The First Book: Behind Melpomene's Tears

Prologue


If you're going to break someone's heart, yeah/ Might as well, might as well be mine - Hunter Hayes, Somebody's Heartbreak

-X-X-X-X-X-

"You missed the funeral."

Dean Thomas looked blank. He was too numb to sympathize. He barely felt the cold as the chill of early winter crept into the room. "Didn't know I was invited," he answered hollowly, lying back down to stare at the ceiling. Neither of them spoke for a while but he could feel those somber eyes on him, taking in every detail of his listless form. Under normal circumstances he would have squirmed under that unyielding gaze but at the moment he couldn't muster the strength to care.

"Your parents are worried." There was reproach in that voice, but it was halfhearted in a way that sounded exhausted by grief. He didn't respond so they lapsed into silence again. He already knew his staunch refusal to leave his old room other than to relieve himself troubled both his parents. Maybe it was selfish of him but all he wanted was to be left alone, to draw, or to wake up with the realization that it had only been a nightmare and everything was still the same. He didn't know how long he had been laying there on that thin mattress and staring into space. It might have been weeks or months, even years. Time seemed to bleed into one giant blur.

A resigned sigh broke him out of his reverie. "They found this in the rubble," his visitor said, placing something down beside him then leaving. That was it. Dean wondered if he had just failed some kind of test before deciding that he didn't care. He turned his head to see what had been placed on his bed. It took a moment for him to register what he was seeing. He pushed himself into an upright position and picked it up with a reverent slowness. Wide-eyed and trembling, he traced the letters carved neatly in the leather: Property of Dean Leander Thomas.

It had been obviously singed in places, and the pages were all burnt in places along the edges, but it was otherwise whole and intact. The irony that this of all things had come back to him, that mere leather and paper had survived while everything around it was being reduced to ash, was more than he could take. Dean hadn't cried yet, but the tears flowed freely now, falling silently onto the sketchbook in his lap.