Once my Grandfather told me that for every lie you tell your grave is dug that bit deeper, for every secret there is a shallow grave. People spend their whole lives erecting imaginary headstones only to bury the truth a little under the surface, where it eats away at them like maggots. When you lie your way through life there's no such thing as getting laid to rest, you get buried the same way you lived; in a bottomless grave with the maggots eating away at you like all those truths. Telling your truth is never easy, the truth rarely is. You may find yourself indulging to the people closest to you only to not be able to make yourself understood. That stings the most, maybe, because you feel something is so important that you have to say it and nobody gets what the big deal is. Even if what you said might make you feel like crying, even if you'd tried your best to convey it, to make them feel the same weight of the words that they carried in your head. You can't simply make people understand, and I think we're all scared of being misunderstood. Maybe that's why some secrets stay buried.

I met Alison DiLaurentis in the fifth grade. Neither of us had turned eleven yet, it had been half way through the school year when I'd been enrolled and that was about the only similarity that could be summed up between the two of us. We weren't fast friends; at ten we were old enough not to fall in easy friendships, we were more picky about who we spent our time with and why we should be friends in the first place. We got there, eventually. And it was the night they found her body that I knew my Grandfather had been right all along. People who lie never lie easy.

(AN: Recently I re-started Pretty Little Liars, and I feel like Jason really got the short end of the stick for most, if not the entirety, of the series. Plus, sometimes I want to scream at the girls for being idiots.

I won't spoil the ending since it's pretty common knowledge, but this fic while be centered mostly around Charlie's secrets rather than the elusive identity of 'A'. It's called Pretty Little Liars, not 'Who's A', and this is called Charlie Red Hands because it's about Charlie's secrets.)