Lovers: Boarding School

_dance

Can you guess which character matches the vibe of this INCREDIBLE song? ^^^

HAPPY (not really) FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH WOO HOO!!!! And what better way to celebrate this excellent alignment of day with month (SPOOPY MONTH YASSSSS) than this very emotional, very *stops herself from speaking more* I'll end it here.

BUT HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO. THIS CHAPTER. THIS CHAPTERRRRRR.

I'll provide some tissues and punching bags at the end of this chapter.

"Jack? Jack?"

The pale orange glow of dusk was surrendering to the purple haze of night as Violet trudged through forest brutalized with the first true awning of winter; snow, ankle-deep and downy like white cotton clouds, topped the ground with opalescent alabaster, its denseness and depth suctioning in her feet for a second before begrudgingly letting them go.

"Jack? Jack? Goddammit Jack, where are you?"

For the past two hours, Violet had been shouting, begging, for Jack to crawl out from whatever cave or cloister he'd been hiding in and vanquish the worry that's been wringing her neck, and her nerves, thin. Since her return, Violet's Golden Boy had been missing for two days in the virtual realm.

"Jack? Please say something!"

For the past few logins, the arrangement decided by Gin and the currently missing Jack (without Violet's consent) was, needless to say, going without hitch. For Violet, edging into this ridiculous arrangement was akin to peeling off strips of her skin one slow piece at a time. Whenever she was shuttled from one Cardinal Point to another, the memory of the other CP would always hang over her head like a melancholic reminder of her unabated selfishness, a souvenir of her shame that tarnished her sense of righteousness, of self.

"Jack? Jack? Answer me!"

When she was with Gin, it was like their whirlwind romance had resumed--albeit with a heightened degree of intensity--from a momentary pause that did nothing to wane the affection, the passion that got her heart so entwined in Gin's fingers.

"Jack! Please! Don't do this to me!"

But when it came time for her to return to her publicly recognized "one and only", she could see Death withering the light in his whisky brown eyes and chip cracks in his empty, stationary smile that greeted her every time she returned to him from her bad boy paramour. "I should end this," she said one time when she noticed the sunken skin around his clavicles, around his eyes, and around his face.

"It's okay," he said softly, cradling her in his arms like she'd been startled awake by a nightmare. "It's better this way."

It's not, Violet thought at the time.

But she said nothing.

"Jack! Jack!"

Gin told her that the culprits behind the fire and her murder attempt were still at large; neither Gin or Jack could pinpoint who exactly plotted to burn Violet alive in that building or the motives behind the carefully orchestrated almost murder. All they knew was that Jack's group was not happy with the idea of their leader being a suspected cuckold, that Violet needed to be constantly monitored just in case a member of that "mob" wanted to finish their job, and that the school quickly demolished the charcoaled ruins of the abandoned arts ward on the grounds that it caught on fire "due to a gas leak" under one of its many "uninhabited" rooms.

"Please, please let him be there," Violet whispered, the darkness of evening draining the colour of day.

"I saw a few people around the building when I noticed smoke coming from the building," Gin said to her when they were cozying up in "their" favourite black Audi. "I didn't pay them much attention because all my attention was directed at getting you out of there. I only realized it was foul play when I saw that the door to the art room had been stapled from the outside."