A/N: Life has been a bit awful lately, and I've been doing a lot of stewing and not enough writing. The problem was, I couldn't figure out who the right character was to get across what I was feeling. Then this came to me. I hope it works.

Disclaimer: Not mine.

Apology: Sorry. I will write something more positive for this fandom at some stage. I promise.


Weaker Than the World

by padfoot

...

Sometimes, Taylor feels so lonely that she thinks it might kill her. She can hear voices outside her room and she knows that there are people right there – so close and so willing to help – but sometimes, some days, it isn't enough. She hears people laughing and people talking and people being and wonders why she can't do it. Why can't she just be? Why is that one, simple thing so hard for her to do?

She thinks of Hannah, alone, trapped in that house in this place and knows that she's selfish, she's stupid, she's weak. Hannah was more alone than Taylor has ever been, being stuck here with everyone's ghosts circling, circling her endlessly. Hannah had it even worse than on those nights years ago when Taylor's mother would leave her there in their awful flat in King's Cross. Because then, at least, she'd had Simon. She'd had Tess, the girl she'd pretended to be. And she'd had Tate, or Annie, or Mum- whoever she'd called herself those nights.

But here she just has darkness. The eerie sounds of life outside, of the world going and on and on and never stopping, not even for a moment.

She wishes she were as strong as the world.

Able to keep turning, no matter what. Ignoring all the awful, horrible things that go on right there, ignoring all the ugly blemishes that mar its surface. Maybe it only paid attention to their beautiful things. To flowers blooming, to waterfalls cascading, to rainbows shining bright ad hopeful after a storm. To Hannah's smile, to Jessa's sticky, sweaty hands when they grasped Taylor's tight. To the secret, little looks that Raffy and Santangelo shared sometimes, when they thought no one was looking. To Jonah.

Jonah's hair and his jaw and his eyes and the way he laughed and teased and loved, so wholly, so surely. The way he could be so unashamed of who he was and what he loved, but how there were so many ugly parts of him too, parts that he kept deep down and only shared with those he trusted. With the people who knew what that ugliness was like. With the people who, maybe, he thought could help him fight it.

Taylor wishes she were as strong as the world. She wishes she could hold Jonah from here and convince him that it was all for him, that she gained nothing from knowing that, sometimes, he was as lonely as she was. But she's selfish and stupid and weak and she needs him, pathetically so. He's so far away, and yet she knows that he's the only one who can cure this particular type of loneliness. She knows he can't do it from there. She wants him, wants him here, with her. So much that it hurts.

She wonders if that pain, that longing is enough. She wonders if yearning for something so much will mean that nothing could kill her before she gets what she wants; if by sheer stubbornness she can make it through times like these, because there is no way in hell that she's dying now and never seeing Jonah again.

She wonders how it feels – how this agonising press of loneliness feels – to people who don't have someone like Jonah to keep them alive.