Behind These Wings

Manipulation

Why would anyone want to love something so flawed, so completely ruined, that it couldn't even function? She had been left in tatters behind Him; a broken shell of an angel. So what's the point? Why fight to live on if there is no future?

There is no point.

Izzy's thoughts twisted around in this dangerous spiral and every time she reached the same conclusion.

She was not worthy of Andrew's love therefore he was right to reject her now. He was right to not believe her story; she had never been good enough for him and had shamed him on countless occasions. She had lied to him for months. There had to be a moment at which he would snap.

She had been expecting it and unfortunately it seemed that those borrowed minutes of blissful naivety were over.

He had finally awoken from the fairy-tale and realised that she was not the perfect princess which he had fashioned with his imagination. She wasn't prim or proper. She couldn't offer him beauty and could only muster brains if she wasn't panicking about something else. She didn't have a clean past, innocent eyes or a youthful smile. Her features cried with experience, her body taunt with tension and her mind exhausted by anxiety.

She wasn't good enough.

She would never be good enough.

Tears streamed down Izzy's cheeks at such a rate that she had long given up believing she could deceive anyone who saw her with the excuse that there was something in her eye. More like something in her heart, stabbing and grinding its way through the organ until it was completely destroyed.

She sobbed now, with her shoulders shaking and her face buried deep into her shrivelled hands as the frigid droplets of water flowed down her back. Her heavy clothes weighed her down almost painfully but it was nothing compared to the weight she felt against her shoulders. The water from the shower had long since turned icy but Izzy barely registered this. Lost in her own misery, she cried.

She cried for all that she had ever done wrong, for every mistake she had ever made; all the evil that she must have committed to have been sentenced to such a fate.

She cried for Drew, for her most perfect husband who just couldn't bring himself to tell her that he no longer loved her.

But most of all, she cried for herself. For every time that she had got her hopes up only to have them shattered minutes or seconds later. For all the lost time craving the one thing she knew she would never have. For all the selfish bones in her body that were screaming for someone, anyone, to come and offer some help or sympathy.

However no one came and Izzy knew that no one would.

No one was left that loved her because it simply wasn't possible to love her.

She was too wrong, too bad, too much of a failure.

'Not good enough.'

'The worst Archangelios there has ever been.'

'How could anyone love you?'

The voices tore through her heart, ripping the fragments into pieces so small that no one would ever be able to put it back together again. She began to lose herself within their words, her breathing becoming sharp and rapid.

'Did you honestly think that was flattering?'

'I wouldn't eat that if I was you, you can't possibly be hungry yet.'

'That extra padding will surely be useful in the winter months, shame about the summer though, who would want to see that in a bikini?'

Screaming hoarsely into the cold tiles that surrounded her, Izzy clasped her hands over her ears mentally pleading for the onslaught of memories to stop but they were relentless. A downpour on an already saturated mind.