So I said I was never gonna write a sequel to At Last, and I guess that's only partly true, because here I am with this companion fic with time... difficulties. Like Ed and Casey get together way earlier in At Last than they do here, and I changed the time when he goes to school. But whatever. I guess it works better this way... Or not, actually. This fic... not so heavy on the dialogue. And I dunno, when it shows up, it feels awkward to me, but I guess this whole story has this kind of awkward vibe going, so maybe it fits... Um, and let's see, I owe some lines and inspiration to the song, "All Over You" by The Spill Canvas, "Spark" by Tori Amos, and "Where I Stood" by Missy Higgins, from whence the title comes. And some of the lines in this fic are the same as the ones in At Last, because there was some overlap, but as you'll see, there's a whole different point of view here and different emphasis, tones, interpretations and all that jazz.

Um, in terms of spoilers, Vacation with Derek is briefly mentioned but not really specifically. Just extremely general things like the grandmother and it being a camp, none of the plot stuff, since I still haven't seen it and really don't want to have to bother integrating that into the story. And it's kind of AU in that Derek and Casey don't go to Queens, though Liz and Ed do, because the original story was written before the writers made that decision, obviously. But everything that happened on the show happened here, basically. So, if you want a few more details about the world in which this story is set, I recommend reading At Last, although keep in mind that in matters of timing, they are a bit different and conflicting.

Let's see... I don't own the characters or, for that matter, most of their situations. I do, however, own the plot.

Also, originally, this was meant to be a one-shot, like the original. And in some respects, most respects, really, it is. But I decided to divide it up because it's got to be like, twice as long as the original. And I wanted to make it easier on you guys to read, I guess. Since people complained about it the last time. But it is a one-shot, meant to be read whole, in its entirety, in one sitting. None of this waiting business. That being said, I do suppose it can be read in segments, but just consider yourselves fortunate that I divided it up. ;)

This story, when I started writing it, well, it was meant to be completely different than it turned out, and so many little things about it are. But it's, really, it's kind of the product of a year of my life, a year of, well, lots of stress and maybe some turmoil, and me growing up, and that moment in your life right before everything's changing, something I worked on in the early mornings between other stories and kind of with Strange Attractors in the back of my mind, so some of that influence has filtered in... something that got me through those weeks when I was sexiled at three in the morning and living with my roommate and her boyfriend for a month, and I thought I was just going to go insane because I was so alone and so... left out... like I was an island and, I dunno, it hurt, more than I realized at the time... and so it's darker than I thought, and heavier than I thought, and somehow more... personal than I thought. Which is odd, really, 'cause mostly my life is nothing like Lizzie's in the story, but it wound up being all her story. And, I mean, this story, parts of it sort of sustained me, kind of how writing the first one really helped me work through some things. So it means a lot to me, and finally publishing it feels kind of like coming full circle.

So I would really appreciate reviews and anything you may have to say. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy it.

It's never been easy for you. Things don't fall into your lap like they do for Casey (despite Derek's best efforts), and you've never been anyone's dream girl. You're sort-of pretty, you guess. You're athletic, coordinated in ways Casey will never be, intelligent (but not quite as smart as Casey or Edwin, and not half as wise to the world as Derek), well-liked, nice when you want to be, agreeable, and fun to be around. And what you lack you make up for in other areas, but that doesn't change the glaring fact that you've always been that tomboy, that ugly duckling, in the shadows, easily overlooked and easily forgotten. You like to joke and say that you're an acquired taste, but you've said it one too many times and now it tastes like iron in your mouth. Sometimes you really hate always being the friend.

In high school, there had been boys, but for some unknown reason, they all tired of you before much of anything could happen. You'd had plenty of male friends, but Jamie was one of the few who ever dared to ask you out. When you ask your girlfriends why this always happens, they say that you're too intimidating. They mean that you're too competitive, too much, entirely in a league of your own. Casey tells you you're a strong woman, stronger than her, even, and this scares guys. You read between the lines and hear her really saying that you're too intense. Sometimes you think she's right about you, but the rest of the time you just wish you were more like her, just weak and flawed enough to attract men like flies. You've always stood up for what you believe in; you never, ever back down, and, more than anything, you're a fighter first and foremost.

You feel like you've been struggling your whole life. When you were little, you fought to keep your family together. When that didn't work, you fought the inevitable forces of change with every breath in you. Sometimes you think you still haven't stopped fighting change. Then, when you moved in with the Venturis and knew in your bones that your life had changed forever and that there was nothing you could do about it, you fought against the Venturis, fought for your family and your sister. As time passed, you and Edwin fought for scarce attention, and then you teamed up to fight against the yoke of your older brother and sister (you've been waging a war against Casey and everything she is ever since, and you don't know why). As a teenager, you fought for your freedom, your rights to have your own life. You speak up for those who cannot speak and defend those who cannot fight: the environment, the animals, the world. In sports, you fight the pain; you wage war on your body, ignoring every screaming, gasping muscle to achieve your ends. And there's a certain gritty satisfaction in it, because that is one war you know you can win.

You only win a couple fights, usually minor victories that mean so little to you. But the struggle is endless, interminable, and painful when it feels like you're. always. losing. Even when you lose, though, you don't stop fighting. You just move on to the next battle and keep charging forward, and sometimes you think that that is maybe a curse. After all, it's not in your nature to give up, even when you probably should.

Then, one day, when you're so caught up in waging a million other tiny battles at once, trying to hold back the tide of inevitability (because that is the very nature of change), pushing and pulling and screaming and clawing at your enemies, something even more insidious creeps up on you. Edwin, and you know it sounds like a bad joke, but that's the truth.

You've grown apart a bit, and you're not as close as you used to be. You're still close friends, of course, but it isn't the way it used to be. You don't know why, don't want to think that this one pure, dependable thing in your life is changing, but it has, and it's too late. Maybe it's because you're both growing up, and it feels like now you two have nothing in common anymore. Maybe it's because things have changed without Derek and Casey in your lives on an everyday basis, or maybe things changed when Liam was born. You don't know how it got this way, only that it is. You have your life, and he has his; sometimes they intersect, but a level of intimacy, of friendship, has been stripped away. You can't get that back.

It takes a while before much of anything happens. There you are, practically estranged, as you've been since the first few months of high school, and the final year, things change. He'd started looking at you differently a while ago; you can't put your finger on it, but you sense the slow change nonetheless. At first you don't know what to make of it, so you don't make anything of it, don't even waste the thoughts on it. But something changes that summer of your last year of high school, and he who was once so scarce is now completely unavoidable.

Odder still, you found that you didn't mind this so much. You didn't quite know what it was he wanted or why, but you know he wants something from you. You can read it in his dark eyes, in the cocky curve of his lips, so like his brother's. It's only at times like this, when he looks at you in this indecipherable way, manipulation and a kind of hunger in his eyes, that you remember he's Derek's brother. It's the end of an era, and Edwin's graduating early because he can't wait to get out of here. High school for him wasn't what it was for you. Maybe it's nostalgia, maybe he knows he's going to miss this, and he's trying to take advantage of the time he has left.

He gives you looks like he appreciates you maybe a little too much, and he jumps through hoops to stay in your good graces. He says things now that make you blush in spite of yourself. If you didn't know better, you'd think he was flirting with you. Worse still, it begins to dawn on you that you just might be flirting back. And clearly something must be wrong with you because you don't mind that at all, and, for God's sake, it's Edwin! As much as you'd like to be horrified, you're not.

There's a new kind of tension in your interactions now. It's visceral, like you're circling each other with watchful, suspicious eyes. There's friction now where there wasn't any before, when you were younger. You two aren't bickering like siblings or arguing like people who live together anymore. You can't quite put your finger on it, can't properly recognize it or give it a name, but it's a new, itchy feeling, like there's something under your skin that you can't scratch. There's a feeling like you're working towards something together, and every day the tension builds just a little more until you could cut it with a spatula.

You don't realize how your lives begin to slowly intertwine or just how close you've been growing, like weeds. Every day ends with you two closer and closer and closer still... And then you lose track, and it bleeds into something else entirely. He leans over and kisses you one night on the couch when you're watching a movie. You don't fight it, not even a little. The way he does it, as if it comes naturally to him, as if there's nothing even remotely unusual about kissing his stepsister, surprises you and puts you at ease. But you're not really that surprised because you finally understand what that feeling in your stomach is, and a part of you knew this was going to happen at some point.

Things are changing, and you normally hate that, but this doesn't feel like change. It's a natural progression, so much so that it feels like an extension of what you already have and not at all like you're crossing a line. You know because there's a settling in your stomach, and it says to you that this is fate, this is meant to be. That should be an alarming feeling, and yet it isn't.

What you don't know, what you have yet to learn, is how deep you're in it already.

You don't talk about the kiss. Or the ones that follow it. They just kind of happen at random moments when you're alone, but they're stolen moments. Edwin has dates, flavors of the week, but so do you. None of them last long. Still, it bothers you to see them together, makes you a little bit queasy the way he acts like nothing's really changed when the both of you know better. You know you don't have the right because, well, what are you to him anyway?

You don't ask him what this is. Maybe you don't want to know. Maybe you don't want to jinx this. Maybe you're a little afraid of the answer. Maybe you should have asked him.

Things escalate a little further because he likes to push the envelope a bit, and Mom and Dad are busy worrying about their eldest and Marti's imminent adolescence. They're too busy focusing on paying bills and trying to accept that soon you'll both be gone that they rarely see the difference in your interactions. Then again, they're around so little that they rarely see you interact, period. For you, that's convenient. He pulls you into the Games Closet, which is dusty and a little sad, utterly neglected but completely private. No one bothers you there, and you let him feel you up. You're starting to think you enjoy this just a little too much.

This thing, whatever it is, it makes you do things you don't normally do. The lies, they fall off your lips so easily. You weren't a good liar before, either. You say whatever you can think of to get rid of potential suitors when he so much as looks at you because you know what that look means (make-out session in the janitor's closet, he's thinking, because you two have always had this thing about closets). You don't know, don't care what you are to him, and you don't feel dirty or guilty about it, but you're not a cheater. Once that's done, you follow him to the closet kind of like a lost puppy, and you don't regret any of it. You lie to teachers and parents about where you are and why you're late, why you've missed class, why you're flushed and flustered (and happy, strangely, terribly, ridiculously happy), and it's all so easy.

You have to hide like scared children in the dark. A part of you almost resents that, but it's habit to you now. You and Edwin always snuck around together before, spying on everyone else, and it feels kind of like old times. If you're being honest with yourself, you kind of like it, having a dirty little secret like this. So you duck into closets and dark spaces where no one can see you, like old classrooms and bedrooms and bathrooms at parties and tiny corners and the living room, where you can do almost anything as long as the lights are out and no one can see your hands moving underneath the blanket. No one suspects anything just as long as you're watching a movie.

You're almost nocturnal now because you come alive most at night. That's when you see him. You feel as if you're using up borrowed time, and you just know that the hourglass is going to run out of sand some time soon. You don't know when, though, but you crave more time. You don't get near enough time with him, just slivers here and there, the bit of downtime at home you're afforded when you don't have practice before Marti gets home and a couple hours at night if neither one of you is sleeping or busy. You're afraid of wanting more, but you do, no matter how hard you try and convince yourself you don't.

You don't really get why he does it, and you don't question why you do. All you know is that it feels good; it feels right, and he's paying attention to you. He knows the real you, has seen you at your best and your worst, and you don't have to pretend with him. There's a certain appeal to that. You know that it can't, won't last and that you'll probably end up ruining a great friendship because of this, but you don't really think that matters because you two will have to say goodbye eventually in the coming months, and you'd rather do it this way than wonder. Besides, you might as well go out with a bang (but you're not sure about doing that).

You're pretty sure you can handle it. It's just Edwin, after all. It won't end messy, you tell yourself, because the two of you just aren't like that. It's nothing serious, and it's not... love or commitment or a real relationship. But it's not really a friends with benefits thing, now is it? Whatever. Anyway, it's not like you're in love with him or anything. So it continues.

Every time you're alone together, you let things go a little bit further. You never really intend for that to happen, but when you're with him, you lose your head a little bit. When his lips are on yours, it feels so good that your body melts a little, and you're too lazy, too lost up in the ecstasy of it to say no to anything or to even want to say no. His hands slip up your shirt, fingers tracing patterns on your back. His hands trail around and rest on your stomach, firm and full of promise.

His hands smoothing down the slopes of your legs, leaning over you, hand holding your leg up by the crook of your knee. His lips, soft and moist, on your jaw, your chin, your cheekbones, your temples, your forehead, your throat, your neck, your cleavage, your collarbone, behind your ear. Your eyes practically rolling back in your head, and all you remember are the feelings, the pink light of your eyelids, and pulling him as close to you as possible, desperate for more.

You don't sleep with him, though, except the night before he leaves. Strangely enough, you're feeling terribly attached to him and wistful, wishing, almost hoping he doesn't have to go away tomorrow. You need something tangible to know that he's still here. You don't want to let go of him, even when he says he has to get up. You cling to him, digging your fingers in, stubbornly refusing to let him go. "Please, Ed... Stay," you rasp, pleading, not knowing whether you're asking him to stay here for the night, here with you, or if you're asking him to stay indefinitely. It makes you sound needy, pathetic, and desperate, and that's not you. You don't need Edwin. You just don't. Nevertheless, you're stronger than he is, stronger than his weak will, and you win that battle.

But by winning that battle, you've already started to lose the war, only you won't realize that for months.

So he sighs and says, resigned, "But only until you fall asleep... you know how it'll look in the morning..." Here he trails off, warning glaring in his tone. You get what he means by that, but you don't really know how this will all look in the morning. Nothing can prepare you for that ultimate finality, of the necessity that is his departure. You have no idea how much you'll miss him.

Then you curl your body around his, and there's no way that anyone who walked in that room and saw you two lying there wouldn't believe that you two are having a sexual relationship. But you don't have sex with him because that'd be too much like a final goodbye, like he was going away and you'd never see him again, like you were dying or he was going off to war or something. And none of that is true because it's not adieu or even goodbye, and he'll only be two and a half hours away at college, and he'll be back for break, you think, and you're not dying.

Heaven knows you could've had sex with him. It would've been easy enough, and it wasn't like you weren't horny and didn't want him. He wouldn't object either, but his morals aren't as strong as yours. But you can't forget so long ago that that was where you'd drawn the line. And you don't want to lose your goddamn virginity to your stepbrother. Much less as a result of a tawdry affair you can't even admit to. Because there are some things in this world that matter to you, and sex is one of them. You don't want to have sex with someone you don't love. You want it to be special, and nothing, nothing, is special about losing it to a brother figure, a family member, in your room with the lights off and on sheets you haven't washed in a month and nothing to hear but the pipes and heating and maybe faint snores from Derek's bedroom across the hall. You trust Edwin, yes, more than you've ever trusted any man (because your father breaks promises just as often as he keeps them and George is unreliable at best), but it's not about that. You want-no, deserve, the whole damn thing.

In lieu of that, you take his hand and guide it under your shorts and up your thigh. It's not the first time for that, but it is the first time you let him hook his fingers under the seam and touch your bare skin. Neither of you says much after that. He lets his fingers do all the talking, and your gasps and quiet moans say things you never could. But it doesn't exactly work the way you think it will, and even though you've done this thing... you don't feel the way afterwards that you wanted to, not that you even know what that feeling would be. All you know is this isn't it, and you feel ill at ease and somehow not right about this whole thing. You don't sleep for a long time. Edwin falls asleep soon enough, arm draped over your hip. You can't, though, so you pull the blankets up for privacy and stare at him for a long, long time because you're kind of afraid you'll forget what he looks like.

You watch his chest rise and fall with every breath, see his muscles relax as he drifts off to sleep, marvel at how his face looks (marbled, peaceful) in the light filtering in through your window, and then you intertwine your fingers with the hand in between the two of you. For whatever reason, and you know just how ridiculous this is, you want to be even closer to him. That would be practically impossible and uncomfortable for the both of you, so you resist the stupid impulse. You put your other hand on his heart instead, even though you can barely feel it thump through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. So then you slide your hand up under the hem of his shirt, resting on his bare skin, and you feel his heart beating against your palm. It's a reassuring feeling, that very feeling you were looking for.

The next morning, you wake up cold and alone in your bed, the sheets bunched around your waist. He's gone. He left early, early that morning and didn't even bother to say goodbye. At first, it's like last night didn't even happen, and you feel like you imagined it all. Because, you tell yourself, if all of that had really happened last night, it wouldn't be so damn easy for him to leave. It doesn't make sense to you, because if that happened, how could he just leave like that, like he didn't even owe you anything? Did he even look back?

It feels like you're going crazy, and he's so not worth it. You gaze over at the slightly rumpled sheets on his side of the bed; it's almost like he was never even here, only if you try hard enough, you can kind of almost smell him on your pillow. And, damn, this is harder than you thought it would be, and you haven't been this angry with him for months and months and months. So you throw his damn pillow, if indeed you didn't dream last night up, across the room and barely repress the desire to scream. But the minute after you do it, you want the pillow back.

The only other thing that convinces you that he was there last night is the fact that your underwear's not quite in the right place and you feel kind of... dirty. By the time you woke up, he and Casey are probably already there and moving things into his dorm. And that burns you a little.

But, damn it, you're not supposed to miss him.

- Loren ;*