——
"Kellin? Do you recognize him?"
Oliver Sykes' frowning, angry face glares into his own through the screen on the television; his hazel eyes blink, and then he looks away.
"Yeah, that's Oliver Sykes." Kellin answers.
"How do you know him?"
The small boy sighs through his nose, rubbing at his sleep-sore eyes, running his hands through his greasy, unwashed hair. He can't remember the last time he had a shower, can't remember how long he's been here in this bizarre fucking underground whatever it is. "He was my soulmate."
"Was?"
"You heard me, alright? Can I fucking go now? My dad's probably-"
"Just a few more questions," Dr. Iero flips over a page in his folder, writes something down, grinning to himself.
Kellin is sitting at a wooden table in a large room surrounded by a half dozen other lab coats, all staring at him with dropped jaws and incredulous smirks. They probably all feel very, very proud of themselves after having finally cured one of the second generation, one of the disgusting fucking mutts, and Kellin curls his upper lip at them all.
In front of him is a television, nicer than the one from his shitty little cell down the hall, playing the same exact thing he had been watching only a couple of days earlier. He stares with a frown at Oli, a deeper frown at Taylor fucking Momsen, fantasizes about jumping through the screen and chopping her head off with garden shears, and feels nothing more, nothing less than that.
"Oliver Sykes. What do you think about him?"
The bright-eyed boy sighs, long and loud, throwing his head back, mentally cursing every single person in this room to hell and back. All he wants is a shower and some actual fucking food. "I don't fucking know! He's just a guy, alright? Is that what you want to hear? Hello, hello, is this thing on? Yeah, I have zero urge to seek him out. We are no longer soulmates. How much clearer can I be about this?"
A low ripple of excited laughter flows through the room and Kellin grits his teeth in irritation.
"Just one last question, then, Mr. Quinn-" Dr. Iero puts his pen down, eyes Kellin up and down, and smiles. "Do you love him? Oliver Sykes, I mean."
"Oh... my God?" Kellin groans, raising his eyes to the ceiling in the most intense eye roll of his life, and snorts out a laugh. "I hardly know the fucking guy. Can I leave please?"
——
Kellin Quinn and Oliver Sykes are no more. Koli is f**king dead. Koli is dead, God isn't real, there is no such thing as happiness, or rainbows, or puppies, and I woke up this morning and discovered my period destroyed my favorite pair of underwear in the middle of the night.
These are all most certainly signs of the upcoming apocalypse. I am literally wiping tears out of my eyes as I type this out – as I have done ever since news broke out of the two idiots getting cured. Cured? What the f**k? Who okay'd this? Cured? I want to f**king vomit.
I know I said, after that whole fiasco at Taylor Momsen's party for them, that I hoped Oliver would, like, die or something; honestly, after watching that tell-all on Soulmates... I took it back so hard and so fast that I smacked my head against the wall from how hard I backpedaled.
Oliver was right, after all; us common folk don't know s**t about what it's like to be soulmates, about how it makes people go a little bit nutty. So, Oliver hit Kellin across the face and then practically cried about it on national television before dissolving into a rant about... um, we're still not sure, actually, what he was going on about. But it was... romantic, right?!
