I assumed most have you have seen the new promo today, hmm? I'll admit I'm a little on the fence with the whole Drew/Katie/Bianca thing. I've never been an avid shipper of each couples, but I have to say that there is fault in both Drew and Katie's part. First of all, Katie had been there for Drew through all the hardships he had to encounter in Now or Never, and it is in my opinion rather harsh of him to break up with her just like that when she needed him most. Secondly, he was her first- at this point., we don't know when this had happened, but if it had been after the whole Bianca thing, then that boy needs a good whooping. That would be a very selfish thing for him to do.

But Katie damaging Bianca's car? That's inarguably below the belt. None of this is Bianca's fault, and it's unfair of Katie to judge based on the type of person she had once been. That's all in the past.

And as for Eclare, the lack of clips showing their interaction may be a good thing. Less drama, I hope.

I promise you that the chapters will get longer after this one, and as always, enjoy!

Eli sits, leaning his head against the back of the wall and tossing a hatchet up in the air repeatedly. He snags it easily before it touches the floor, and then proceeds to lifelessly flick it upwards again. Wash, rinse, and repeat. And every time he captures the small device in the crevice between his index and middle finger, the time span between the toss and the catching, it mimics the time it takes for his heart to beat against his chest. The pumps of blood are long and drawled out, more like a dull clawing at his chest than anything else. Even when the hatchet cuts his palm as it descends, his blood doesn't look remotely similar to the vivid scarlet that pools underneath her cheeks. It looks like a faded grey in his eyes, oozing out and dripping onto the carpet.

And he sits like that for hours, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. His hand is getting bloody and his fingers are starting to look mangled with pain he can't feel, but he continues to sit. His eyelids are heavy and sluggish with fatigue, eyes rimmed with red and accompanied with deep purple rings underneath. He feels his body disconnecting from his brain, gradually, nerve by nerve. More and more he starts to feel like a living corpse, and he feels himself dying.

Eli Goldsworthy is dying.

There are a lot of things he regrets- hell, there is an endless list of sins he committed within in the past few years, things he would try to atone for if it was somehow possible to go back in time. Remorse is what it feels half the time.

He regrets what he said the first time they fought.

"You can't keep pushing me away, Eli, I know you." Clare yells from a few feet away. She eventually stops and cements her feet on the hard of the sidewalk. There's an unmistakable inflection of pain dripping through her every word, lagging behind the heavy frustration seeping through her voice. The way she is speaking to him, it makes him want to turn on his heel and yell back. It makes him want to disgorge every bit of love she had given him and stomp on it with his feet, right where she can clearly see.

But instead he continues to stride away, hands jammed in his pockets and feet moving mechanically forward.

"Why do you keep running away? Huh? You tell me you love me one minute and completely throw me away the next and I can't keep up with you!" And even though his back is turned and the distance between them is stretching, he can feel her eyes burning a hole in the back of his head. She sounds scratchy and exasperated and it just spikes up his anger even more. "Oh I get it," she says bitterly, almost spitting out the words. "Let's mess with Clare's heart, why don't we? Rip it from her chest, feed it false affection, and then leave it on the streets to die. It's just a fun game to you, isn't it? You're messed, Eli."

At this point, he's letting out a cynical bark of laughter. "You're delusional," he snorts, shaking his head.

"'Delusional'?" Clare repeats with a scoff of disbelief. "Well forgive me for not being able to read that warped mind of yours! You…you change like the weather. You're so erratic, I can't stomach it."

She hurries and reaches out, seizing his wrist and pulling him to a complete stop. She turns him so that he has no choice but to face her, and stares at him with a piercing look in her eyes.

"Tell me what I'm supposed to think," she demands, almost daring him to say what she doesn't want to hear. "Tell me the truth!"

"I'm afraid you won't be able to stomach it," he mocks, yanking his arm away. Disregarding the rush of coldness that entered his veins when they were no longer touching.

"Try me," she says steadily, flames ablaze in her pupils.

It's his turn to narrow his eyes into angry little slits, and when he does it, he's taken aback by how unafraid she is of him. Even as he's glaring down at her, she stays rooted without a single flicker of hesitation of fear, eyes never tearing away from his.

"I never loved you, I don't care for you, and you are completely delusional in thinking that we would ever have a future together," he says shortly, warily, watching her unmoving expression. "This just proves how little you know about me. I needed a distraction, and you were just too easy. We were never really together."

"Wow," she says at once, still glaring at him. A long silence full of tension environs them now, neither willing to back down so easily. "You're quite an impressive manipulator. My mistake for believing that actually had a heart under that bullshit front you keep up."

Eli still winces at the image of Clare, tough as steel and firm and metal, standing her ground and saying what she said after the horrible things he threw at her. It was at that point that he realized that the impossibly strong girl before him did in fact know him, better than anyone else. How accurately she had called him out on it, how capable she was of holding it together when he was shattering into a million pieces inside. It scares him so much- the fact that she reads him like a book, the fact that she had proven herself to be incredibly tough in spite of the incredible fragility Eli knows of her, but most importantly the fact that he had driven her to that state. He knew she was hurting, but he didn't stop. He was a completely monster for acting the way he did, and felt even more like one when it was later revealed that he had broken her in more ways than one. That was something he would never forgive himself for.

Another thing he regrets is not spending every waking moment with her when they were together- when they could be together.

"There's a carnival today near that bookstore we always go to," Clare says with a glimmer of hope weaving through her voice. "Would you like to go?"

Eli clamps the phone between his ear and shoulder, merging his eyebrows together as he glances over at the clock. He makes a mental calculation of how much time he has to finish his paper for English and frowns when he realizes, not very much.

"I don't think so, Clare. I have a paper due tomorrow and…"

"Oh." The disappointment in her voice is not well-hidden, but she speaks again before he has the chance to say something. "No worries, we can do something else another time. Do you need some help with your paper?"

"It's about gun powder," he says with a faint smirk. "You might want to reconsider that offer."

"Well, alright then. I'll see you Monday then."

"Guess you will."

He winces again at his insensitivity, how inconsiderate he had been. The homework was no excuse; he had all week to work on it, he had merely procrastinated and inevitably disappointed more than just himself. Eli doesn't dwell too much on this, mostly because it was something that could have been corrected by prudence and a bit of responsibility. Not one of his finest moments, definitely.

But his biggest regret shadows all his mistakes from the past.

He regrets not saying I love you to Clare before they were torn apart.

Before he was left in the dust.

"What the actual fuck, man!"

The lights flicker on, and for a second he stings his eyes. That's good. He's feeling something.

"Are you trying to kill yourself or- where's Clare?" Adam narrows his eyes at him. In his half-awake state, his hair is dishevelled and his sweatpants are pooling around his ankles. As he squints, shielding his eyes from the bright fluorescents, Eli momentarily stops tossing the hatchet to stare blankly at the wall behind Adam. Scary thing is, even after having been disrupted from peaceful sleep at three am, he looks a lot healthier and well than Eli by a landslide. It doesn't even occur to the boy that the sound of his catching is loud enough to be heard from behind the thin wall, and that when it is done constantly, it is enough to irk the hell out of anyone that close.

"We broke up," he says bitterly, face twisting into a grimace.

"That doesn't make any sense," Adam mashes his brows together skeptically. He folds his arms across his chest, frowning expectantly at him. "You love her, and she loves you." He says it like the most obvious thing in the world, as if they were blowing a small quarrel way out of proportion.

"Yeah well, sometimes love isn't enough," he says curtly, whipping the hatchet across the floor with an angry contraction of his muscle. It collides against the leg of a chair with a loud thud, provoking a flinch in Adam's part. "She's tied to someone else."

"Jake? Her parents are forcing her to be with Jake?" he scoffs in disbelief.

"He won. It's over," he spits out, clenching his bloody hand into a fist.

"Like hell it is," Adam cusses. He never curses. He only reserves profanities on special occasions.

Like every week, maybe.

"We tried, and it didn't work," Eli says obstinately, as if refusing to think otherwise. He slowly rises to his feet, glancing from his hand, to Adam. The look in his eyes is so dark, so haunting, and so bleak; it causes Adam to stagger backwards, as he is unable to comprehend all of this.

"You can't give up on her, Eli," he tries to persuade him, eyes diverting to the blood dripping on the carpet. "You two have been to hell and back, there's no way this can just- s-she's your lobster for Harold's sake!"

"Who the fuck is Harold?" Eli glares confusedly at him.

"I- you get the point," Adam glowers, cheeks a faint red. "How long have you guys been at it? Half a year or something like that?"

"Almost six months now," Eli says with a shape inhale.

"Exactly! You just can't throw time and development like that away. I've seen you two in action- you have huge blow-outs here and there, and it's hard. It's hard on both of you, but somehow, someway you find a way to patch things up. You conquer all the shit life throws at you and you strengthen your relationship in that way."

"So?" Eli says, arching his brow.

"So, what makes this time any different than the others?"

"This time, we can't fix it. I mean, we physically can't," Eli says, dropping onto his bed. Even in an upright position, the exhaustion releasing itself from his body is just incredible. His feet feel more like cement blocks than flesh and bones, his legs like heavy metal poles than what they are. "The cops followed us today and everything. He took her away in his car and-"

He swallows the lump down his painfully dry throat, and it feels more like swallowing a steel knife than anything else.

"And I didn't even get to tell her good-bye," he says hoarsely, all in one quick breath. He averts his gaze immediately, afraid that if he meets his best friend's sympathetic eyes, it'd be harder to keep himself together.

"You don't have to," Adam urges in gentler tone. "Because it's not the end. It's nowhere near the end. Just trust me, man, you have to keep trying. Listen, I can go call Fi if you want- she's usually better at sorting these things out."

"It's late," Eli shakes his head resolutely. "Just go to sleep Adam, I'll...I'll be fine. Thanks for coming out here."

Seeing that he's nowhere near budging, Adam sighs, running a hand through his hair. "I can see that you're lying, but you're exhausted."

"I'll sleep on it," Eli waves his hand dismissively.

And what exactly does he have left to sleep on, when blissfulness is so far away? What will help him drift off into the peaceful land of slumber with no happy thoughts to gently rock him to sleep? The sense of sorrow is sapping away all his energy, his will to think, and all he feels like doing in wallowing in his own-self-pity, grieving over the lost of something rare and never to reoccur.

But even drowning in the pieces his shattered heart, Eli knows he has a duty. It is, and always will be his job to protect the princess, and that duty is his first priority.

And right now, it's calling him to save her from the tall tower.