Set the World on Fire (Before You Die in the Flames)
by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)

She finds him sitting on the porch steps of his house. He's still wearing the suit from the service, but the pants look crumbled and dirty and the tie is gone. He's working something in his hands, and when she steps closer she sees that it's an empty bottle of Jack, nervous fingers scratching at the label, peeling it loose.

The leaves rustle under her shoes, loud in the silence of the night, and he looks up at her with glassy, unfocused eyes. Drunk out of his mind. Worse than the night he crashed his car, worse than she's ever seen him since Ali died.

Regret clenches around her heart like a fist of steel because she did this; this is on her. Not A playing their cruel games, not Ali and her secrets and her lies. Here's a new thought: the truth can be just as effective a weapon as the lies are. But then, she knew that, and no matter how much she pretends that she didn't want to hurt Jason when she told him about Ali's pregnancy, she can't deny that it feels good not to be the only one who's unravelling.

"Spencer," he calls out, and the smile tugging at his lips is bitter and ugly. "Come to share more secrets about my sweet little sister?"

His speech is a little slurred and heavy, but at this point, she's surprised that he can string a coherent sentence together at all. She takes a step towards him, and then another and another, until she's standing in front of him, towering over him. He looks up at her and squints, or perhaps he's narrowing his eyes, it's hard to tell. It's hard to read him like that, inebriation blurring out his emotions. There's anger somewhere in his expression, she's sure, but there's no way of telling if it's her he's angry at or himself or Ali. All three of them, most likely.

Cautiously, she sits down on the steps beside him. The stone is hard and uncomfortable beneath her, cold seeping through the thin material of her coat and the bottom of her pants.

When she opens her mouth, she means to apologize, offer another half-truth that may or may not make Jason feel a little less wretched, but what actually comes out is more truth than she ever wanted to reveal.

"It didn't stop. The messages, the blackmail, the whole A thing, it hasn't stopped. It never stopped. And it's not just Mona." Stopstopstop, her mind screams, shut up, but she can't. All this time of not talking about it, and now here's someone who's in as deep as she is, who deserves the truth even if he might not be able to handle in. "There are— others. People close to us. They killed Garret, and they tried to push Aria off the train, and they drugged Emily and they tried to frame us for digging up Ali's body. I don't think they're going to stop until they've destroyed us all, and I can't fucking stand it anymore."

When she's finished, she's breathing hard, as if forcing the words out put a real physical toll on her. She can feel Jason's eyes on her, watching her, but she can't even bring herself to turn around and face him because it takes all of her strength to hold back the tears. She's spent the last few days crying; she promised herself that she was going to stop. No more tears. Toby isn't worth them. She's stronger than that.

Except she really, really isn't, no matter how much she wants to be.

Jason's hand comes down on her shoulder, warm and heavy, and she shivers because suddenly the cool night air around her seems so much colder. The last part of the truth spills from her lips. The ugliest part. The one she was going to lock away in her heart and never speak about because the betrayal cuts her wide open like a corpse under the coroner's blade.

"Toby's part of it."

It comes out like a sob.

Next to her, Jason is drawing in a sharp breath. His hand slips from her shoulder to the back of her neck, his grip firm and steadying, offering comfort she doesn't want.

Being comforted means that she's weak. Broken. That she needs someone. She doesn't; she's done with that.

She wipes at her eyes and pushes him away, furious with herself for opening up, with Jason, with the girls, with Ali, with Toby and Mona and whoever else is in their fucked-up little clique. With the world at large for piling up secrets and lies and pain at her doorstop and leaving her to deal with it.

"Don't," she warns harshly. "I don't want your pity."

A strangled little sound escapes Jason, and it takes her a moment to realize that he's laughing. "Trust me, Spencer. I need all my pity for myself."

His tone is hard and clear. Not as drunk as she thought he was, then. At least that's what she thinks before he reaches out again. At first it seems like another attempt at comforting her, but when his hand curves around her shoulder, his touch is rough and unkind. Just how angry is he with her? Angry enough to want to hurt her, perhaps, and drunk enough not to stop himself. She moves to push him away, adrenaline pumping through her veins, but before she can decide how much force she needs to use to get away, he's pulling her in, hard, unrelenting, his fingers bruising against her skin, and then his mouth is on hers.

Spencer remembers before. When Jason first came back to Rosewood. How she used to think that he was hot. Used to feel the attraction, churning in her stomach. Tension sizzling between them. But then he turned out to be her brother (half-brother, a voice at the back of her mind whispers, as if that makes a difference) and there was Toby (oh God, Toby) , and none of it mattered. They were wired the same, that was all. Had to be all.

That's what races through her mind in those split seconds when his lips crash onto hers. She wants to pull away, she really does mean to, but his mouth is hungry and insistent, and she still feels the same kind of bone-deep longing for him she always felt. There's nothing sisterly about it. Nothing proper and safe and platonic.

She opens her mouth and kisses him back, her hands tangling in the jacket of his suit, crumbling the lapels.

He tastes bittersweet and sharp, like whiskey. Smells like it, too, and she knows she should stop him because he's not sober enough to make this decision, even if he was the one who started it. She's taking advantage, and it could fuck them up badly, could fuck up everything. Panic gives way to hysterics, and she releases a shaky little laugh into his mouth. Things are already fucked up beyond repair. One mistake more or less, what does it matter now?

"What?" He breaks away, frowning.

Spencer shakes her head and chases his lips with hers once again. "Nothing," she mutters into the kiss, her tongue frenziedly pushing against his, wet and warm and so wonderfully uninhibited.

The last person she kissed – the last person she fucked (made love to, she thought, but that was yet another lie, because what they had was never love) – was Toby, and she wants to chase away his taste, his touch, replace it. She wants to be clean and unsullied by his touch, but failing that, it's enough to cover it with someone else's.

She lets Jason pull her closer until she's straddling his lap, his hands around her waist, sprawling against the small of her back, skin on skin where her shirt has slipped out of her pants. She can feel how hard he is beneath her, and she wants. Wants him on her, inside of her, wants him to erase every last memory of Toby from her body and her mind. Wants him to take away all her anger and her pain and her guilt.

Their mouths are still sealed together, tasting and licking and sucking, when her hands push his jacket off his shoulders and pry his crumbled, whiskey stained dress shirt from his pants. There's the harsh sound of fabric tearing when she pulls too hard, making her giggle despite herself. For the first time since she found the fake name tag in Toby's drawer, she doesn't feel weighted down, feels like she can breathe freely. She buries her face in the crook of his neck and arches against him as his mouth trails down her jaw, sucking bruises into her skin.

Her hands slide down his sides. Warm, smooth skin under her fingers, until suddenly, her right hand brushes against something.

The scar tissue is pink and fresh, coarse against her fingertips. A stab wound, no older than a couple of months. Her mind takes a moment too long to make the connection, and when she does, she feels the blood rushing to her ears, loud and hot, like a wave that's going to overwhelm her and swallow her whole.

Her hands fall away and she tries to scramble off him, but before she can put any distance between them, he catches her wrist and holds her.

"You were—" She doesn't know what she's going to say. You were on the train. You tried to kill Aria. You're one of them. All of that, but she can barely think the words, much less speak them. What she really wants is to scream and scream and never ever stop, so perhaps it's a good thing that he interrupts her.

"Yes, but it's not what you think. I'm not working with them."

His voice is insistent, sincere, calm apart from the desperation in his eyes and the way he grips her arms so hard that she can't get away, no matter how much she struggles.

"I promise, I have no intentions of hurting you and your friends." And then, imploring: "Just, trust me, okay?"

"I trusted Toby." She almost chokes on the name.

"I'm not Toby."

"Did you know? Did you know about Toby?"

"No. I would have told you." He closes his eyes and shakes his head, and there's a faint, defeated smile on his face, like she's forcing him to tell a secret he hadn't meant to share. "If I had any reason to suspect Toby, I would have told you. Not for the right reasons, maybe, but you'd have known."

Her breath catches, and she stops struggling.

"I've wanted you," Jason says when he looks at her again, as if the implication hadn't been obvious from what he just told her. It's a different matter to hear him spell it out, though, the words and the desperation of them hitting her in the gut. "I've wanted you for a long time, and I knew that it was wrong, that I couldn't have you, but it didn't change anything about how I felt. I did a lot of shitty stuff, Spencer, but this is the worst. And you know what? I don't give a fuck. If I could stop whoever it is that's pulling the strings I would take that bloody shovel from the evidence room and bash their heads in until there's nothing left of them, but I'm almost grateful for them for making you snap so badly that you came to me tonight."

His hands fall away, releasing her, freeing her to make her exit. Except she doesn't. She's still straddling him, coat crumbled before her, shirt half-undone, and she barely dares to breathe. This is the most awful, ugly thing anyone ever told her. It's also the most romantic, in a deeply fucked-up way, and the raw honesty of it is tearing at her heartstrings.

So she doesn't get up, gather her clothes and leave. She doesn't push him and tell him to get away from her. She doesn't grab her phone to tell her friends about the stab wound, or even demand an explanation.

"Okay," she tells him quietly, firmly, and she's never been more sure of anything. Her hands come up to cradle his face and she leans in, and when she kisses him again he looks at her like he's going to fall apart.

She rocks steadily against him until she feels him hardening under her again, grinds down and makes him moan. "Fuck me," she whispers against his lips.

"Let's go ins—"

Her fingers clench in his hair and pull, hard. "No," she tells him, and watches understanding dawn in his eyes.

"You want them to see," he says.

"Yes." She nods, reaching down to undo his pants, knowing that he won't stop her, not after what he just told her. "I want them to watch us and realize that we're not going to back down. They can take their best shot at us, but we're going to fight back and we'll stop at nothing and we're going to win, and we'll destroy them before they can destroy us."

It's the best declaration of war she can think of: fucking Jason right here, out in the open, like telling Mona and Toby and their creeper friends, come on, use this against me, I fucking dare you.

Jason looks at her wide-eyed, like he can't believe this is happening, that they're actually going to do this. Half-scared, half-amazed. Like she knew he would, he says, "Okay," a little breathlessly and unsteady, but that's all right because she's determined enough for both of them.

Her pants come off and his are pulled down, and there's a split second when he first pushes inside of her that she thinks that this is madness, but it doesn't matter. They've come so far and there's no way back, and the desire burns in her blood as much as the need to take back control over her life once and for all.

She lifts herself up and pushes down again, pulling breathless, inhuman sounds from his throat, and his fingers are digging so hard into her skin that she thinks she will still feel them tomorrow and for the rest of the week.

When he comes, he calls out her name, broken and reverent all at once, like she's never heard it before, and she sinks her teeth into his naked shoulder and rakes sharp nails down his torso, accidentally on purpose scratching against the scar tissue of his wound. His body shakes, like he doesn't know whether to arch against her or jerk away from the touch.

Spencer pushes away and gets up on unsteady legs, a shiver running down her back that might just be the cold or possibly the unconscious knowledge that somewhere out there, someone is watching. Still sprawling on the porch, Jason looks up at her. His eyes are dark in the pale lamplight. He looks as wrecked as she's been feeling, those last few days.

"What now?"

She swallows. There's a part of her that wants to flee, even now when it's too late and they've already broken all the rules that matter. And then there's this other part of her, the one that's still hurting and lonely, that wants to curl up against him and let him hold her and take care of her.

There is no time for either of those now, and she locks them away deep inside of her, reaching instead for the determined one, the smart one, the one who's unafraid and never loses.

"Now," she announces, and her voice is like steel, "we're going inside, and you'll tell me all about that wound. And then I'll tell you everything I know about A and we're going to put the pieces of this puzzle together. And then we're going to go after that fucking creep and their little bitches and make them wish they'd never messed with us in the first place."

End.

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