twenty one pilots one shots

Why Don't You Love Me Back?

A/N: Based off "Rory" by Foxing which is a song you should all listen to but it's v sad as well as this one-shot so get yer tissues. And thank you so much for getting this book to 6k!!! I love you all ^^

"Tyler?" Jenna called, her voice as clear as the crisp autumn air as it interrupted the morbid silence of the dying forest.

Tyler opened his eyes, finding his gaze locked on the wooden roof above him. "I'm up here." He told her, raising his voice slightly so she could hear him.

"Just as I thought," Jenna spoke as the rungs of the ladder groaned beneath her weight. "You might as well live in this treehouse."

"Well, you know," Tyler replied, sighing as he sat up. "It's a great place to go when I want to leave everything behind."

"You really shouldn't be hiding from your problems here, Ty," Jenna advised as she ascended the last ladder rung. "It's not healthy."

"So what brings you up here, Jen?" Tyler inquired, deciding to change the subject rather than discuss his cowardice.

"I have a letter for you." She answered, holding out an aged envelope.

Tyler looked at the thin, yellowed slip of packaging paper, then up at his best friend.

Somewhere along his many years of journeying through his life, he learned how to discern someone's feelings just by analyzing their facial expressions, looking into their eyes, noticing their body language.

The first thing he noticed was that Jenna wasn't acting like herself. Not at all. She seemed nervous, finicky. Her hand was trembling ever so slightly, making the envelope shudder like flimsy tree branches enduring a light breeze. Her eyes hardly focused on one thing for more than a second at a time, and she never looked him in the eye. She was either biting or licking her lips the entirety of her visit to the treehouse. There was also a timidness, a hint of anxiety in her posture and general aura.

Tyler slipped the envelope from Jenna's shaking fingertips, feeling the rough paper on his own. He held the envelope just under his nose, inhaling the scent.

A flurry of emotions rained on him in the moment his mind registered to whom the scent belonged. It was like a midsummer rain shower; there and gone so quickly you couldn't describe it in more than a single detail: it had rained. He couldn't tell you what he was feeling in that moment if you asked him. He might give you an educated guess, but that's all he could tell you.

He smelled pine needles, their lungs filled with the sputtering gasps of ocean air. It was the smell of the cliffs he could see if he turned his head to the left.

"I'm not reading this." Tyler stated with a rough voice, shaking his head. He stood, walking over to the left side of the treehouse, throwing the envelope out and letting the air catch it.

"Tyler—" Jenna began.

"It's too late now." Tyler dismissed, turning to her. "That thing is destined to drown before too long."

"You don't even know who it's from," Jenna pointed out, trying to make Tyler realize how irrational his action was. "How could you just toss it into the wind?"

"I do know who it's from, Jenna," Tyler defended, his voice frosting over with a thin layer of ice. "So, I'm not reading it."

"Who's it from then?" Jenna challenged, folding her arms.

Tyler simply said, "Him."

~

Josh paced his living room, nervously, interchanging from biting his nails to running his hands through his hot pink hair, from scratching the back of his neck to wringing his hands. He had sent Jenna to give Tyler the letter he wrote him almost twenty minutes ago and she still wasn't back. Where could she be?