Arcane Guardian ↣ Avenged Sevenfold

30 ☼ sealed

Mandy saw the world around them turn back too. "Stop! Only one of us has to do it then, right? Let it be me." 

"Fuck that." Noelle sunk her thumb deeper as her apartment became clearer. They stood by her body, silently.

"So we have to hurt ourselves where we were mortally wounded," She nods. "What the everloving fuck." 

"Zack. He... he was the one who had to tune in." She felt awful imagining him sinking his fingers into his split wrists. "He took the fall for everyone." 

They heard a knock on the door, and Noelle's heart dropped. "Fuck, no, not like this. Please just take her home with you Brian, please." She begged the air. She crouched down to her body, first nudging it, then shoving it, then trying to hit it to get it to move, but it stayed still and stiff. "God, fuck!" She screamed. 

Mandy pulled her arms around her from behind to take her away from the body, and they sat on the floor while Noelle sobbed. The door swung open as she briefly saw Dari and Brian laugh about something, before Brian locked eyes with her corpse in the middle of the floor.

It was like it all happened in slow motion. The second Dari saw it Brian grabbed her and pulled her face into his chest to avert her eyes. He called 911, stuttering and screaming that it was urgent, before running to her clearly dead body. He tried pulling the wound shut, he tried CPR, And it wasn't until he checked her pulse that he started sobbing. He made Dari get the neighbors, and in the last moments before the emergency responders came through the door, he just sat there and stroked her hair, emotionlessly with tears falling onto her body. 

The world started to tune out again, and Noelle let it. She felt like she was gonna throw up. The world around them blurred again as she hyperventilated, Mandy squeezing her tightly. 

"I died," She bursted out through choked out sobs. "You died!"

"Yeah, we did." Mandy said, taking a deep breath of nothing. It didn't even feel like oxygen was entering her. "We died." 

☼

Easy enough to say the apartment became a crime scene as soon as the body was taken. 

But the worst part was that there was no DNA. Not even a piece. No dead skin, no fingerprints, no sweat, no hair. Whoever killed her was so tactful that they managed to do it without even the slightest trace of proof. Which completely solidified in Brian's mind that it was Thellessany. 

But there was no purgatory anymore. So there was no getting back. In a span of a day he lost his sister and his girlfriend. 

Darien was safe. She would be going back with David. Making the call to tell him his daughter died was so far the worst part. David wasn't the crying kind of guy, so when Brian heard him break down over the phone as he told him how it happened, it was truly one of the worst moments of his life. David hadn't even considered the possibility of his kid dying before him. God, Mandy died too, that's like losing two children in a day. He always looked out for her.

The guys didn't talk, if that's what you were expecting. There was no group meeting or game plan. Jim fucked off back to Longbeach with a few words about funeral plans, Matt was MIA, Johnny was off grieving without realizing the full gravity, and Zack had said something about needing time alone. 

Usually Brian would go to Noelle about this. She would give him a shoulder to cry on, give him a pep talk, talk about moving on and the cycle of life and how it was okay to grieve. But Noelle was dead.

Usually he would go to Mandy about this. Mandy would tell him to stop being a little bitch, and how they would've wanted him to be happy and deal with it because life was too short and they were the prime example of that. But Mandy died.