Title: Footprint in the Sand

Author: Summer

Rating: T, will likely go up to M

Title: Twenty years later, to the day, tragedy repeats itself, and this time it's Brooke and Lucas' teenage daughter caught in the crossfire. Can the divorced couple get it together when their daughter's life hangs in the balance?

Author's Note: This idea came to me suddenly last night, and I pondered it for a while before deciding to write it. I've had a lot of ideas come to me for "One Tree Hill" fiction, but I also have a lot of stories to finish, so I've been putting off writing them. But this strikes me as an important story to tell. The content may not be something you're comfortable with, and there's definitely a lot of tragedy at the beginning, but I promise you there will be happiness as well.

……….

Red. Not that bright shade in a child's paint set, or the burgundy of the bridesmaids' dresses at his wedding. The weekend he and his ex-wife had spent painting his office, she'd commented that it was the color of a sunset after a wildfire, and the description had stuck.

Now, though, as Lucas Scott gripped the office phone so tightly his knuckles turned white, the red he was seeing wasn't just on the walls. It flooded through his body, clenching his heart and surrounding his brain, his ability to think rationally disappearing. "You want to what?" he spat into the phone, annoyance evident in his voice.

There was an exasperated sigh on the other end, and then a husky voice murmured, "She's sixteen, Luke. And from what you've told me, it sounds like she needs more female influence, someone she can confide in, a mother figure-"

"A mother figure?" Lucas repeated with a roll of his eyes, picking the framed picture of his teenage daughter up off his desk and studying it. "No, Brooke, what she needs is a mother, and you've made it perfectly clear-"

"That isn't fair!" his ex-wife interrupted, practically shouting. "I gave you sole custody because we agreed she needed stability, and moving back and forth between Tree Hill and New York constantly wouldn't give her that. You know that, so how dare you say I don't want to be her mother anymore!"

Clenching his teeth, Lucas had to admit that Brooke had always acted in their daughter's best interests. "She's hit a rough patch, Brooke," he pleaded, running his index finger along the edge of the photograph, "Give it a few weeks and she'll snap out of it. You'll see."

"Snap out of it? Luke, our teenage daughter bought a pregnancy test, and the only reason you know about it is because you found the box in the trash. You don't even know what the results were! How do you know she can just snap out of it? If getting un-pregnant was as simple as snapping your fingers, I doubt social workers would have jobs."

Wincing, Lucas set the photo back down as Brooke brought the ugly truth back to his attention. "Yeah, I know. I'm going to talk to her tonight, though, and we'll figure it out, either way."

"This is our daughter's life, Lucas. If she is pregnant, she needs me. And if she isn't, she still needs me. I think she should move up to New York, at least for a while. There are good schools up here and I could book her an appointment with my therapist, and-"

She broke off suddenly and Lucas furrowed his brow in confusion, wondering if he'd lost the call. There wasn't a dial tone, but the home phone line had been acting funny…

Just as he was about to set the phone down in its cradle, he heard a bustling in the background and a mechanical sounding siren.

"Luke?" Brooke's voice was soft when she spoke again, and she sounded oddly distant. "Luke?"

"Yeah… I'm still here."

"P-put on the TV," she stumbled over her words, and something in her tone made his stomach twist.

He scrambled around for a remote before remembering he was in his office, that there wasn't a television there. "I don't have a TV in here," he responded with a frown, "What are you watching?"

"Put. On. The. TV." When she repeated the sentence, it was slow and demanding, yet vulnerable. "Just put it on."

He was about to protest the hysterics when he heard what sounded like a whimper from her end of the phone. "Alright, I have to put the phone down, though. One minute."

Setting the phone down on his desk, Lucas pushed himself wearily out of the computer chair he'd had since college and walked slowly out of the room. His speed decreased as he walked down the hall to the den, not because he wanted to annoy Brooke but because he had a vague sensation he was walking toward some personal hell.

Picking up the phone in the den as he rounded the corner into the room, Lucas murmured into the phone, "Alright, I'm in the den," as he picked up the remote and switched the television on.

And then his heart stopped.

………..

"This is almost too easy," Declan Covington murmured as he gazed at the expansive brick building, foreboding now due to the silence that surrounded it, the lack of activity bustling from its doors as the bell signaling the end of the school day provided a shrill backdrop for television broadcasts around the nation.

His camerawoman, Penny LeBlanc, nodded but didn't bother to look up from behind the lens she was adjusting. "Yeah… yeah, you're right," she returned distractedly, holding up her right hand, fingers outstretched, and slowly lowering one at a time. As she lowered the last, she spoke up assuredly, "You're on."

Declan cleared his throat quickly, and he didn't have to feign a grave expression as he focused his gaze on the camera. "Declan Covington reporting from Tree Hill, North Carolina, a small coastal town about twenty miles north of the city of Wilmington. Today, lightning struck twice for this close-knit community. Twenty years ago, to the day, a school shooting claimed the lives of seventeen year old James Edwards, and thirty-six year old Keith Scott, who'd entered the school in an attempt to talk young Edwards out of the horrific crime. Now, as the school marked the twentieth anniversary of this tragedy with a memorial service, a gunman-"

A bang behind them stirred Declan into silence and he glanced over his shoulder, camera still rolling as Penny adjusted it to focus on the main entrance of Tree Hill High School, which had just been flung open, a stream of students running from the building.

Staring in horror for a minute, Declan watched the ashen faced students rush into the courtyard, the SWAT team roaring into action and running forward, shouting orders for the students to drop to the ground, and then his gaze went back to the door, to the stragglers.

The broken, the bloody, the limping. "Turn off the camera," he instructed Penny in shock, his voice barely above a whisper as a brunette girl hovered in the doorway, glancing down at the stairs but not breaking into a run as the others had. Instead, he saw her gulp, and then she was pushed forward, an arm encircling her roughly from behind. He saw the gun dug into her side before he saw the shooter standing behind her.

Even from fifty yards away, Declan could see the girl's wide blue eyes pleading with the crowd, tears streaming down her pale face. From her expensive fitted jeans and silky brown locks, he knew immediately that she'd have been one of the giggling, popular girls in the middle of the lunch room on any other day.

And then the gun went off, and the girl buckled before falling to the ground, scarlet pooling underneath her.

"Abby!"

The shout was heartbreaking, clear over the barrage of shots that followed as the SWAT team took down the gunman, and Declan craned his head in that direction. "Don't film him," he instructed Penny, even as all the other networks swiveled their cameras around to catch the first image of a victim's father.

The man was dressed casually, as if he'd come from home rather than an office like most of the other parents lingering behind the yellow tape, and his blond hair was a tousled mess, as if he'd been running his hands through it on the drive to the school. But what caught Declan's addition was the effortless way the tall blond man tore through the yellow tape and broke through the throng of police officers as he closed the distance between himself and his teenage daughter.

………….

One of the perks of being a successful fashion designer was the even more successful friends she'd made. Almost as soon as Lucas had assured Brooke that he'd rush to the school and disconnected their call, the phone had rung again.

Academy Award winning actress Chloe Olsen's melodic voice had filled the line, cutting through the bullshit of the usual pleasantries with, "That news report- isn't Tree Hill were your daughter lives?"

Forty minutes later, Brooke was boarding Chloe's private plane housed at LaGuardia Airport, the pilot already waiting to take her to Tree Hill.

Collapsing onto a couch positioned on the left side of the cabin, Brooke hadn't even had a chance to open the quickly packed carry-on she'd brought along before the plane lurched forward, taxiing onto the runway. She glanced up briefly before returning her attention to her bag, fiddling with the zipper and pulling out the photo album she'd kept in her office.

The divorce had been hard on Abby, twelve going on twenty-one at the time, and precocious as all hell. Brooke squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the fears that had been running through her head since she'd first flipped on the television.

Sending your child to school wasn't supposed to lead to this. It was natural for a parent to have trouble letting go, to cry when their five year old got on the bus for the first time. But after years of sending a child to school for 180 days each year, give or take a few, that fear disappeared in most cases.

For Brooke, it had never totally left her, but it had faded into the background, becoming little more than a nightmare. It wasn't something she thought of every day, but now that she was faced with the reality, memories of her own longest school day flooded back to her.

She remembered after the shooting, the news had held reports of "Tree Hill High students were among the lucky, when the only student to die was the shooter." It had always angered her that they were supposed to think they were "lucky." She wanted to call in, to ask, "What about my best friend, who will have a scar on her leg to remember the day by for the rest of her life? What about my boyfriend, whose uncle was killed being a hero? What about his mother, who lost her fiancée? What about me? I lost my hope for normalcy, my belief that everything will work out in the end."

And now, it was happening all over again, and this time it was happening to her daughter. Abby, who'd rolled her eyes at her mom the last time she'd seen her and told her that she was old enough to go back-to-school shopping with friends, that she didn't need her famous fashion designer mom to pick out her clothes for her anymore. Abby, who'd always brushed off Brooke's concerns about school safety, and told her to stop worrying when Brooke would dwell on the Code Yellows and Code Reds outlined in the safety packets the students were handed in homeroom on the first day of school every year.

Abby, who at the best, had had her whole life altered today in a way Brooke had hoped her daughter would never have to experience. And at the worst, who'd had her life ended.