Restore (a Julian Fineman Fanfiction)

AFTERMATH

"Love is a heartless bastard." -- Aaron Warner (Shatter Me)

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She lied. Lena lied to me. The shock of the matter has gotten me on my knees, skin to dirt, hands trembling by my sides. Dear God, she has me in ruins. I claw at the dirt, feeling the sharpness of rocks and jagged sticks cutting into my hands, but remain absent of the physical pain. Let me just get this straight. Work it out in my head. Lena lied to me. Impossible. Lena loves me. Lena taught me how to love. Lena cured me. It doesn't make sense. 

Don't believe her.

Alex. Godamn Alex. A short burst of rage erupts in my chest and I pound my fist on the ground before glancing over to the giant puddle of still water and catching a glimpse of myself. Unrecognizable. Lena was right about the Wilds. And how it makes us animals. 

Upon meeting my own fading eyes, the rage all dies and instead, something much worse fills its vacancy. An agonizing numbness that I don't know how to describe. 

Eventually, my bones seem to wear down from beneath my skin, shaking and threatening to fail. My heart is hammering in my chest, willing itself not to explode. I am utterly excoriated. 

I am a lost ship drifting out to sea. And Lena, a giant inescapable iceberg. I suppose we were destined to collide. How the hell could I ever fool myself into believing I was safe? 

Love is a facade. It is terminal. It is violent. 

Lena's captured my mind and invaded every corner of my brain, she's taken me over, stolen my pride. She was everything. And now she is gone. Maybe there was a mild truth--hell, maybe it was all true. What my father said. This is the repercussions. This is Deleria. And I can't pretend any of it isn't of my own doing. I knew what she would do to me. I knew it, deep down. I must have. But the way she looked at me with eyes like kaleidoscopes, endless ways to see the different shapes of her soul, she hypnotized me. She put me in a trance I'm not so sure I'll ever break free of. 

"But she loved me," I whisper to my own reflection before dipping my fingers down in the water and dragging ripples through the puddle. Everything feels violently vivid. So in focus that my senses are beginning to be overwhelmed. This is a categorical response to trauma, I know because I read about it in one of my father's mundane psychology books. 

I begin to fall apart. I can feel myself breaking down. Exhausting in the middle of the god forsaken woods, bare, out in the open where whoever the hell could come and find me. I am a wanted fugitive by the DFA. If they find me, they will shoot me. Kill me. Or perhaps worse. I have played all my cards. I gave my life to a rebellion that despised my very existance. 

Why did she even do it then? She should have let them kill me. Should have saved me the misery. At least I could look my bastard father in the eyes and die. 

But her? I don't think I can ever meet her gaze again.

She broke her promise. How could she handle me like glass and shatter me the next second? I do not understand. Was it all a game? Was I just a vessel to allow her to reach the destination she desired all along? Was I just a medium, a conduit, a bridge between her wicked apprehension and her true affection? What was my heart, if not a martyr?

She was my grace, and now my tourment. Her face, her soft hazel eyes. The feeling of her hair sliding between my fingertips. Every memory reemerging is like a giant punch in the chest. Each time I get the breath knocked out of me. 

The sudden thought of her kiss traps a scream in my throat. 

I try to stand, but my head spins and my knees hit the ground again. This time against a sharp object--a rock, I beleive, and it peirces through my skin. Blood runs down my knees. A pathetic whimper escapes me and I press my thumb to my temple, trying to ward the thundering headache away. But it persists, drumming on and drowning out the better of my senses. 

The world becomes a chaotic mosaic of quick flashes, bright light, and murky colors all meshing together in the sky. Leaves become clusters of olive green. My vision is moldy, corroded. I can feel my consious beginning to sway back and forth like a hammock. The world seems to be dissolving beneath my feet. 

I hear a fumbling fairly close, a cacophony of pounding and screaming and falling. A symphony of madness traveling in and out of my ears as sound begins to fade away. My chest is moving rapidly. I tear at the frayed seams of the white t-shirt, suddenly feeling a panicked suffocation. My last true effort before I blackout. I tear the t-shirt off and get on my knees, holding my hands to the ground. 

She doesn't love me. She doesn't feel anything for me. She never loved me.    

And it is the occurance of that thought, the breakthrough of the protective denial I had walled myself into that sends me reeling over the edge. 

I vomit onto the ground. 

When I look up I see a face I nearly don't recognize. I wouldn't know her, if not for the eyes. 

"Hana?" My voice cracks. 

There's a fathomless craze in her bloodshot blue eyes. She looks prepared to murder me. I nearly beg her too. 

But I cannot. I will never beg anyone for anything ever again. 

She almost says something, but then collapses. And as she falls, I feel the world darken, one shade at a time until eventually it is the color of the hole in my chest where my heart used to reside. 

Pitch black.