A/N: know that carol: "It came upon a midnight clear"? Well this chapter came upon a midnight rainy, but same difference. Just a little angsty-ish filler space. Promise longer chapters later.

Chapter 5: "She that can't endure the bad will not live to see the good"

The sun was setting on the town, dusky rays shone upon streets that glittered from the past day's rain. At first glance, there was only a young man walking down the streets alone. Yet he was talking, and an answering voice confirmed the presence of another. But who could this be? An imaginary friend, perhaps, brought magically to life by the hopes and dreams of.

~~Celia. Your 'commentary' is getting sickly saccharine and disgustingly maudlin. Stop, please!~~ ~~Aren't you gonna tell me to 'cease and desist'?~~ she laughed ~~I can't help myself, its sooo lonely here when you two decide to escape.~~ I shook my head wildly in an attempt to get the voice out of it. Then I immediately regretted it when the headache returned.

The guy next to me chuckled understandingly. "Don't ya hate having her in your head?" I muttered an agreement. Unfortunately, I also stumbled. Jon grabbed my shoulders and asked if I was okay. I nodded, even as my head throbbed and my knees went limp. Undaunted, I convinced myself that I wasn't going to get any better if I kept feeling so weak, so I continued walking. I was gonna show them I was better if it killed me! And at this point it felt like it probably would. Ironic, huh?

It had been a week since I had come down with this food poisoning, and it hadn't gone away. Since being cooped up makes me crazy, I had been trying to let Janine, our resident 'doctor', let me get up and about for the past couple of days. She finally relented, on the condition that I stay relatively near the building and that Jon accompany me. Being Jon's foster parent, she had taught him first aid and figured I'd be safer with him than with Celia. Feeling excluded, Celia had decided to get revenge by thoughtfully telling me all sorts of reasons why I would not be safer with a guy than with her. When I seemed relatively immune to her taunts, she decided to stick in my head and stay there.

Apparently, Celia found this thought floating around in my mind, and decided it was more scary than ironic, because before I knew what was happening, Jon had pulled me into a doorway and was staring at me rather searchingly. I squirmed. "If it kills you, huh?" he asked pointedly. "Any use asking why you've gone all suicidal?" "I'm not suicidal" I muttered lamely. "Nah, you just want to prove a point." Jon replied heatedly "you want to show that bastard Gerald that he didn't hurt you as much as he wanted to. You want to show that you're stronger than that, that you can handle this. You want to be as invulnerable as you are invisible!"

I could feel the blood rushing to my face and for once was glad he couldn't see me. Damn him! Damn Celia! Why'd they have to get in my business like this? I stared at the floor. I felt like the power to say anything intelligent had left me. But Jon had one last thing to say.

"We know that Gerald doesn't control you, that nobody can control your life. You don't have to prove it to us."

I finally looked up at him. "Yeah, I do" I replied. "I have to prove it because he does control me. Did you know he moved everything in my room, all of my disappeared clothes? I can't find them if I can't see them. I need to prove I can cope, with or without him. That being invisible hasn't stopped me from having a normal existence!, I wanted to lose everything that had to do with me before my life shattered. That's why I moved here, I ran away from the taunts, the unspoken criticism. I don't want to be invulnerable, I just want to be indifferent."

I could feel myself breaking down. God help me, I was gonna start bawling. But, somehow, I couldn't stop talking. "Did you know that sometimes I have a hard time remembering what I looked like before I started disappearing? That I have to stare in the mirror for a long while before the pictures start coming back to me? It's been five years since I've seen my own face!" I was really choked up now, and I blinking away the unwanted dampness in my eyes.

But I realized I didn't have to say anymore. No one expected me to. And so I cried out the next few minutes into Jon's shirt, belatedly realizing that Celia had shut off her link long ago. Maybe she has a sense of decency after all.

A/n: Hip hip hooray, ive passed the 20 review mark! But that doesn't mean I'd mind hitting 25.