Auslly One Shots

Shining Just For You

By ausllydawmoon

She returned to her hometown for the same reasons anyone else does: to care for a parent, to start over, to remind herself of where she came from, to get back to her roots. Her mother insisted that she was fine, that by the time Ally moved into her new house by the docks her father would be fully recovered and able to care for her mother. She was right, of course, but that call she got from her dad at the hospital explaining the car crash and her mom's broken neck left her shaken to her core. She realized that she hadn't been home in years—her parents were always the ones coming out to visit her in big, bright Los Angeles, because Ally was always too busy recording albums or writing music or planning tours to take time off in a sleepy beach town down the coast.

They all moved to L.A. when Ally was fifteen, after a music producer discovered a video of her singing an original song on the Internet. The next five years were a whirlwind of albums and publicity and growing, growing, growing, until Ally was twenty years old and a multi-millionaire. But her parents were never the types for a Los Angeles lifestyle, so she surprised them with their old house for their anniversary. They moved back home, and Ally was on her own.

Ally had never missed her home before. She missed friends, sure, and when her parents moved back she missed them like crazy. But never the life she had there. Growing up, she had been content in the background, reading books on the quiet little beach at the edge of town or watching the boats out on the bay. But as soon as she found out what she was missing—the glitz, the glamor, the spotlight—she never looked back.

But after that call from her dad, when he told her about the car crash and his broken arm and her mom's broken spine, she ached for home more than she thought possible. The glitz and glamor became frustrating, ugly, fake; the spotlight suddenly blinding, overwhelming, suffocating. Her big house was too big, too empty, too perfect. She's still grateful for all of it, of course, but she was just consumed with a need to return to a safe place, where she could leave her house without worrying about paparazzi and where people don't constantly expect something from her. A place where everybody already knows all your business (which is, admittedly, very annoying), but that means they aren't always bothering you asking about it.

So, she packed a couple suitcases and drove down the coast with her best friend in the passenger seat, trying her best to describe the small town she came from. Trish grew up in L.A., meaning that she was already afraid of small towns.

"That's where murders happen," she said when Ally told her she was moving home for a while.

"Only in the movies."

"Horror movies are, like, ninety percent of my resumé," Trish reminded her.

"We get it, you won an Oscar," Ally had said with a roll of her eyes before Trish could get there.

But Trish is loyal to the end, so despite her insistence that this was a horror movie in the making and her claustrophobia at just the explanation of small-town life, she was determined to help Ally move and settle in before running back to the safety L.A.

Ally told her stories from when she was growing up, about her childhood best friend Austin Moon and how they used to ride their bikes to the candy store his family owned every day after school; how when they were ten he gave her a Ring Pop and swore that when they grew up he was gonna marry her.

"Honestly, I think we might've really gotten married if I hadn't left," she had said when she finished the story. "We never even dated in middle or high school, but we always talked about it like it was inevitable."

"That's terrifying," Trish had said. "If I ever get married, he will never learn what I was like as a kid. Some things are meant to be forgotten by the world."