Black Roses {Skephalo}

Hot Chocolate [Day Twenty-six [2] ]

-Zak's POV-

"So you've lied to me again."

Lily looks up from her pile of books, the colour suddenly draining from her already ghostly pale face. "What do you mean?" she asks quietly.

"You told me Darryl had read my note ten times in the first hour of me dying" I watch the scene unfold through this weird orb thing Lily gave me. She only let me have it so I'd shut up and let her work. Apparently I'm not helping with whatever she's trying to do.

The little orb shows me Darryl, and what he's doing in the real world. Currently he's holding my letter, which is still sealed.

"Yet the letter I gave him is unopened" I add bitterly. "Explain."

She sets down some for her books, picking at her nails to avoid staring me in the face. "Okay so there's something weird going on. The notebooks are confused, they're showing you two different scenes."

I squint at her, somehow still surprised by all of this weird stuff. "What? I don't speak magic."

"The notebooks are confused. Half of them thinks their job is done, and half of them thinks it's done wrongly. They're meant to believe you love me, but they know otherwise."

She sighs, hurt evident in her chestnut eyes. "The notebooks have a mind of their own. I can't change true love Zak, even though I tried. You're meant to be with Darryl, and those books know it."

Somehow, after all of this, I feel a tiny bit bad for her. A tiny bit of sympathy, that she did all this for love. That's how much she wanted to be with me. "Continue..." I drawl, hiding that sympathy.

"The notebooks are showing you two options. One in which you come back to life, and one in which you remain dead. I can't tell either apart." So that's why the scenes don't match up, there's two different versions of them. Two separate, yet both possible outcomes.

"That's why I said there may be a chance of getting you back to the real world. The notebooks are annoyed that you died 'because of love'." She puts air quotes around 'because of love', and sighs again. "They're mad at what I've done. They want you back." She casts a look over my shoulder towards the orb, watching Darryl carefully. "And so does he."

Silence drags out as I watch Darryl, not knowing which outcome I'm seeing. There's a way for me to get back, we just haven't figured it out yet. So Lily is looking through those books, somehow able to understand the cryptic language in which they're wrote.

"I know I've done a lot of bad things Zak..." I hear books hit the floor behind me, and don't bother to turn around and face my murderer. "But I'm trying to get you back. So please, stop giving me the cold shoulder would you?"

I stare longingly at the vision in the orb. Darryl is reading my note, stopping every few seconds to slow his breathing. "If you get me back to him, I'll forgive you."

"That's good enough I guess."

Some amount of time goes by. It feels like maybe half an hour, but it could be any time really. In the abyss, there don't happen to be any ways to tell the time. No clocks on the non-existent walls.

Lily calls this place purgatory, but that's an annoying word. She's also referred to it as the void, so I'm going with that. The void. This empty space that I just kind of exist in.

With her.

Get me out of here...

Darryl leaves the room, the orb not choosing to follow. I'm left with a view of his empty apartment, Vincent having left a bit before Darryl did.