2. mirrorball (a taylor swift au)

-chapter three-

It had been Joe who made her believe that. The little comments here and there... it had been Joe that had grilled that insecurity into her system. The snide little remarks about being seen out in public with her... the comments about being out in public with her. Comments about how hard it was to do anything. There was one time where he'd yelled out to her 'god, I wish you could just be normal for once in your life, babe.' It still haunted her. Taylor hadn't even really noticed it at the time, and she'd just brushed it off with the assumption that anyone would feel like that. That it was a normal reaction. So she'd stopped doing things in public, she'd stopped doing all of the things he didn't like. She hadn't even realised that she'd done it until this moment. But she had - she'd stopped her life just to please him. She knew she could never do that again - not for anyone.
"I'm sorry," Derek shook his head. "I don't know why I said that."
Taylor just smiled. "I'm the one who's sorry. Earlier in the year I got out of a seven year relationship," she told him honestly. "You asked who made me believe that, and I realised that it was him. Joe." She shook her head. "Can I get you another drink?"
He grinned, "only if you'll have another one too."

Taylor watched as Ellie was sitting on top of the monkey bars with Margot. Margot had taught her how to climb up - Taylor knew that Ellie had been scared but pushed through it anyway.
"What made you move to Nashville?" Derek asked her with a smile.
"I grew up here," Taylor smiled. "I wanted Ellie to have a place where she could play and grow and just be a kid. I felt like New York wasn't that place."
"Ellie's from New York, isn't she?"
Taylor nodded. "I think she's been happier since she moved here."
"She certainly looks like a happy kid," Derek told her. "Margot still has nightmares - I think I thought they'd go away eventually, but they never did."
Taylor looked over at the kids, who were laughing and giggling and talking to each other, and found herself wondering how someone could ever be so cruel to them. Ellie gave her a wave as she saw Taylor watching, and Violet was lying on the grass beneath them making a snow angel.
"Ellie gets so scared from her nightmares," Taylor told him. "Sometimes I have to sing her a lullaby until she's asleep. That can take up to an hour and a half, depending how terrified she is."

Derek hadn't spoken to any of the other parents from the support group like this before. Sure, they'd talk at the meetings and at school pick up, but he'd never actually seen any of them outside of that. Melody had been the one that loved that kind of thing, not him. But this was... nice. He found himself liking it. He'd isolated himself so much when Mel died.
"What do you sing to her?" He asked. "The girls always ask me to sing to them but I have no singing ability whatsoever."
He watched Taylor's lips curve upwards in a smile. "I have a couple," he liked the way Taylor glowed when she was talking about Ellie. Derek wondered if anyone else noticed it - the way she'd smile and her cheeks would turn pink and there was a sparkle in her eye. "One of them is a song I wrote ages ago, about never growing up. And the other one is a song I wrote just for Ellie."
A song about never growing up. It sounded familiar to him, but he wasn't sure why or how.
"And that helps her to get back to sleep?"
"Sometimes," she nodded. She paused, and Derek could tell that she was trying hard to decide whether she'd be honest with him or not. He didn't know how he knew - he just did. "In July, CPS called me - I was just fostering her at the time and said that her parents were... better."

Derek knew where the story was going, and considering that Ellie was here now... he knew that it meant that her parents had not been better. But the thing was... what had happened to the poor kid? He also knew the struggle of telling this story, that every single word was killing Taylor. He couldn't help but be pleased that she felt like she could trust him. He'd never go public about this - never tell a single soul. He didn't really understand how someone could look her in the eye and then go running to the media about something she'd said. How could anyone betray her like that? She came across so confident and happy and like she had it all together - but Derek had masked the art of pretending he wasn't drowning. Only letting himself be real under the cover of darkness, or late nights in the restaurant.
"Within the space of twenty four hours, I'd gone from dancing on a stage in front of tens of thousands of people... to having her taken away from me." Taylor bit her lip, glancing out to the kids playing on the playground. Her eyes watered, and Derek wanted to comfort her. He wanted to reach out to her, wanted to tell her that she wasn't alone... but he didn't know where it came from - that feeling. It was foreign to him. It was something he'd not felt in years.
"She was back there for four days, and in that time, her parents had continued to abuse her until her mother overdosed the same morning as I finally had a reason to keep her out of that house for good." Taylor was biting her lip, her brows furrowed together. Sure, it may have been weeks ago, but Derek knew what it was like to experience a sort of pain that didn't seem to heal. The sort of pain that never gets easier, you just learn to live with it. The sort of pain that would be at the core of everything forever... he knew that pain all too well.
"Every single time there's a knock on the door, I still flinch... I just, it sounds so dumb, but I'm just taken back to that time. I don't really like to talk about it with people - I mean, my friend Gracie was supporting me during that time but I don't like letting people see me like... like this."
Derek shook his head.
"That's not dumb," he assured her. "Every time the phone rings I still get taken back to the phone call saying I needed to get to the hospital right away to say my goodbyes." Derek told her. "You know, I had to choose, right then and there, whether I'd let the girls see her like that. She couldn't talk - the brain cancer had taken everything." His jaw clenched as he remembered it. "She hadn't been able to talk for six months, and she just... I... They'd already said goodbye, and I had to make the decision that I didn't want their last memory of their Mom to be of her... paralysed in the hospital bed, with breathing tubes and things coming out of her arms... I still get taken back to it even after all this time. Melody had said that she'd not wanted them to see her like that- she'd made me promise her that I'd make sure their memories of her were not of her death. Sometimes there are memories and feelings that haunt you, as much as you wish they'd-"
He was cut off by Margot yelling out for him to watch as she swung from the monkey bars upside down.
"Woah!" He clapped, giving his daughter a thumbs up. "That's so cool, Magpie!" Violet was picking the daisies off the lawn, and he smiled as she threw them up in the air so they'd fall down over her. "Go Lottie!"
"They're the sweetest kids," Taylor told him. "I think they're going to grow up to be the best of friends."
"I hope so," he looked over at her with a smile. "Margot hasn't got many friends."