Under Control.

chapter twenty seven.

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Nora was beautiful, and unreadable, and everything and nothing like he'd left her, all at the same time.

Julian was a mess, a glorious disaster, in pieces but well arranged, and exactly like she'd left him, plus a few new worries besides.

They were both the same, but broken. Different, but known, and without wanting to be.

This moment was new, but all of their feelings — the love and the hurt and betrayal — were unchanged, and all there was to be certain about was that they'd failed to outrun each other, after all. There was nowhere in the city or the world, it seemed, that would ever be far enough for one them to be unaffected by the other's wide-eyed, heartbroken gaze.

'You moved.'

Julian met Nora's eyes finally, even despite the blinding glint of the sun, and said the first thing that fell off his tongue.

'You're covered in blood.'

Nora tried to appear as unaffected as he seemed to be, tried to meet him halfway. But as ever, she failed.

'Are you okay?'

Julian could only scoff, a bitter, sad-sounding little huff that sent his gaze darting away from hers to try and hide the tide that had suddenly welled up in them.

'Yeah, I'm great,' he said, his sultry voice all cracked and low, the masquerade of his indifference the only thing about him in this moment that could be counted as a success.

'Okay, great.' Nora, though — she couldn't handle acrid words from him. She could barely handle the sight of him, let alone the sight of him crumbled on the sidewalk outside of her apartment. This was supposed to be the place she could escape all the ghosts of himself that he'd left behind.

When she'd gotten home from being away, Nora had found that she couldn't bear to be in her apartment. There was too much of him everywhere she looked. There were traces of Julian left all over her kitchen, her sofa, the bathroom, in her bed. And every time she woke up there, all she was left with was the grief that remained in the wake of what he'd done.

She hadn't wanted to move. She loved her weird little apartment. But she couldn't stay there, either. And so she'd left it and come to this place — a place that was, on a map, closer to Al and Julian's apartment than her last one had been. But in the end she'd figured that it would hardly matter, considering the band and everything that came along with it — all of their successes, and the tours, and the bodies that weren't hers. She'd thought that maybe they'd move on when finally they did get back, and that if she could just do a good enough job of extricating herself from their lives then, maybe — just maybe — they wouldn't even realise that she was gone, let alone to where.

And even if it turned out that Nora had underestimated Albert, she'd figured at least that she would have been able to rely on Julian to not care.

She had resigned herself to thinking that he would find himself someone new to disappear into, all the better to chase the memory of her away with. And so, here and now, Nora wanted to let him be nasty and cold. She let him avoid her. Because in the end, it was a good excuse for her to do the same to him.

So, she left him to his brokenness and his misery, and dropped his crutch into the gutter beside him before moving to walk away.

'Do I,' Julian huffed, surprised and awkwardly scrambling to get up from the ground in the wake of Nora's leave. Maybe he'd gotten too used to people wanting something from him, and sticking around to get it? Maybe that's why he didn't consider that if he was enough of an asshole to her, she'd leave him, again? 'Do I look okay, to you?'