"Be The Lightning In Me That Strikes Relentless"

by: singyourmelody

Disclaimer: Don't own The Fosters characters. Title is from Snow Patrol's "The Lightning Strike: What If This Storm Ends."

Her third foster home belonged to an old woman with a penchant for quilted items, southern cooking, and the Good Book.

She had eight-tracks of old gospel hymns and a cross above every doorway as if those two wooden sticks forged together by anger and love could somehow protect anyone who walked under them.

She and Jude were there for six months and during that time, Callie learned two very important lessons.

One.

Forgive us our trespasses.

She was a sinner. She needed forgiveness.

Two.

And lead us not into temptation.

She had to laugh when she moved into the Fosters' home. Because he sat down at the dining room table next to her, casually asking who she was, with Liam's breath still making the hair on the back of her neck stand on end and his words haunting her every dream. And she realized that asking the Lord not to lead you into temptation was as futile as trying to grasp the wind with both hands.

"Don't say it."

He looks at her with narrowed eyes and they are nineteen years old and she should know better.

He should too, for that matter.

He opens his mouth to respond, but she quickly moves off of his bed and towards the door.

"We-"

"Can't. I know," he recites the words that have been pounding in their ears for what, years, now? Years. "Look, we're both home for the summer. Let's just try to get through this until we leave again in the fall."

"I don't know how to do that with you," she says and it may be one of the most open and honest things she's ever said to him.

He shrugs. "We're friends."

She stares. "Two minutes ago you were about to tell me you loved me."

"And you weren't going to say it back. Not seeing what the problem is here," he says and there's something in his nonchalant tone that makes her want to scratch his eyes out. Or maybe kiss him until he can't feel anything anymore. Until she can't.

"The problem is that we are obviously not friends, Brandon. We're. . ." and she really doesn't know how to finish that thought, so instead the solemn words the old lady taught her so long ago echo in her ears: deliver us.

Deliver us.

He's always been her greatest temptation, hasn't he?

And she's always been so so strong.

As she walks out of his room and into what once were the four walls she shared with Mariana, she decides that maybe the old lady had it right.

Maybe there was some providential force guiding her every moment of every day that she lived under the Fosters' roof. How else can she explain her steely and consistent resolve? How else can she look at him and want him and turn away, time and time again?

They have an old fashioned family dinner two nights later and it's like old times, almost.

Mariana's away for the summer working at some internship and Jesus is trying to get as many hours as possible at the car wash and Jude is spending the night at a friend's, so it turns out to be him and her and the moms.

"Not exactly what I had in mind, but it'll do," Lena says when they all sit down together, the three open chairs reminding Callie of all the gaps she's tried to fill and all the times she's come up short.

"We are family," he says dryly.

"Mm, I love that song," Stef says and Lena laughs.

They talk of weekend plans, of the extra online courses she's taking during the summer session, of how creamy the mashed potatoes really are, and she realizes how much she's missed this while she was at school. How much she would miss it if it ever was taken away from her.

And even though she's never been the praying type (too many images of Christ hanging on a cross and the sky raining down and nails and blood and tears), she sends up a silent prayer of thanks.

Thanks for the people around her, for a family for Jude. And thanks for the reminder of what she values most. What she's given up for what she values most.

She looks at him then and he must be able to feel his eyes on her because he looks up from the table and suddenly, over a plate of marinated chicken and carrots, his eyes boring into hers, it's over.

All those years of arguing with herself, all those moments of confusion and tension and denial, wasted. Or maybe just forgotten. Not necessary anymore. Her carefully constructed walls, the ones that took years shaping and reforming and perfecting, cut to size to keep him out, all of them have evaporated in just one moment.

And she's left with just her, a sinner, sitting across from him, her . . . what? Temptation? Her forbidden fruit? Her greatest reward?

Somehow that last one seems to fit and even though she knows that the quest for knowledge can lead to destruction, images of slender fingers wrapping around a shiny red apple flashing through her mind, she suddenly just has to know. His thoughts, the lines of his palms, his favorite memory, how he tastes, all of it, she just wants to know.

He's staring at her as if he's seeing her last internal war, so she shrugs a little, because this feeling, this letting go and falling is freeing and open and scary, and she doesn't quite know what to make of any of it.

When she kisses him later, he only asks "Why?"

But she just shakes her head. "Wanted to give in a little."

He looks at her skeptically and she can't blame him.

Years of hearing no have led him to distrust her saying yes.

"I'm tired of being saved," she says, as she pulls him closer, the eight-track hymns playing quietly through her mind. She tries to drown them out with the even melody of his breathing.

"No one is saving you here, Callie," he says and she almost loses it when she realizes how much he gets her, how much he knows that she needs to be independent, her own person, her own mind.

Her own savior.

She needs to be the one deciding.

And if she is walking right up to the lake of fire and dipping her toe in, getting burned, no, being consumed, well . . .

She groans a little as he kisses her jaw and moves towards her neck. Pulling back, she looks right at him and sees the one person who could love her unconditionally, the person who's asking for the chance. How could anyone ever want less?

"Don't say it," she says, burying her face a little.

"Wasn't going to."

She looks at him skeptically, as his fingers press the notes of his most recent song into her hipbone.

"What? You don't think I know you well enough to know that you aren't ready for that? Like it or not," he says, leaning closer, "I do."

"I'm going to get there," she states and he grins. "What?" she asks.

"You're all resolved. It's like you're on a mission or something."

She nudges his shoulder. "Shut up."

After a moment she says, "I should go. Don't want the moms to be in for quite a shock." She sits up, carefully tucking the blanket around her.

"Oh, they already know."

She freezes. "What."

He grins again. "The look on your face. . ."

"I hate you. I hate you so so much," she says, punching him this time.

He grabs her fist and wraps himself around her and she automatically leans back into him, even as he says, "No you don't."

And he's right.

They become a habit.

And it's summer and she might feel like she's living in a Beach Boys song. He buys her ice cream cones and brings the sunscreen when she forgets it and proofs her papers, even the really long ones, so she knows this really is something, even as she's not sure what.

It'd be so easy to think this is what love is like. Late night walks when everyone is asleep and him waiting for her when her shift is over and Marge, the manager asking if he is her boyfriend and saying He's cute with a wink and she actually blushes and who is she anymore? She doesn't recognize this person who gives in and takes what she wants and just enjoys it.

He snores a little when his allergies act up and she knows this now because she's next to him when he sleeps and it's one small part of him, but it makes her want to know more and more and more. After a few weeks, she begins to wonder how he could ever be a wrong to her, how she could ever possibly be more broken when he's around (isn't she already shattered enough?).

If this is temptation, she thinks to herself, one morning when the sunrise is particularly bright and they sit on the hood of his car as it creeps higher and higher, warming every part of her, his thumb mindlessly drawing circles on her hand and her face ever so slightly turned towards his, if this is temptation, she has succumbed.

He leaves to go back to college a day before her and they don't label or define anything and it feels a bit like that book she started at her second foster home and wasn't able to complete before they left.

Unfinished.

But then Stef asks if she'll check her brother's room for any dirty laundry because she's doing a load of whites and she realizes that Stef's not referring to Jude.

And with that one thoughtless question casually slipping off of her foster mom's tongue, he slips back into that role: brother, family, forbidden, wrong.

He's been gone for less than a day and it seems that that's all she needs. Less than a day and she realizes what she's done, recognizes her need to absolve herself of the past, to purge herself of her wrongdoing, to step forward, because really, it's easier than standing still.

And in less than a day, she resolves to make this right, to fix this summer, to erase them.

She starts by throwing out the ticket stub from that awful rom-com they spent the whole night making fun of and quickly moving on to the photo of the two of them on her first upside-down rollercoaster. He looks like he's having the time of his life. She looks like she might puke.

Then there's his copy of To Kill a Mockingbird that she forgot to return, his UCLA sweatshirt tucked under her pillow, the sliced wristbands that got them into the Passion Pit concert in her desk drawer. She finds the napkin on which he drew his self portrait, still stained with remnants of his chocolate ice cream cone, his birthday present she purchased two months early (blank sheet music inscribed with his name, waiting eagerly for his compositions), and of course, her journal. She doesn't even know what to do with her journal. Because even though she never mentions his name, she learned that lesson long ago, he's there in every page, in every line, in every word.

She briefly considers trying to cut him out of the book, literally, a box cutter in her hand, but she knows that some things are impossible, so she tosses it into the box along with the rest of her summer. Taping it shut, she shoves it into the corner and reminds herself to take it to the dumpster at work before she leaves for school.

Later that night, she closes her eyes and tries not to remember his hand reaching for hers right at the moment when she would drift off to sleep, just as it had every night that mattered.

He'd probably give the moon to her if she asked for it, or worse, a diamond ring.

Because he doesn't get it and probably never will. That's not how things work for her. She may have given in to him, may have let him see every little part of her that she usually keeps hidden, but really that doesn't mean anything.

Just because she gave him everything and just because he would give her anything, doesn't mean that this magically becomes a happy-ever-after type of story.

It doesn't mean that they get married and buy a house and put up a picket fence and have two-point-five kids, because really who would want a point-five kid anyway and she's never been the type to wear pearls.

She knows this.

But the thing that she didn't count on, the one that she never could have seen coming, (although that old lady did, didn't she, as she recited those prayers over and over again, her words forming an invisible shield) is this: once you give in, you can never, ever go back.

There aren't clean slates. There's only Adam and Eve, forever banned from paradise.

Once you've bitten the apple or taken what you shouldn't or done what you could never undo, that's it. You're forever marked, transformed, remade.

She's different now. He's made her that way.

Although, really, she made herself that way.

So here she stands, both savior and destroyer, simultaneously glorious and ruined, in her freshly unpacked dorm room, a collection of books on her desk and a poster of their favorite band on her wall.

You can never go back, a small voice hisses in her ear.

Her cell rings.

And when she sees his name on her caller ID, she decides she doesn't want to.

Looking over at the last remaining box sitting open on the floor next to her desk, the box she didn't (couldn't? oh what does it even matter anymore?) throw away, the sleeve of his sweatshirt peeking out over the edge, she hits 'Accept.'

"Hey."

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.

End.

Thanks for reading and reviewing. Love to all.