2.6 | Forget Me Not ✓

+9 || lilium

A/N

Happy new year my loves! I just want to thank you all for sticking with me through thick and thin. I'm immensely grateful that you're here, and I hope you've been enjoying this story. I also hope that 2022 will be good for you, and that you'll be safe and healthy and happy!

Side note, this chapter is brand new, never seen before, totally deviating from the original. It's what I always wanted Emma's character to be, but couldn't due to constraints of the original work, and it's also the reason why she's possibly my top 3 favourite female characters in the second universe.

Enjoy! x Noelle

ps: slight trigger warning for abuse.

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+ 9

l i l i u m

For innocence.

(now: +9)

  

SLATE GREY WALLS and threadbare furniture create an atmosphere of doom and gloom, but somehow, it's fitting at a time like this.

It's fitting for him.

It's been years since she last saw Keith Jacobs. Just like Scout, who remembers her ex as he was, and not as he is now, Emma thinks of Keith the same way. Crew cut, wide grin, broad shoulders. She remembers his dark hair gleaming in the sunlight, a fitting white shirt over his tanned muscles, a football tucked under his arm. She also remembers his lips twisted into a cold, hard smirk, a taunting gleam in his eyes, and his hand curled into a fist.

For a moment, she falters outside the room. This is Keith, not as she remembers, but of the present day. If anything, his years in prison seem to have done him good. He looks bigger, stronger, taller now, slouched in his seat with his long legs sprawled out beneath the table. She'd give anything for Dylan to be here now. But then, she'd also give anything for him not to be anywhere near Keith, ever, in this lifetime and all others.

I can do this.

She takes a deep breath and steps into the room. There are cameras around, security is watching, and she's no longer the Emma he once knew either. Keith glances up, and one corner of his lips lift in a hint of a smirk. "It's been awhile."

She settles down opposite him and folds her hands in her lap. "Not long enough."

"Are you here to gloat?"

"Yes, actually. You should've really used your time in prison more wisely. Learning how to improve your penmanship, for starters. Instead, you still behave the exact same way: violent, reckless and stupid enough to use the same handwriting after all these years."

"Do you really think I give a fuck that I've been caught?"

"I hope you do. Attempted murder is a lifetime sentence."

"There's always parole."

"Maybe," she accedes. "But you seem to have forgotten who I am, and who my parents are. My dad is already assembling a team of his best lawyers. We will keep you in there for as long as we can, so that even if you're ever granted parole, it'll be when the best years of your life are way behind you."

His face reddens with anger, and his hands curl into fists. "It doesn't matter," he snarls defiantly. "The best years of my life were already behind me, long before I even met you."

"If you're talking about your father, who taught you to be this way, he's not the one to blame." His eyes widen at her words—it's clear that her knowledge of his father has taken him by surprise, but Emma has done her research. She always has. "From the moment you chose to hit me, it was all you."

His features contort in anger, but he doesn't say a word, and she knows that her revelation about his father must've left him more shaken up than he shows. She stands up to leave—there's nothing else to say, anyway, but he stops her.

"I still remember the way you looked in those pictures," he says, and even though his voice is quieter than before, there's still a hint of mockery. "Won't ever forget them."

She lets out a slow breath, trying not to react to his words. In a flash, she's back in college, crying, begging, staying because of his single threat to ruin her family's reputation.

But the thing about a monster is that, once you escape its clutches, it just becomes the past.

"You can keep those memories," she says, without turning. "They're the only things you have left." She shuts the door behind her, sealing him to his fate.