Consequences of Flirting (Teacher x Student)

Chapter 17 - Bulletproof

"My love for you was bulletproof
but you're the one who shot me"

- Bulletproof Love
Pierce the Veil

"Shit."

The air was heavy, tight, every atom pausing to watch the spectacle taking place before them. Silence, thick and imposing, lapped at our feet, seeping in from every crevice. Despite everything; despite the hurt, despite the lies, all I wanted in that moment was Sherlock's arms around me - the warmth they provided had always been associated with safety, and the thought that that might no longer be the case isolated me more than ever.

My throat tightened, restricting my speech and replacing adjectives with pure black bile - the type of bile that tore at your flesh, mutating into a beast that harboured in your lungs and suffocated you from the inside.

And I started to laugh.

It was hollow, uncontrollable. Single tears formed and fell like bullets in a war zone. My sides ached, but my chest was void of feeling, a sensation I'd become far too accustomed with.

"Why didn't you tell me," I spoke aloud, the betrayal and melancholic connotations of the words lingering on my tongue. I swallowed them dry, like pills.

He was silent.

My heart didn't sink, it plummeted. My whole body felt numb, as if someone had just injected me with a deadly poison - a poison that had been killing me slowly, bit by bit, and I hadn't noticed until now.

And so I simply repeated the question - insistent on indulging my fears. He was hiding something, he had to be. Everything was panning out far too much like a detective novel for everything to be purely coincidental, "Why didn't you tell me?"

"It wasn't important," his voice was the epitome of nonchalant.

I was choking, suffocating slowly; endlessly sinking deeper and deeper into the bottomless abyss of my confusion - how wasn't this important?

Picking at a scratch in the table before me absentmindedly, I waited, patient despite myself, for an explanation. The poison had already reached my lungs, limiting their intake; it was fear, I'd concluded.

It was selfish, really, that I was stood here - alive yet having a so-called 'quarter-life crisis' - feeling as though the world was crashing down around me, whilst Sebastian was already buried beneath the rubble; I had the audacity to feel victimised. 

It wasn't even like I was surprised that everything had fallen to shit. This had been bound to happen from the very start, from the first word, the first line; Sherlock was going to destroy me. And yet I allowed it to happen, because I suppose there was some dark, sadistic part of my being that craved misery through means of self-destruction. My mind would forever plead the fifth whilst I bathed in desolate melancholia. I would never categorise myself as the villain.

"Did he have a funeral?"

"Does it matter?"

And, after brief internal elucidation, I supposed it didn't. Up until now, I had been convinced that religious based ceremonies were designed to exploit the purest of emotions. In my mind, funerals had always monetised on grief and its simplicity; why did I suddenly care about them now? The answer was: I didn't - I cared about the implications they held, the finality and coverage they provided. I wanted the knowledge that Sebastian had felt loved with his final breath. And God had he been loved.

Wait, final breath? That didn't seem right. Although it had been mere minutes since this fact was disclosed to me, Seb's death didn't sit well. It wasn't heartache or sorrow - it wasn't mourning. It felt like discomfort, like something didn't quite add up.