Only because you asked // Rafe Cameron

Chapter Twenty Eight - Avoiding true terms

"So, why aren't we getting the rest of the gold out today?" Lana asked Sarah as she sat down on the grass.

"My dad wants to take John B fishing," she told her, grabbing a picnic blanket from out of her bag. "Get up, I need to lay this."

Lana sighed and stood up again. "And God forbid John B lived life without a fishing date with your father."

"Hey," Sarah began, sitting down on the blanket and crossing her legs, "it's the least he could do with the whole DCS situation." Lana went to lay on her stomach, grabbing two spoons from out of her bag and handing one to Sarah. "Are we really going to eat an entire cake to ourselves in a field?"

"Of course we are," she exclaimed as Sarah pulled out a cake from the basket. "Really? You couldn't have made any other cake besides vanilla?"

Sarah took off the film that had been covering the cake, taking a bit onto her spoon. "What would you have preferred?"

"If you really loved me, you would've baked me red velvet," she announced, leaning her head forward to eat the cake that had been on Sarah's spoon, earning a whack from her.

They spent the afternoon slowly devouring the cake, lost in chatter and the comfort of each other's company.

The future held so much for them, so much more than their little hearts could contain and comprehend. If only they could look back in time and fathom the simplicity of the very fact that their only problem in that moment was to finish the vanilla cake, that they needn't worry an extraordinary amount than they eventually would've.

Sweet Sarah valued her relationships with the people she loved most; when asked about her family, she would tell them she had two sisters. She thought of her bond with Lana something stronger than how it would be with her soulmate and in fact, to some extent, Lana was her soulmate. She was a figure in her life she couldn't ever allow herself to visualise imagery of disappearing one day; it was completely out of the question. Wheezie was someone she'd forever look out for; for many years now, Sarah had to be her mother. She had to nurture and care for her so she wouldn't miss out of anything, for she didn't have a mother but she did have Sarah.

She had the privilege of growing up with an older brother who protected her from all the horrors of the world. A person who she thought would eternally - without doubt - have her back in any situation. There were absolutely times where she would have nothing more than to slam his face into a car door, but she loved him. Wheezie had been more like a daughter to her, Rafe was truly and utterly her brother. He liked to conceal the part of him that held any sort of purity and coherence from the rest of the world, but that had been because she saw the very moment he stripped away his pride for kindness. She had been there when she saw a humanity-scorched boy crying in the corner of his room that night he fell apart. She had witnessed someone she kept so close to heart crumble and slowly deteriorate right before her eyes, and that night, she only held him closer ever since.

She still remembered what it felt
like to see an empty tub of pills next to his bedside table as he blinked the tears down his face. She remembered what it felt like to look into his eyes, shaking in fear as she realised that those might've been her last few moments with him. She remembered being convinced that she quite literally had heard her heart break into two when she saw a boy of such innocence give up on life, feeling betrayed that he would leave her behind.

It was always Sarah and Rafe; in their minds, it had always been the two of them. Her soul ripped in half when she pondered the fact that he was going to leave her, that he had wanted to departure himself from her. She still remembered the anguish she felt when she dragged him into the bathroom and stuck her fingers down his throat, screaming for her father through the sobs.