As I stepped into the General Store, I could feel the loneliness gnawing at me. After the chaos at Shane's, the silence of the house made my ears pop and my head throb. I moved through the darkened aisles of artisanal jams like a ghost haunting its own life, my boots feeling miles away from the floorboards.
By the time I reached my room, the MDMA had completely fractured, leaving behind the "crash"—that jagged, hollow depression that comes when the chemicals finish borrowing happiness from your future. My brain felt like it had been scrubbed raw. I didn't turn on the light. I couldn't bear to see the wreckage.
The moonlight was carving the attic into sharp angles of shadow and silver. I stood in the center of the rug, my breath coming in shallow, hitching gasps. The wings—the ones that had felt like a dark, romantic rebellion hours ago—were now just a heavy, cumbersome harness digging into my ribs. The black feathers felt oil-slicked and filthy, catching on the floral wallpaper as I struggled with the buckles. When the harness finally snapped open, the wings didn't fall gracefully; they hit the floor with a dull, pathetic thud.
It started as soon as the silence hit.
Alex. His hand on Haley's waist. The way he looked at me like I was a broken appliance he didn't have the manual for. The "science project" lie that felt like a splinter under my fingernail.
Emily. Her voice, an unforgiving scream in the backyard. The way she looked at me with a pity that was more violent than her rage.
Sebastian. The song. The public autopsy of our shared "Source Code" performed in front of an audience. The silver-grey intensity of his eyes that told me he was still drowning, and I was the one pulling him down.
Every memory of the night was a jagged piece of glass, and the more I tried to sweep them away, the deeper they cut. I thought about the rain on the night of the accident—the smell of wet pavement and the sudden, violent end to the only world I'd ever known. It felt like the valley was closing in, the shadows of the maples outside the window stretching out like skeletal fingers.
My hands were shaking as I sat on the edge of the bed and reached for the nightstand. The plastic bottle of Xanax glinted in the moonlight, a small, clinical promise of silence. I wasn't thinking about a flatline. I wasn't thinking about a cinematic ending. I was just thinking about zero. I needed to reach a level of numbness where the Alex-and-Haley image would finally stop flickering against the back of my eyelids.
I took one, the blue pill feeling slick and cold against my tongue. I swallowed it dry, the bitter chalkiness a welcome distraction. I waited five minutes, staring at the wings on the floor, but the noise wouldn't stop. Emily was still screaming. Alex was still laughing. Sebastian was still playing that goddamn synth.
I took a second. Then a third.
Just enough to bridge the gap, I told myself, the logic fractured and desperate. Just enough to make the room stop vibrating. I took two more, the world already starting to blur at the edges, the floral wallpaper beginning to drift and liquify in the blue light. I lay back on the bed, my black dress pooling around me like ink, and watched the ceiling become a vast ocean. I wasn't scared. The world was finally quiet.
*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
The ceiling began to breathe. The white plaster expanded and contracted in time with my own shallow, hitching breaths, turning into a sky that felt miles away. I felt a sudden, terrifying weightlessness, as if the mattress had dissolved and I was suspended in a thick, amniotic fluid. The floral wallpaper of the attic started to bleed down the walls, the roses turning into dark, liquid that pooled on the floor, swallowing the wings I'd discarded.
My hands felt like they belonged to someone else, cold and distant at the ends of my arms. I tried to lift a finger, just to prove I still had a connection to the physical world, but the command got lost in the grey matter, muffled by the chemical fog.
Then, the world outside began to break through—not as sounds, but as vibrations.
It was a long-distance call placed from the bottom of a frozen lake. At first, there was a sharp, percussive vibration that I realized was the front door slamming. Then, footsteps. They weren't just steps; they were violent thuds against the old floorboards.
"Ro? You up yet?"
Abigail. Her voice was a distorted, underwater frequency, stripped of its usual cynical edge. It sounded like it was being filtered through miles of industrial felt. I heard her bedroom door open, then silence. Then, the sound of my own door handle turning.
I couldn't see her, but I felt the sudden, violent spike in the atmosphere. There was a gasp—a sharp, ragged intake of breath that cut through the silence.
"Aurora? Oh god... Aurora!"
The hands on my shoulders were frantic, shaking me with a desperation that made the liquid world wobble. I wanted to tell her to stop, that I was just trying to sleep through the noise, but my tongue was a heavy piece of lead pinned to the roof of my mouth.
Then, more frequencies began to bleed in, overlapping like a badly tuned radio station.
Caroline's voice was a high-pitched scream. Pierre's was a low, steady rumble. I heard the word "ambulance" over and over, a mechanical chant that matched the slowing thud of my heart.
The scene shifted, the attic dissolving into a blur of red and blue lights that pulsed against the back of my eyelids like a heartbeat. I felt the bite of the cold morning air, the smell of wet pavement, and the sudden jostle of a stretcher.
Voices swirled around me, disconnected from faces. Sam and Elliot—a collective hum of "Is she breathing?" and "Stay with us, Hale." They sounded like they were calling to me from across a canyon.
But right before the signal cut out entirely, I heard a frequency that was different from the rest. It was silver-grey and cold, a sound that felt like a hand reaching through the ice. Sebastian. He wasn't screaming. He wasn't panicked. He was just saying my name, over and over, his voice sounding like the woods at fourteen, full of a quiet, devastating grief.
I tried to reach for it, to catch the silver thread of his voice. The sound of a distant siren became a long, sustained note that faded into a deep, hollow silence, and the line finally went dead.
*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
The world seemed to return in a violent snap. One moment, I was submerged in the indigo silence of the ocean, and the next, I was being dragged upward into a reality that felt far too bright and much too loud. The ceiling of the hospital room was a flat, aggressive expanse of white acoustic tiles, illuminated by fluorescent tubes that hummed quietly. My first conscious sensation was a throbbing ache behind my eyes. My mouth tasted like dry slate, a lingering reminder of the medical intervention that had pulled me back from the edge.
I tried to shift my weight, but my limbs felt like they had been cast in concrete. I looked down at my arm, seeing the translucent plastic tubing taped to my skin, the clear fluid of the IV bag dripping in a slow, hypnotic rhythm that matched the mechanical beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor beside me. The air was bitingly cold and carried that unmistakable, sterile scent of bleach, industrial soap, and the sour, metallic tang of a room where the atmosphere is held together by adrenaline and prayer.
"Ro?"
The voice was small, stripped of its usual cynical armor and intimidating edge. I turned my head slowly, the motion sending a fresh wave of nausea through my gut. Abigail was there, hunched over on a small, uncomfortable vinyl couch in the corner. Her purple hair was a chaotic, unwashed mess, and her eyes were red-rimmed and hollowed out by an exhaustion that went deeper than just a lack of sleep. When she realized my eyes were actually open and focused, she didn't say anything at first; she just lunged across the small gap between us and wrapped her arms around me. She held me with a desperate, shaking intensity, her body racking with a sob she'd clearly been holding since the sun came up.
"You're a fucking idiot," she whispered into the crook of my neck, her voice cracking under the weight of it. "I found you at five in the morning, Aurora. You were blue. I thought... I thought I was looking at a ghost that had finally decided to stay one."
I lay there for a long time, my chin resting on her shoulder, feeling the warmth of her. "I'm sorry," I finally choked out. "I didn't... I just wanted the noise to stop. I wasn't trying to leave."
Abigail eventually pulled back, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and trying to regain some semblance of her usual "cool" composure, though her hands were still trembling. She told me it was Sunday evening—eight o'clock. I had been out for nearly the whole day, a long, dark stretch of time I had no memory of.
"My parents have been a wreck, Ro," she said, her voice dropping into a weary register. "Pierre's been pacing the cafeteria since the morning, acting like he can out-walk the anxiety, and Mom... Caroline's just been sitting there, staring into a cup of black coffee like it's going to give her the answers. They're terrified. Every time a nurse walks by, I see them both flinch, waiting for a piece of news that'll break them. They love you like you're their own, and seeing you like this... it's like they're losing the only piece of your parents they have left all over again."
She took a shaky breath, her eyes finally meeting mine, raw and unshielded. "But it wasn't just them. Sam and Elliot... Sam looked like he was crawling out of his skin, and Elliot—I've never seen him so quiet. He didn't even have a book or a drink; he just sat there in that plastic chair, staring at the floorboards as if he were trying to memorize it. They only left an hour ago because I practically threatened them with a restraining order if they didn't go get some real food. They've been here since the ambulance pulled away from the store, Ro."
"And Alex?" I asked, the name feeling like a bruise on my tongue.
"Alex didn't show up until nearly four this afternoon. I called him twenty times, Ro. Twenty. His phone went straight to voicemail every single time, and when he finally did wander in here, he looked like he was the one who needed a sedative. He stood at the foot of your bed for ten minutes, barely saying a word, just looking... annoyed. Like your collapse was a personal inconvenience to his weekend plans. He said he had to 'clear his head' and vanished. I haven't seen him since he realized you weren't going to wake up and tell him everything was fine."
She paused, her gaze drifting back to the glass window in the heavy hospital door, her voice softening until it was barely a whisper. "But Sebastian... that was different. He showed up looking like he'd crawled out of a wreckage himself. He didn't go to the waiting room. He just stood out there in the hallway, leaning against the wall for hours. I watched him through the glass. He was just... staring at you. He looked like he was seeing a version of the future he'd spent his whole life trying to avoid. But when the doctors came in to adjust your monitors and the alarm started that high-pitched whining... he couldn't handle it. He turned white as a sheet and just walked away. He didn't say a word to anyone, but the way he looked at you through that glass? It was like he was watching his own heart stop beating."
Abigail looked at me, her eyes searching for the truth beneath the mask I was trying so hard to reinforce. "I know it was an OD, Ro. Don't give me the accidental-slip-up script. I know how many pills were missing from that bottle. Why?"
"It was the X," I lied. I focused on the silver moon bracelet on my wrist feeling its cold weight. "The comedown was just... too much. Emily was screaming at me in the yard. Alex was... he was with friends. I just wanted to reach zero, Abby. I just wanted to sleep until the world didn't feel so loud. It wasn't about the exit. It was about the silence."
Abigail watched me for a long beat, her expression a weary mixture of skepticism and profound relief. "You have all these people, Aurora. People who are literally falling apart because you decided to flirt with the void. So don't tell me it was just the 'X.' Don't tell me it was a mistake. Because I'm the one who had to watch them all break while you were gone." She didn't buy the "accident" story completely—she saw the ghosts in my pupils and the way I was protecting Alex even now—but she didn't argue. She just climbed onto the edge of the narrow hospital bed and pulled me back into a hug, holding me like we were the only two people left in a world that was constantly trying to break us.
*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
Being discharged from the hospital was supposed to be a relief, but as Pierre's truck rumbled over the familiar gravel driveway of the General Store, the world felt too sharp, too loud, and far too permanent. Caroline had spent the entire car ride in a state of silent worry, her hand occasionally reaching back to pat my knee as if to ensure I hadn't dissolved into the upholstery. The "quiet" in the house was a different beast now.
I was tucked into my bed in the attic, the black wings moved to the back of the closet where they couldn't remind me of the floor, when Alex arrived.
I heard him downstairs first, his voice the perfect pitch of "concerned-but-steady" as he spoke to my aunt and uncle. He was playing the part of the Golden Boy who had survived a tragedy, the loyal boyfriend who was standing by his "troubled" girl. By the time he reached my room, carrying a bouquet of grocery-store lilies and a bag of takeout I knew I wouldn't be able to taste, the "Saint Alex" persona was fully engaged.
"Hey," he said, setting the flowers on the nightstand. He sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. "You really put us through it, Hale. I mean... Jesus. You had Pierre looking like he was going to have a heart attack in the cafeteria."
He reached out and took my hand, his thumb tracing my knuckles in a way that felt more like he was checking for a pulse than offering affection.
"I'm sorry, Alex," I whispered, the script feeling heavy in my mouth. "It was just the comedown."
"Yeah, well," he said, his gaze drifting to his phone as it buzzed in his pocket. He didn't check it, but I saw the twitch in his jaw. "Just... don't do it again. It makes everything a mess."
He looked back at me, his eyes searching mine for the girl who was "easy" and "fun". "Haley's actually been great about it, though," he added, his tone shifting into something casually dismissive. "She's been helping me keep up with the notes for the science project. She even checked in on me to see how I was doing."
The splinter of jealousy I'd felt at the gridball field gave a sharp throb, but I pushed it down. I needed the lie. I needed him to be the hero so I didn't have to be the victim.
"That's nice of her," I murmured.
"Yeah, she's a good one," Alex said, already standing up and checking his watch. "Look, I've got to head out. There's a group session tonight for the project, and then gridball practice. You going to be okay? You look... tired."
"I'm fine," I said. "Go. I'll just sleep."
He kissed my forehead and walked out. He didn't look back at the bottle of Xanax still sitting on the nightstand, or the way my hands were shaking beneath the duvet. He had done his time. He had checked the "Good Boyfriend" box and moved back into the light, leaving me in the shadows he didn't want to see.
The silence after the front door slammed was suffocating. I lay there for an hour, watching the afternoon sun crawl across the floral wallpaper, feeling the "static" in my head start to build again. The absence of the drugs was a physical ache, a raw, exposed-nerve sensation that made the world feel like it was made of sandpaper. I felt a profound, bone-deep isolation. Alex had been in the room, but he hadn't seen me. He had seen a PR crisis he was managing.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand—a sharp, percussive vibration that made me flinch. I reached for it, expecting a text from Abigail or a "checking-in" message from Caroline.
Instead, it was a notification from Instagram. A DM from @sebs_666.
My heart gave a violent kick. We hadn't spoken since the poolside confrontation, since Emily's scream... I opened the message with shaking fingers. There was no text. No "Are you okay?".
Just an audio file.
I hit play, and the attic was suddenly filled with a quiet, haunting melody. It wasn't the industrial, punk roar of the band's set. It was raw—just a piano and a faint electronic pulse that sounded like a slowing heartbeat. It was a recording made in a room that smelled of damp wood and cloves. In the background, I could hear the distant, muffled sound of the waterfall near the lake, and the occasional, soft click of a lighter.
There were no lyrics, but I didn't need them. I could hear the grief he had felt standing in that hospital hallway, the guilt of the song he'd played, and the silent confession he'd made by the pool. It was a 2:45-minute transmission of pure, unedited truth—a mirror to the wreckage I felt inside.
Unlike Alex's flowers or his performative visit, this felt like being seen. Sebastian wasn't asking me to be "normal" or to "fix" myself. He was just acknowledging that we were both still drowning, and that the silence between us was now a shared language.
I listened to it three times. I looked at the flowers on the nightstand, I realized then that the Golden Boy was a lighthouse that only worked in the sun, but Sebastian was the only one who knew how to find me in the dark.
I closed my eyes and for the first time since the "Gothic Harvest", I didn't reach for the pills. I just listened to the silence.
*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
𓆏Sebastian𓆏
𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝒩𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉 𝑜𝒻 𝓉𝒽𝑒 "𝒢𝑜𝓉𝒽𝒾𝒸 ℋ𝒶𝓇𝓋𝑒𝓈𝓉"
The sliding glass door clicked shut, the sound final and sharp against the muffled throb of the bass vibrating through the house. I watched the spot where Aurora had disappeared. The MDMA was hitting its peak, making my chest feel like it had been hollowed out with a rusted spoon.
"Sebastian."
I didn't turn around. I couldn't. Emily's voice was alcohol-fueled desperation that made the air feel heavy. I took a slow, deliberate drag of my cigarette.
"Don't," I muttered, the word barely a breath.
"Don't what? Don't look at you? Don't ask why you just played a six-minute song for a girl who's standing right there?" She grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into the fabric of my hoodie. "She's been back for months, Seb. Two months. And I've spent every single second of that time pretending I don't see the way you look at her. Like she's the only person who actually exists and I'm just... I'm just background noise."
I finally looked at her. Her face was a smeared, tear-stained mask of envious rage. In that moment, with the drug-induced empathy screaming in my blood, I wanted to feel something. I wanted to be the guy she deserved—the guy who could look at her light and not feel blinded by it. But as I looked at her, all I could think about was the way Aurora's hand had felt on mine by the pool.
"I never lied to you, Em," I said, my voice sounding flat. "I never said I was fixed."
"No, you just let me try to fix you!" she screamed, a sharp, hysterical sound that cut through the night. She shoved me, her palms hitting my chest. "I've given you everything. I've been the one holding you when you're shaking, I've been the one staying up until four in the morning to make sure you're still breathing. I've said it, Sebastian. I've said 'I love you' a thousand times, and do you know what you say back? Nothing. You just look at me like you're waiting for me to finish a sentence you don't understand."
She's right. I hadn't said it. I couldn't say it. Because in my head, those three words were a locked file. I realized then, with a terrifying, absolute clarity, that I had never stopped loving Aurora. It wasn't a choice.
"I'm sorry," I whispered, and for the first time, it didn't feel like an apology. It felt like a confession. "I really am. I didn't mean to drag you into the dark with me. I thought... I thought I could move on. I thought I could be the person you see when you look at me. But I'm not that guy, Em. I'm never going to be that guy."
"Because of her?" Emily's voice dropped into a low, broken whisper. "Because you're still stuck in a basement from four years ago?"
"Because I can't overwrite her," I said, the honesty of the drug stripping away my last defense. "I've tried. God, I've tried to see a future with you where I'm not just pretending. But every time I close my eyes... I can't fall in love with you, Emily. Not truly. Not in the way you need."
Emily looked at me for a long, agonizing beat, her energy finally flickering out, leaving her looking small and grey in the moonlight. She lunged forward then, not to hit me, but to pull me into a kiss. It was a frantic, desperate attempt to reclaim a territory that was already lost.
I didn't pull away, but I didn't "melt" into it either. Her lips were warm and tasted of sugar and vodka, but there was no spark, no sudden rush of heat to match the MDMA hum in my veins. It was like watching a movie of a kiss—technically perfect, but entirely scripted. I felt a profound guilt. I wrapped my arms around her, holding her against my chest as she started to sob, her body shaking against mine.
I wasn't holding her because I loved her. I was holding her because I was the one who had broken her, and I didn't know how to do anything else.
"We'll talk more when we're sobered up," I murmured into her hair, the words feeling like a stay of execution. "Let's just... let's just get you inside. We'll figure it out tomorrow."
"Okay," she breathed, her grip tightening on my hoodie.
I stood there in the dark, holding a girl I would never love while the only girl I ever had was falling apart somewhere else.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
The Sunday morning light filtering through the small, high window of my basement room catching every dust mote dancing in the stagnant air. I lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, feeling the full weight of the serotonin debt I'd incurred the night before.
The MDMA had left me a dry husk of a person held together by a pounding headache and a lingering taste of cigarettes and regret. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the strobe lights hitting Aurora's black wings. I saw the way she looked at me—that raw connection that made everything else feel like a simulation. And then I remembered Emily.
The memory of the kiss by the pool felt like a lead weight in my stomach. It hadn't been an act of love; it had been an act of mercy, and those are always the ones that hurt the most in the light of day.
I heard the floorboards creak above me. A few minutes later, the door to the basement opened, and Emily stepped down the stairs. She wasn't wearing her ethereal costume from the night before; she was in one of my oversized flannels, her blue hair pulled back into a messy knot. She was carrying a tray—two plates of eggs, toast, and a glass of orange juice.
She was playing "house." It was a last-ditch effort, a desperate attempt to overwrite the truth of our fight with the domesticity of a normal Sunday.
"Hey," she said, her voice soft, tentative. She set the tray down on my desk, right next to my synth. "I figured you'd be feeling pretty rough. I made breakfast."
I sat up slowly, my head throbbing in time with my pulse. I didn't look at the food. I couldn't even think about eating. "Em, you didn't have to do that."
"I wanted to," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed. She reached out, her fingers grazing my arm, searching for a connection that wasn't there. Her eyes were searching mine, looking for the boy who had held her in the dark, hoping the daylight hadn't changed anything. "I thought maybe we could just... have a quiet morning. No talking about the party. No talking about... her. Just us."
The silence in the room was suffocating. I looked at the eggs cooling on the plate and felt a wave of nausea. She was trying so hard to fix a machine that was already in pieces.
"I'm not really hungry, Em," I said, my voice sounding exhausted.
"You should try to eat something," she insisted, her voice rising just a fraction, a thin veneer of "perfect girlfriend" over a well of panic. "It'll help with the comedown. I even put the good seasoning on them, the way you like."
"I'm not hungry," I repeated, a bit sharper this time.
She flinched, her hand dropping from my arm. She stared at the tray for a beat, her shoulders slumped. "Right. Okay. Maybe later then." She didn't get up. She just sat there. "We're okay, right, Seb? After last night... I mean, you held me. You said we'd talk."
"I said we'd talk when we were sober," I reminded her, the words feeling like a stay of execution I was finally ready to carry out. "And we're sober now."
"I don't want to talk if it's going to be that talk," she whispered, her eyes filling with a fresh sheen of tears. "Can't we just pretend for one day? Just today? I can stay, we can watch a movie, and we can just..."
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I reached for it, expecting a notification from the band or maybe a text from my mom.
It was a text from Sam.
[10:14 AM] Sam: Man, you need to get to the hospital. It's Aurora. Abigail found her this morning. Overdose. It's bad, Seb.
The world stopped moving.
The grey light in the room turned into a blinding, static-filled white. My heart gave a sudden, agonizing jolt, a physical sensation of something tearing deep inside my chest.
"Sebastian? What is it?" Emily asked, her hand reaching for mine again. "You look like you're going to vomit."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. I stared at the screen, the words Overdose. It's bad. repeating in my head like a broken record. My hands started to shake, a fine, uncontrollable tremor that made the phone rattle against my palm. The guilt of the night before—the song, the fight, the way I'd let her walk back into that house alone while I held Emily—hit me with the force of a tidal wave.
"I have to go," I said, my voice sounding like it was coming from miles away.
"What? Go where? Sebastian, we were going to—"
"Aurora's in the hospital," I snapped, standing up so fast the room spun. I grabbed my hoodie from the floor, my movements frantic and uncoordinated. "She OD'd. Sam says it's bad."
Emily stood up, too, her face pale. "Oh god... is she... is she okay?"
"I don't know," I said, already halfway to the stairs. I didn't look back at her. I didn't look at the breakfast she'd made or the girl who was currently breaking into a thousand pieces in the middle of my room. I didn't have the bandwidth for her grief. I didn't have the bandwidth for anything other than the terrifying, absolute certainty that the "Source Code" was flatlining, and I was the one who had pulled the plug.
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
Every step I took down the ICU was a struggle against the current. My boots felt like they were made of cinderblocks, and my head was an agonizing pulse. I reached room 302 and stopped. I couldn't remember the last time I took a breath.
Through the heavy observation glass, Aurora looked less like a girl and more like a clinical experiment. The "Gothic Juliet" had been stripped away, replaced by the translucent, sickly paleness of someone who had flirted with death and almost won. She was buried under paper-thin sheets, her skin the color of damp ash. The IV lines were the only things tethering her to the room, the mechanical beep... beep... beep of the heart monitor acting as a countdown I wasn't ready to finish.
I stared at the silver moon bracelet on her wrist—the one I'd given her in a different life. It looked wrong against her grey skin.
"You look like you're about to put your fist through the glass."
The voice was low, bringing me back to the hallway. I didn't turn around. I knew the cadence of Sam's breathing before he even spoke. He stepped up beside me, his shoulder brushing mine—a solid, grounding presence in a world that was currently falling to shit.
"I can't go in there, Sam," I whispered. "If I go in there, and she... if the machine stops while I'm holding her hand, I'm never coming back. I'll just stay in that room forever."
"She's stable, Seb," Sam said, though his own voice was thick, stripped of its usual stoner-philosophy ease. "The doctors said the odds are in her favor now. She's just sleeping off the damage."
"The damage is me," I hissed, finally turning to look at him. My eyes felt like they were full of glass shards. "I played that fucking song. I stood by that pool and told her I couldn't overwrite her, and then I watched her walk back into that house alone because I was too busy being a coward with Emily. I pushed her, Sam. I just keep fucking it up."
I leaned my forehead against the cold glass. The abandonment trigger was screaming in my chest.
"I love her," I confessed, the words unpolished, sounding like a death sentence in the quiet hallway. "I never stopped. Not when she left for Zuzu, not when she blocked me, not when I was lying to Emily's face every night. It's always been her. And now I've finally done it. I've finally broken the only thing that made this valley feel like it wasn't a cage."
Sam didn't look away. He just reached out and gripped the back of my neck, his hand a heavy, steady weight.
"You didn't do this, man," he said, his voice dropping into a tone of quiet certainty. "She was drowning long before. You're just the only one who noticed. That's why it hurts—because you're the only one who actually stayed."
"I didn't stay," I countered, a tear finally escaping and tracking a hot, salt-slicked path down my cheek. "I left. I'm always the one who leaves, or the one who gets left. It's the same fucking loop, Sam."
"Not this time," Sam said, squeezing my neck once, hard. "Look at her. She's still breathing. The loop is broken, Seb. You just have to decide if you're going to be here when she opens her eyes, or if you're going to let the 'Golden Boy' be the first thing she sees."
I looked back through the glass at the girl in the bed. The heart monitor gave a steady, rhythmic chirp—a tiny, mechanical defiance against the dark. I wanted to be that hero. I wanted to be the one to pull her back from the woods. But as a nurse moved toward the door, the panic flared up again, cold and suffocating.
"I can't," I breathed, stepping back. "Not like this."
"Sebastian—"
But I was already moving. I turned and ran, my reflection in the hospital glass a hollowed-out ghost that vanished as soon as I hit the stairwell. I burst out into the October night, the freezing air hitting my lungs, and as the hospital faded into the mist behind me, I realized that the silence I'd been chasing wasn't a sanctuary.
It was a grave I'd dug for both of us.
𓍊𓋼𓍊𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊𓋼𓍊