center "I'm only honest when it rains
An open book, with a torn out page
And my inks run out
I wanna love you but I don't know how."
-'Neptune' by Sleeping At Last/center
centerXXX/center
"I trusted you." You had whispered, hurt laced in your words like streaks of red paint posing as blood in your lungs. Breathing in and breathing out to perpetuate your existence in the room you no longer felt safe in, swallowing the paint fumes whole, praying to choke on the toxins and allow your undead heart to beat it's final beat and stop wallowing in the hope you kept feeding it.
Hope, what a silly word meant for children, children unknowing of the cruelty in the world they were forced into. Unknowing of all the possibilities that would come their way and try to break them, unknowing of the heartbreak, of the hurt that would be thrown upon them at various different ages that could easily cripple them.
You stood there in front of your biggest hope, as she stared right back at you. Clearly she knew what she had done, she looked like she was going to rip out her heart at any given moment as you hissed through grinded teeth, jaw clenched tight enough to turn diamonds into dust. How ironic. You were your own undoing. You had always been your own worst enemy, the stone foolish enough to love flesh, to try and capture it and mold itself into something less hard and more fragile. To impersonate the one thing you couldn't be.
You weren't sure if you knew what love was anymore. Hell, maybe you had never truly experienced the way it had meant to be. You could have easily endured all of the worst-case scenarios, badgering yourself with projects to better yourself for those incapable of loving you. Girls who couldn't comprehend how vast your life was. Girls that didn't know that there was more than meets the eye, more than meets the soul, more than meets the heart.
"I didn't know what to do, Carm." Laura's voice was wobbling, hurt etched into her own skin and bone. Her blood ice cold in it's boiling.
You were tired though, more tired than you had ever been in your entire three centuries of overcompensation and stolen life. "You keep the secret Laura, it's something you learn in grade school!" You were yelling, something you rarely did, and it wasn't your style. Your passive aggressiveness was long gone now though, there was no room for it in your small body. A body you hadn't catered to in a long time, allowing your veins to grow into vines, blood to flow like tidal waves instead of lazy rivers, and your bones to break down into smaller replicas of things you only see in museums and back alleyways under the pseudonym "Freak". Which you supposed you were after all you were a 335 year old being that drank blood.
What scared you in this moment though was how much you sounded like your mother. How desperate you were for acceptance, and how angry you were for the betrayal you never thought you'd feel. You guessed it would be easy to compare it to you killing your own mother, that Laura risked your sister's only secret to the one person you could never trust. Not entirely anyways.
Your love stood before you a broken shell, one all too similar to your own, and instead of welcoming her with outstretched arms, you felt like ripping hers off. You had felt true hatred before and this wasn't it. What you felt now couldn't be compared to a feeling on any therapist's chart. Your anger couldn't be scaled from 1 to 10. Your pain couldn't be filed away as "tortured" in a cabinet for police to look at later in suspicion.
Your Laura stood in front of you feeling the same thing you felt. She understood what she had just done. You knew that she couldn't take it back, and she told you anyways. She informed you of her betrayal. She allowed you the knowledge of telling the one secret you yourself should have never uttered.
"I don't know what to say." Laura said, her voice somewhere between inaudible and a shaky sob.
You wanted to pull your own hair out. "I've tried to love you Laura, I've really tried," You said in a shaky tone of your own, "I've loved you more than I have ever loved anybody, and I know that because instead of making you feel what you've made me feel in this moment, I somehow still love you more than I did yesterday."
"Carm-" Laura trailed off, she had no idea what to say to you, and that was okay. You've accepted that she was too afraid to feel what you felt. Too scared to know the love you welcomed with open arms. Terrified of falling.
"I want to love you Laura," You said to fill the silence, "There's nothing I want more than to sweep this under the carpet or bury it with the rest of the skeletons in my closet," You bit your lip, "But I just don't know how."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that I can't do this. I can't do this right now, not when you just gave away the sole reason my sister is invincible." You looked away from her; you wouldn't be able to say it with her looking at you with the eyes you had the opportunity to drown in for a short while. "I'm saying that I'm leaving, and I'm not sure if I'll be coming back."
At Laura's gasp you stopped in the doorway, your feet somehow working while the rest of you could barely move. "In your lifetime anyways."