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IT WILL COME BACK / 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖙𝖍𝖗𝖊𝖊
(i was gonna use a joesph morgan gif for this chapter but... c'mon)
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It wasn't often that Ella found a silence she couldn't stand.
For as long as she remembered, she'd been inclined to it: the kind of quiet that made people look back in conversation on a busy street, as if to check if they'd lost her in amongst the bumping shoulders. The kind of softness that came with someone content with their own solitude, company and a gentle morning.
She wasn't scared of a lull in conversation or the pause in between this and that –– Ella, in fact, welcomed it.
She'd grown used to preferring it. A lonely house in the middle of the woods was far more appealing to her than an apartment in a busy city. She'd spent a few years in civilization and it hadn't been right; none of it had ever been right. For Ella, this isolation was it.
But this? This silence?
It bled through her like a split vein.
It was moments like these that Ella remembered that living alone in the middle of nowhere had it's dangers –– and one of them was standing right there, staring back at her.
This realisation had all begun with the chilling fear that something had gone wrong.
That something in the morning peace had slipped and slid, breaking china in the process and leaving her table bare.
It'd continued with the thick discomfort of spit in her mouth, bile that she struggled to swallow and the itch of skin on the back of her neck as she felt the suspicion of being watched––
And then there was the knowing.
The turn to notice the intruder and the feeling that came with it: the way her body numbed, her jaw slackened, blood rushed to her ears and she almost went dizzy with the racing fear that strummed up her heart––
