Bury a Friend | Hemlock Grove |

Chapter 27 | Flume |

Peter sits impatiently drowning in the silence. He's beyond terrified that the boy laying before him won't wake up. Without Roman, Peter is helpless. He feels lost in the world with no one to confide in or share the fear he felt with. The two of them were the only one possibly capable of understanding what the other was going through.

He had reached out to Emma a few times but mostly was only responded to with the bare minimum. He had to find out from Destiny about the shift in fates. He only received a one-word "yeah," text back from Emma. She'd gone MIA.

Peter couldn't even turn to Letha. If anything, he had been shutting her out more and more with every passing day. It was safer that way. The less Letha knew the less of a chance there was for her to get hurt.

Roman stays in the same position, hooked up to the same machines making the same noises every day. Sometimes Peter thinks he sees him move but then he'll realize it's a floater or a shadow. He can only sit there and wait and watch. Letha sits with him occasionally and Shelley is almost always there, missing the one person who truly cared for her.

One of the doctors from the institute that Olivia brought, Dr. Pryce, said he had done all he could. It was Roman's choice to wake up. Peter scoffs at that. He wonders what thoughts must be running through Roman's head, and if he would remember them when he woke up. He was going to wake up.

........

Emma is more upset than she will even admit to herself. There's an unnamed feeling festering in the pit of her stomach. When the possibility and opportunity to make amends begins to slip from your grasp it's devastating. Even if you weren't planning on making amends. It's the fact that you will never get to make that choice.

Somehow the person she wanted out of her life the most has become the person she missed the most. It's indescribably lonely to miss a former incarnation of them.

The highest of the highs can only provide so much compensation for the lows. And right now? This was the lowest of lows. The way all things had fallen apart at once was overwhelming.

Possibly, worst of all is her inability to comprehend death and loss, whether her own or another's. Having lived most of her life alone with her mother, she had never experienced death the way others had. While Roman had found his own fathers body, Emma knew of only distant relatives that had passed away. She had never even met her own grandparents, only spoke to them on the phone.

Her father's parents had both died years ago. She only found out a year later when stalking through a distant cousin's Facebook. It meant nothing, she felt nothing. What can you feel for someone you don't know? Someone who never attempted to know you. Her own father could be dead and she would have no clue.

The dead girls at school were sad, sure. So much potential lost, the unfairness of it all, but it was second-hand sadness. She had only accepted the reality of it all late at night, drunk and alone. It meant nothing to her in the morning.

This was the only time it had ever meant something. She could feel it down to the core of her bones. She was sad and lonely, but above all else she was furious. Furious that he had left her alone that night to go fuck around, overdose and wreck his car. Furious that he could leave her forever without asking for forgiveness. She wants to deny him that.

Sharing almost every class with him had been hard, seeing an empty chair was harder.

At school, it's the motions without the act. There's no need to smile and laugh with others about things she felt so distant from. It was her chance to be as self-involved as everyone had claimed she had been. It was never intentional before, but now she wallowed in her own sadness as if it was a warm blanket. How is it possible for it to feel so good to feel so shitty?