A/N: Usually I like notes at the end so I can discuss the chapter and everything but I really feel the need to "trigger warn" this story. If suicide, major depression disorder, substance abuse, and/or neglect affects you, offends you, and/or turns you off from reading then just skip this story. Not all of what I listed occurs directly to/within the protagonist, but it affects her life all the same. This is not a generally happy story, but it won't be blow after blow after blow either. However, if you're expecting to be smiling or laughing for a majority of this story...Don't...
also the regular disclaimer of not owning anything applies. Enjoy as much as you can for being either curious or a glutton for bad feelings Kidding!
When you're a pretty girl, it's quite easy for your death to be made into a spectacle. Even if you died in the most gruesome way, wild dogs pulling the muscles fiber by fiber off of your face after being impaled by only half of an iron maiden, people would make your ending into the final scene of mesmerizing movie.
"She was so beautiful, but in the end she lost it all. Beauty is only skin deep, you see, and now she knows. Tragic how it's too late, though," they'd say before wiping off a stray tear and then walk out of the theater to their cars to drive away from your deadness.
There's a famous picture of a woman who committed suicide; she's laid out on a car like she was preciously taking a nap, legs crossed at the ankles and clothing slightly askew. She threw herself out of a window and dented the car so badly that not even a time machine would fix it – but everyone stares at the picture with the same mind-set.
They want to look like her when they die.
They want to look like her as they're living.
Her note said something about being unworthy but whenever someone sees the picture, they can't think of anyone else who would be more worthy of the attention unjustly thrust upon her. Imagine her parents, her family, her fiancé seeing that picture – seeing everyone clamor on and on about a woman they know next to nothing about, speculate about how they would have made her want to live or helped her in some way – imagine her closest relatives being able told back-handedly that they don't know how to love someone that they didn't know needed perhaps just a little bit more. Or maybe not even love at all, maybe just support that they didn't know how to ask for or an escape plan that isn't exactly plausible but still assuaging when things got too cloudy.
When you're a pretty girl who commits suicide either the world seems like a darker place to the public or you seem like an uglier person post mortem because of your choice.
And they don't realize that the world isn't one of those pop-up haunted houses on Halloween, who you were living can't be made uglier by you being dead and it's not really a choice. It's a refusal to stop playing chicken on a train track right outside the station. You know the train will stop there and you know that perhaps you could actually ride the train to the next destination, too, if you could just make a tiny step to the left. But you've been inching left for so long and you've been seeing the mirage of a train for so long and even if you stand on the platform, the sun's heat would still burn your fragile skin. The choice to live is hard but to stop the inertia of moving leftward is just as tiring.
But I'm going to try. And I'm not going to say why. You know my past, you know my parents, you know me inside and out, and so I'm not going to justify this to you. You don't know what I'm thinking and while that frustrates the fuck out of you, it's the only thing that gives me peace of mind. I've given you everything that I've had except my mind because I know you'd pull me onto that platform if I did and I just don't know if I want to use my legs anymore.
You're a survivor. I don't want to presume that this'll influence your life in any way bar a few weeks at most. You're probably going to go fuck some strangers somewhere and visit your mom and then you're going to go back to being you. Because that's who I love. Who I loved. And I'm going to try because it's much easier for you to love me if you're not around me.
I'm sorry, I guess. I'm selfish, I suppose. I'm dead, you know.
Happy stared at the piece of paper in his hands – they had started to shake minutely with adrenaline like they once had when he was first starting out at the MC. His mind was clear – confused by what he was skimming over – but he had linear thoughts and the only sign that he was affected at all by the words were his damn hands. That's how it always was. He didn't feel, but he showed and most of his training involved repressing those physical signs.
He read the last sentence before looking up and shoving the papers back on the mahogany table she had in the entryway. She liked dark wood, thought it gave off a more pleasant smell than any other type but was livid when he brought home that table. He didn't understand, it was the darkest piece of wood they had in the store – a store that he clearly had no business being in, if the hovering of the owners to make sure he didn't try to stuff a armoire in his cutte was any clue– and big enough to put flowers and a bowl to hold their keys in, on. That's what he thought she wanted and he took the time out of his day to go and buy it for her.
And after about an hour's worth of shouting that's apparently the part she had a problem with. She had a crappy job as a secretary for some legal office (the corporate kind, not anything useful in the club's eyes) in the next town over so whatever extra money she had after groceries and bills went directly towards gas or a pair of hose to replace the ones that sprung a run during the lunch hour. Happy pointed out that she had no way of paying for such a piece on her own and that's when she started to cry. She knew that, of course she did, and she was floored that he did something as domestic as buying her a table – but she hated the fact at the same time, too.
That was probably the first warning sign that he ignored.
She knew how to act when he wasn't domestic. When they were just fucking. When he would grab her onto his lap during a random party or would show up in the middle of the night to take her on a ride because he wasn't tired. She knew how to do casual, but the idea of him standing in a furniture store to splurge $450 on her when all of her Christmas gifts from her parents didn't add up to that amount was unsettling to her. She didn't know how to react and eventually she gave in to keeping it. Like he wanted. Like he got.
She was smart, though, leaving that note on the table and not near her. It ensured that when he found the note and read through it, she would most likely have gone through the deed itself, too and bought even more time for her to grow even colder. That didn't stop him from running through the small 1 bedroom, 1 bath bungalow that through technicalities she inhabited. Not in the kitchen nor living room right off of the entryway in an open floor plan, he rushed to the back two rooms and hit the depressing jackpot when he saw light emitting from underneath the bathroom door.
Even approaching death she was afraid of the dark.
Shouldering the door open with one single, powerful shove he stumbled uncharacteristically into the bathroom to see her dressed fully – legs crossed at the ankles, in the claw foot tub she had refurbished herself one Spring when it was raining too harshly to do anything else. Black pencil skirt, crisp white button up, thigh-highs with a no-doubt accompanying garter belt, and white piped-Mary Janes, she would have looked like they were simply role-playing naughty-secretary if it weren't for the fact that she was sopping wet.
Phone in one hand, he had already dialed 911 when he used the other one to pick the orange bottle off of the floor that had rolled his way sometime after her planned overdose due to an uneven, settling foundation. They were his, prescribed from a pharmacy-happy surgeon after he had to have a bullet removed from his liver (hunting accident, he lied). His was expected to remake a full recovery, but not without some pain and so they had given him enough to last a full year (most likely to milk his insurance for all its money). He only had it filled because the hospital had a pharmacy on site and only kept the pills because who knows when one of his brothers would get hurt next and needed pills, no questions asked.
The rumbles of motorcycles quickly followed the sounds of sirens and it already seemed like a procession, the line of Harley's, Dyna's and what-have-you's following the ambulance to St. Thomas. But the hospital was in the opposite direction than the cemetery and that was the only thought Happy allowed himself to dwell on.