Chewing on dried cranberries prove to be helpful, as do long, calming, hot baths. I just came from one - a bath, I mean - and now I suddenly thought of a fic that I could write. You have been warned, though, that this a supposedly angsty one-shot, and it's J/T-related. Well, enjoy, if emotions permit.

Disclaimer: I do not claim to own Class of the Titans. I've tried, I've failed, and so here I am, writing fanfiction. Is there anything more to say? No, so let's get on to the fic.

How It Ended

The bed was warm and soft as the two snuggled in it, book in hand. Mother and daughter were flipping through the worn, yellow pages of Theresa's old photo album. Heavy as it was, little Roxanne seemed enthusiastic about it.

"Hey, Mummy, here's you and Daddy!" she squealed with excitement only little kids could possibly feel.

Theresa smiled, touching the faded photo with much fondness. "Yes, and here's my dad, your grandfather, rather."

She gently pointed to the photograph where her father and a much younger version of her smiled back at the both of them. A moment of wistfulness flooded her as she realised how much she missed her father. He might have died a year ago, but one year was too short to forget even a portion of what her father was like.

It seemed that when one reached a certain age, life started taking away things instead of giving them to you.

She was just thirty-one but she could remember the countless things she had lost. Not things, really - more of people. It started with some of her friends who were in the team she was in back then - her best friend, Atlanta, whose striking red hair was still engraved strongly in her mind. She was lost in the deciding battle between Cronus, the god of time, and the team. She had fought so strongly and courageously. Yet it had all boiled down to saving herself or saving the team. In the end, her brave self was lost for the greater good she had sacrificed herself for.

Then, the next year followed with the heartbroken Archie. He was the one most badly hit with Atlanta's death. Not surprisingly as well, since they were engaged and were all ready to be married two days after Atlanta was killed. He hardly spoke anymore, and when he did, it was to criticise and mock the friends who were trying to help him. It wasn't his fault - it was nobody's, actually - that he was so broken up over Atlanta. Still, he had gone too far to come back, and his friends could only stand by and watch hopelessly as their friend plunged into an abyss of depression. One night, the abyss had totally sucked him in, and when Theresa herself answered the phone, she cried. His car had been found crashed near a cliff, and he had lost his life. No one knew whether it was intentional or accidental. It could have been either. Accidental would have meant he was so caught up with the sorrow he couldn't forget, and intentional was... Intentional was something that Theresa would like to believe wasn't true. Still, she felt more peaceful knowing that Archie would no longer have to spend the rest of his life in lonely pain. Instead, he would be able to join Atlanta in the Elysian Fields...

After Archie came the harsh, unexpected war that broke out in New Olympia. Riots, actually. It had cost many lives, including those of Herry, who at that time was a policeman for reasons unknown. Odie just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Stepped out of the brownstone and into the firing zone... They had killed him, thinking that they had gotten someone else. As for Neil, his luck prevailed. He barely missed three bullets in a row. In order to pursue his model career in safety, he moved away from New Olympia. It had seemed heartless at that point in time to Theresa, as though he was ditching his friends, but now when she looked back at it, she was happy for him. Right now, in America where he had moved to, he was a household name.

Just like that, all five of her friends had slipped away. Then it had only left her and -

"Mummy, who's that?" Her adorable seven-year-old's voice cut into her thoughts.

Blinking, she stared down at the page. A young man had his arm around an orange-haired girl. Those deep, chocolate-brown eyes swimming with warmth and that light brown hair that she had once thought adorable was nothing short of forgettable to her.

"Jay..." she breathed, a tinge of sadness to her voice.

"Who?" Roxanne asked innocently, glancing at the page and then at her mother.

Her mother smiled briefly, but the smile didn't quite reach her eyes. She shook her head. "Jay. Just an old friend, really."

She reached to turn the page, but her little girl stopped her. "Was he really just a friend?"

Theresa sometimes had to wonder if children were really as innocent and pure as they seemed.

She hesitated. Finally, she started her story. "Well, once upon a time, I was a stupid seventeen-year-old who didn't know what she was getting into. I was young, I fell in love with this... this Jay person."

Roxanne looked up at her with those deep brown orbs she had gotten from her father - her real father. "You dated?"

Theresa sighed. "What do you kids watch on television nowadays? Well, not really anyway. We didn't really date. I loved him, or so I thought. I spent my time trying to please him, console him when he was down... He was our leader, and he was a good leader at that, a respectable one. But while he was a good leader, he was just that. A leader. He was always the leader, and he couldn't stop playing the leader. We were confused, young and naive. No, I was. I was the stupid one. I was cheerful, optimistic and thinking that one day, we would be just like any other fairytale - together, riding off into the sunset. Naive, I was, really."

Roxanne continued staring at her mother as Theresa spoke again after a slight pause. "We didn't really know what we wanted, and we got into it. Did things that... That we would regret later. We never knew what we were doing, never had the courage to see it was never really love. It was just a short fling. Even long after Cronus - uh, the bad guys, I mean, were gone, he couldn't stop worrying. He was paranoid. I had just been a distraction for him, an escape he wanted. I was nothing more than that to him."

A bitter tone, tinged with the hurt, made Roxanne cringe.

"It got too confusing until one day... It just cleared. My mind cleared, and I knew what he wanted, what I wanted - what we both wanted. We needed to face up to it, that we weren't for each other, and that, somehow, we just got lost along the way. And I left. And I never saw him again."

"Then you found Daddy." The statement from Roxanne came out sounding soft.

Theresa patted her daughter's head. "Yes."

Roxanne cocked her head to one side. "So was that how you and Jay ended?"

Theresa rolled her eyes. "Roxanne, it's time for bed." She moved to get out of the bed, taking the thick album with her. A flick of the light switch plunged the room into darkness. She tucked her little precious in, and turned to leave.

"Mummy! You can't leave me without telling me properly!" insisted the little girl, thrashing about in the bedsheets in the dark.

Theresa thought for a while. Her hand lingered on the doorknob as she turned to leave, a sad smile playing on her lips. "It never really ended, dear, because it never truly began."

She walked out of the door. "Goodnight, sweetheart."

And the door closed, leaving Roxanne to ponder on what she had just heard.

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End of one-shot. Hope it wasn't weird or something. I get the feeling it wasn't really angsty. Oh well, never mind about that. Ah and please review to let me know what you think, if you have the time to!