A/N - This chapter has been coming for a while, and to be honest I'm quite relieved to have it done. It was pretty difficult to write, so I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say about it.
Dominique at 4:00pm
She was standing with them all gathered around her in their space in the library, everyone in their usual places. She looked almost translucent, like some terrible, broken doll only held up by her own resolution.
They waited in silence for the last one to arrive, Lily, slinking through the door with gauzy eyes to take her seat, all nervous and tense and not sure whether to look at their cousin's frightening form or away from it.
Dominique drew in a long breath, tucking her lifeless hair behind her ear.
"I suppose there's no easy way to say this." She began in a small, queer voice that shook ever so slightly "but, um, the thing is…I'm going away."
She said it with an awful finality - the tone of a girl who is dreading the future with a terrible, sick feeling in her stomach, yet knows that it is completely unavoidable.
They absorbed the news like a blow, shocked and yet a little bit relieved, a little bit calmer. Molly was the only one to speak.
"When, Dom?"
Her cousin smiled mirthlessly. She hadn't really expected them to be surprised, but is stung in a muted sort of way that they accepted this so easily, that they had all known.
"I'm leaving this afternoon. Sort of now, actually. All my stuff is already gone, the picked it up half an hour ago, and mum and dad have been in with the head since then."
The room was stiflingly silent, with Dom begging someone silently to make her feel a little better, but all the rest paralysed with fear of sending her off wrong.
Eventually though, Rose spoke.
"Oh, Dom." She sighed, tears starting in her eyes. She melted off the armchair and hugged the frail girl tight, "I'm so sorry."
But they all knew the unspoken words, the "don't be sorry", the acknowledgement that this had to be that lurked behind every grim, unhappy face.
"It's okay." Dom whispered into her hair "it's okay."
Rose stepped back, looking her full in the face. "No. No, it isn't okay. But it will be, yeah?"
Dom smiled, starting to cry just a little. "I hope so." She said in her broken voice, straight from her broken heart.
Suddenly, they all moved, and Louis had them both in his lanky arms, and then everyone was hugging her, crying, promising to write all the time. Still uncertain, but offering whatever comfort they could.
And then, she left.
Just like that.
And they didn't know how she felt on the way home, how the house felt empty when she arrived, how she cried herself to sleep the first night in glorious exhaustion.
The exhaustion she'd been praying for.
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