Pacifier

🍎Van🥀

The study was dark, the curtains drawn on late afternoon or early evening.

I wasn't sure.

I wasn't sure of anything anymore. Only that Jake was dead. Ruby was dead. And I hadn't seen Isabelle for several days.

Those were the three things I knew. Those, along with one suspicion, were all that was on my mind.

The suspicion, that I was losing control, losing my mind, was fluctuating in certainty by the second.

With every whiskey I'd knocked back the notion had intensified and washed away, and every time I felt myself growing certain that I was, losing my mind that is, I knocked back another drink and let the thought wash away.

But it didn't work. It wasn't working.

The out of control world I'd wound up in was a relentless truth and one which couldn't simply be washed away with JD.

All the alcohol was really working on was the ache in my chest. The dull ache of heartbreak. Like a bruised rib. The swollen soreness which soared in me everytime I remembered Izzys face, the last time I had seen her. Puffy eyed, red cheeks, sad and swollen features. The sad swollen features of a girl I'd let down. A girl who wouldn't look at me the same, with love and understanding, ever again.

A girl who I had hurt, who I had wounded. Who wouldn't trust me now or tomorrow or ever. A girl who looked at me and saw only a monster.

I wouldn't ever see her the way I once had, full of sweetness and light, ever again. Because she wouldn't look that way when in my presence now. She would only ever look like a girl harbouring disgust and horror, betrayal and a sadness so pure it spilled from her in every moment.

And she would look that way because of me.

This I was certain of because she had fled every room I had entered since the morning she'd found out about Jakes death. And all the times she'd not been able to leave she had shrunk into her brothers side, hidden away from me by burying her face in his neck or his shirt, pulling his jacket around her so that he would chuckle and remind her she wasn't as small as she used to be, that thst didn't work anymore.

She hated me, I could tell because she tried her best not to look at me now and when she did it was with more fear than she'd ever looked at me before.

I'd lost her, just as suddenly and as easily as Larry had warned me. I shouldn't have been shocked but somehow I was, and this was all I could do to numb the pain.

The light of my life, the most precious thing I had, my soul, snatched away from me and why? My own stupid decisions. Things I should have thought through but hadn't made the time.

So she was gone and the life we all knew was burning, turning to ash all around me. And I couldn't think, couldn't see straight, couldn't stand the self loathing and the pain which had overwhelmed me since I'd realised. She was gone.

The rest paled in comparison to her. She was all Id ever thought I could save. Everyone else already scarred, izzy had been the only pure thing left in our lives. She'd been the one I was really fighting for and now, what? She was tarnished with grief just as the rest of us had been, she had seen death and all his dark twisted friends.

And worse, she had seen worse than that in me.

I poured myself another glass. Hoped the dark would creep up and consume me. Hoped the hopelessness would fade and the insencent buzzing in my mind would settle long enough to let me think. For long enough to let me think of a better plan. A method of winning this war which felt now like it couldn't be won but which had to be.