After Fate Fell

24 • JOHN

TITLE CHANGE!
After it All —> After Fate Fell

Hey guys! First off, I apologize in advance for the emotional rollercoaster that is this chapter. I have to admit I cried a few times while writing it. Also, you will notice that this chapter is ridiculously long. You're welcome :,)
-Braden

1 year, 3 months, and 14 days after it all
•JOHN•
I didn't want to do it, but I had to do it. I couldn't just leave Sarah's family wondering where their daughter was and what had happened to her. It was a heart wrenching hour of crying, explaining, and blaming.
I knew they would blame me for her death. I knew they understood, I knew they knew that it was her choice to come with me, but deep down they still blamed me for the lot of it.

Sarah may have chosen to come with me, to help protect her planet, her home, and to be with me, her soulmate, but the reason she decided to come with me was because I fell in love with her in the first place. I took our love too far, to a point where she couldn't just stay here in Paradise, waiting for me. She did stay for a while. But she couldn't do it anymore. And I came back for her. Why did I do that?

Even I have accepted that it's all my fault. She's dead because of me, and only me. Ella blames herself, I know that. Sarah would blame herself if she were still here. Six probably blames herself for not being more firm, telling her to get back into the forest and hide. We all blame ourselves.
But it was me. And I should've seen it coming from 300 million miles away. Henri warned me about falling in love. I should've listened. But it was love. Real fucking love. I remember thinking that the world could pass by without me, without us. Just as long as we could stay there, together, in each other's arms. I wondered if that feeling could last forever. And it lasted, it lasted through the period when I couldn't see her, it lasted through the hard times, it lasted through all the destruction, all the war, everything. But as soon as I heard her voice on that phone call from Mexico, as soon as I heard the first word out of her mouth, I knew that it was all going to end.

I knew my encounter with the Hart family today wasn't going to be something I would want to remember, I knew that they would never, will never fully forgive me for any of it. But I knew I had to do it. They need some type of closure for her death. I just wish that I could go back in time and not come to Paradise, and not meet Sarah Hart, the ex-cheerleader, the photographer, the radiant and gentle girl from Paradise High, the one who transformed into a fighter, a woman who never gave up, even when all seemed lost. I wish I had never fallen in love with her. I wish I had never promised her that I would come back to her. I wish.

Tears stream down my face as I sit in the passenger seat of the rental car. Six volunteered to drive when she deemed me too emotional to operate a vehicle at the moment. She pulls out into the street and looks at me expectantly, as if asking me where to go next. I haven't really given her much of a choice in this, and I think she finally understands why I had to come back to this town, back to Paradise, the most accurately yet so dead-wrongly named town in the world.

"Sam's," I tell her. "We have to go to Sam's house."

Under normal circumstances, Six and her stormy personality would ask why, tell me that Sam isn't dead and we don't need to go tell his mother that we're sorry for her loss, just as I just did at Sarah's house. But instead, she just turns her gaze toward the road and starts driving.
We aren't going to Sam's house to talk to anybody, anybody who is alive, that is. In that well in Sam's backyard, there is a skeleton. Pittacus Lore. Some say I have become him, but I don't feel it. Sure I got the Legacies to brag for it, but what about the leader aspect to it? I'm no Elder. I'm no Pittacus. We need the real thing.