Eventually

Chapter Sixteen

A.N. I liked writing this chapter. In-between writing two really fucking hard 2000 essays this week (one of the shitty Anglo-Saxons and the other on the USELESS Dark Ages), it de-stressed me to write. It's pretty reflective and mostly inside Freddie's head, except for a flashback scene to a conversation he has with Arthur's sassy mum, Elvari Avassi Valgari. Ugh the name. My names are so hilarious. Anyway, vote and comment, xoxo, Clay.

Chapter Sixteen

June 23rd 1999 - Frederick Pepper

An entire lifetime's worth of memories had been crushed, in one single moment. Walking through that door and seeing what I saw, I watched everything die right in front of me.

I watched the two little boys playing in the long green grass move apart, separate, and lose each-other forever. I saw the kid I sat beside on his first day of school stand up and sit at another table. Our whole friendship, years and years of happy memories, of laughter and the pure, dripping nostalgia of all those years weighing down on me. Our whole childhood together melted away, became blue and bitter in my memory. My whole world broke apart, shattered, destroyed. It became nothing, and it left behind a boy shaking in the corner of his bedroom, a boy I barely even recognised as myself.

I couldn't cope. I didn't know how to cope. I'd barely been managing without him. Every night since Millicent's party, I'd stare at the blank ceiling above me. I'd imagine it had great big eyes, and they stared right back at me, right into me. Eyes that resembled Arthur's: brooding and foreboding and angry and imperfect and perfect all at the same time. Eyes that used to look at me with an effortless twinkle, but now only held a look of shameful sadness and regret.

I'd see it over and over again, what happened at the party. Seeing him there, across the room, so far away and yet only a few steps apart. I saw the fear that I felt of delving deeper into something with Arthur that I didn't know if I could handle. I saw the disappointment in his eyes, the tears starting to form and threaten to break like a huge mechanical dam behind the willowy skin of his eyelids.

But I knew that I was in the wrong. I'd flipped him off, I'd broke whatever we had, and I'd latched on to some random cheerleader who was only interested in a quick and shady hook up. It all seemed so worthless now, looking back on it, knowing that I couldn't change it.

I should have just went up to him. I shouldn't have ran from him, I should have ran right at him, and hugged him, and kissed him, and held him, and told him that everything was gonna be alright.

Even more than that, though, I should have wanted to be with him, in every way possible. I shouldn't have been afraid of him, of what lay underneath the thin material of his Calvin's. I should have embraced what was happening, despite my fears. But now, what was happening was over. Any chance, any final glimmer of Arthur being in my life was gone. And it was all my fault. I couldn't blame anyone but myself.

But at the same time, it hurt. It hurt more than anything ever had in my entire life. Throwing him aside, latching onto someone else, creating this endless rift between us, and then watching as he found himself and his happiness with someone else, it was fucking heartbreaking. And the worst thing about it was that I was powerless to stop it, and I had no right to intervene, to even try and stop it, because he'd moved on. Just as I realised my mistake, just as I felt everything Arthur meant to me smack me like a ton of bricks, it was already too late.

And now what was I left with? The dark, empty corners of my bedroom. Closed doors locked tight, the lights off, sitting half-naked on the floor, drowning in a deafening silence. The flooding of tears down my face. The heartbreak, the nothingness, the complete and utter emptiness that I'd created for myself, and all because Arthur was gone.