Watch What Burns (24 page)

“I never did to get bake cookies with her,” Austin whispered into the dead air that hung around them. Her tone was soft, distant, and piercing all at once. She didn’t move away from Tyler’s body, she just lay against him, staring off, her fingers entwining absent-mindedly with the hair on Grace’s doll.

“You’re going to have so many more opportunities to make cookies,” Tyler stated back. He wasn’t giving up on the idea that Grace was going to be back in their arms soon. For that reason, he wouldn’t let Austin give up either.

“Am I?” she asked him, pushing off his body so she could twist to look up. “How can you say that, Ty? How? We don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Why are you being so negative?” Tyler asked, deliberately getting off the bed to look directly at his wife. “This isn’t you.”

“There isn’t much to be positive about,” Austin admitted weakly. She felt pathetic under the strain of life and she hated it. She hated every moment that she allowed Natasha to rule any of her emotions, but her yearning to hold her daughter was too overwhelming. She was weak without her family together.

“I need you to kill this mood you’ve allowed yourself to get into, Austin. It’s not like you. I know, right now, you feel like you’re to blame, and that you are solely responsible for everything that’s happened to us in our past and now, but we vowed to never let our past define us,” Tyler stated, only stopping when his tirade finished.

“It’s hard to stop it when our past won’t leave us alone,” Austin fought back feebly with him. “I just feel swallowed by it all and I can’t stop myself from feeling like this. I don’t want to be like this, but can you blame me?” She suddenly looked up at him, her eyes emblazoned with a multitude of emotions. “I can’t cope with this anymore. She’s winning.”

“And you’re letting her,” Tyler snapped at her, he was unimpressed. “I can’t take this! This isn’t the Austin we watched come back!” Tyler bellowed, everything topping him. “Look what you’re becoming, Austin.” He threw his hands up, running them through his hair. “I
understand that this is hard, it’s hard for me. I also get that you’re in pain and you feel helpless, but, Aus, I’m trying everything here. But right now I feel like I’m losing you too!” He stepped forward, crouching slightly to be at her level. “Do you know how that feels?” he asked her, begging her to react.

Austin nodded at him. “This is what she wants,” Austin mumbled, her head dropping as her gaze lowered furthermore to her lap. “She wants us at loggerheads with one another. I know she does.” She slowly looked up to meet his solemn gaze, her heart beginning to pound violently behind the walls of her chest. “I can’t be okay with this, Tyler. I’m terrified and I feel trapped. I can’t do anything but sit around and wait for you to come back to me and tell me something new. What happens if you have to come and tell me bad news?” she asked him, her voice quaking under that one question. “What happens when Natasha gets what she wants?”

“She only gets what she wants if we let her!” Tyler argued back, unable to see how all the fight was lost from his wife. “Why are you being like this, Aus? You’re usually the strong one. Where has she gone?”

Austin lifted her gaze to look at her husband, and lost her cool entirely. “I don’t know,” Austin began to cry
out, drawing her legs up slowly to her chest. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

In the moment that weakness completely beat his wife down, Tyler felt the terror he had kept controlled strengthen and it quickly consumed him. He couldn’t believe how broken she had become in the course of a few days. He could never be disappointed in her. He had expected her to break under the pressure. Hell, he was breaking out into a sweat under it all, but he had always expected his wife to remain strong and in control. Now she wasn’t and he felt like his entire world was crumbling down completely. And as he watched, he felt a part of him snap. His mentality tested and he needed to make this right before she gave up.

“Aussie,” he whispered as he swooped to her side, ready to take command and soothe her.

Austin shrugged him off. “Leave me alone.” She looked at him, trying to get him to back away from her. She wanted him so much, but a part of her wanted to push him away, make him leave her alone.  “I’m sorry I’m like this, Tyler, but I’m not strong. Why can’t you see that? I’m weak. I’ve been living under an act and for what?” she asked him, her tears beginning to fall in torrents down her damaged cheeks.
“All for me to disappoint every single one of you when you realize how easily I falter and fall.”

As her words hit him, he realized she had addressed them all inappropriately. She had played a guessing game,
labeling them all with a reaction that wasn’t true. With the ante getting heavier, Tyler knew he had to save Grace in order to save Austin. However, he couldn’t just let her sit around and behave like this. Swallowing the lump that had cemented itself into his throat, he calmed himself down before he gave her a final blow. A plan struck up in his mind instantaneously, and he knew that if anyone was going to annihilate Austin entirely for her to hit rock bottom and jump back up with her fighting nature, it would be him. He hardened his gaze, told himself that this would end one day soon, and he would never have to administer the next words to his wife ever again.

“If you want to throw a pity party, Aus, do it,” Tyler suddenly stated. “When you realize this isn’t you, call me. Until then I’m going to bring our daughter home. If that’s what it’s going to take to get you back to the woman I know and love, then so be it. This isn’t you, Austin, and I refuse to sit here and watch you be like this. If you want to act like a child and not the woman
I married, or the woman that is Gracie’s mother, then fine. Just don’t expect me to hang around.”

He said nothing else. He just left.

What have I done?
She thought to herself. With her vision swimming, she looked around the empty room, praying it was all an awful hallucination, but Tyler was no longer here. He was no longer with her in the room. Feeling her lip begin to tremble, she clung onto the Clara doll as if it were her lifeline, and just gave in to everything that was coursing through her body. She didn’t care that each new sob that wracked her body only exacerbated her pains, she didn’t care that each new cry set a shockwave to the gunshot wound to her chest. She just didn’t care, and she knew she wouldn’t until her daughter was home, and her family was safe. This shell that had taken over her body was impenetrable to all of her attempts to free herself. She had felt herself slipping further and further into an icy darkness, but now she knew she couldn’t remain like this.

Not after Tyler had left her alone. He would always be her biggest threat. He loved her with every part of his being, she knew that, but he could destroy her in one swift swoop, and right now, he had completely killed her.

Thankful no one was here; she gave herself a moment to pull it together, waiting for her composure to restore itself. Laying in the stillness of her room, Austin allowed to her mind to wander towards thoughts of Grace and Natasha and what they could be up to right now. Closing her eyes against the bitter tears, Austin denied any thought that involved Natasha mistreating her daughter. It was incomprehensible. She found herself literally praying that Natasha was loving Grace so she wouldn’t be scared at not being home with her family. Hearing her cell ring, she immediately grabbed it. Hope igniting in her like a wildfire as her mind told her it was Gracie.

“Gracie?” she answered the call, not even looking at the screen. “Is that you?”

“Close enough,” Natasha’s voice sung down the phone in response. “Now, now, now, Austin, I’m just ringing to sa-”

“Where is my daughter, you psychotic bitch?” Austin snapped back, wiping away her tears as she fought all the pains in her to sit up. The culmination of everything toppled and Austin found the part of her that she had thought was gone forever. “I swear to God, Natasha, if you don’t bring my little girl home I will make you regret the very day you were born. I
won’t give you a chance to beg me for forgiveness. You’re well passed getting retribution.”

Natasha’s laughter resonated back for a moment. “Now do you really want to be upsetting the woman that is currently staring at your tiny sleeping beauty?” Natasha asked back, the glee so clearly in her tone. “I mean you don’t want to upset the hand that feeds you right? Without me, Austin, how will you ever know what your little cherub is up to?”

Closing her eyes in a bid to calm down, Austin couldn’t stop herself from agreeing with Natasha. After all, she was the one that had the final say in all of their fates. “What do you want?” Austin asked, her tone simmering down, her compliance beginning to heighten.

“For you to forget about her,” Natasha replied with the simplest of requests.

“Not possible,” Austin bit back, still keeping her tone calm. “You know I can’t ever do that, Natasha. You can’t expect me to do something that isn’t ever going to be possible. You cannot expect me to just forget about my daughter.”

“I can love them both better than you ever can.” Natasha continued her torture of Austin. “I am
already. Gracie loves me. Not you. She has barely asked to come home since I got her.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Austin asked, her eyes betraying her as they let tears slip free. “Please don’t take the two things I love most in the world, Natasha. Please, don’t do this. I have put up with a lot at the hands of you for years. Haven’t you done enough?”

“I’ll be done when I have a free pass to a life with Tyler and Grace. Until then, I’ll await the final piece of the puzzle,” Natasha goaded Austin to a darker life. “I won’t be happy until you’re lonely, Austin. My life would have been perfect had you never existed.”

“I tried to be your friend,” Austin retorted angrily. “I was always the one to see the good in you, and this is how you repay me? You killed my first child, killed my chance with Tyler the first time around, and then when I finally come home you tried to kill my place in my family, and then you tried to kill me. I have never done anything against you and this is how you treat me?”

“I never wanted to be your friend, and I was sick and tired that everything seemed to fall so perfectly in your lap without you trying,” Natasha sneered back at Austin, not caring to use a less bitter tone. “You didn’t have to fight for a man to love you. You didn’t even need to fight much for your family. They just loved you. I will fight for the man I love.”

“He loves me,” Austin murmured back as Natasha said her last sentence. “Why can’t you even be remorseful to him? If not me, what about Tyler? If you love him, why are you doing this?”

“Because he has to notice me,” Natasha lashed back with a simple statement. “Now I know he realizes I’m here and I know he knows what I’m after.” There was a pause on the line before Natasha struck back with a new onslaught. “This would have been simpler if you had done what I had planned in the first place. I wanted you to die at the bottom of those stairs. You just don’t seem to die. Everything is still just perfect for you.”

“It’s not,” Austin regrettably began to tell her enemy. “Tyler
can no longer stand to look at me because of you, Natasha. You might well be getting what you want after all.” Closing her eyes, she bit her lip before striking back. “Now please, just give me my daughter back. You’ve tortured me for long enough. Please, stop using me as your victim.”

There was another pause, and Austin felt like it was a calculating pause in the conversation.

“I’m not quite done, but you might want to get to the station, Austin,” Natasha’s voice sneered down the phone. “There’s a
little
surprise
waiting for you in Tyler’s office.”

As the call ended, Austin looked around panicked at what she should do next. As her eyes landed on the door, she knew what she had to do. Kicking the starchy sheets from her body, Austin pushed off the bed, and propelled towards the bag that Tyler had brought from home. Awkwardly she changed into her own clothes, ignorant of the pains from the fall and bullet that began to scream in agony. She left the hospital gown on the floor where it fell and then turned to find a nurse standing in the doorway.

“I want my discharge papers,” Austin stated, she wasn’t taking no for an answer. “I’m more than well enough to leave. I need to leave.”

“I need to get a doctor to give you the once over,” the nurse replied, clearing her throat while she crossed her arms over her chest. “Then you can be allowed to leave.”

“I want to leave now,” Austin argued, not willing to stand around in the room.

“After a doctor has seen to you,” the nurse replied, allowing Austin to understand the hospital rules.

“Fine,” Austin relented easily, and went back to the bed and tore the sling from her arm. She didn’t need more hindrances than she already had. When the nurse was out of sight, she stood up and fled her room. She wasn’t going to wait for a doctor. There was too much at stake right now for her to wait around any longer.

“Where are you going?” Tom asked from behind her. He was coming back to check up on his sister when he found her making a slow get away from her room. “Aus,” he called out, rushing to get in front of her. “Where are you going?

“To the station,” Austin admitted without fault or hesitation. “I-I ne-need to be there, Tom. She told me someone’s waiting for me. I can’t sit around in here any longer.”