Phoenix's Lies

Thank You

(Other songs for this chapter would be those eyes by New West and Here With Me D4VD -  for the end of the chapter - but this one is the song the two dance to) 

Phoenix

The first few days after we manage to make it out of town are quiet. Both Riv and I still look over our shoulders for danger, but it's harder to spot it the longer we see nothing around. Leaving us with time we can spend together. Just being kids with the time we have left before something inevitably drags us home. To him.

But she's restless. I keep watching to see if something happens that I'm not seeing but after a few days of nothing happening out of the blue, I question what is making Riv so jumpy. So nervous that she keeps looking around with wild eyes, checking every noise. Every crack of a branch behind us. Every tap on the glass. She jumps at every small sound until I'm afraid she's seeing something I can't. But nothing ever happens.

"Riv?" I call over to her from the doorway to see she's obsessively watching the rain outside. We have been hearing it all day, the rain and distant rumbles of thunder as a storm shakes our hometown across the cliffs. Round the bay where its lights shine like candles, lighting those we left behind. "Hey, what's wrong?" I move over to her slowly, seeing how she turns to watch as I do so. She sighs when I come to stand behind her, my arms around her shoulders, both of our eyes on the home we've left behind, at least for a while. "Are you ok?"

She gives a low sigh, her body slumping ever so slightly. "I miss her." Her quiet words are eaten up by the silence between us since I don't have to ask her who she means. The memory of Lena is suddenly strong in my mind. "Some days it's easier to push the pain down. To remind myself of what you said to me when we buried her. But others it's harder. Strangely more so since we came here. It's like I see her in everything even though she never came here. I've never been here before and yet, everywhere I look I see her ghost staring at me. Accusing me of being what my mother always told me I'd never be. Good enough for her." She gives a sad sigh then, her eyes troubled and shadowed over with regret.

I hold her closer, trying to find the words to convince her that she is. She is and always will be enough. Not just for me but for all the people she means so much to. But instead, come up with a different set of words. "I wish I could you know. I wish I could let you see yourself the way I see you. That we all do. Because you are enough Riv. Always were."

She gives a sad sigh, her head on my collarbone as she glances out the window, our arms interlocked where she's twisted hers through mine still resting around her. "I wish we had another way out of this." Her voice is sad. "You know in another world I see it. In another universe, we can just be us. Without the mess of the last five years. Without the missing people, we love and abuse and pain we've suffered. Without the loss. In another world, I'm in my bedroom with the window open. You're there too. Both of us were lying on the floor, heads touching. In that vision, we're back to being twelve years old again, but this time nothing bad has happened to us. We're just kids. Free and wild. Happy without the pain, and I wish it were true." Her voice is even lower the next time she speaks. "I just need to make it all stop. Make the voices stop. The thoughts. The tears. Please, if there's a god out there who gives a shit please, please make it all stop. Just for a while if it can't be forever." She sobs as her voice cracks over the middle, please.

Her tone is as haunted as her eyes when I catch her reflection in the glass window. Sections of it are thrown into shadow as we see lightning join the storm over Ayrith in a way that has Riv smiling, eyes on the glass. The silence stretches between us then, the storm raging outside so loud we can hear it across and round the bay, not quite close enough to touch it but close enough to feel it. How powerful it is. How much it can destroy within a few seconds. Powerful yet dangerous, like so many other things in life.