Sometimes it takes one instance, one split second to remind you how utterly fucking stupid you are. Like beyond words stupid. Infantile and jaded and yes, gross. Even when the person you love more than anything else calls you on your bullshit, you still don't learn. You're incapable of doing anything right. It's only when you're slapped in the face with the possibility of losing that person that you begin to wake up from your power hungry head trip.
I came out from the bathroom to complete chaos. CO's running past me, alarms sounding but no one paying any attention as they rushed past. I headed out into the yard and saw everyone being herded away from the lake they had apparently found on prison grounds, huddled in small groups as the attention turned toward the greenhouse.
Morello didn't waste any time debriefing me on what was going on, her voice catching as she reached for my hand. I only comprehend small pieces of what she's telling me. Alex in the greenhouse with a guard who wasn't really a guard. He tried to kill her but she gave him one hell of a fight. Managed to push him through a glass door. Fake guard was shot dead by real guard. Ambulance came but saw nobody saw Alex leaving in it and no one knows if she's okay. If she's alive or dead.
She might have said something else but I didn't hear anything. I could only hear the pulsing in my own ears and a faint voice echoing in my distorted brain. Alex is dead, it repeated over and over. Alex is dead and this is all on you.
I lunged forward and vomited on the ground, my legs no longer able to hold me. "Fuck!" I heard myself screaming in a voice that I wasn't entirely sure was my own. "Fuck." I barely felt Morello crouching to my level and putting her arms around me. I didn't feel Yoga's hand on my back or Boo, as gently as Boo could manage any way, lifting me up. I felt nothing except the throb of the marking I had given myself and all I fucking wanted to do was give into the pain and sink into it and feel nothing else.
Because then I wouldn't have to think about how I had murdered the only person I'd ever loved.