"He was abominable, and the most alluring, tortured soul I'd ever met."
— Becca Fitzpatrick
THIRTY EIGHT
MIRABEL
SHE WOKE UP TO the sound of glass shattering against a hard surface and jolted from the comfort of her leather couch. Nothing would prepare her for what she was about to witness. Mirabel shook as she slowly creeped towards the landing so she could peer into the kitchen. Was she being burgled? Just as she was about to grab the landline and dial 911, she heard sobs.
It was the sob of a man who had lost everything. It was the sob of a man consumed with grief so large that he felt the physical pain through his bones. If Damien was a fictional character, this would be the moment he had realised his fatal flaw. His hubris. Nothing could reverse it.
Mirabel stepped into the kitchen, terrified at the state of him.
But when he looked up, eyes void of anything beautiful, and caught the eyes of the woman he was certain he had loved hard enough to abandon his family, he felt the rage course through his body.
"This is my final letter." He murmured, as his eyes scanned the one thing Mirabel had thought she had control of. His voice shook as he read the contents of the letter to her. "For months, I tried to reach out to you. Now, you are dead to me."
Mirabels eyes scanned the broken ceramic and glass that dotted her pastel kitchen. Her kitchen was destroyed. He had tossed and overthrown anything that wasn't connected to the ground. Her hands flew to her mouth in horror when she realised what he was holding between his fingertips.
Like a deer in headlights, she stood before him as though she were naked and afraid. "Damien,"
He was no longer looking at her. He was looking anywhere but at her. She had become the sole source of his pain. "Did you do this?"
"Damien..."
"Did you hide these from me?" He asked, harsher.
In a desperate attempt to hold on to her lover, she began to unravel. Her voice was desperate and her hands fidgeted against the silk of her dressing gown. "I...I did it to protect us."
"You did it to—" Damien stopped as if the anger bit his tongue. He suddenly stood, shoving the kitchen table to the side. It skewed and screeched against the hardwoood. "Fuck!"
Mirabel winced, taking a cautionary step back. Damien had never been aggressive towards her so she was unsure how to act in this scenario. It was a depraved feeling, knowing that she was the reason he had changed. "Baby. Please, calm down."
Damien flinched. "How can you say that to me, knowing what you've done?"
"I needed to do it." Her voice revealed her fear but her face remained stern. She needed to remind him that she was the most important thing to him. He had reassured her with those words in the past. Now, he seemed to be taking it back.
Like an expert manipulator.
Damien took a menacing step forward. "You had no right." His voice was cold.
"You're with me now, Damien." Mirabel protested his words. "You've left them. They are your past!"
In the second it took him to face her, his face had contorted into anger. He stomped towards her, planting his hands on either side of the door jamb and leaned into her face. "THEY ARE MY FAMILY!" The veins in his neck bulged.
Mirabel met his glare with wet eyes.
He looked into her eyes, replacing her horror with waves of regret. "They are my family." He whispered again, his anger melting into misery.
It wasn't often that the smart-mouthed Mirabel was at a loss for words, but the universe seemed to have shifted on its axis because she was speechless. He had confirmed her biggest fear. Softly, terrified that she would break if his response wasn't what she wanted, she asked. "Then what am I?"
And in the moment the words left her lips, he stumbled back because he didn't know. That was the thing. Damien didn't know what Mirabel was. "I..."
He couldn't come up with anything. All he could think of was the fact that he couldn't take anything back. He had become, and had always been, the sole reason for everyone's pain. The letter had revealed to him in jarring detail that every single person in his life was hurting, and he was the abscess that caused the ache.
The letter had wrecked him completely.
Mirabel watched in fear how Damien struggled to reply her question. She watched his desolation distort his features. She noticed how he stood lopsided, more pressure on one foot than the other. His physical pain challenged her emotional one.
After moments of silence, "How could you be so selfish?" — was all the cowardly Damien could muster.
Mirabel whispered, heart in hands. "I wasn't selfish...I thought of you."
"And baby, look what that caused." He gestured to the letter. "Have you even read it? Do you know what you've done?"
What I've done? Mirabel thought, incredulously. As always, Damien was shifting the blame onto her in an attempt to reduce the colossal amount of guilt that sat on his shoulders. She pushed him away hard and he stumbled back in shock. "What I've done? Are you insane?"
"Maybe I fucking am! You drive me fucking crazy," His voice was loud enough to bounce off the walls of the room, and the walls of her heart. She could instantly tell that it wasn't anger lacing through each word, it was sadness.
"Jesus Christ, Damien." Mirabel felt defeated. "You're really fucking breaking me."
He watched her for seconds, trying to make a quick-fire decision that he hoped would cause the least pain. Then, he shook his head, snatched the letter off the table and grabbed his jacket from the hook on the door.
It was only when he had slipped one socked foot into his boot that Mirabel realised that her worst fears were truly manifesting before her eyes. It was all happening too fast.
She rushed towards the door and stood before it. "Wha—What are you doing?"
"I need to go to them. They need me."
"No." Her back was pressed hard against the door. He stood before her, his patience growing thinner with every breath he took. "I can't let you leave. I need you, Damien."
"Move."
"Think about what you're doing, Damien."
"Move out of the way, Mirabel."
"You don't want to lose me."
"I don't want to hurt you. Get out of the way."
"You're going to regret this."
The silence after her words came crashing down like an avalanche. Her eyes didn't leave his, even though they were looking at her with anything but love. She remained adamant to hold on to raft that protected her from the harsh waves of the lonely sea. At first, the turmoil in his eyes made her feel a flare of hope. He seemed to be considering her words. She could practically see gears in his head turn and twist.
She looked into his hazel eyes and felt the full impact of the way he had affected her. He had come into her life at a vulnerable time, charmed her, and made her fall hopelessly in love with them. Now, he was threatening to leave her behind. It was like everything he touched turned to fucking stone. Damien was her Medusa. He had done this to her.
But Damien blinked, and his answer was deadly.
He leaned down, voice thunderous against her bleeding heart. "The only thing I regret right now, is you." — and he shoved her to the side so hard that she crashed down to the kitchen floor, against the hardwood and broken glass.
She watched in shock as he slammed the door so hard it splintered. She heard his car engine start and felt him physically and emotionally drive away from her. In the silence of her home, she held back her tears.
She shook her head. "No, Damien, you don't mean that."
She took a moment before she stood up and willed her aching heart to relax. Glancing down at her arm, she knew that the bruise on her flesh had left a mark on her brain. She wasn't about to let him go back there and leave her hanging like a used doll.
She decided to take matters into her own hands. Speaking sense into Damien had proved futile. Anything she would say had already been said, a million times.
Mirabel tip-toed across a sea of glass and rushed up to her bedroom to change into her own clothes. She pulled on a pair of leggings, a zip-up hoodie, and tied her hair up in a quick bun. She usually took the time to make herself look perfect, but nothing in her life was perfect. Everything was topsy turvy.
She looked outside, and realised that it was dark already and a bleak trickle of rain spattered against the earth. It was pathetic fallacy.
She felt insane when she ran down the steps, taking them two at a time. But at the foot of the steps, she stopped.
She took a deep breath to clear her maddening thoughts of Damien. She could see how hard her hands trembled. She could feel how hard her heart was beating. Mirabel turned around, and walked back up the stairs. She opened the door to her bedroom, and reached into the farthest part of her cupboard.
She grabbed her gun.
And this time, when she came down the stairs, she felt a little better. If Damien wanted to act crazy, she would give him crazy back.
_____
MIRABEL PARKED IN FRONT of the Black Household and narrowed her eyes at the bungalow. Once upon a time, she had come here with gifts for her nieces (Diana and Aria) on Amelia's baby shower. It had been a pretty good day, and that version of herself would have never imagined that in a decade or so, she would be stood outside of the house once again.
This time, with malicious intent.
As her foot loudly crunched the leaves on the paved pathway, she noticed that the entire house was eerily silent. If Damien had come up here, there was no way that there would be silence. Mirabel could vividly remember the vehemence and hate that had consumed Diana when they had first met. She knew that the girl was fire. The entire house was supposed to have been razed to ashes.
"Fuck, this is going to be so awkward..." Mirabel muttered, deciding to leave her gun inside her car.
There were many different scenarios that had crossed her mind as she drove there. They had been spiralling so hard that she had needed to switch off the radio to give herself a moment of silence for what she was about to do. She had pictured tears, anger, frustration and desperation. She had imagined a version of events where she was successful, and another where she had been humiliated.
But she had never envisioned death. If you'd given her a million years to think, the probability of coming up with death would've never crossed her mind.
And so, when she pushed open the door of the Black Household, nothing, not even Christ, could prepare her for it.
In a twisted version of events, Mirabel was suddenly the one who was at the short end of the stick. If she had thought she had lost everything for Damien, she knew now that she had been terribly mistaken. In reality, she had lost it all for nothing.
Her hands flew to her mouth in horror as she took in the mass amount of grief that hung above the room. Her lovers corpse was slumped against the wall by the front door, hand clasped against his bleeding chest. The weapon was a few feet away, skewed as though it had been tossed far away from him. His blood stained everything. A deep red painted the wall behind him, the front door, the cream carpet, the coffee table.
These were the parts of him that were supposed to be inside. Yet, they were out and they were staining everything.
She didn't realise she was sagging against the wall until she noticed the bloody streaks against her hoodie.
Mirabel couldn't breathe.
She wanted to reach out to him, to fall on the floor like the grieving women in cult films and wail against his body. She wanted to scream and ask God "Why?!" — but she couldn't do any of that. To her, it was as if she were standing in an eye of the storm. The entire was spinning. Everything tilted. A tremor was building up on the ground underneath her feet.
Her world had completely and irrevocably become useless.
As though the scene before her was comedy, the clock on the kitchen wall did a little jingle it made when it hit midnight. She had gotten the clock for Amelia as a housewarming gift. The sound had been humorous to her then, but now it mocked her with severity.
The sound broke her out of her trance and it took everything within her to physically step over the corpse of the man she loved. She sobbed all the way to the kitchen and grasped the door jamb to support herself. She felt cold and oh so weak. Nothing could have prepared her for seeing Damiens' lifeless body.
And when she looked up with tears staining her cheeks, she noticed the brains of her son scattered against the linoleum floor like a sickening art work.
No one could blame Mirabels heart for missing two beats, and causing her to pass out. You would pass out too if your worst nightmares manifested into reality in one singular moment.
an:
sometimes I'll say "I'm updating tomorrow" bc I genuinely intend to but then something pops up like a 9K word coursework on the reforming of legal parenthood in English law & i end up delaying the updates. i'm not a liar, I'm just a law student with unpredictable deadlines lol