Saints & Sinners

Chapter Twenty-Five

A.N. IMAGE OF SEBBY'S OTHER MUM, VIENNA, the bitchy one. As I've said before, I kept the same teenaged actors as in Vanity Teen bc I didn't want to cast them fifteen years older as different actors.

On a lighter note, I turned 18 today and so here's an update. I'll be updating every three or four days now, thank you so much for reading this far and sticking with this story, it means a lot to me. Don't forget to vote and comment, if you like this chapter!

Chapter Twenty-Five:

My bloody mothers.

Could they even call themselves mothers? They'd left me my entire life. I knew that some twisted part of Vienna loved me, and my mother Freya couldn't love me enough. But that didn't stop them from wandering off and leaving me on my own for years.

They were hardly even my family, more like two distant aunts that you saw at Christmas and rare occasions, like a funeral, that would pinch at your cheek and ask you how you were, leave you gifts, and then piss off back to wherever they came from.

Who did they think they were? Barging in on my life just as everything was going my way, and actually expecting that I'd be fine with moving to some far-off Hispanophone country with no one there I knew, no friends, no Tristan, just those two women who would no doubt bugger off after the first day and decide they'd leave me again.

That's what they always did, and they weren't doing it again. If they wanted to go to Argentina, let them. But I'd burn my passport and tie myself to a lamp-post with five-inch thick chains to stop them from taking me anywhere. I wouldn't be a complacent little teenager and do what I was told any longer, letting them decide what was best for me when I was clearly able to do that for myself. I didn't need them anymore.

Of course, I wouldn't mind their money.

"Stupid bitches," I said to the wind, to the nothingness that surrounded me.

I was at one of the highest peaks in the entire mountainside, so high up that the wind slapped me like an angry girlfriend and all I could see around me was Norway. Down below to the south, the skyline was dotted in lights of the town centre and the outlying homes, as small as fireflies and so far away that all I could hear were the calls of nature. A parliament of owls were hooting in the trees, and I took my solace from them.

Looking over into the horizon, where the sun was sinking into the earth, my eye followed the thick fjord of Geiranger. In actuality, a fjord was basically just like a river, and I couldn't tell the difference. But looking over at it now, with the flamboyance of light from the newly rising stars and the setting sun, and small dots of lights from the boats and cruise ships that swam up and down the fjord, I could sense that I'd never find a place more beautiful.

And then, she ruined it.

"Hey, kiddo," my mother, Vienna, said silently, her voice echoing out slightly.

"I want to be alone," I told her coldly. "Look, Momma," I refused to call her Big Momma, like she preferred, when I was mad at her, "you don't know him, you'll never know him, so don't judge him. You just don't know."

She laughed a little, a rare laugh that made me look to her face, which had a smile plastered across that I'd never seen on my mother before. It was kind, and loving, and everything that my mother was not.

"What's so funny?"

"Kiddo, I know what love is. I had a friend once. Tonight, you reminded me of him. Oh, he was a brave boy, my Ari. And so are you, my Sebbie. The way you spoke so freely, without conviction... it was such a slap in the face."