity as his fingers still on the steering wheel. “Is that I’m thankful for you. I am. Without you, what we went through, you helping me after… Jason, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Lyla-“
“Just wait, Ok? Just wait….I love you, Tim. I think I always will, but I just need to do this, okay? I need to get out of here. I know who I am, and that has so much to do with you. But I can’t be with you until you know who you are, too.”
Tim looks at her for the longest time before putting the truck in gear. The silence on the drive back makes her uncomfortable, and Lyla fidgets in her seat the entire time.
+
His hand on her wrist as she moves to get out of the car, and he looks at her again, really looks at her like he used to, like she’s it, a godsend, an angel and she’ll never forget it for as long as she lives.
“I love you, too,” he says, voice quiet, broken, and she hopes above all else for him to be okay someday. “Always.”
A gentle brush of lips, a promise, and she never says she’ll wait, but visions of her future dance bright on the horizon and she can’t imagine one without him in it.
She’s not exactly sure if that’s enough, but she wants it to be and that has to count for something, right?
+
A week later with her foot on the gas pedal, she leaves Dillon behind for the bigger and better.
Gets to California the Tuesday before classes begin and the first thing she does is make a beeline for the beach.
It’s late, nearly night, and it’s practically deserted and the sand feels cold and foreign between her toes.
Feet at the water’s edge and she breathes in a deep breath, lets the gentle breeze nip at her shoulders.
She’s scared of what this year might bring, of the independence she’s wanted so badly for so long, but she’s done hard, and she knows she can do this, too.
The sun sets, the under curve meeting the water’s edge and bathing everything in a brilliant golden orange hue.
It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
Lyla thinks, finally, that she might just be okay.
Summary: Daddy told her once, the first time she put a Dillon blue ribbon in her hair and grasped those pom-poms in her hands, Baby you're destined for greatness, you know that right? Maybe it was true once.
Rating: pg
Author's Notes: 1,793 words. Post season two finale. I'm pretty sure this is rendered AU after season three premieres this week. Con crit is always appreciated. Feedback is a lovely, lovely thing. Enjoy.
Daddy told her once, the first time she put a Dillon blue ribbon in her hair and grasped those pom-poms in her hands, baby, you are destined for greatness, you know that right?. And Lyla supposes sometimes that it was true once, because she’s got the brains and the looks and the cheering and she really could have done anything she had wanted to do if she had tried. But things change, people change and Jason got hurt and lost his legs and she somehow managed to lose her faith, and things just kind of felt irrevocable after that.
And maybe that’s how it happened, she thinks sometimes, her and Tim.
When God closes one door, he opens another.
Isn’t that what they always told her in Sunday school and Church? That week after her granddaddy died and she couldn’t stop crying for days?
Maybe her and Tim grew a beginning from an ending and it was more about holding on than trying to let go. Maybe the fall that ensued was a trial, a test, a step closer to the God she’d forgotten along the way within the five steps of grief that had become her life.
Somewhere along the way she starts regarding her life as being separated into two different entities: before the accident and after the accident, and she thinks that’s odd, selfish almost, because it’s Jason’s cross to bear, not hers.
Lyla can’t help but feel as though it defined her, too.
+
She applies to FSU and UCLA in the fall. Continues this thing with Chris (one day, his hand in hers, perfect and secure, safe and Lyla never wants to let go) and chooses the latter because she wants nothing more than to put distance between her and the her of yesteryears she tries so desperately to forget she ever was.
(God’s forgiven her, she knows, because our God is a forgiving a God to those who repent and lord has she ever, but some days, it’s just so hard to forgive herself.)
+
I love you, Tim says and she half believes him, half loves him back, but she’s not the same girl he fell in love with, and he can’t be the guy she needs so it’s all sort of negated.
He shows up to church, and it’s an invasion, a setback and the security the stable walls and the sight of the cross used to bring her starts to slowly ebb away.
That first day, the preacher speaks of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, original sin, and Lyla shifts in her seat and remembers that night in the rain, the first mistake in a long list of many. She knows about regret, can taste it’s bitter essence on the tip of her tongue, but can’t help but feel thankful for it all in the same breath.
Without Tim she wouldn’t be here.
It’s both a blessing and curse, she muses.
+
“I can’t believe you have a baby,” she says to Jason one night - they’re sitting in his apartment, football on the TV, coke in her hands, beer in his and it’s nice, relaxing.
She misses Jason some days. His touch, his companionship, him, and when she’s low and blue she’ll sometimes wish for three years ago, sitting around in the pre-season, twirling a bottle of beer between her fingers and taking stock in things like Texas Forever. It all just seems so stupid now.
“I know,” Jason smiles and it crinkles the edges of his eyes. Her heart warms at the sight. “Who would have thought?”
He’s right, who ever would? For so long her forever included Jason and babies, and it’s a shock, an adjustment to see him working on his own forever, completely independent of her (even now, after everything. Old habits and all that).
That’s Jason though, you knock him down and he just keeps going. Lyla smiles towards him and wishes she could see more of that in herself.
+
Sunday afternoons after Church Chris will pack a picnic and Lyla will pack a blanket and they sit at the park, knees touching, all smiles and soft laughter that makes her heart beat something lovely. It’s easy with him, oh, so easy, and a part of her she refuses to acknowledge can’t help but think that’s where this starts and ends.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he tells her one afternoon, all sheepish eyes and flushed cheeks.
It’s the first week of spring and there are kids running around, carefree and happy, and she can’t help but wonder if he thinks about that, about the future, a future with her, with the 2.5 kids and the white picket fence. She tries to imagine her own, five, ten, fifteen years down line and knows it doesn’t include him.
She should tell him this, be honest, and end it before he gets hurt.
Instead, she merely leans forward and brushes her lips against his.
+
Tim gives her a ride home from school one day when her piece of crap car decides not to start. It’s silence mostly, filled with fleeting looks and small smiles. Her hand brushes his when she reaches for the volume on the radio.
Tim smiles when she just doesn’t pull back as if branded like she so often does.
Lyla’s fingers on the door handle, and his voice stops her.
“What?” She asks over her shoulder when he stalls, falling short like he so often does.
He shrugs. “I just miss you is all.”
It takes everything in her to push open the door and slide out of the truck.
When she gets to her front door, she looks back.
He’s still waiting.
+
Graduation’s a blur of hugs and kisses and promises of see ya later that she never intends to keep.
Lyla takes one last look around with her diploma underneath her arm and feels proud, accomplished.
There’s nothing about this place she’s going to miss, she muses mirthlessly, and starts counting down the days until she can hit the ground running and never look back, a slash through each date on the calendar the equivalent of another step towards the salvation she’s been so desperately searching for.
+
“Baby, eventually you’re gonna have to choose,” her Daddy tells her one Sunday.
He’s taken to accompanying her to church, and she kind of likes it, this time shared between the two of them. He’s made mistakes, sure, but who hasn’t? Lyla knows better than anyone.
Lyla thinks maybe she’ll miss him the most.
Chris’s voice floods the church, certain and sure, preaching the book of John like he was born to do so. She sneaks a look out of the corner of her eye and sees Tim two rows down and up, staring intently straight ahead. Her heart does that thing it so often does when he’s around; she’s too tired to ignore it.
“I know,” she sighs, her index finger tracing the lines and edges of the cross engraved on the front of her prayer book. “I know.”
+
“I can’t,” she says, barely a whisper, tears in her eyes and it’s harder than she thought it would be.
Chris just looks at her for the longest time. Lyla thinks he knew it all along.
+
She lets Tim take her out to dinner a week before she’s set to leave. It’s Applebees (there isn’t much else, this is, after all, Dillon) and he still wears a nice shirt and combs his hair and brings her flowers. They eat and talk and he smiles at her in that way only he can and her heart does that silly little thing and she wants so badly to wish for a future that includes him in it.
Afterwards, he opens the door to his beat up truck and she slides into it and counts the beats until the ignition turns over.
It’s taken her all night, weeks really, to work up the courage to say what she needs to say, so as soon as the driver’s side door shuts, she turns towards him.
It says everything, Lyla muses, that all they’ve had between them these days is distance, but this thing between them is still there, too. An undercurrent pulsating between them, binding them together.
“What I really wanted to tell you tonight,” she starts, and the parking lot hums with activity as his fingers still on the steering wheel. “Is that I’m thankful for you. I am. Without you, what we went through, you helping me after… Jason, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Lyla-“
“Just wait, Ok? Just wait….I love you, Tim. I think I always will, but I just need to do this, okay? I need to get out of here. I know who I am, and that has so much to do with you. But I can’t be with you until you know who you are, too.”
Tim looks at her for the longest time before putting the truck in gear. The silence on the drive back makes her uncomfortable, and Lyla fidgets in her seat the entire time.
+
His hand on her wrist as she moves to get out of the car, and he looks at her again, really looks at her like he used to, like she’s it, a godsend, an angel and she’ll never forget it for as long as she lives.
“I love you, too,” he says, voice quiet, broken, and she hopes above all else for him to be okay someday. “Always.”
A gentle brush of lips, a promise, and she never says she’ll wait, but visions of her future dance bright on the horizon and she can’t imagine one without him in it.
She’s not exactly sure if that’s enough, but she wants it to be and that has to count for something, right?
+
A week later with her foot on the gas pedal, she leaves Dillon behind for the bigger and better.
Gets to California the Tuesday before classes begin and the first thing she does is make a beeline for the beach.
It’s late, nearly night, and it’s practically deserted and the sand feels cold and foreign between her toes.
Feet at the water’s edge and she breathes in a deep breath, lets the gentle breeze nip at her shoulders.
She’s scared of what this year might bring, of the independence she’s wanted so badly for so long, but she’s done hard, and she knows she can do this, too.
The sun sets, the under curve meeting the water’s edge and bathing everything in a brilliant golden orange hue.
It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
Lyla thinks, finally, that she might just be okay.