It wasn't that Eric was giving up; it was just that he didn't see any other way out anymore. Growing up he had always been able to rely on his sister to shield him from the worst but she's decided to leave him. She decided to leave him in the darkness, in the deafening quiet. His mother had never been the most attentive person in the world putting her own idea of happiness over the well being of her children.

Eric can still remember the weeks and some times months she would just disappear, without so much as a note, with some man she deemed to be the love of her life. Although to be honest he preferred her absence to her bringing home the lowlifes she was dating at the moment. For instance that one guy who was consistently snorting an amalgam of various drugs in their kitchen like he was having his morning coffee. He also had tried to get Eric to join in until he was kicked out when Serena was caught snorting his stash. She was 14.

That incident marked the downward spiral of his sister who was the sunniest person he knew to that of a broken shell of her former self. Every time she got worse Eric could feel his heart break into smaller pieces. The days she would be gone tore away at him, what hurt the most was that he knew exactly where she would be and there could be nothing he could do to bring her home. She would not have wanted Eric to see how far she had fallen and he would not know whether he could bear seeing her in such a state. So they grew distant, thinking that they had grown out of each other and that the other would be just fine without them.

So that was how their years went. Serena would go on to lose herself with every day looking for something or someone that could fix her or at least help her feel normal. His mother, who had wisened up about letting just about any man in their home, would be maintaining the façade of a happy family amongst the rest of high society by covering up Serena's slow breakdown. Leaving Eric to be the witness to this entire mess of a family while putting on a mask of complacency so he would not have to face the reality of how fucked up everything really was.

His mother informed him of Serena's impromptu enrolment in some boarding school in the Hamptons over breakfast, in a nonchalant tone as if she was noting something odd about her white omelette. The oatmeal Eric was eating suddenly lost all of its flavour and acted as a lump of paste preventing any sort of sound to escape his throat. He knew he should have seen it coming, he knew his mother was desperate to straighten Serena up and he knew that this news should not effect him in the way that it did but why did it feel like somebody just pulled the entire world out from under him letting him fall into the empty void of space?

Instead of responding to the news Eric excused himself from the table, got his iPod and went for a run. He turned the music up to the point where he didn't even hear the pounding of his feet on the pavement. He pushed back all his questions and feelings of abandonment in favour of the music and the burn in his legs. He ending up running in Central Park, he kept on running until his lungs burned.

By the time he slowed down, he found himself under the bridge that he and Serena would use to hide from the world. Where as children they could pretend that nothing existed outside of the shadow of that bridge; they would spend entire afternoons just sitting under that bridge imagining the world that they wished to have, whispering nonsensical childish secrets into each other's ears before the nanny of the time would find them to take them home.

Eric reached out to the cool walls of that bridge recounting the days when Serena was his best friend, when he could count on her to make life easier. When she would make stupid jokes about Dali or Hemmingway to cheer him up on the days he was tired of the façade of normalcy he put up as the shield to get him through every day. A bittersweet smile spread across his face with the realisation that the Serena he held in his memories has been gone long before her sudden departure to, the denial of that fact dissipated with the finality of Serena's departure.

Under the shadow of that bridge Eric sat, hardly making a sound. He immersed himself in the memories past, he thought of easier times; he uses them to keep him safe from the storm he knew that would be coming. He sat there keeping himself safe until his back became sore from the rough brick wall and he got up and he continued his run.


A/N: I am so sorry for how short and long overdue this chapter is. Life just got in the way as well as a severe case of writers block. Thank you reading!