Summary: They fall in and then they fall out. Something like love and death, except not really. twoshot.
A/N: I was in a strange mood, I guess. Listening to two songs really. I have a blend of lyrics from both in this. Major props to anyone who knows them. Here it goes.
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[ Frayed Ends ]
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i. there are some things we don't talk about, rather do without and just hold the smile.
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She finds him standing motionless after everyone's left and headed back into the church.
His arms hang loosely on either side of his body, and his eyes are still and numb, focused on just that specific area of the ground.
She's not sure if it's really hit her yet, but for some reason, she doesn't want to think about that. The boy next to her doesn't seem to notice her presence or care to acknowledge it.
And a million phrases come across her mind, but she can't seem to execute them into coherent string of words or comment. Her mouth is unable to move, and none of this feels genuinely real.
Everything seems to be overdone blurs, and a part of her wants to simply draw back into the dark corners of her mind.
She thinks maybe she should give her apologies, or condolences, or something, but she hasn't received one today that's actually seemed helpful. She doesn't think he's gotten any heart wrenching ones either, so she doesn't bother trying.
Instead, she notices his pale skin, pastier than it has been in the last few days, and his eyes from the side. They look bigger, blacker, the dark circles under them from nonexistent hours of sleep more prominent against the white of his skin, and the black of his attire.
He's worn black before; so many times she's lost count. He's a rock star after all and he's got an image to keep. She gets it. They all do.
"She hated you in black." The words come out of her mouth before she can take them back, and she's more shocked at the sound of her own voice than he seems to be.
His eyes dart apathetically towards her direction, his head turning a fraction towards her face.
"Yeah, she did. She'd never let me forget it either." His voice sounds rough, the rasp in it so thick, she can barely understand.
She nods her head, staring at the same spot on the ground as him.
"Loved your ridiculously bright-colored leggings though." He points out blankly.
And she laughs brokenly, more at the truth of his statement than the dark twinge of sarcasm he adds to it with his tone. The laughter dies on her lips as reality sinks in all over again.
"She told me that whenever I danced with them on, it reminded her of the bright side of life. All those swirls of color so vibrant, continuous, never-ending, like life should be." She murmurs softly.
He nods his head stiffly, his jaw a little more clenched than before. "That was her. Always laughing, smiling, living."
"Yeah, that was her." She echoes emptily, her voice hollow, as she looks up and observes the drizzle starting to come down.
They don't say anything else after that, just stand there in each other's presence instead, letting the light rain sprinkle onto their clothes and skin.
And as drops seep into the ground, she wonders if the water is reaching her, washing over her.
They'll never know.
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ii. you can never say never, when we don't know why.
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The next time she sees him, it's at the Torres' home a few hours later. Her parents have only called a few relatives, and close friends for the small gathering and dinner of mourning after the services and the burial are over.
He's sitting all alone on the curb of the deserted street right in front of the house and he's smoking a cigarette, staring into space.
A part of her wants to go sit next to him, not to talk but rather, to just be in his presence again.
But the rational side of her tells her to stay in place, that there's something slightly inappropriate about ditching your best friends' mourning parents to go sit next to said dead best friend's (ex) boyfriend for the rest of the night.
She decides to listen to the rational side of her brain, leaning against the doorframe and intently studying him from afar as the minutes tick by.
She doesn't really think there's any type of attachment she feels towards him. There is no connective feeling of concern or compassion between the two of them. There never was in all honesty.
And right now, she doesn't feel anything except maybe loneliness.
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iii. when all is crumbling, steady your hand.
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Somewhere in the back of her, she can distantly hear the sound of someone calling her name repeatedly, but she decides to continue ignoring it.
And when she feels a cool hand on her shoulder, she almost jumps. Almost.
She turns around to meet tired eyes, and there's something so familiar about the sadness in them.
But she just can't seem to put her finger on what or whom they remind her of, so she tries to let it go and instead focus on the words coming out of those chapped lips.
She blinks a few times, nods her head surreally at the words being spoken, and all of a sudden he stops talking. His eyes looking over her features, before traveling to the sight of his (ex) best friend smoking a pack of cigarettes outside on the street like there's no tomorrow.
His eyes flash with a deeper emotion, too complex to be interpreted thoroughly in such a short time, something a little more torn and painful than before, but it disappears as fast as it appears. Gone in a blink of an eye, and she's left to wonder if she merely imagined it all in her head.
He's leading her through a sea of people now and it takes her a few minutes to realize they (he) are saying good bye to everyone, and then he's guiding her out of the house with his hand on her back.
And they're passing by his (ex) best friend without a second glance, when said brooding boy looks up from the rubble on the street, his dark, dark eyes landing on her hazel ones briefly, jarring her in her place.
But then she's in the car and the curly haired boy, her boyfriend, is helping her put on her seatbelt like she's a docile child who'll break any second you aren't being careful with her. And then, he's starting the car, and soon enough, they're driving off.
The ride back to the hotel is quiet and he takes his attention off the road only once, at a red light, to look at her, and it's then she realizes the familiarity in his eyes.
They hold the mirror image of emotions as his (ex) best friend's eyes did at the burial and on the curb of the street.
She feels slightly sick at the revelation, but when she feels him slip his fingers through her own, she only grasps onto his hand tighter, like her life depends on it.
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iv. we're coming apart but we hold it together.
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They're having dinner one night, when he says he's been thinking about getting married.
It's been four months since the funeral as of yesterday, and she doesn't know how to react to his comment.
She chews the food in her mouth at an excruciatingly slow pace. It tastes bland, but then again, everything's tasted bland these past couple of months. She tries to push it down her throat, but it keeps wanting to come back up.
"Oh."
It barely comes out of her mouth, but at least it does. She wishes it could have broken the tension in the air, but it seems to have only made it worse.
He looks at her, his eyes scanning over her features unhurriedly, without unmasking any of his own feelings or thoughts at the same time. It's a gift of his, this aloofness, this mystery.
"That's it." His tone is clipped, the question coming out vague and emotionless.
She shrugs. "I don't know."
"You don't know." He repeats her words, elongating their sound into the space between them, measuring them, decoding the meaning behind them.
She doesn't say anything else.
"Okay I'll tell you why I think we should get married. And you can tell me if you agree or not. And then you can tell me why you think we shouldn't, okay?"
Logic and reason really has always been a part of personality she adored. She used to understand where it came from so well.
"Sure." Her reply is short.
He looks right into her eyes as he starts.
"We've been living together for the past two years."
"Yes."
"We've been happy."
(No)
"Yes."
"We've been stable."
(No)
"Yes."
"I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
(Lie)
"Right."
"I love you."
(Lie)
He stops when he realizes she isn't responding to the last reason.
"Your turn." He says carefully, choosing to ignore her lack of response to his last statement.
She looks into his eyes pointblank. "I'm not Mitchie. I'll never be Mitchie."
His eyes seem to glaze over, and she swears she can see guilt and pain in his eyes at the mention of her name especially intertwined with her own.
"Caitlyn—"
"We could get married, we could have the most beautiful kids, you could take care of me, never cheat on me, never intentionally hurt me, but you could never love me as Caitlyn. You would always love me as Mitchie."
"That's not true Cait—"
"Yes, it is. It's true, and it's unhealthy and it's already breaking us apart. I don't want to lose you forever."
"So what do we do now?" His question sounds far away, like some soothing nightmare coming true finally.
She takes a deep breath. "I think we need to be apart for some time."
He's quiet for a long time, and then he stands up suddenly, walking over to her rigidly before bending down and kissing her lightly on the cheek. She can feel his warm breath on her ear, and it's almost like old times.
It's almost like summer days, behind her cabin, innocent kisses against the wall. It's almost like their first date at a music store, sharing the same head phones and listening to Radiohead. It's almost like her first time in in a hotel room right after they've watched Titanic.
Except it's not.
"I'm sorry, Caity."
He walks out of their apartment with only one glance back. It speaks enough.
He's never been a guy with a lot to say by word of mouth anyway.
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v. in the dark you wonder where did the years go.
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"Caitlyn."
She's pretty sure she's hearing voices now.
Well, that's what scotch does to you, when you have a little too much than necessary, she guesses.
She's humming "What Sarah Said" by Death Cab for Cutie, when the closet door opens, and she's a mess of limbs splayed across the small, confined space. Her head is spinning a little, and she feels a little more tipsy and delirious than she probably should.
She looks up dazed to a face, and she can't really identify the person, because her sight is kind of hazy but Jesus, he's so pretty-looking, with such dark dark eyes. It all feels hazily familiar.
"Surprise…you found me." She says, giggling at her own joke, the slur in her words crystal clear.
"Well, look at you." He breathes in, a smirk on his lips, eyes scanning over her disarrayed limbs, the mess and tangle of curls on the top of her head, and cheeks stained with invisible, dry tears.
"Look at me." She extends her arms out with spontaneous fervor, and then draws them back in towards her body, before yawning and leaning her head against the back of the closet wall.
"Drunk?"
"Maybe." She replies sleepily.
"Lovely." By now, she's closed her eyes.
And then she hears the creak of the hard floor, and a body entering the closet and closing the doors slightly.
"What you doing." She asks incoherently, still not opening her eyes.
"Joining the party of one." He responds dryly.
"So now it's a party of two?"
"Guess so."
She doesn't bother to say anything else for a while. She feels too dizzy, and she's more concerned about the alcohol now insistently singing in her bloodstream.
"Why are you here?"
"Nate asked Jason to check up on you. You haven't been picking up the phone supposedly."
"Why isn't Jason here then?"
"Because." There's a hardness to his answer, and she chooses not to push it any further.
"Because." She parrots vacantly, drawing her knees closer to her body and putting her head against them, while letting the word write all over the walls inside her brain.
"How'd you get in here again?" She hears herself ask him from somewhere far away. It comes out muffled, and resonates in her ears.
"Mitchie's key." He replies casually.
"Oh. Mitchie…"
"Yeah, Mitchie." He nods his head distractedly, looking at anything but her at the mention of her best friend.
"I miss Mitchie." She whispers randomly into the open, collected air.
"I know."
"Did you know she was my best friend?"
"Yes. Yes I did."
"Did you know she used to come to me every time you guys fought, or you made her cry?"
This time there's no response.
She starts humming again faintly.
"She loved you so much."
There's a muffle of movement, of something moving against the clothes hanging on hanger, the sound of a head leaning against the side of the closet.
"I know."
"You broke her heart so many times."
"I know…I never deserved her. I wish I loved her as much as she loved me." His voice holds an indescribable burden.
Silence again.
"You did."
He quirks his head to one side, smugly eyeing the outline of her figure in the dark before responding, "You act like you know that for certain."
"I do."
She hears a bored sigh, and the drum of his fingers on the wall.
"Why would you say that?"
"Because," She pauses, taking one long inhale of the air they're sharing, "Because love is watching someone die."
He laughs indifferently at the soft melody in her whispered confession, the upward curve of his mouth not reaching his eyes.
"So who's going to watch you die?" He asks lazily, deciding to play along, while fiddling with the fray ends of her leggings for a few minutes.
"No one." The gravity in her voice grabs his attention, and in the dim light he can see her eyes are open now, staring at him listlessly.
"So who's going to watch me die?" He pushes forward, because that's what he's all about. Just testing and testing until he hits the point of no return.
She takes the half-empty bottle of scotch, handing it over to him and looks up, her brows furrowed, signaling she's deep in thought about how to answer his question.
Finally, she looks back at him, and her eyes are swimming with some twisted kind of joy, as if the answer is so easy, so simple. She can't comprehend why it took her this long to come to the conclusion.
"Me." She speaks the word gently, like she wants to believe in it with all her heart.
He doesn't reply, and silence washes over them yet again. Except this time, he's not staring at her with pretend indifference. There's something a little more desperate and hungry in the way he's staring at her.
She thinks a part of him knew her answer long before she actually spoke it. It's so much different to hear it out in the open though.
But she doesn't have a care in the world right now, and she's going to try to enjoy it, savor it as best as she can.
Because soon enough, it'll slip away again, and then she'll have to return back to the grief, to the fears, to the reality.
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vi. time and time again, younger now than we were before.
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It's a few week later, she finds herself in front of his door. Her knuckles are hovering in front of it, hesitant and cautious and a part of her know if she knocks, there's no go backs.
She has nothing to lose though. The worst he can do is tell her he doesn't want her here, and she'll be gone. The matter would end there, simple as that.
She closes her eyes trailing her fingers across the wood of the door, imagining what could be behind it. She's been here a number of times in the past. She knows what the living room looks like, knows the feel of the couch beneath her body.
She remembers different times and moments.
She remembers rushing in, in the middle of the night, to find her best friend sitting on the couch, tears streaming down her cheeks, and the faint shiver overwhelming her as she held her in her arms all night. She remembers watching her friend fall asleep with the sound of his name on her lips. But most of all, she remembers him never coming back those nights.
She wants to think this is the same apartment, but it's not.
And suddenly she finds her fingers touching air, instead of hard wood, and she slowly opens her eyes to see him looking intently at her, his gaze demanding an answer to his unspoken question.
"You left me to fall asleep in the closet." Her voice falters, and she can still feel the hangover, the ache in her bones and limbs from the awkward position she laid in all those weeks ago.
"Yeah." The look in his eyes doesn't change, he's still waiting.
She nods her head. She wants to laugh.
If it was Nate who found her in the closet, he'd talk to her, comfort her, and when she fell asleep, he'd carry her to her bed and tuck her in with a light kiss on the top of her head, like she was a child. He'd care for her like he loved her, even if he didn't really.
But this is Shane. If he doesn't love you, he won't pretend to. If he does love you, well…
It occurs to her that, every time she looks into his eyes, it's this never ending darkness she's looking into. She can never see her reflection in them. She wonders if that's what got to Mitchie in the end.
He exhales an exhausted and impatient sigh. "Caitlyn, why are you here?"
"I—" She stops short. She doesn't really know why she's here, but she is and she doesn't know what to do next.
He looks up from beneath his thick eyelashes, and there's some sort of struggle she can see in his eyes, but that's it; nothing else. She's pretty sure she wants to leave now.
She's never felt so alone, so small, so breakable.
She wants to be strong again. She wants to know where this is going, where her life is leading her now that everything seems to be leaving, changing too fast for her catch up.
But she can't, and it hurts so bad, she's not sure how she goes through each day with it. It's like a trainwreck of emotions, finally overwhelming her.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry—"
Her voice breaks at the end, and she turns around too fast, her footsteps clumsy and ungraceful, and she's tripping over herself. And somewhere in the background she can hear her name in the wind, but it's all over, from every direction and she's so confused, so very confused.
And when she gets in her car, her hands are trembling and the key just won't go into the ignition, and the car just won't start. Somewhere in the middle of it all, she realizes she's sobbing so hard her body is shaking against the steering wheel.
She's never cried like this before.
Not when her father died in front of her eyes, not when she watched them put Mitchie's body beneath the grass, and certainly not when Nate left her without a fight.
She wants everything to go away, but it just won't. It follows her around wherever she goes, like the shadow of ghosts she used to once think she was too old to believe in.
Eventually, she takes her head off the steering wheel, at the sound of someone's light tapping on the window. And when she looks up to see Shane standing outside the car, that unreadable expression in his eyes from all those weeks ago, it nearly takes her breath away.
Because it's even more beautiful when you're actually sober.
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vii. all we know is distance, we're close and then we run.
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They drive around the whole day, with no real destination in sight. And they never seem to stop; they just keep going on and on for what seems like forever. The road never seems to want to end. It keeps winding around and around.
She doesn't mind it though. It's kind of comforting. She'd like to hold on to this.
The entire ride, he never speaks a word to her, his eyes trained on the road, the journey ahead of them. Eventually she feels herself falling asleep against the window, to the sound of the tires against the road.
It's the first time in a long time she falls asleep peacefully.
In her sleep, she thinks a part of her drifts away somewhere down the road.
And there it goes. Up, up and away.
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vii. i know you hate this one, but this is how the story ends.
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She wakes up at dusk and they're somewhere too green to be the city. The sky is a canvas of blemished shades of grey.
She's rubbing her eyes when she notices him reading some book.
He looks up from the book when she starts to sit a little straighter in her seat. His gaze is calm, steady, and electrifying all at the same time. His eyes move up from her chin to her eyes fluidly, and there's something inside of her aching for him to do something, anything.
She thinks she's starting to feel something that shouldn't be felt.
"You ready for me to take you home?" His question breaks her out of her thoughts.
She's quiet, and then she nods her head slowly, impassively.
"Yeah. I'm ready."
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A/N: I'm actually not sure if this will be a two-shot. I need to find two songs to inspire the second part, so the whole thing can be in the same format and style. I'm OCD like that. But yeah, we'll see I guess…
By the way, don't be fooled by what Nate seems like in this part. There's a lot more to him. Yeah, just a heads up.
