A Kind Of Emotional Tether

Part Five

"Please shut up and let me save your life..."

-

Daphne only ever avoided the gang when she couldn't look them in the eyes.

Whether it was out of disappointment or fear or something much worse.

She wouldn't take any phones calls, answer texts.

Hell, she won't even answer the door for them.

These times were rare since Daph was almost never angry enough at them to leave them. But when they did happen they were long and didn't let up easily.

The last time this had happened was when Fred had accidentally spilled all her personal family drama to the lacrosse team. And then it immediately spread throughout the whole student body because Fred had no idea how high school worked.

She hadn't sat with them for lunch for almost a month.

Only returning after Shaggy and Velma came and expressed how much they missed and needed their peacekeeper.

Velma was too close to strangling Fred without Daph to defend him.

Of course Daphne returned since there was no way she could refuse Shag's desperate eyes. Besides, it felt really nice to be needed.

That had been a year ago.

After that Daph had become more accustomed to Freddie's major screw ups, and was more comfortable with confronting him on them.

The gang was hoping this meant that Daph wouldn't randomly disappear from their lives again, that she would stay there next to them playing the ray of sunshine act she lived by.

They were wrong.

The night after the.....incident with Andrews involving guns and tears and lots of hugs, Daphne and just gone home without saying a word to any of them

For the first few days the gang didn't bug her, since all of them didn't really feel like showing up to school. Especially since people were keen to ask questions on what it was like. Some would walk up and admire the bullet holes in the Mystery Machine others would pose like a corpse in the same spot Andrews was shot.

Everyone was treating it like it was an amazing feat and that they were so lucky to have such an intense experience in real life.

Shaggy was glad at first that Daph wasn't showing up to school because he knew that people would flood her with questions about the exact thing she was being haunted by.

The gang could grin and bear it when they were being attacked with curious teenagers.

But if somebody congratulated Daphne on killing someone, they would probably snap.

Everything felt broken.

Like life had just kind of slowed down for them.

Sometimes things would just be totally silent even if they were surrounded with noise. Only able to hear their breathing and feel their hands form and into knuckles or their teeth sink into their lower lip.

It felt harder to walk in a straight line. Watching as things would be thrown into fast forward.

The only thing they had was each other.

Except Daph, who was just pressing pause on her life all together.

For the first couple of weeks they didn't bother calling her to ask if she was okay.

Of course she wasn't fucking okay.

One time, on the way home from school, Fred had driven up to Daph's house and parked in the driveway.