Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/873170.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Choose_Not_To_Use_Archive_Warnings, Underage
  Category:
      F/F
  Fandom:
      Pretty_Little_Liars
  Relationship:
      Melissa_Hastings/Spencer_Hastings
  Character:
      Ian_Thomas, Wren_Kim, Paige_McCullers, Emily_Fields
  Additional Tags:
      Mentions_of_Emily/Paige, Mentions_of_book_events_(beware_of_wren/spencer
      boning), Sibling_Incest
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-07-07 Words: 1798
****** Sandbox Love ******
by orphan_account
Summary
     You wonder what it means, that while most people have given up trying
     to compare you two, you still do, time and time again.
Notes
     There is a distinct lack of happy-ended Hastingscest, and just
     Hastingscest in general. So I figured, why not help remedy that?
(one)
You’re eleven when you stop seeing her on a regular basis. That year brings
many changes for the both of you. It’s her first year at Penn, and your first
at Rosewood’s one and only middle school. For her, it brings stress and work
and success. For you, it brings only awkwardness, your first A-, and the onset
of puberty.
(two)
Two years later, and you barely see her anymore. She moves out, and into her
boyfriend’s apartment in the city. That’s when your parents start measuring you
against the footprints she’s left behind. But they’re too big, and you’re still
just a long-limbed kid, and you begin to resent the face you can no longer
recall from memory alone.
(three)
Her final year at Penn, she only comes home briefly for Christmas. She shows up
in a strapless dress and designer heels, takes one look at you, and smirks. You
look at yourself in the hall mirror, with your too-big nose and your flat chest
and your spindly legs and the little doll’s dress your mother picked out for
you and you want to cry. When Melissa has safely commanded the attention of
your parents, you slink away to your room and do just that. You’re barely
fourteen.
(four)
It’s your first year of high school, and you’re finally finished puberty.
Things fit better, and you’re not as emotional, and boys have started to notice
you. You don’t see Melissa at all anymore. Sometimes, if you close your eyes
and block out the words of your parents, you forget she ever existed. And you
start to believe it. You’re Spencer Hastings, and you’re forging your own
legacy. Still, you can’t ignore her existence all of the time, but you comfort
yourself with the fact you’re accomplishing things your sister could never even
dream of. Sports had never been her strong point, and interning for the mayor
is no small accomplishment either. You wonder what it means, that while most
people have given up trying to compare you two, you still do, time and time
again.
(five)
She comes back to Rosewood on a hot summer night and you wonder how she looks
so different when she hasn’t changed a thing. It’s the first time in nine
months you’ve seen her in anything other than childhood photographs. You don’t
know how it’s possible that she looks so like you, but so different. Her hair
is dark, long waves, and her eyes sharp with wit. And then she’s talking to
you, and, oh. Her words are all soft touches and melodic tones, and you trip
over a response, your gravel voice scrubbing away the skin where she touched.
The grating sting doesn’t stop all evening, not until she’s gone to her
friend’s apartment, and you stand there, bones bare and heart tripping, trying
to find your voice to say goodbye. If you had found it, then maybe it would’ve
been enough to wear through the bloody muscle until it stopped. But you don’t,
and she turns and smiles at you before getting in the car, and then your flesh
clings to your frame again. Blood pours through your ears. When you finally
retire for the night, you whisper her name and it is a song.
(six)
The night Ali goes missing, Melissa drives all the way from the city to see
you. You didn’t even ask for her to come; didn’t talk to her at all. If you
had, you would have insisted she stay where she was. Maybe she even would have.
But she’s there, not even an hour after the missing persons report is filed.
The rest of your friends are mildly confused, but they don’t question it when
you leave with her. You don’t remember the space in time between then and when
she half-carries you through the door to your room and helps you onto the bed.
You’re still slightly drunk, and you want to cry, so you do. She holds you
there, rubbing your back as you dutifully ruin her silk blouse with salty tears
and mascara. It only makes her hold you closer, until you’re so curled up into
her you can’t tell where you end and she begins. The two of you have always
kind of been that way, even before either of you knew it, you think, and laugh,
and cry. She doesn’t quite understand, and that’s alright since you don’t
either. You’re two sides of the same coin; but you match, and so you cannot
exist with her around. It’s just not possible, because your polarities are the
same. You’re both volatile chemicals and — maybe you’re wrong about all of
that.
There’s no end or beginning for the either of you. Instead, you flow and
connect. She holds you, like a drop of oil in a sea of possibilities, and yet
her tides are still gentle enough that you can exist. But you tend to forget
that you’re also containing her; holding her back from being all-consuming,
until you both just exist there. It’s beautiful, in a moment where nothing
should be. Instead of questioning that, you breathe in the smell of her skin,
tilting your head out of the crook of her neck, and sloppily kiss her jaw. She
does nothing, just turns her head to face you, her lashes dark, so you kiss her
again and then she smiles before covering your broken skin and racing heart
with her love. When your parents find you curled up into each other the next
morning, they smile as parents do when finding their children sharing a tender
moment.
Melissa is gone before you awaken, and the next time you see her she has a
fiance.
(seven)
She can’t do this to you; you’ve worked and worked to break the mould and she
comes back into your life smiling just as much as ever, but her eyes are dark
and taunting when she tells you her and Wren are moving into your loft. The
warmth and tenderness is gone, and you’re back to playing the parts your
parents were pushing you into all along.
So you fuck Wren in the barn, in Melissa’s bed, your face buried in the sheets.
Her scent is all around you, the memory of her velvet voice in your ears even
as her fiance is panting and cursing behind you as he comes. He pulls out
without any consideration on your part. You wouldn’t have let him continue,
anyways. But nevertheless, you turn around and slap him, ordering him out, and
like a scared little boy he does. You’d finish the job now yourself but the
spell is broken and all you can smell is him. Instead you drag the bed out from
the wall a couple of inches, pulling your car keys out of your bag as you do,
and carve ‘SPENCER WAS HERE’ into the back of the headboard. As you leave, you
swing by Melissa’s bathroom and grab her bottle of perfume. She won’t notice
it’s gone, but she certainly notices it when you start wearing it. You try to
tell yourself that it’s a trophy, and the headboard a warning. But then you
remember that you can’t recall a single thing from the whole ordeal aside from
the memory of Melissa leaning over you the night Ali vanished. It’s exactly a
year to the day. And then you can’t lie to yourself anymore.
(eight)
So you start distracting yourself instead. You’re almost thankful for the
emergence of -A, and you definitely are thankful that either they don’t know
anything about you and Melissa, or they’ve got enough sense not to touch that
with a ten foot pole. But it can’t last. The thing with Wren finally boils
over, and Melissa all but flings his things out the window before dragging you
into the barn and pushing you into a corner. She’s angry, and you should take
her seriously, but then she’s so close and her eyes are bright and she’s
inhaling viciously in preparation for another bout of yelling… and then she yet
again notices her perfume fragrancing your skin and now she knows. It’s nothing
as simple as you borrowing it and forgetting to give it back. It’s deliberate,
and so is the way her hand is positioned next to your head. Suddenly, she’s
grinding her hips against yours, her lips leaving bruises in their wake. When
it’s over and done with, she slaps you and kisses you again, then promptly
kicks you out with your shirt only half-on. And that’s how things go, until she
gets engaged again and you get Toby. Then it’s back to distracting for the both
of you, it seems.
(nine)
It feels like there’s half a second of time between Melissa announcing she’s
pregnant and Ian dying. And not long after that, she loses the baby. She comes
to you for a strange kind of comfort both times - a blend of yelling and loving
that must be criminal, even if what you’ve already done isn’t. Still, things
seem to have calmed down, to the point where it’s almost normal. That is, until
the sun sets and you find yourself outside the loft, without fail. But in the
dark, shadows can turn into all sorts of different things, even when in the end
the results are the same. Melissa’s taken to painting your skin with her own
tears, like that time you ruined her shirt so long ago. Sometimes, you even
manage to tell her you love her under the light of the moon. The sun never sees
such sights anymore. Somehow, it still feels like a lie, and you tell enough of
those already nowadays.
(ten)
Years pass. You don’t get into UPenn, much to the disappointment of your
parents, but much to their surprise you do get into Stanford. It’s a long ways
away, but it’s near San Francisco, and Melissa lets you live with her, rent
free. Someone’s got to look out for her little sister, after all, she explains
to mom and dad with a politician’s smile. It’s more than worth the long
commute, and it means staying out of Paige and Emily’s way. Whenever you visit
them these days, they look like they’re a few seconds away from jumping each
others’ bones. You kind of wish you could judge them, but then, you’re not
exactly the poster girl for abstinence yourself, and you’ve got Melissa to
blame for that much. You wouldn’t trade her for the world, though, and though
she’d never admit it, you know she feels the same. The only reminder you need
lays directly behind you, and every night after Melissa has drifted off, you
run your fingers along the backside of the headboard.
Spencer was here.
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