you know our love is like thunder and lightning / darren

Nineteen, life stolen by the ones who gave it to her, sobbing into strands of midnight half-way down the stairwell. Skin raw, choking on her own grief because she's never become accustomed to crying and static finds a home somewhere between her throat and the bottom of her rib cage. 

("I'll do anything.")

Fist at the wall, a puncture wound in her chest and the pale pink plaster. The world comes tumbling down, slowly and all at once, cursing her carelessness and still trying to learn how to breathe while gasping for air and reason.

("Please.")

That earns her a slap to the face.

("Don't pretend you don't want this, Pyrite.")

Fist at the wall, a puncture wound in her chest and the pale pink plaster. The world comes tumbling down, slowly and all at once, cursing her carelessness and still trying to learn how to breathe while gasping for air and reason.

Knocks on Addy's door, nobody's home.

Throws a rock at Addy's window. It stays shut.

Barking down the phone lines: "Please," a breath, voice urgent. "I need you."

She swears she hears a laugh down the hall and hurls a vase in it's direction. It shatters, she flinches. (Unlike her.) Doesn't care. (Not unlike her.)

There's a silver chain at her neck and she hates the way the weight of it drags her down the stairs, down the street, round the corner, looking like chaos to a stranger and a stranger in her chaos. Craving the sanction of the dark she follows the light instead - blinding, burning, watching it soak into her skin and ignite her chest. The static comes back, all-consuming, in her ears, in her eyes, in her throat.

Knock on the door, Rian Fray and her half-smirk that deserves a fist to the face but hers already burns from the hole in the stairwell and red was never Rian's colour. 

"You look like shit."

"Fuck off, Fray."

"Alrighty then, sis."

No angry outbursts, no unannounced entry, no furious passion. She slinks into their home and finds a familiar door handle, hair in her face and bloodshot eyes. He is there, all of him, static at her fingertips, ignoring what her mind has been telling her to do for months.

Hate spitting out of her mouth, what follows is anything but.

"I'm tired," she confesses.

Quiet, a whisper, fear wrapped up in words and nestled in the center of her mind. Settling at the corner of his bed (she can't bear to look at him), legs up to her chest, she breathes and stares out the window with his silhouette in the corner of her vision and the ring her parents caught her in cool against her chest.

"I'm tired of pretending that I hate you."

Nineteen, a storm passing, never knowing what daylight would bring.

"Because I don't."

The last of the rain falls from her eyes. 

"I love you, Kellan."