2Woop woop, long time no see once more! Wow, I really need to get better about updating regularly. My timeframe thus far is unacceptable. Hmph. Well, anyway, I reached two hundred followers on the Homestuck amino (trash, anyone?), and promised them all a fanfiction (I did for one hundred followers, too, but I'm still working on that one. Ships are hard). So here it is! My very first songfic!
They were a regular family, as far as anyone else in the neighborhood was concerned. Well, maybe not entirely normal.
Roxy LaLonde was considered to be mother of the century, with how efficiently she ran the Strider-LaLonde household. She kept the children on time to their various activities, the house completely perfect, her husband completely and utterly satisfied in every way, and more.
Dirk Strider was viewed as the best father to be asked for. He kept a job well enough to keep their lovely house (read: mansion) paid for, and to keep Roxy from having to get one so that she could keep up her picture perfect family life.
Dave Strider was cool kid extraordinaire, keeping up appearances as well as his parents without even having to try. Football star, decent enough grades to keep up the scholarships he'd already received though he was only a freshman, and relationships for him came by nature. Girls flocked to him by the dozens.
Rose LaLonde was brilliant, the smartest teenager that anyone in the neighborhood had met in ages; she definitely managed to outsmart many of the residents around their perfect home. She didn't have many friends, but it could be said about her that she did honestly care for the ones she did have in the most perfect, loyal way.
On the outside, they were perfect, to be envied and adored. Smart, attractive, sociable, always available if someone – even a total stranger – needed someone to talk to. But on the inside.. Things weren't quite what they appeared.
Rose sighed as she approached the house that she and her mother, Roxy, had moved into four years ago. She'd been thirteen then, and excited beyond belief. She had very much liked her new father and brother, Dirk and Dave, then. But the amazement had worn off long ago, when she realized just how much of a hellhole that she and her mother had moved into. But she'd grown into her role, just as they all had. She knew the rules: what happens in the house stays in the house; when people are over all masks go up and remain perfect; all actions and words reflect the family, so keep them positive and perfect.
It hadn't been so bad at first, during that thing they tended to call the honeymoon phase. That first full year, maybe a little more, Rose had been happy. Happy to be perfect, happy to be silent, happy to do all of her work and be Mom' and Dad's little girl. But then Dirk lost his job for a time. He regained it quickly, when the company realized just how large of an asset he was, but the damage had been done. The struggle and strain of those short few months took their toll. Dirk and Roxy's arguments began then, ranging from short, strained conversations to full blown physical battles, the two taking and giving hits and throwing things at each other. Dave, being the kind boy he'd been at the time, had tried to be a mediator of sorts, taking messages from one parent to the other in an attempt to keep the arguments from happening.
That method had surprisingly worked for a while, keeping the violence and aggression in the house to a minimum. But that, too, shattered and ended very suddenly. To this day, Rose wasn't sure whether Dirk or Roxy had started in on Dave first, but both of them did around the same time. The two of them called it discipline, and each had their own ways of doing it. Roxy was verbal. Cutting words and sharp statements meant to tear you down and make you hate yourself and everyone around you. Dirk was physical. A hit of some sort was no longer uncommon in the house, but Rose somehow found it worse when it was her cute, loving brother who took the hit than when it was her strong, somewhat bitchy mother.
And then, of course, it got to him, and he went to further and further extremes to get away from the physical, emotional, and mental abuse he received regularly. Rose wasn't safe herself, though Dirk had never dared to hit her again after she stabbed a knitting needle into his leg in retaliation. Dave, for some reason, never dared to fight back, so it continuously got worse for him. He was still sweet, in some ways. He cared a lot. But he no longer showed it in normal ways; not in the same ways most brothers did. Instead of a hug or something of the sort, now he was forced to show care by leaving food outside of Rose's door on the days the fighting got so bad she couldn't bring herself to leave her room except for school.
The two of them tried to spend as little time at home as possible, choosing instead to go to friend's houses or offering to do the grocery shopping. Anything to escape the suffocating, continuous presence of rage in the home. But it wasn't enough for Dave. He'd finally broken precisely one year ago today, she recalled. He'd found a new escape. One that his parents didn't know about, and his sister hated: drugs. All different sorts, all different amounts. Rose expected him to drop dead from overdose any day now, but she supposed he had some semblance of experience, or at least his dealer told him what to do with the stuff so he didn't kill himself.
She recalled every broken moment of the family, each rewriting itself into a new image as she walked into the kitchen. Here, she allowed herself to actually consider the possibility of maybe one day escaping the hell she called home and family, but quickly let go of it as she witnessed every nightmare she'd already been thinking about as she took in the scene in front of her.
"Where have you been?" Roxy's words were slurred, which only slightly surprised Rose. The older woman was a known alcoholic – in the house, at least – but she normally saved her drinking for later in the evening, when there was no risk of anyone coming to the house. It was a Tuesday, now that Rose thought about it. No one came over on Tuesdays, except for Dirk's "friend" Jake every now and then. Jake, she supposed, was the root cause of her mother's drinking, or at least one of them. When Dirk had met Jake about three months ago, and then started spending more time with him than at home was when Roxy's now-and-then sip of wine became full-blown drinking of everything from tequila to vodka, just anything she could get her hands on.
"I've been at school, Mother. It's four in the afternoon, you realize."
"Don't smart off to me, I can read the clock. Where's your brother?" The question was followed by a flask raised to her lips and a swallow.
"He's at football practice. Just like every day."
"I am getting sick and tired of your attitude. Go to your room, and don't let me see your face until tomorrow." Rose did as requested, grateful for the quick escape and knowing that if she didn't listen, or if Roxy did see her later, she was going to end up in tears from her mother's words, or worse.
As she walked through the house, she studied the photos she'd seen a million times before. Each of them depicted four perfectly poised, wonderfully dressed, brilliantly smiling people, some with one or two extra people, mostly Jake or Dave's friend John. Each of them had been impossibly easy to fake for. She could remember the day each of them had been taken, every single little detail that had occurred on that specific date. She recognized the photo that had been taken the day she'd told her parents about her girlfriend Kanaya, and remembered how that had been the trigger for their start in on her. Up until that point, they'd left her alone, seeing Dave as a much easier target. But being gay was unacceptable to her parents for different reasons. Dirk saw it as a threat, an outing of his newly discovered sexuality; Roxy refused to let something that was ruining their family spread to her daughter.
She noticed a picture of the four of them with Jake, and immediately knew it as the one taken on the day she'd caught the two men together. It was just a kiss, a simple one, but it opened an entirely different world to her. One where she realized that her parents were truly unhappy, and would be forever, because for them to get a divorce over Jake would ruin their reputation, and image was everything.
As she walked through the house, she closed the curtains that covered each of the numerous windows in the hallways, wanting it to look exactly as suffocating and dark as it felt to her. She reached her room just as she heard a car door. Dirk was home, then. Perfect timing. She looked out her bedroom window to see him walking up the driveway, approaching the front door. She noticed he looked tired, instead of angry as he normally did. She pulled the curtains closed as he looked up at her window, no longer wanting to look at him. She collapsed onto her bed, and started laughing out of nowhere.
A thought had just occurred to her. What if someone ever looked in through the windows and saw what their perfect family was actually like? She knew it would never happen; this house would forever be filled with fakes, dolls to occupy the dollhouse. Because that's what they were, she realized. Beautiful creatures with nothing but secrets, forever doomed to be played with and toyed with by the children who controlled every move they made and word they spoke. She continued laughing, tears streaming down her face now as she listened to a glass bottle shatter somewhere far off, followed by muffled words and then screams, and then silence. Beautiful, perfect silence for beautiful, perfect people.