Running Away (Home)

The Starting Line

Authors Note:  Hey Guys! Thanks so much if you decided to read this! Apologies in advance cuz the writing is kinda bad, I've never really written fic b4, so I hope you like it! This is gonna become Patrick Stump x Reader eventually but it's a slow burn with a solid chunk of backstory, so sorry if it moves too slow! If there are any situations you want to have in it/ any writing suggestions you have, pls lmk! I'll try to write more chapters soon, i alr have a second one drafted. Anyway, happy reading, and I hope you like it!

TW: MENTIONS OF SUICIDE

The screech of your alarm and the fuzzy dread of morning hit you like a ton of bricks. Pawing aimlessly at your alarm clock, the weight of the grief which was only lifted off of your shoulders in sleep once again began to dig its hooks into you. You'd never liked the mornings, far preferring to wake up around noon, but they'd been especially bad lately. You thunked out of bed and thudded to the bathroom, stopping in front of the mirror. You hardly recognize yourself anymore. Your hair is long, and the band of your natural color before the black dye begins is thickening. Your bangs are too long, almost covering your eyes. You notice the increased paleness of your skin, the dark circles around your eyes, and the gauntness of your face. It had been three months since your best friend died, and it looked like you were heading the same way.

You hadn't been to school since then, and the administration had been mostly forgiving, forcing even the most unrelenting of teachers to excuse you from the assignments in your classes. But lately the calls to your house about your attendance had grown more frequent, and your AP Statistics teacher apparently "couldn't possibly" excuse you from this final. So, you were forced to pull a brush through your hair and yank on a pair of maybe-but-probably-not clean jeans from your bedroom floor, and head out the door.

The cold December air nipped at you as you trudged down to your bus stop, beat up converse rhythmically thunking the ground. It was dark, and the world that surrounded you now was still, a far cry from the thousands of lives that hustled up and down these streets during the day. Walking down your block you passed the record store, the tattoo parlor, the chinese restaurant, and a thousand other buildings which were all blurred into similarity by the dark. You walked a few more steps, stopping for a moment outside of the pizza place. Drowning Lessons by MCR thrummed in your headphones, but you could swear your heartbeat was louder. Gazing up, you saw what was once their bedroom window. This time last year, you were carving the same path toward the bus stop, but waiting here, for them to finish the walk with you. They would call out "be right down!" from their apartment window above. Now, you waited for nothing.

Gazing into the window that had once been theirs, the sunlight creeping up from behind the brick buildings illuminated the familiar colors and shapes in the room, revealing that it still hadn't been cleaned out. Posters from Korn, Nirvana, Limp Bizkit, all the bands you started loving because of them still plastered the walls. You couldn't see it all, but you imagined the room. A desk, which was usually strewn with food wrappers and discarded post it notes, sat in front of a creaky chair, it was probably clean now. Beside that, a bed, never made and typically littered with last night's pajamas, was now adorned with clean sheets and fluffed pillows. An old, and frankly disgusting bean bag chair that you had found together in a dumpster, that they'd insisted on keeping. His mother had always hated it, so you wondered now if she had gotten rid of it out of disgust or kept it out of respect. The final piece of their oddly sterile room, you imagined the guitar in the corner. A simple black fender strat, coated in stickers, that now sat unplayed, falling out of tune. The empty shell of a life once lived.

Hearing the still familiar rattle of the bus as it approached the end of your block, you hurriedly took the final paces to the stop, jarringly alone. As you and the bus weaved down the road, you imagined the last time you had ridden it, and everything that ensued. When everything imaginable went wrong. The grief was crushing and unrelenting, and as you walked through the fluorescent-lit linoleum-floored halls of your highschool, just beginning to cope with the fact that there wouldn't be that beacon of hope to pick out amongst the crowd. Then you heard it. You weren't oblivious, the darting stares, fervent whispers, and general sense of commotion which surrounded you far from escaped your attention, but you could rarely make out the incoherent mutterings of the student body. This time, however, the girl's words were clear.

"Fucking freak. I mean, I'd kill myself if I had to spend all my time around her too. Not like he was any better."

A girl with the worst bleach job you'd ever seen muttered to her similarly hair-fried friend in a poorly disguised whisper. Almost like she wanted you to hear her, you felt her gaze in the back of your head, waiting. Whipping around, you yelled "What the fuck did you just say?"

"You heard me."

She was fucking asking for it. In a blur, you were hitting her. You don't know how, but she was on the ground, nose bleeding and she was crying and so were you, but a different kind of tears. The kind that exploded from anger with just a spark. Just a word. Between heaving sobs, you screamed,

"They were twice the person you'll ever be, and they're gone. Because of people like you, the only person who ever cared about me is gone."

Your sobs drowned out the whimpers from the bloody-nosed girl on the ground. As your eyes began to clear, you noticed her other bleach-blonde-bitchy friend dragging a teacher toward her. Your old English teacher. You were almost embarrassed, him seeing you like this, remembering the way he used to talk with you about your favorite bands after class, the glowing remarks he always left on your papers. He motioned his hand, sympathy in his eyes, and you knew what he meant. So you walked to the principal's office, tears still streaming down your face. The counselor just looked at you with pity. You received no punishment, much to the dismay of the girl's parents. During a meeting with your mother, they insisted you'd permanently disfigured their daughter, and you'd have shot back that you'd probably helped, considering now they could get her gargantuan nose fixed and consider it a medical expense, if you weren't so consumed in your grief.

The bus finally pulling into the front of the school pulled you from this train of thought, and you hoped this day would be better. The same glances and hushed conversations dashed around you, now traced with a sort of fear. You took your AP stats final, still seemingly having done fine, despite having not attended the class for much of that semester. It was designed for the stupidest of the smart. Having almost forgotten about you, the conversations swimming around your head on the bus home concerned winter break plans, prospective vacations, parties, the usual. Your plans consisted of going home, smoking out your window, yelling "no mom I wasn't smoking out my window!" and looking at the pictures of you and your best friend from the holidays past. You always used to go sledding at this really big hill outside of the art museum, and walk around, pretending to be too cool to adore the cheesy Christmas music and decor, really being in love with it. So, for the next week and a half, you did just that.