dear violet ➳ andy biersack (currently editing)

23

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chapter
twenty two
violet
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"Andy." My voice came out strangled and uneven.

He looked up at me, the confusion in his eyes darkening into worry as he looked at me.

He drew a deep breath, shoulders rising and falling with the movement. "Violet, what's wro -?"

"Andy," I cut him off, saying his name as if it were drenched in lime, as if the letters cut into the sides of my mouth.

I knew what he saw as I faced him; he saw me as if I couldn't fucking bear to even look at him.

I couldn't.

Because now - now, I had to break his heart.

"Andy, your saving me last night won't change a thing." I drew in a shuddering breath. "I'll still kill myself within the year."

"No!" Andy burst out suddenly, jumping off the stool and catching me by the shoulders so that I was forced to meet the intensity burning in his saphire eyes. "Violet, no! You can't fucking say things like that to me!"

I flincher in surprise as his deep voice filled the hotel room; he'd never shouted at me before.

Andy's face softened as he absorbed the mixture of fear and alarm on my face. He rested his forehead against mine and shut his eyes tightly, his warm hands shaping to my cheeks. I could feel his fingers trembling slightly against me, his face riddled with simething like desperation. I almost didn't want to look.

"Just -" he choked on a breath of air. "Don't go."

There was a note of desperation, of pleading in his voice, as if the prospect of a life without me was too much to even consider.

It made the spot just behind my ribs ache deeply and dully, like an everlasting bruise.

And there was a part of me that hated him in that moment. Hated him for lunging into the fire without any regard for his own life, for responding to my letters and kissing me and singing to me when really there had been a girl before me with tired eyes and black hair and scarred wrists.

I felt that hatred coleasc into a rotten black mass in my chest, felt it rise in my throat. I hated falling in love with someome so intent on breaking himself apart.

I needed to end it.

I needed to end it now.

So I choked out the words that would cut deep enough to push him away. "Andy, I am just like Jacqueline."

He jerked away from me as if I'd thrown a rain of red hot sparks into his face, shoving me away so that I stumbled back a few steps.

"How -?" He gripped the edge of the counter, squeezing his eyes closed, looking as he had just recieved a sharp kick to the stomach. "How do you know about her?"

He looked as if his bones were broken, as if he were on the brink of disaster.

He was.

We both were.

And I needed to keep it up, I needed to push harder, I needed to chase him away from me with a razor sharp knife and words cunning enough to kill.

I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't want to end it.

I didn't have a choice.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I demanded voilently back, advancing closer to him.

I could feel myself trembling uncontrollably, the sickening pain in my chest only getting worse.

"Violet, just -"

But I caught his arm roughly. "No. Andy, why didn't you tell me? You could have saved yourself all of this! I would have left sooner if I'd just known! I would -!"

"You can't leave," Andy cut in breathlessly, catching at my wrists in the same depsperation, only now ten times stronger. He sounded like a drowning man, somebody up to their chin in water too wild to tread. "No, Violet no, you can't -"

The pain rose in my chest, filling me up to the brim. I could feel myself beggining to cave in, to fall apart.

"I'll just hurt you more," I choked out unevenly, the pain blurring my vision, clogging my lungs.

It felt as if I were staring down into the darkness at the edge of a cliff, as if I were poised to fall.

Andy stared at me helplessly, his pain only making mine that much worse. "Don't go," he whispered. "Violet, don't go. I love you so much."

And suddenly it was all I could do to not just break, to give in completely, to surrender to the raw agony in his eyes.

He was drowning, and I was the one stopping him from coming up for air.

This needed to end.

I drew a shuddering breath. "Thank you for everything, Andy."

Then I pulled away from him and walked straight towards the door, forgetting everything but the fact that if I didn't get out out out I would crumble right in front of him.

But I still paused in the doorway with one hand on the doorknob, to look back at him.

It hit me like a stab to the front.

He was hunched over, still gripping the marble countertop, a bruised deep purple, a beaten black and blue boy. With black hair and blue eyes and a heartbreaking desire to fix everything that was broken but himself.

He looked at me as if I were a dying sun and he was waiting in helpless agony for me to destroy his entire world.

In the glow of that orange fire, his evening blue eyes glistened with withheld tears.

But I had to let him know. "I love you too. That's why I'm doing this. You need somebody who will live for as long as you do. You need somebody that isn't me."

I stepped outside the door, looking him in the eye as I said, "I'm not sorry."

And the light of the sun tore him apart as I left.

In the afterglow of my own destruction, I stepped out onto the street into a world that wanted nothing more that to hurt me unimaginably.

The sky was grey, the cold bit at me, the wind hissed with volatile intent all around me.

And I thought of all that love, all that happiness and hope that we'd found in each other.

In each other, we'd found all the world.

And now. Now.

We'd both lost it all.