Never Alone

8 : 4 4 | A M

Elliot = Bold

Isabella = Italics

For someone who talked a lot, Elliot had nothing to say. All the words in his throat had linked to form an unforgivable chain that squeezed his hyoid bone to the point of speechlessness. His vocal chords had become tangled within each other, no longer musical but eerily silent as they struggled to make music once more. But there was only one note in his head, a note so far set into the minor key that it would probably be better to say nothing at all. But this was Elliot Davis. An Elliot Davis that was so far off the edge that he was barely gripping onto the cliff. The cliff that prevented him from falling into an unforgiving ocean. An unforgiving ocean. So he said the words anyway. "I'm sorry." It wasn't what Isabella needed or wanted to hear. Hell, she'd probably heard it a thousand times before. But he was incapable of saying anything else.

And, in a way, he was sorry.

He didn't know what he was sorry for, exactly but he was sorry. And not in a guilty way. In the sort of sad, twisted way that didn't really hold any meaning. Just a smothering blanket of pity. An apology for all of the atrocities in the world.

Isabella pulled into the car park, body less tense as the absence from steel in her blood allowed her to relax. She couldn't help the frozen state of her personality at the mention of murder in cold blood. Just the mention of the vile act trapped her in the nightmare of being caught in an ice cube. Cold. Unable to move. Frozen. Waiting for the temperature to neutralise so that it could melt the ice into a puddle. Because, when it was pooling around her feet, it was a whole lot easier to ignore. She just wondered what was preventing it from evaporating into gas.

She didn't respond to Elliot's statement at first, taking her time to have a good old laugh at the pure predictability of his answer. In her head, of course. In reality, she had the same straight face that she had had a few seconds ago. Only a little less tense. 

The 'sorry's' didn't bother her so much anymore, only adding salt to old wounds as they rubbed in the truth. That the one person who should say sorry couldn't. Wouldn't. Shouldn't. She supposed she was glad that Elliot didn't say anything else. Like try to understand. She wasn't in the mood for being understood. Helping someone to understand would mean explaining. Explaining would mean reliving. And she wasn't ready for that yet. She would be. She just had to...figure out a way for her nightmares to remain as nightmares.

"Don't be. It's not your fault." She'd been saying that a lot recently. Why was it that people were always sorry for things that weren't their fault? "Besides...this trip isn't about me."

She turned to face Elliot as she pulled the car to a halt, forcing herself to smile at him as if he wasn't the son of a murderer. But he was. And it was cruel. But that made things different. It shouldn't have done. But it did. She knew it was horrible, that she should wait to hear the full story. But she couldn't. After what she had been through, she saw murderers as what they were. Murderers. Thinking of them as anything else made her brain hurt. Because thinking of them as something else would make the whole thing her fault. Which it was. No one could persuade her otherwise.

Taking blame for the death of her classmates was easier than facing the sickening truth. That her boyfriend had been a controlling, manipulative psychopath. Sociopath. She wasn't sure she wanted to grant him the benefit of the doubt. Being a sociopath would give him an excuse for being how he was. She wasn't sure if she wanted to give him a tragic backstory. It was so much easier to see him as a killer.

Elliot hadn't moved from the car, hand clutching the door handle as if he was willing for it to break beneath his fingers. "You know I can't actually go in with you...right?" He turned to face the eye contact he had been avoiding with a sense of caution. There was something about looking into the eyes of a victim that made him nauseous. Just to think about what she had been through...What do you say to a person who had witnessed something like that? How do you look them in the eye?

Maybe he should have looked in the mirror more often.

But then he remembered the wary glances everyone had given him in the college corridors. They hadn't known what to say to him. He hadn't known what to say to them. But he remembered wishing that they would treat him like a normal person. He supposed that Isabella would feel the same. Being part of a tragedy wasn't a reason to be excluded from normalcy. If anything, the thing a victim needs the most is a sense of normal. People just didn't know how to give it to them.

So he smiled and nodded, pushing open the car door with a new sense of confidence. But not before he heard a soft voice say, "I...I'll be here for when you come out, okay? You're not...you're not alone."

For whatever reason, those words gave him a slice of hope. Hope that maybe there was finally someone who could understand and not just watch as he fell to pieces.

It made him feel even more assured to hear the airy bark of laughter as he hit his head on the way out of the car. 

Nope, he definitely wasn't alone.

And neither was she.