a/n: um hi, a new oneshot. yep. why? i don't know — it just hit is dedicated to rachel (temporary homes) because i really want to write something for her — just to honor her marvelous writing & just how sweet of a person she really is. it's also for any other girl who ever felt like dylan. we all have flaws, that doesn't make us any less.

dylan oneshots are pretty cliché & this one is pretty much like all the other ones you see. sorry. it's reallyreallyreally short — i can't do long writing and still have it make sense like some people /clara/ can.

· summary courtesy of coldplay's paradise.

under the stormy skies

a dylan oneshot

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Sometimes, Dylan wishes life had an escape button — she wishes she could be be Alice and loose herself in a world of walking cards, cheshire cats, mad hatters and magic.

Life, she thinks, is an illusion, where one moment she's soaring through utopia and the next, she's huddled up in bed, crying and crying and crying until she's too sore, too numb to even feel. There are those instances, those picturesque moments when everything seems plausible and possible, yet most of the time, those moments are overshadowed by the days everything is wrong, and hopelessness seizes her.

It's not as easy as she tries to make it seem, being Dylan Marvil.

There are so many days when she feels as if she's on the brink of crumbling and yet, she's forced to put on a pretty smile and wink for the paparazzi, because showing emotion is a sign of weakness and she must keep up her facade, for Merri-Lee's sake, for the sake of the family reputation she must uphold. She's already shamed the Marvil family enough, just by being herself and she doesn't want to mess up even more.

She's trying her hardest but it doesn't seem to be working anymore.

More than anything, Dylan hates looking in the mirror, seeing all her imperfection and her flaws reflected back at her — thrown in her face — and sometimes she wishes she could hurl her phone at the glass, watch her reflection shatter into a million little pieces, and sometimes she wishes she could curl up in a ball and drown herself in self hate.

She's always the odd one out, the second choice, the one that doesn't really seem to fit in amongst all those pretty faces with their perfect everything. Looking at her own sisters, she feels self-conscious because Jamie & Ryan have made thousands of boys drool, with their glamorous smiles and exotic beauty that Dylan never really got.

She sees it in her mother's eyes and in the looks exchanged between her friends —

There's no more sugar coating facts, Dylan's a fat, ugly pig and that's that.

She tries dieting, then she tries fasting, but it's all hopeless because days have gone by, and the hunger is almost killing her now but she looks in the mirror and it's all the same, always the same.

Some days, Dylan reads book about fairytales, about little girls who grow up to become lovely swans & marry the man of their dreams, and wishes she was special.

She doesn't have charm, she doesn't have beauty — all she has is burps and funny jokes that scare boys away and Dylan was never meant to be born amongst all these princesses and princes — she's a lowly peasant with nothing she can claim to be hers. She's losing everything; her friends don't care anymore (did they ever?) and her mother looks at her with the same pity and disgust that makes Dylan want to run, run, run away from everything and anything.

She wants to scream until her voice goes hoarse but Dylan doesn't dare to utter a word because she doesn't want to be labeled again; fat, ugly, slut, useless, attention whore… the list is endless and so is the amount of times Dylan has cried because of it.

They'll never understand what it's like to feel the world falling apart beneath your feet, to watch your hopes, dreams and wishes all go down the drain.

She's stopped eating again, just to see if maybe the fourth time's the charm.

Sometimes, Dylan looks back at wonders what happened to the little girl, with two, tiny auburn braids and a huge smile, skipping through the first few years of life weightlessly — no regrets, no hesitations, nothing whatsoever. The girl that used to take two chocolate chip cookies and a peanut butter jelly sandwich in a pink Dora bag to lunch everyday and not care about the consequences of sugar & butter and all those other things Dylan frets about now.

She wants to be that little girl again.

Dylan sees the escape button now — it's in the form of tiny red pills and a crystal bottle but it's there nonetheless.

It's an easy route, it's fast and it's efficient, it's one quick swallow and then it's over, all gone. Dylan looks but she doesn't see something forbidden and she doesn't see a dead end — she sees a beginning, a light shining on the far edge of the tunnel. She can close her eyes and picture it all now, a tiny island located up in the clouds, filled with endless possibilities — it's all just a daydream away.

Maybe she's crazy — and maybe she's seeing things but Dylan knows, she feels it heart and she knows.

She closes her eyes and lets go, for once and for all.

fin.