Arcane Guardian ↣ Avenged Sevenfold

42 ☼ shaded

FUCK IT here's a chapter:)

Explaining your entire 30 year long, variously rewritten platonic and romantic history with someone is hard, but can be done, as proved time and shitty time again. Even the painful parts. The parts she wasn't there for that Mandy told him about. It was the end of a long day, and they were walking up the slope they had been on multiple dates on in a prior life. "You told me you never loved Andrea to begin with here. I think it was the first time we ever kissed."

"I just wish there was a quick fix." Brian said, as Noelle set out a towel this time for the dewy grass. "A way for me to remember everything. I mean you sold me on the little details, they match up--I had an extreme addiction to Vicodin and Xanax in like, 2008. And everything with the necklace makes sense."

"Oh wait. Your necklace." She realized, unlatching it from around her. "You might want it back. I felt kind of bad taking it."

"Considering you told me a dream demon took it from you so I wouldn't recognize you if you came back, it's yours." Brian smiled with a tight mouth, nodding. "Everything you're saying rings faint bells and all, but it's like looking in at somebody else's life."

"That makes sense. I mean, I was a pretty small part of your hundreds of years of life, you were a part of my entire life."

"Matt is a golden retriever. So I'm not surprised you guys can rebuild so easily. Zack might take a little convincing. But you obviously weren't a small part of my life. And I hate that I can't just force myself to remember."

She sighed slightly. "I... I could give you another vision."

His eyes widened. "Like the ones that almost made you black out?"

"I wasn't ready to fork them over when you kept grabbing me. It was like my subconscious was sloshing around up there." She shook her head. "I can go slow."

He in turn shook his own head. "Not if it hurts you. It's not worth it."

"You know... Matt started to remember. He remembered Jim's wedding. All of it." She laughed, pretending she wasn't holding back from crying. She just knew, deep down, nothing would bounce back this time. The consistency had bled from her life and trying to recreate it wouldn't make sense.

"Can you show me him?" Brian paused. "Him getting married. It's something I think I'd want to remember."

She remembered the good parts of that day and tried putting them all into one place in her mind, before reaching out and taking his hand.

It showed up far more muddy to him, but in clear detail, he saw Mandy and Jim dancing. He saw himself making his best man speech. And instead of seeing himself dancing with Andrea, he saw himself dancing with her.

"You?"

"I spent that whole night wishing I had danced with you." She shook her head. "Pierrick always had two left feet."

"So what happens now?" He laid back, her following suit as they looked up at the stars. "We make an album? Win an award? I thank you in the album booklet and then we never talk again? How am I supposed to continue on with all I know now?"

"I don't know." She brought her hands up to cover her eyes. The stars felt too fast. "I don't know. The paranormal has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. I don't know what I'd do if we went our separate ways."

"You'd be ok. You've went through worse."

"It's like breaking off a part of my soul." She shook her head. "I haven't had the easiest life. But now it's really gone. Purgatory, a stupid fuckin demon, the final reset."

"Did we ever talk about getting married?" Brian said out of nowhere.

"I uh,... a couple of times, maybe. It wasn't a popular topic of conversation."

"What'd we want?"

She kept silent for a moment. Shit, now she was really gonna cry. "We wanted the color to be blue. Jim your best man, Mandy my maid of honor."

"Come on. There had to have been more than that." Brian prodded

She took a deep and shaky breath. "My sister, Darien. She doesn't exist anymore. Time erased her because fuck me, right?" She laughed, beginning to lose her cool almost entirely. All the emotions she never vented to Mandy had always been reserved for Brian, and she felt herself have to fight to hold up her guard. Tears slipped and fell but she tried her hardest to stabilize her voice. "You wanted her to give us our rings." She brought her knees up to her chest. "We wanted an outside ceremony." She laughed again. "When we did talk about marriage we joked about A Little Piece Of Heaven being our damn wedding song."

This made Brian laugh as well.

A long silence only interrupted by satellites and stars overhead ended with Brian.

"I'm Brian Haner. I'm turning 30 this year. I'm writing my next album with the guys I grew up with." He shook his head. "That's all my life looks like. Sure I've been struggling for purpose like everyone else, especially since Jim died. And you... you're incredible. You're absolutely the weirdest chick I've ever met, but you're incredible. And I want us to have that history. I want to believe one day you were supposed to marry me. How did we feel about kids?"

She didn't respond.

"Well? How'd we feel about having children?"

"In normal conversation we would say we didn't really care either way." She said. "But you wanted a kid."

"Well I want so fucking hard to believe I could've had that with you." He looked up to the sky. "That I could've been happy in another life. As happy as I've been fleshing out music with you."

"So why won't you let yourself?"

"I'm also Synyster Gates." He said blankly. "I've been pretty emotionally vacant for a long time now. I'm an asshole in the press. I have a very private and very speculated life."

"A life that you in 2007 probably didn't care about preserving when you found me."

"It's..." he trailed off. "It'd all just be unfair to you. And honestly to me. You know everything about me. My mannerisms. My tells. My whole entire life. For hundreds of years back. You know who I am." He paused. "Maybe you need to figure out who you are too."

"So it's done?" She said. To be truthful it hurt a little more than dying did. "We make a record?"

"We make a record." He nodded.

"And then what?" She said. The codependency of the last 30 years strangled her. Fear and anxiety of what the rest of her life would look like grappled at her.

"You figure out who you are. What your life looks like outside of pain, and supernatural forces. I figure out who I am. Where everything I now know about myself plays into all of that."

"Ok." She said. Because what else can you really say?