Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)

Time After Time

Since Vin's already done the traditional fairytale, I decided to take us back to the eighties, so this totally fits in with all the chapter titles 'n' shit. 

XxX 

Day 5 – In A Fairytale

"We found Wonderland; you and I got lost in it."

XxX

Most fairytales started with a "once upon a time", or at the very least gave you a pretty good depiction of a female protagonist caught floundering amidst her life troubles. This one started with a crash, a shriek of 'Vin! Come fix the toaster!', and a teenage boy covering his head with a pillow as he tried to sleep. Not the standard format, to say in the least.

Meet Vin Williams, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, Welsh-American boy who, while not being your standard Cinderella, was stuck living the lifestyle appropriate to it. Vin had grown up an orphan for the first ten years of his life, knowing nothing about his birth parents save for the fact that they'd left him a medallion with the Welsh coat of arms engraved on one side. And believe him on this – being an orphan in the 70s sucked. However, not long before he turned eleven he'd been taken in for fostering by a hawk of a woman named Sadie Macbeth (who, mind you, just totally wanted the government benefits). Vin never really decided if that was an improvement or not. While the orphanage had been a bitter, lonely place, and he had always longed for a home of his own, Macbeth was a dreadful "parent". She'd treated him more like a servant than a child for the last seven years, having him be the one to handle errands and chores far beyond a lot of his capabilities, when ideally he should have been more concerned about things like school friends, and sports.

Despite the way things were however, Vin was a happy kid. When he was about twelve he had decided that this was just Fate trying to balance out how ridiculously good-looking he was. At least, that was what he told himself.

Eventually deciding that lying in bed wasn't really worth it anymore, Vin grudgingly rolled to his feet and pulled on a t-shirt, before shuffling downstairs to deal with the toaster situation.

While he may have hated living there, Vin didn't mind the actual house itself. It was standard, middle-class suburbia lifestyle, and Macbeth didn't really care if he lugged his boombox and cassettes around with him while he worked. However, that may just have been because she was rarely home, gone most days and quite a few nights, working at a boarding school on the other side of town. Just sometimes it was the little things that bugged him; like how they still had a 1985 calendar pinned to the wall when it was the beginning of 1988, or how the TV never worked, and he had to keep jiggling the antenna to get a few minutes of midday soap operas – that's if he was lucky. But there were things that he liked, too. Like how he could get out the door at eight am sharp and not have to come back for seven whole hours.

It was the little things.

Today he got out the door at seven forty-five, and really, that was fantastic. He could loiter on his way to school, maybe listen to an entire side of his Men at Work tape while he walked, then sit under the tree by the cafeteria and pretend he wasn't staring at Zero Toriello. Seemed like a pretty good plan, actually.

And so he did. By the time he got to school, he still had two whole songs left on the tape, so he set the boombox down on the grass and sprawled beside it, feeling somewhat content.

Zero Toriello was one hell of a girl. No one really knew anything about her for sure, as she dressed like a total badass and scared everyone away, but most had her theories. There were rumours that she'd stabbed a guy, others could have sworn she was part of some cult, but at least the story about her "accidentally" blowing up the chemistry building at her last school was true. Vin had been hanging around the park across the road just as everything went up in flames, and man it was show. A week later she turned up at Pinkerton, hands stuffed in pockets and a colossal scowl on her face. Vin was instantly smitten.