Libra's Symphony (Alec Volturi x OC)

February

    I was officially unemployed after the fire. My parents offered to pay for my expenses for as long as I needed until I could find another job and they were adamant that I took some time to process what happened to get to a good place mentally and emotionally. I didn't have anything to distract myself from the awfulness of it all since I was on winter break and had no job, so I thanked them profusely but declined. I knew that if I stayed unoccupied I would just focus too much on my dire situation and make everything worse. I had already decided I would stay in town and told them I didn't change my mind after the fire, even though they tried to convince me otherwise.

They made a lot of sense. Of course it would be better to go home to them, to my actual house and my actual room, step away from the place where it happened and see my childhood friends and all of my family, but I honestly didn't want to do that. I wanted to get another job as soon as possible and get busy to take my mind off of the bar and the boy in the car.

Besides, I really wanted to attend Lucia's and Marcelo's funerals.

I just told them the part about the funerals. I didn't want to discuss the best way to deal with it, didn't want to hear that I should at least consider attending therapy, so I just told them I would stay to go to the funerals and that I would get another job as soon as possible because I couldn't stand becoming a financial burden to them. There was a lot of back and forth about the money, but they eventually accepted I wouldn't take any from them. They promised to visit me as soon as they could.

I dove into my hobbies, especially bookbinding and calligraphy. I took the extra time I had to walk around town, visit the churches and museums, and see the statues and sculptures. Most of it was very familiar to me already since I had been living there for a few years and was studying art in college but it was comforting to be around beautiful familiar things. I spent a lot of that time with Luke whenever he could, but unlike me he still had a job so sometimes I would be alone.

Life went on with no other surprises for a while. I attended Lucia's funeral and then Marcelo's. I found a job in another bar and when classes restarted I went back to studying. My parents visited for a few days in August and we had a nice time. For eight whole months everything was fine and nothing out of ordinary happened. Summer break came and went, I went back to the capital to be with my family and in February I was back in town to start another semester in college.

I was excited. I would be turning twenty-one in a couple more months and planned to celebrate with Luke, the girls that lived with me and my friends from college. I put the fire accident behind me and barely thought about the boy with red eyes anymore. Every once in a while I wondered about him but even my memory of him was beginning to fade and I started to question what I really saw after a few weeks.

That being considered, I had the fright of my life when I got home one evening and found him standing on our front porch.

I only noticed him when I was very near the front door, almost at arm's reach from him. His eyes were not red this time, but a very dark brown, almost as dark as his hair, and he was wearing more casual clothes than when I first saw him. I couldn't see very well what he was wearing then but it was definitely more formal than the grey shirt and black trousers he had when he showed up in front of my house. He looked at me in silence and still didn't say anything when I stopped walking after finally noticing him.

"Uh, can I help you?"

He didn't answer immediately, instead he walked away from the house to close the distance between us and though my heart felt like it was trying to fly out of my chest I schooled my features to not give it away, I stared back at him with a perfectly neutral expression. He still seemed to know somehow that I was not as calm as I tried to portray myself because with his face only a few centimeters away from mine he smiled softly and said —