Notes: Please review and tell me how I did. Because I'm subtle like that.
Part 19
Sunday, June 12th
Oblivion
When Dawn awakes the next morning, she feels sore and worn out and her body is aching all over. She's slightly disoriented at first, but then weakly remembers drinking whisky together with May and stuffing herself with comfort food. How long they proceeded to do this or what else they might have done she doesn't know and, if she's honest, doesn't really care about, either.
The sound of his voice, of its bored tone is haunting her and drowns out nearly everything besides. All that remains is pain and doubt. A combination—as she knows from experience—that is fatal.
But maybe, she muses, fairly aware that she's giving it much more thought than she should, maybe it's not even his fault, maybe it has been hers all along. Maybe it's everything he can give.
For a while she continues this train of assumptions, to entertain herself, but first and foremost to avoid any contact with May, who's, by the looks of the room, probably been already up for a while. At some point, though, she knows she will have to face her. So, at about eight o'clock, she finally dresses herself and heads out to look for her.
She finds her in the kitchen together with Drew.
They laugh, fool around and none of them utters just one word about the evening the day before. Until—
Out of nowhere, Lady Gaga's Paparazzi begins to wail out of Dawn's jacket, which still lies on the sofa, crumpled and stained with tears and tequila. Quickly, she scurries over to pick up her cell. She doesn't even have time to say her name or a simple 'hello'.
"Dawn," a boyish and shrill-pitched kind of voice shouts, "I will kill you!"
For a moment she is too perplexed to answer anything to that. (It isn't everyday that someone calls her with a death threat as a greeting.)
"A-ash?" she dares ask, timidly. "Is that you?"
"OF COURSE IT'S ME," he roars. "WHO DID YOU EXPECT?"
Again she doesn't quite know what to respond and hesitates. "Um. Ash, what's wrong?"
"What's wrong?" he asks, quietly—menacingly. "What's wrong? I'LL TELL YOU WHAT'S WRONG. I JUST GOT KICKED OUT OF MY FLAT BY MY EX-GIRLFRIEND BECAUSE YOU MADE ME THROW THAT STUPID PARTY INSTEAD OF CELEBRATING OUR ANNIVERSARY WITH HER."
And she feels numb and hollow and very, very stupid. "Ash, look … I'm sorry. I didn't know—"
"THAT'S BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO ME AND PRACTICALLY FORCED ME TO DO THAT—THAT THING."
Before she can say anything else, she is treated to the dial tone. She doesn't try and call back.
Instead she takes her things and goes, and ignores May, who persistently (and desperately) insists she should stay with them to divert herself from her rejection. (From Paul.)
Honestly, though. Dawn doesn't want that. She wants to be alone—very alone—at home with some cheesy romantic movies and pralines. She wants to cry rivers as long as the Nile, she wants to forget all about him, although she very well knows she won't be able to.
She wants to die. To disappear.
Part 20
Sunday, June 13th
Togetherness
She didn't want Ash and Misty to break up.
Part 21
June 14th to December 15th
Sainted
The months come and go by, faster than anyone could have deducted and too sudden for her to comprehend.
It's winter now and the air biting and cold and Christmassy sweet at the same time. Every street is crowded with couples, united in young, dumb love, and mothers with their kids, who stare with stars and awe in their eyes at the colourful and bright decorations, created by avarice and consumption.
Unlike those children, Dawn has no attention left for those and stalks with steady strides toward home, hands buried deep in the pockets of her thick grey coat. Her throat is dry and burns in the aftermath of today's events. It's not like she isn't happy for Misty and Ash—she may have changed from a bubbly, naïve girl who likes pink into a quiet, calculating adult, but she never fully lost her sense of romanticism—still, the thought of them marrying is automatically linked to the conclusion that he is going to be there. The idea isn't particularly surprising her, but rather alarming and frightening her beyond belief.
Her pace speeds up, as does the anger she feels, the flaring shame of her own weakness.
Part 22
December 15th
Lattice
Unmoving and still as a statue, he stands on his balcony, barely dressed in a pair of lose, worn-out boxer shorts.
His gaze is directed at the blinking and sparkling skyline of (t)his city and his thoughts are even farther away—probably already out of the country by thousands of kilometres.
(He's been tricked, lured into this trap of humanity by the twit and now caught forever.)
And he wonders just what the heck he's supposed to do now. He knows, if this (whatever it truly is) continues to develop, his soul of concrete will be shattered and thrown to smithereens like the one of a young girl in love, and, without a heart as support, never be repaired.
But, if nothing else, he knows as well that he won't be able to let this or the twit go, because it makes him feel so very warm from the inside, he isn't even remotely bothered by the freezing cold surrounding him.
Part 23
March 3rd
Saleable
"You cannot be serious, Dawn!"
It's about the fiftieth time May has already told her this and Dawn has grown more than tired of it. She understands why May can't understand, but she just wants this damn conversation to end and fall into her bed, into an ocean of dreams, which are, hopefully, more pleasant to be engaged in than reality.
"I'm sorry," she answers, her voice monotone. "Really, May, I am."
"That won't cut it, Dawn," May screams, so loud it causes Dawn's ears to ring. "Don't you get it? This is the most important day in her life and you as her friend should be part of it, for crying out loud!"
The ringing gets shriller and shriller with every syllable May utters and Dawn's head feels like it's about to implode. The pain poisons and numbs her brain as her eyes threaten to leak.
This needs to stop, this all needs to stop, she needs to die (maybe they all do)—
and with a force neither girl expected she slams the receiver down and goes to sleep.
Part 24
March 5th
Cessation
Nobody, neither Misty, nor Ash, nor Drew nor May, says anything when Dawn shows up at the wedding, anyway, slightly tardy and interrupting the whole ceremony in the process. She takes a seat at the very back as the fairy tale continues.
Only when she stands up to properly greet her newlywed friends, she realises who she has been sitting with.
Dawn gapes, like a goldfish without water, whereas Paul merely motions her to go out of the way. She complies, too quickly if she is honest with herself, but struggling would be stupid and childish and she has given up on those character traits already a long, long time ago.
For the rest of the day, she avoids him, flees and hides herself as soon as she glimpses only the tiniest veil of purple. Around eight she completely withdraws from the party to a deserted balcony. Or she believes it to be deserted, at least.
"What do you want?" Paul asks, kind of weakly, from the shadows where the disco-lights can't reach.
She has nothing to reply to this. The sheer impossibility of this all has (temporarily) frozen her.
"Well?" he demands, his voice slapping her in the face, hard, and wakes her out of her stupor.
And then she bursts into tears.
Suddenly the emotions she has kept bottled up until now are spilling out, unstoppably fast and powerful.
Expectedly, Paul does and says nothing. Instead he averts his gaze to the sky, a black and empty bowl with bright little spots tacked all over it, and exhales. Dawn continues to cry, loud and frantic and as if her life depends on it. In a way it does, because she's most certain that, if she swallows all this pain and recomposes herself now, she will fall apart. And she just can't grant him this kind of easy victory.
Part 25
March 5th
Lurk
After fifteen minutes or so she has finally stopped sobbing and begins to rub her eyes with her sleeves, leaving behind ugly black stains in her petrol coloured jacket.
"You're acting unbelievably childish," he informs her, whilst holding out a tissue.
She stares at him disbelievingly and almost appalled, like he has grown another limb, but takes it, anyway. When she is finished with snorting, she thanks him for his courtesy and yet can't resist the urge to retort that she is not acting childish.
Paul merely scoffs at her haughtily and says, "Just look at you. You haven't changed at all."
Then something inside her snaps. This is enough, she thinks suddenly, he really doesn't know anything. As she crumples up the used tissue in her hands, her accurately manicured fingernails slowly dig themselves into her skin.
(Tonight she never looks back.)
Part 26
March 6th
Misfit
The next day, at pointedly four o'clock in the morning, he stands on her doorstep, dead drunk and with bloodshot swollen eyes.
To say that she is surprised would be the understatement of the century.
She instantly goes vivid and starts shouting. "What the hell do you think you're doing here?" or "Are you nuts?" are only a fraction of the things she quite literally throws at him, but after five minutes of shrill ranting his patience wears thin and he kisses her.
The touch is agonizingly beautiful, but terrifyingly short, and when they part she can still feel the force he's radiating on her lips.
With shaking hands, she closes the door and wordlessly leads him to her bedroom. And although Dawn doesn't know what happened that he has decided to come to her like this, for now at least, she remains silent about it and allows herself to simply get lost in the moment, as they sink into the mattress together.
Part 27
March 10th to 11th
One-way Mirror
For the upcoming three days they both call in sick and spend most of the time in bed, never really talking to each other at all.
When she wakes up on the fourth morning she realises that this is nothing. Nothing she wants or can keep up.
She tells him so the day after.
"Paul," she begins, staring blankly at the clean, white ceiling. He lies somewhere beside her on the right, still tangled up in the remnants from the previous night. "Paul, we need to stop this."
He says nothing to this. (Perhaps he isn't even awake yet, she isn't quite sure.)
She goes on either way. "This won't work, you know. You don't like me and I, I—"
"Do you regret what we've done?" he puts in, startling her.
It's not that she is surprised about him finally saying something, but about the fact that there is a 'we'.
"Yes." It's half lie, half truth, but it doesn't really matter, actually. Someday this will have to end, anyway, and she wants to save herself unnecessary heartache. The pain she feels right now is already more than she can bear.
And he obeys; just stands up, gets dressed and leaves, briskly and cleanly and without any kind of indication that he is ever going to come back.
Part 28
March 11th to June 17th
Scourge
Dawn goes for a visit to her mother the next week. 'For an undetermined period of time', as she tells May's cell phone's mailbox, before entering the train and turning her back on reality.
If Johanna is surprised by her daughter's sudden appearing, she doesn't show it. She simply takes Dawn in (like every mother will) and asks how Ash and the others are. The subject men or her job are nonchalantly being over gone.
The remains of March Dawn mostly spends with Barry, an old childhood friend, (whenever he's at home) or running away from Kenny, who's somehow managed to find out that she's come back.
In April she and Barry begin to date. It's nothing serious or particularly intimate, just something to pass the time, to distract herself from the past. She does call and stay in contact with May and Ash, but, at large, this little utopia she's built herself here in Twinleaf is too tempting leave from.
Part 29
June 17th
Impact
On a hot evening in mid-June Johanna suggests to her daughter she should marry Barry.
Part 30
June 17th to 18th
Feasible
As fast and unexpected as she's arrived, Dawn's gone again. The only difference now is that she neither has a place nor a life to return to. (Two months living pretty much shut off from the rest of the world does that to a person.) Still, that doesn't explain why she's come to his place. (After all, she could have just checked in at a hotel, or something.) And yet here she is, inside Paul Heartnet's flat with a mug of hot, steaming Earl Grey placed in her hands, and sits on his couch.
They don't talk, don't mention what may or may not have happened the past couple of months, they just stare at each other, searching for something, anything to make them believe that this will last. And indeed, there, behind his pupils, beneath the blood-red brick walls surrounding his soul, Dawn can make out a flickering, faint glint and he, as well, seems to have found something. Even though, in all honesty, it doesn't matter at all, because, because—
love is for lucky idiots, anyway.
FIN.
Hope you enjoyed. See you in the next fiction if you like.