A/N: Dedication goes to Careless_Whisper for being the only one to comment in over a month AND for the character ask questions last chapter.
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Reminder: Names have been changed, but the cast is still there. The name conversion is as follows:
William Edwards: Harry Styles (Fun Fact: The new name is a mixture of Louis and Harry's middle names.)
Jacen West: Louis Tomlinson
Emily Thompson: Eleanor Calder
Zayn Malik: Asim Warren
Zerra Mensor: Perrie Edwards (Zerra is an adaptation of Zerrie, which is one of Zerra's nicknames)
James Phillips: Liam Payne (James is Liam's middle name)
Claire Pia: Danielle Peazer (Claire is Danielle's middle name)
Matthew Byrn: Niall Horan
CHAPTER THIRTY
The First Song
(Scratched in the pages of an iconic leather journal, the covers of which had seen better days.)
It’s when I’m laying there
In the middle of the night
Stroking your skin
And feeling your light
It’s when a kiss is not a stepping stone
A way to get
What I want most
It’s when (several lines following are angrily scribbled out)
SCREW THIS! (This is in all caps then:) It’s Roza. That’s it. Wish I could just sing that. How am I supposed to put her into words.
* * *
Denial. That’s what comes first, after the first few moments of frozen horror. But the denial comes in differents forms. Mrs. Bransen’s was pretending the cancer simply didn’t exist. I expected this from William.
I didn’t expect his easy acceptance.
~Roza Fallow
* * *
William had left. Without a single word. Turning on his heel and walking away, walking out, unable to process.
James had stayed with me for a while. I’d begun drawing, my old, familiar default, and he’d tried to talk to me, tried to ask something different so I wouldn’t think of William.
And instead of asking what I was drawing, like so many others before him, instead of asking what, he asked why.
“But what does drawing have to do with all of this?” he gestured around him in a general overreaching wave, finally asked, still trying to process, “You say drawing helps you to forget. What does that even mean?”
I felt a dull pain at his words, but I pushed it away, and it’s so easy. After years of learning to ignore the hurt, it was all too easy to do it then. Maybe that’s the worst part of it all. How easy it is to forget.
“Drawing is-” I paused at this point; unsure how to explain. Then I started over, “When you sleep, everything is forgotten, right? You are taken into this black abyss where you don’t have to face anything or anyone, where you don’t have to feel. That kind of escape is so very tempting to someone like me. But I know, as well as you, that if I were to take sleeping pills constantly, even in safe amounts, people would notice. They would realize the depression behind the act, and put a stop to the extremely detrimental self-medication. Because that kind of escape is dangerous, right?”
