Young God [GirlxGirl]

19. The Damaged Generation

Hey, there's our heaven dissolving // Some broken universe unfolding // Foreign futures by night // Lit by distant insight // You took all of // You took all of my faith // And there's no sense here // Cloud Nine, Hælos

Violet hadn't heard much of what the doctor said.

Not after the words "very lucky" and "alive" left her lips. Nothing else mattered. Nothing but that.

Alive. Blake was alive. Her best friend, her sister, the personification of Violet's broken promise. Violet wasn't going to lose her; a fact she had to mentally repeat several times over in order to truly believe it. Lucky. How close a call had it been? Would another minute have killed her? Another pill? Violet dreaded to think. In fact, she couldn't think. All she could do was feel: feel the overwhelming sense of relief consume her entirely, feel the weight of the world crushing her ribs and suffocating her heart alleviate slightly, feel happy.

Almost.

Almost, because so much was still wrong, and because Blake's beating heart didn't cancel out the rest of her problems. Violet was painfully aware of this. Still, she consciously decided to push all of that to one side for the time being given that all she really wanted to do was sit by Blake's bed and hold her hand until she woke up. Which is what she did. She didn't look at or say anything to her friends; to Ash. They began to wonder if she saw them at all, or if Blake was all she saw. Perhaps, to Violet, she was alone in the universe with no other soul aside from Blake's, and nothing to do but sit right by her side and squeeze her limp hand and try not to cry whenever she looked at her broken face.

Matt and Ash didn't make any further attempts to talk to Violet. Even though she was present now, neither of them felt they had the right words to say to her. How could they understand, after all? So they left her, never wandering too far and never lingering too close. Accessible but distanced. Time passed slowly or not at all for each of them, the sound of the hand moving on the clock like a failing pulse. When Kevin cleverly snuck himself into the ward, dodging nurses and doctors and patients, even Ash couldn't muster a smile at the sight of him. He wasn't there for her anyway.

He bound onto Blake's bed, watched by Violet, and curled into a small ball under the sheet beside her, nestling his body against her waist. Violet didn't know if Kevin had sensed that something was amiss with Blake, if he missed her, or if he was there to offer comfort. Either way, she was glad to see him. She was sure Blake would be, too. When she eventually woke.

It was Nate, of all people, that finally got through to Violet.

He walked into Blake's room carrying two steaming cups of grimace-inducing hospital coffee, setting one down on the cabinet beside Violet before pulling up a chair of his own. His glasses were folded into the front pocket of his shirt, his hair unkempt and uncombed. Violet was surprised to see him. While it was true that he'd grown closer to the girls in the past week, it wasn't as if he knew them very well. She had assumed he'd gone home, and she would have understood if that had been the case.

But there he sat. He looked at Blake, sipped his coffee, and sighed sadly. Another thirty seconds of quiet passed before he said anything.

"All people, I think, go through something like this at least once in their life," He spoke without averting his gaze from their sleeping friend. "A low point. A feeling of hopelessness and helplessness; a never ending hurt. Or, we think it's never ending. It seldom is."

Violet frowned. She looked at Nate - Nate who barely ever spoke, Nate who had looked as if he were afraid of his own shadow when they'd first met, Nate who she still hadn't quite figured out. He kept going, unaware or unbothered by Violet's studious gaze.