Give It a Night

Three

WHEN ARIZONA had gotten off the phone with the funeral home, she just sank against the freshly locked door of her workplace. She sort of felt like a balloon that had been pumped full of air and then suddenly stuck with a needle, which allowed for all of that fresh air to be released.

Except it wasn't air that she had been filled with. It had been calm and that phone call had been the needle releasing all of her calm, quickly replacing itself with that heavy feeling she had become much too accustomed to. It was oddly easy for her to overlook the feeling, as long as she kept herself moving and thinking. Definitely needed to keep herself thinking.

Gathering her thin jacket from the ground, she stood up and tried to straighten her back and not show how she felt bent inside. Twisted up was probably a better way to describe it, but Arizona didn't know if it was even worth trying to properly label the feelings she didn't want anyway.

Julian and Arizona had been friends since they were small children. It was not a long shot to say that she had relied on him just as much as she believed he relied on her. The two had both been foster kids, pushed from home to home, unable to find the right couple to adopt them, even as they were still young. Somehow, they managed to stay friends throughout their rough childhood and many separate homes, finding comfort in the solid platform that their friendship supplied.

Arizona had always believed Julian to be her lifeboat, somewhat of a savior. Which, if she thought about it now, was almost completely ridiculous. He hadn't done anything but care for her and stay with her through her life, which was actually saying a lot, considering the number of people she'd started getting attached to only to watch them leave. 

But maybe those simple things he had done were all she needed. 

When Julian had suggested the two moving in together, right after they graduated, she had happily agreed. He was and had always been the only person she could rely on. But maybe that relying was what was causing her to hurt so much.

Blind reliance on something as fickle as human life was never a smart option, but Arizona had somehow convinced herself that Julian was something that would hang around forever. She would have liked to say that she had learned her lesson now, but that would be lying. She'd give anything to have him back, to be able to have someone to rely on like that.

When she arrived home, she threw her jacket onto the sofa and immediately turned the television on, turning the volume up as loud as it could go. She had always been a fan of noise, finding it to be a comforting presence, but now she had developed a strange sort of addiction to it. It was yet another thing she relied on.

Arizona relied on it to keep her sane. The noise was loud enough to force her to strain to untangle her own thoughts, which meant that there wasn't a complete, coherent thought poking and prodding at her to focus on. Focus was overrated these past few days. 

The loud sounds were kind of like a comforting embrace to her now, and she realized that it was important for her to take all the comfort she could. 

After making a cup of hot chocolate, she headed toward Julian's room for the first time since he'd last occupied it. Her feet paused on their own accord in front of the door, and her hands began to shake, causing the hot chocolate to slosh around a bit and spill down the sides and onto her hands. 

Ignoring the faint sting of the liquid, she gathered all of her willpower and pushed open the door. She was immediately hit with the smell of disinfectant and could clearly make out the marks that the cleaners had left behind. Ironic for them to have left behind a mess when their main job was to clean up one, she found herself thinking.

But, of course, that thought was fleeting as soon as she spotted the crumpled up note lying on his desk. One of the cleaners that she had called in, unable to bring herself to clean up his blood herself, must have picked it up and placed it on the desk. It looked slightly less crumpled at a glance, so she wondered if any, or all, of them had read it when she herself hadn't.