A/N: So I forgot to finish this chapter before moving on to the next one so I literally just had to sit here and find a couple thousand words from somewhere. Basically, there's probably mistakes, but it's been like two hours so I'm just going to post this and hope for the best.
This story is going to be around 25 chapters long, so we're getting pretty close to the end now. Surprisingly. This is one of the only stories I've even come close to finishing, so yay me I guess.
Anyway, enjoy the chapter, and don't forget to vote or comment if you did c:
"Ezra, do you think-" Conor paused in the doorway of an empty room. "Ezra?"
There was nothing but silence. The room seemed strangely peaceful with neither Ezra or Kitzie in it, items abandoned on the bedsheets and shelves messily, as if that was exactly how it was meant to be. Perhaps the silence was too much for Conor, or maybe it was his low mood that made him feel like something wasn't right.
Was anything ever right in Dalacine? Conor doubted it, but the feeling he had right now wasn't the usual dark cloud that seemed to hang over him over the past depressive phase. He felt like someone was slowly trying to hold him back, their arms snaking around him and pulling tight. It was less of a knot in his stomach and more of a broken cage. He knew he could get out of it if he really wanted to, but the bars that remained intact seemed to be the only ones he paid attention to.
Either way, Ezra wasn't in the room, but he had a feeling that the open window had something to do with that. Somehow, he guessed she had gone to find Kitzie herself, but he didn't want to admit it. He didn't want to feel like he had told her to go somewhere and then believed her when she said she wasn't going to. That was a mistake on his part. Trusting Ezra was like putting trust in a wild animal, because she was exactly that: wild.
Wild with emotion. Wild with fears. Wild with life.
Conor had never paid much attention to what was in Ezra's half of the room. He had been in there enough times for everything to feel familiar, but he'd never quite thought about why everything Ezra wore was either black or white. Clothes strewn across the floor lazily were enough to make him question that. There wasn't much that was personal, no photos or posters, just a couple of books and piles of loose paper left everywhere. He'd never noticed that before.
He picked some up. It was crumpled and some of it stained with paint (probably from Luke) or coffee (probably from her times sneaking out with Kitzie) or some random stains that he assumed must be energy drink, for lack of a better assumption. There wasn't much written on them, and none of them seemed to hold any coherent thoughts.
It hit Conor a moment later that most of them were only her side of a conversation.
He wondered what it was like to have to write down everything you want to say to someone. Did it mean she had to put more thought into it? Perhaps she then had time to take back something she wrote down before she showed it to the other person. She had second chances when she wrote things down. Maybe that was why she did it.
There were a lot of conversations with Kitzie, or at least, he assumed that was who the other person's handwriting belonged to. He noticed that most of the words written down were Ezra's, obviously because whoever she was talking to must have actually been speaking out loud, but her conversations with Kitzie were different. Kitzie wrote down her words too. As Conor read it, he smiled, not only because he felt like he was listening to the conversation two of his best friends had had together, but also because the conversation wasn't disjointed or broken.
When talking to Ezra, it was difficult to feel like you were having a normal conversation. It wasn't so bad for Conor, because there was a language they both knew that they could use. Yet, for everyone else, he knew that it was hard to feel natural when talking to Ezra. You either had to take complete charge of the conversation, or you just had to deal with the fact that all Ezra was going to do was react to your words.
