A/N: Okay, I'm really sorry if I scared someone by saying that this chapter would be the last one, but fortunately, this one turned out a hell of a lot longer than I expected, so there's this chapter, and then a sweet little epilogue to look forward to! YAY!

12: There's Someone Else

Adam leaves Jake at the gate to the graveyard. When he shrugs his arms off, Jake looks at him in surprise, but Adam smiles at him. He wants it to look reassuring, but he's not sure he pulls it off.

It's possible that it looks like a cringing mask. Even though things are going to change.

"Don't you want to go home?" Jake asks.

Adam shakes his head.

"You wait here. I have someone I have to say goodbye to."

"But I thought that was what you just did."

Adam smiles. There's a film of sadness over his face.

"Not him. It's someone else. But I'll be right back."

And then, Adam walks back up the graveled path to the church. All the guests are outside now, mingling and chitchatting, like black little ants they scurry around with their glasses of sherry. Adam finds her close to the big gate to the church, and he has to stop and look at her.

He thought she'd be surrounded with other rich wives, more black little ants that want to tell her they're sorry for her loss. But she's all alone, leaning against the white pane of the church wall, she, too, dressed in black, her glass of sherry hanging dead from her fingertips along her side.

She straightens up when she sees him. Doesn't even try to smile, and Adam doesn't want her to.

"I thought I'd say goodbye."

Allison nods. Her eyes are red and puffy from her breakdown in the church, but she's calm and collected now.

Calm and collected.

Like Lawrence.

For some reason, the mere thought is like a stab in Adam's heart.

"Will you come back and see me?"

Her voice isn't nearly as proud as her posture. It's a squeak, a little girl's plea for her dad to sit by her bed until she's forgotten about her nightmare, and that's another stab. Adam's eyes almost well up again when he hears her.

She's not supposed to sound like. He needs to know that she'll be okay. Needs to know that he'll leave a survivor behind, needs to know…

Needs to know that he can leave her forever, and she'll still stand tall.

He doesn't hate Allison anymore. Not at all. He wants to put his arms around her, he wants her to be strong like he wanted Lawrence to be, doesn't want her to break down, because then, he won't be able to keep himself from doing that. But he won't be able to see her again. He won't.

"I…" Adam begins and draws his foot through the gravel. "I'm… Sorry. I don't think I can do that."

Allison nods again. Her gaze flutters down to her glass, she shakes it a little like she tries to find Lawrence in the brown liquid.

"You're going to be okay?" Adam asks.

Allison chuckles hollowly, shakes her head and raises her eyebrows, still without looking at him.

"I have to be, don't I?" She asks, and her voice is already crumbling like an old brick wall. "I… I have Diana, and she hardly needs mommy to break down in a ball of tears in the corner… But…"

A pause. Adam wants to touch her, but he doesn't.

She can't have anyone interrupting her right now.

She won't get another chance to tell him this. And she doesn't have anyone else to tell it.

"But… I…"

A dry sob. She puts her hand over her mouth.

"I miss him so much!" Allison croaks out, and tears start streaming down her face again, her mascara and eyeliner turn into sad tiger stripes across her face.

Adam nods.

"I know you do."

Another pause.

"I loved him, you know."

It just slips out. Adam has no idea why he says it, but it doesn't really matter, because Allison doesn't seem surprised at all. She doesn't even look up.

"I guess it was… The bathroom," Adam continues with a shrug. "I wouldn't even have liked the guy if it wasn't for the bathroom. But… I think it was the fact… Even when we were there, and… We were in shackles, and you and Diana were with a gun to your heads somewhere else, he was… He was still… All calm."

Adam chuckles weakly.

"When I looked at him, it was like… Like he could just make that chain go away. If he waved his wand a little."

Allison makes a sound that's either a laugh or a sob, but Adam has to guess for the latter. She doesn't cry anymore, at least. Now, she's more like she was before, frail and beautiful with the nervous smile, frail because it's only skin that keeps all of her emotions and all of her sorrow from spilling out, flowing out into a black pool in front of her.

"That was Larry in a nutshell, wasn't it?" She says and finally looks at Adam as she draws a thumb under her right eye.

Adam nods with a small smile.

"It was," he says softly.

Another pause.

"I'm sorry, I don't mean to put up a triangle drama at his funeral," Adam says, not sure if he's joking. "But I did love him. I fell in love with your husband in that bathroom."

Allison nods and sniffles. She even looks at him and smiles, and Adam is, against his will, very impressed.

"I guess that's okay," she says with a shrug. "I mean… It's good that someone… Appreciated him. That calm and the control and all that stuff that you fell in love with… God, I hated all that at the end of our marriage…"

She sniffles again, pulls a handkerchief out of her sleeve and blows her nose in it.

"I really did love him," she says, suddenly in a firm voice. "You should know that. I never married him because I was pregnant or because he was rich or something, please don't think that. I was… Head over heals in love with him when I married him."

Adam nods. Even though he really can't picture Allison and Lawrence, his Lawrence, cuddling together on the couch in front of a crappy TV-show.

"I loved the calmness and the control-freakiness, too," Allison goes on. "But at the end… Every time he was in front of his laptop and me and Diana just… Stopped existing to him, I swear to God, I just wanted to… Smash it into pieces."

She pauses again. Her eyes get stuck on a point right above Adam's head, and Adam can't help but hoping that she looks forward.

Forward for herself and for Diana.

For him.

Forward, towards a better future.

"Maybe if I'd told him," Allison says, and for the first time in ages, it sounds like someone actually wants Adam's opinion on something. "If I'd told him that I loved him. You think it would've lasted?"

Adam scoffs and lowers his gaze.

"I ask myself that question every fucking night."

Allison looks at him. And her eyes are all wet again.

Nothing is simple.

Adam can't help but thinking that.

Nothing is simple. Maybe it is to other people, but not to him. He was given a crappy life, and when he reminded himself of that too often, some fucking psycho had to put him in a shackle, made him taste pure, untainted love for the first time in his life and then snatch it away.

But in the meantime, that is what life is. It sucks, and it's a struggle for every second of every day, but he just has to learn how to live with it. He just has to learn how to live with life, learn how to let other people into it, let other people help him stand and let other people struggle with him.

That is life. Adam's life is nothing but powering through, powering through, powering through.

And in that way, it is very simple.

"You really won't come and see us?" Allison asks, once again with that praying tone that tears Adam's heart apart when he realizes what he has to answer.

"No," he says and shakes his head. "It's… Too hard. I can't see you without thinking that it was your fault."

Allison nods again. She almost seems to smile when he puts her eyes on the ground.

"I know. It'd be kind of weird, wouldn't it? I just thought…"

She stops talking abruptly. But it seems to be because she has to figure out what she really wants to say, not because she cries again.

"That's why you fell in love with Larry, too, I think," Allison then says, and for once, Adam doesn't freak out when someone analyzes him. "Because… He knew how you felt. He knew what you'd gone through. And I'm not saying I'm in love with you, I'm just saying… That most people need someone like that."

She makes another pause, but she goes on before Adam realizes the meaning of her words.

"You know what I've been through," Allison says, almost whispering now. "Only you do. Except for Diana, and I can't talk to her. And I don't know if anyone else knows what you've been through, but if there is someone else… Boy, you have no idea how lucky you are."

Adam doesn't.

The thought strikes him like a whack over the head.

He doesn't know how lucky he is.

How lucky he is to have Jake.

How the hell could he have missed that?! How the hell could he have been so busy mourning over Lawrence that he's missed all the wonderful things right in front of him?

How could he have missed his first love so much that he forgot that there was a new one, just as good and just as wonderful right in front of him, someone just as wonderful that he could talk about that first loss with?!

"I do have someone else," Adam says, maybe more to himself than to Allison.

And before Allison manages to reply, he looks her straight in the eye and goes:

"I'm sorry, I know you probably thought that if I didn't, I'd come crawling back to you, but I do."

Allison laughs in that hollow way again.

"No, I didn't think that. You don't seem like the crawling kind of guy."

Adam smiles, too.

He isn't that kind of guy.

Or wasn't.

Because things will change. They will change now.

Allison's smile fades away. Adam looks at her, for a second, and manages to think that she looks like a porcelain doll that's about to fall apart, but that he knows will stay put, anyway, because she needs to power through as much as he does, before she steps forward, takes her glass of sherry in her left hand and wraps her right one around his shoulder, presses him against her in a hug, very briefly, just for a second, before she lets go, steps back. And smiles.

He isn't going to miss her. Even though he doesn't hate her anymore.

He's not going to miss her, since unlike her, he has someone else.

It's just taken him a while to realize it.

Don't get me wrong, I hate Allison as much as any other ChainShipper, but I think even she deserves a little moment of softness every once in a while. I've only written about her once before, and then, she was the worst bitch of all times, and I guess this is her redress! Review and tell me how much you love me, please… XD