V I T R E O U S – S E V E N T E E N
atlas
“Where were you yesterday?”
I looked up from my hands in my lap – as I had gotten a little too mesmerized by the lines on my palms – at Ines. She was looking at me with her hair hanging in front of her eyes like she always did, but for the first time I saw she had brown eyes.
“Sorry, what?” I let my hands fall and set them beside my legs.
“Where did you go yesterday? I missed you.”
I couldn’t hide my smile. “Aw. Well, I was with Arrow.”
She rolled her eyes and my smile faded. “You’re always with Arrow.”
“I’m sorry,” I said half-sarcastically. It wasn’t her business that I was always with him.
“Don’t apologize,” she shuffled on her bed, sliding her legs under the covers and pulling them up over them. “It’s for good reason.”
“What do you mean?”
“You guys are good for each other.”
I chuckled. We’re far from good for each other, I feel we’re, like, poisonous for each other. I care about him so much but he’s a ticking time bomb and I’m a hurricane and it just doesn’t work. We don’t help.
“Why’d you laugh?” Ines asked.
“It doesn’t work.”
“What doesn’t work?”
“Him and I.”
“Yes it does,” she argued, pressing her hands into her mattress. “Atlas and Arrow; the map and the pointer. It’s meant to work.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m a genius.” Was all she said. She didn’t dare to explain it to me, I knew she wouldn’t. She doesn’t like figuring things out for people; she figures them out and then forces someone to wreck their brain to figure it out for themselves.
I still didn’t even fully understand what she meant when she had said ‘It’ll get better, Atlas. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. But it will get better.’ Her intelligence sometimes took me by surprise, because two weeks ago she was the one tattooing her arm with her blood and I was the one questioning my placement here at Hotel Hell. Now she was giving me life lessons I didn’t even understand.
I don’t know how it’ll ever get better. For me, for her, for Arrow, for anyone. I always thought this was a one-way ticket straight down a cliff and once you’ve fallen down you can’t just get back up. You’re stuck falling forever. The fall is so long it lasts centuries and all you can feel for days and days is the gravity pulling at your chest while you’re stuck falling alone and alone and alone.
There’s no one falling with you because you’re just so alone in everything and you can practically feel your body caving into itself and your ribs start to crack and your heart hurts and there’s no one there to grab your arm or even catch you at the bottom because it just feels so bottomless and then one day you hit the bottom and you break and hit it hard.
“Hey Ines?” I said, staring at the wall in front of me instead of at her. Her gaze made me uncomfortable at times so I tried to avoid it.
“Mmhm?”
“How do you get back up the cliff once you’ve fallen down?”
She took a moment to answer. “I’m not sure.”
I sighed, disappointed that Ines didn’t have an answer. I was kind of hoping for one. I wasn’t even going to cry this time. I just felt numb all over and the fall was pulling at my chest. I was falling still. I’d been falling for a while, almost too long. Years. And what fucking sucks about the cliff is that its not you who jumps off; you get pushed.
-X-
I’d been staring at the wall for forty five minutes now and my eyes felt dry. At least I wasn’t crying. Crying made me feel like a baby.
Ines had fallen asleep, even though it was like two in the afternoon, and I had hardly done so much as blink. I was contemplating going to sleep when a knock echoed on the metal door. I looked up with my eyes and saw a tall black woman’s head in the book-sized window.
I didn’t stand up to answer because it was always locked from the outside, so I waited for the woman to come inside. I heard the keypad beeping as she entered the code and then the door was pushed open and it was hardly a tall black woman who entered.
It was Arrow.
His eyes immediately found me and lit up. Naomi walked in behind him, her hand on the doorframe as she nudged his back, pushing him in further. I stood up. “What’s going on?”
Arrow gave me an ‘I have no fucking clue’ look and so my gaze followed to Naomi, asking her next. She smiled softly.
“Figured you guys would benefit from a little more time together,” she said. “You’re roommates now.”
“More like cellmates.” Ines interjected before I could speak. She continued, “Where the hell am I going? Is this not my business either?”
“You’re going into Harry’s room to join his roommate.”
“Yeah, well Quinn is dead.” Ines said flatly. Her words made Arrow flinch and I watched his arm swing up to his other to start to pick at it.
“Not Quinn,” Naomi spoke gently, trying to preserve the calm atmosphere. “Dawn.”
“I don’t even know him. I should get a say in this too.”
“Well I guess you’ll see soon.” Arrow snapped at Ines making her turn her head to him, surprised.
Her eyes narrowed and then she took a step towards him, curling her toes as she walked. “If you know him so well, why don’t you stay with him?”
“This wasn’t my fucking choice!”
“Oh, sure it wasn’t.” She said sarcastically, throwing her hands up in the air.
“Guys, please-” Naomi tried to break them up but Arrow spoke over her.
“Just shut up.”
“No!” She yelled. “I won’t shut up!”
“You’re just mad because I took your spot.”
“Wrong.” Ines spat. “You’re so wrong.”
“Fine then, you’re mad because I have someone who cares. Unlike you, who is left alone most of the time, I actually have someone.”
“Arrow-” I started, but it was too late. Ines’s eyes welled up and she puckered her mouth. Before I knew it, she had slapped him straight across the face. His hand instinctively went to hold his crimson cheek.
Naomi gasped and lunged forward, grabbing Ines’s hands in hers and pulling Ines into her chest tightly to keep her from exploding again. Ines had a satisfied yet pained expression on her face as she watched Arrow hold his face.
“You’re a bitch.” He seethed, lowering his hand and looking up at her.
She gave him the coldest stare and I hoped in my heart that what I thought was going to happen wouldn’t. I prayed she wouldn’t stoop so low. She couldn’t.
Ines clenched her jaw. “At least I’m not fat.”
Naomi wrapped her arms around her and pulled her out of the room, closing the door and leaving Arrow and I standing still in the middle of the floor. It was quiet and neither of us moved for seven minutes until I heard Arrow sit down on his bed.
When I looked at him he was looking at me, and for the first time he wasn’t crying. His eyes hadn’t even watered, he just looked cold.
I sat down on his bed beside him, so close our legs were touching, and I sighed quietly.
“You’re not fat.”
He chuckled sarcastically. “Yeah, okay.”
“You aren’t.”
“Whatever,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You said we could talk about it tomorrow, Arrow. It’s tomorrow.”
“Later.”
The fall was pulling at my chest. He wasn’t holding me up.
“Talk to me.” I said. It wasn’t even a spoken thought, it was an order.
“Hello.”
“Hi.”
Everything went quiet again for a while and I didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t know whether to be angry or be sad or feel bad for him or be pissed that he didn’t hold himself back or feel like killing Ines. My mind was a swirl of emotions.
“Why did you do that?” I asked him.
“Do what? She hit me.”
“No. Not that. You snapped at her when she mentioned Quinn.”
“Oh, that.” He said, sighing. “She said his name like he was a piece of shit. It made me mad. He wasn’t, Atlas. He was such a good guy. I’m so sad that he’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“S’okay I guess. I mean we can’t bring him back, right? Nothing we can do about it really.”
“Yeah,”
“I miss him though.” He said. His tone of voice was so sad. “You would too if you knew him.”
I didn’t speak. Instead, I thought. I thought about how Quinn’s death had affected Arrow and how oblivious he was to the fact that his death would affect me even worse. Death hurts so many people.
I looked at his hands that were shaking in his lap and took one of them in mine, lacing our fingers together. The hand that I was holding stopped shaking. He looked down at my hand and squeezed it gently, slowly moving his thumb up and down.
I only noticed now that our skin tones were nearly the same color. I had never imagined myself as pale as he was, but I guess I was wrong. He had gauze bandages wrapped around the wrist he had burnt; the one I was holding.
I had to ask him. I wasn’t going to let him worm his way out of it. I took my other hand and let my fingers fall over the bandages, touching them only lightly so I didn’t hurt whatever was under them.
“Why?” I said.
“Atlas, don’t.”
“No.” I said sternly. “I want to know why.”
“Please.”
“Arrow, you need to talk to me. I don’t know what the hell is up with you but you’ve got to talk. I understand what you’re going through, why don’t you trust me enough to tell me?”
“It’s not that… I just... I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Yeah well, I’m not letting you do that. You’re going to talk about it.”
His hand started to shake in mine again.
“God I-” he took a sharp breath. “I don’t want to.”
“Why though? Why is it so hard?”
He bit his lip. “Do I not annoy you? Aren’t you tired of all my problems?”
“Of course not.”
“Why?” He stressed.
“I’ll never get tired of you.”
He chuckled. “Someday.”
“Never.”
Then he looked up at me and I expected to see happiness or some kind of hope in his eyes but there was none. He frowned.
“Why don’t we ever talk about you, huh?”
“Because I don’t need to be talked about.”
He then let go of my hand and the fall tugged at my heart. Falling. I looked up at him.
“Really?” He said, venom lacing his tone. “Really? I’m always the subject of the conversation because I’m so important,” he put air quotations around ‘so important’. “But you just don’t need to be talked about?”
I kept quiet. My palm was still tingling from his touch. My eyes started to sting.
“I don’t understand.” He stood up, angry, throwing his arms at his sides. “I’m a bucket full of fucking problems and trust me I know it, but so are you and you can’t… just… shake me off when I try to care about you!”
“Stop it.”
“No, Atlas.” He spat. “God, you’re such a hypocrite.”
I could feel the tears falling from my eyes but I didn’t bother wiping them. I stood up quickly from his bed and stomped as close to him as I possibly could without wanting to hit him. We were a few feet apart but he was always taller than me.
“What the fuck is wrong with you today?” I yelled at him. My voice cracked. I didn’t care. “You’re never like this! Ever! I don’t even know who you are. God, I hate you right now.”
His eyes welled up. He made that face everyone makes before they cry and then yelled back at me. “So do I. I hate me too! I hate that you hate me but, fuck, you need as much attention as I do, if not more, and you just can’t fucking ignore that!”
He took a step towards me and I took a step back right into the wall. He took another and we were so close and it only hit me then that skinny, bony skeleton Arrow could still be terrifying. I couldn’t stop the tears from falling.
“You give me everything and the moment I try to give you something you push it away. You get mad when I do that and you do it all the fucking time! That’s fucking hypocrisy! Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck… fuck I don’t want to… I’m not going to hurt you but God, I need… fuck I need to hit something.”
He stepped back and pulled at the roots of his hair, falling into his bed. I exhaled and ran to mine, shoving myself underneath the covers and beginning to cry. I wasn’t mad at him. He had every single reason to be mad at me. I was a hypocrite. He was so right.
alright so that was a really busy chapter i might rewrite it anyways so obviously Arrow is mad but he was also snappy at the beginning so I want u guys to comment why u think he’s mad or whatever (it’s not super hard) just for fun and stuff and also I want u guys to comment what u think of the cliff metaphor cause it does mean something and I think it’s really important coz is gonna come back soon!!!
if you don’t want to comment you don’t need to and yeah so let me know what you think annnnd I love you all xoxoxoxo
song attached : red arrow // gem club (god its so pretty i fall in love every time i hear it)