New story I've been working on and hopefully update more than I did my other one. Please let me know what you think.

With or Without You

Prologue/ A Bad Dream

Nobody heard the door creak open, nobody heard the footsteps that intruded their perfect suburban lives. They came from a small town in Ohio for fucks sake, locking your doors there wasn't a necessity. But now, after four months of living in LA, you would think that they would have known better. You would think that it would have dawned on the Carlins to lock every door and window in their two story home.

But they didn't.

So when the intruders broke in through the front door Mr. and Mrs. Carlin didn't hear them from their room upstairs. Their fifteen year old son Clay, who fell asleep playing video games didn't hear one of them creep up behind him. Their thirteen year old daughter Spencer didn't hear them come up the stairs and their other fifteen year old Glen; well he was out with the cheer captain from his high school. So there was no one there to help Clay when they snatched him and gagged him. No one was there to help Mr. and Mrs. Carlin who were also dragged down the stairs, kicking and screaming down the stairs. Spencer did, however, wake up when her door was shut closed by accident when the Intruders had passed her room during the grabbing of her parents. Spencer Carlin, barely a teenager, and quite scared, she runs into the closet. The door to her room opens and a man she can't really make out in the dark checks around her room before shutting the door.

When Spencer hears the man's steps get further away she goes to her door and opens it quietly. She peeks out the door and when it is safe she heads to her steps where she can see her parents and Clay on their knees in front of a man she can't really see. The man is asking her parents where their little girl is and her parents say she isn't there.

Now Spencer, she isn't a dumb girl, so when she sees this man pull out a gun she knows this is the last memory she will have of her family. The same stranger talks to someone she can't see and asks them a question Spencer can't hear. Then a long pause before this stranger, this asshole with no name, turns the gun on Clay and pulls the trigger. He hits Clay straight in the head that held so much knowledge; he hits the brain that would have made Clay a millionaire. Clay's head lurches back and he falls backwards, never having seen it coming. Spencer's gasps are overpowered by her mother's sobbing and her father's yelling at these men. He says words that sound like mumble coming from a crying man. The only thing Spencer hears is her mother yelling my baby boy. In the middle of her yelling another shot rings and it hits her mother who falls back in the same manner Clay did. Spencer is frozen, she wants to run downstairs, to run anywhere, but nothing happens and she is forced to sit there as her father catches the last bullet.

These strangers, these intruders, they leave without another word. Spencer checks out and the next thing she remembers is being held in her brother, Glen's, arms outside of their formally safe suburban home. There are siren lights and people, but all Spencer can see is her brother and all she can hear is him saying;

"Close your eyes it's just a bad dream Spence"

The last of her family, Glen Carlin, and a social worker took him away from her a week later. They separate the only existing Carlin's left and Spencer is left with an empty feeling in her chest. She doesn't know that this is emptiness she feels all she knows is that something about her is no longer right. Other people notice it, especially the other kids in the home she was sent to. They beat up and tortured our young Carlin and not once did she make a peep. Spencer stayed so quiet that sometimes people forgot she was around. That's why running away from that place was so easy for her. Only carrying a backpack full of clothes and a picture of her family that one of the police officers gave to her the night her family died, Spencer Carlin was on her way. She was determined to find Glen and then they could leave together.

Then she met Ashley Davies.

Ashley, unlike Spencer, always had a shitty life. She was cursed with having the body of a woman at an early age. Ashley has always been beautiful and on her ninth birthday her mother's boyfriend noticed this. From that day on he decided to remind Ashley everyday what he thought of her body. Ashley never met her father and her mother was just as scared of her boyfriend as little Ashley was. So it occurred to Ashley at an early age to do what her mother did and pretend like it wasn't happening.

Him creeping into her room at night, it never happened.

The beating she would get when she tried to scream for help or stop him, it never happened.

The screaming coming from her mother's room whenever she tried to kick him out, it never happened.

Ashley's mother, she stopped pretending one day and she took Ashley and they left to a women's shelter. Ashley hated it there, although she was told she was safe she felt more scared then she had her whole life. She celebrated her thirteenth birthday there, the last day she saw her mother. Mrs. Davies left to get Ashley a present and after that she was never seen again. Two weeks later and Ashley left the shelter, backpack in hand. Whenever night time hit Ashley would ride the buses and sleep on there.

That's where she met Spencer Carlin.

She saw the blonde walk up to the bus stop, wearing hand me down clothes same as Ashley. This girl with a black sweater and long baggy jeans, too big for a girl her age, she had tears in her eyes. Ashley felt a pull and she suddenly had the urge to comfort this pretty girl with the dark blue eyes.

"Whatever it is I'm sorry it happened", the young brunette says in her softest voice. If you ask Spencer now she couldn't tell you why, but she grabbed onto Ashley and held her like they were old friends meeting again for the first time in years.

But this story isn't about how they met; it's about what happened four years later….