FicWad

A/N: Hellooooo there, people! Wow, thanks for all the lovely reviews…you made my week (: sorry this is a little late- I’m like, completely swamped with schoolwork right now, and it’s shit :L Really sorry but I haven’t had time to respond to all of your reviews (catching up with a years school work kinda takes up a lot of my time) but each and every comment is incredibly appreciated- thank you all so much. anyway, I really hope this chapter is okay- it’s a bit of a risk, but I enjoyed writing it, so I hope you enjoy reading it (:


Chapter Twelve

Time seems to crash to a numbed standstill as I gaze in hollow, unblinking horror at the twisted silhouette blocking our way to the main entrance, the dark of their shadow seeming to taint the whole schoolyard; the shyly shimmering frost on the ground, the weak, watery fragments of golden winter sun, all suddenly feel cold and cruel and forbidding, as if all the hope has been drained from the world.

All the tiny, tentative beginnings of hope, sucked out of the untouched December morning like innocent blood. Anything good or positive, bled away just to feed one cruel, mangled monster’s vindictive nature and selfish brutality.

The monster that’s obstructing our path to the school building.

The monster that’s hounded my tail incessantly for what feels like eternity, haunting my once innocent existence with the stains of hate and injustice; a dark, forbidding shadow that never truly leaves me, because it’s embedded into my mind, there to make me even worse when I’m down, to lurk in the darkest corners of my thoughts.

The monster with those horrible, dead, bottomless eyes.

Those eyes that make me nothing. When I get lured into their deadened, shark-like depths of churning, murky ocean, everything positive I’ve ever felt is instantly drowned in their twisted depths. They bore into me like blunt blades, hacking at my already battered soul, gouging into my emotions, scratching at my bones. Silently scarring me, over and over and over again.

When I look into those eerily green eyes that seem to have no end, I’m trapped in an ensnared, copious web of metallic fear and unjustified pain that chokes the air I breathe so as have to gulp and gasp at the bitter air around me.

When I look into those eyes, I become everything I loathe.

I’m scared and shaking and choking. I’m burnt with the cuts and bruises tainting my skin. I’m weak and powerless and defeated, reduced to a shadow trembling behind a curtain of choppy chestnut hair.

Those shark-like slits of venomous vindication, I want to run and hide. I want to run and run and run; to escape the blood and the fear and the guttering hurt. I want to escape from myself. But I know that I can’t run from it for ever. That twisted, darkened shadow of shattered dreams and violence would be forever on my tail, smelling me fear like blood, tracking me, hounding me, haunting me until I finally weakened.

So instead, I hide. I hide from the intimidating, predatory figure looming ominously before me and shadowing my existence with tainted blackness. I hide from anyone who tries to care. I hide from it all.

When I’m fixed with that repulsively green gaze of soured seas, I hide from myself. I become nothing but a hollow husk, an empty shell.

And it’s all because of him. Because of that dark, twisted shadow that’s blocking my path to the peeling school doors that suddenly seem a very long way away from where I stand vulnerably, by the rusting gates, watching the huge mass of swarming students slowly seeping through the main doors, leaving the almost deserted schoolyard behind them uneasily empty.

“F-Frank?” a small, scared little whisper from my side brings me crashing back into reality, away from my crescendo of mangled memories and rapidly increasing fear.

Eyes gritty from unblinking, I look round to see the wide, innocently hazel eyes behind the well-polished lenses of my skinny stepbrother’s geeky glasses. He blinks nervously, nibbling at his lower lip anxiously and staying huddled, quivering slightly, into his navy blue duffel coat, breath curling in uneven exhales of soft smoke into the air around us.

Suddenly, I can feel the harsh, grey, frost-incrusted concrete beneath my feet once more, and a little warmth seems to seep back into the sun’s feeble rays.

As a shy glance of recognition passes between us, sharing the same shaking fear and dread, the same understanding and the same love for bittersweet chords, a sudden shot of determination flashes through my numbed body.

A sudden vivid flashback of images shoot through my mind; the pure, undiluted fear in Mikey’s eyes on his first day of school, to see someone plagued with the same fear as I am; the way he so shyly asked if we could be friends as if he thought I wouldn’t want someone like him; the way he talked about his bass playing, and half-convinced me to carry on with my guitar; Ocean’s fierce eyes as she endlessly tells me to keep fighting; the drunken mess of mangled emotion in Gerard’s usually hidden emerald green eyes last night; and the wonderful, soaring serenity I feel while I’m strumming away at my guitar; the same, battered, well-worn guitar I’m clutching right now.

Nothing but mere wood and strings and glue, yet it’s the one thing that’s kept me breathing to where I am in this moment right now, in the shattered, frosty December sun in the morning schoolyard, staring into the soured green eyes of the corrupted soul that’s made my life a living hell for years on end; each encounter scarring me forever.

But maybe it doesn’t have to this time.

Maybe I won’t let it.

“Frank?” the nervous little whisper beside me is this time accompanied with an anxious tug at the sleeve of my hoodie. I look round again at Mikey, who’s shaking more than he was a few seconds ago, breath coming in terrified little puffs of clear smoke as his innocent, untainted eyes dart from Danny, halfway across the yard from us, to the fear I know is riddled in my eyes and across my battered face. I suddenly realise that my hair is not fully covering my wounds, and hurriedly shake it across my face, hiding behind the chestnut and biting my lip apprehensively in a similar fashion to the skinny boy I hardly know standing beside me.

I glance back at the menacing shadow that’s sneering at me as if I’m nothing.

He expects me to surrender, to be nothing but a tiny little speck of dust consumed by fear.

But maybe I don’t want to be nothing anymore.

I look straight into those zombie-like eyes of violence, not allowing their bottomless depths to infect me with weakness as I usually do. I look at those eyes that have ruined so many innocent souls, and a potent, seething anger starts to froth in the pit of my stomach, fuelled by determination.

I take a deep breath of the cold, frostily golden air of uneasy silence.

“C’mon, Mikey,” I say, mind made up. My voice wobbles slightly, but I ignore it, the same way I ignore the fearful pound of adrenaline through my veins and my heart hammering against my ribs. I clutch the case of my guitar tightly, and start determinedly towards Danny, jaw set, inwardly shaking, but gritted with slightly tentative strength on the outside.

Mikey stumbles along beside me, face queasy and clammy. He’s shaking violently, but I’m almost certain it has nothing whatsoever to do with the icy air whipping round us. I’m almost certain his heart is beating as frantically as mine is, and I suddenly wonder if he knows what it’s like to be taunted and tormented day after day after day.

I find it hard to believe; those almond-shaped hazel eyes hold far too much innocence. They aren’t tainted and stained with the brutal truth of reality as I know mine, and a thousand other broken souls are.

With every step I take forwards, a tiny little bit more confidence bubbles up inside me. Sure, I’m absolutely fucking terrified, but for once, I’m too determined to care. I might be about to go down, but least I’ll go down fighting.

A look of complete surprise crosses Danny’s repulsive face as we draw slowly but surely closer across the nearly empty, frost coated yard, but he soon masks it with a horribly sadistic sneer as, he too, starts walking towards us, looking alarmingly muscled and formidable.

“And where do you think you’re going, Freak Iero?” he sneers, stepping in front of Mikey and I so as we can’t get any further.

“School,” I reply through gritted teeth, my heart pounding wildly with suppressed fear as I try to sidle past him. Unsuccessfully.

“Woah, I don’t think so,” Danny says threateningly, blocking our path once more.

“Move,” I growl, heart hammering so hard I can barely hear my own voice from all the blood beating in my ears, but I’m still determined not to let him take me down without a fight.

“What did you just say, Freak Iero?” Danny snarls, grabbing me by the collar of my bloodstained school shirt, making me jump and behind me, I hear Mikey gasp.

“I told you to fucking move,” I snarl back at him, despite the fact my knees are trembling and I feel almost ready to pass out with fear as those shark-like eyes bore into mine with the dark promise of brutal revenge. The increase of danger shoots another vivid injection of pumping adrenaline through my body, but somehow, instead of it reducing me to a crumpled, trembling skeleton, it fuels my new determination with reckless anger.

“No one tells me to move,” Danny whispers, tone deadly.

“Well, you’re clearly pretty stupid then, because I obviously just did,” I hear myself say, and immediately regret it as a look of pure venom flashes across his gooseberry green eyes and he tightens his grip round my collar, making it slightly difficult for me to draw a breath, but this new reckless anger is still seething through me like fire in my blood, frothing and bubbling as violently as the venom in Danny’s cold eyes

Behind us, I hear Mikey choke back another gasp, but I ignore it, just as I ignore the cold air stinging my skin, the fact my hair’s been swept out of my eyes and my injured flesh is on display, and Danny’s face threateningly close to mine, spitting and snarling. I just concentrate on the tiny little bubble of minted confidence forming inside my chest, determined not to let it go to waste.

“Oh, you are going to pay for that, you ugly faggot,” Danny hisses, grip clenching, and he draws back a fist, ready to punch me. I hold my breath, heart thumping, teeth gritted, prepared for the shattering impact.

“Stop!” a little squeak sounds from beside me.

No punch smashes the vulnerable flesh of my face; nothing touching my scarred skin, but the ripping cold of the bitter December air around us.

Uneasily, I open my eyes I hadn’t realised I’d closed to see that Danny’s attention has been snatched from me, his head is turned away from the stains he’s gouged into my face; he’s glaring with a horrible, threatening air of brutal pleasure at Mikey, who looks strangely stubborn and, completely bizarrely, a lot less scared than he did a moment ago. In fact, he’s glaring back at Danny from behind his tufts of windswept mousy hair and geeky glasses.

The effect is somewhat marred by the fact I can see his knees quivering, but he’s still got the air of someone angry and smothered with honest emotion. I suddenly feel horrible, dragging guilt tugging through my body as I look at the vulnerable form of the boy beside me in the frosty air; he’s standing up for me, someone who hasn’t exactly been nice to him, someone he hardly knows, someone messed up and sarcastic and scarred with his own flaws.

He’s standing up for me.

And he’s going to pay for it; Danny will make sure of that.

“What?” Danny asks softly, tone dangerous as he doesn’t move his eyes from Mikey. “What the fuck did you just tell me to do?”

Mikey gulps, but stares resolutely back at Danny.

“Go, Mikey,” I hiss urgently from Danny’s snare-like grip.

Mikey blinks in surprise at me, dropping his gaze from Danny’s heartless one.

“Aww, trying to save your ugly little fuck-up’s skin?” Danny sneers. “Well,” he yanks me horribly close to his face so as I can smell stale beer and cheap cigarettes and rancid power on his foul breath. “That ain’t gunna work, faggot,” he snarls.

I try and wrench my head away angrily, hating the putrid scent of cheap cigarettes and harsh aftershave on his breath that make me want to retch.

I squirm and struggle so I can turn my head sideways. Mikey is still standing stubbornly by my side, trembling slightly.

“GO,” I repeat furiously at Mikey, panicking somewhat as Danny tightens his grip further, grinning threatening at my obvious panic and writhing attempts to free myself in vain.

“I-I can’t leave you to get beaten up!” Mikey exclaims incredulously, strangely sounding the most determined and assertive since I’ve met him. He sounds almost as if he knows exactly the horrors that will await me when he departs. Anyone who knows the truth of someone like Danny’s tormenting and had an kind of human emotion would find it very difficult to leave someone almost completely helpless in his power.

But you’d have to have gone through those horrors yourself to know the full nightmare…

“You have to,” I hiss furiously at Mikey’s motionless stance, struggling wildly as if it will somehow encourage him to leave.

“I won’t,” Mikey looks close to tears for some reason; the carefully polished lenses of his glasses steaming up ominously as he looks from my struggling, helpless body from Danny’s coldly triumphant sneer.

I am starting to feel scared now. Not for myself, although I can’t really say that the prospect of being beaten into a pulp of spilled blood and broken bones before first period is even halfway finished is an appealing prediction. It’s Mikey that’s making me scared. I don’t like it when people get close to me or try and help me because when they do, they always, always get hurt.

And I don’t want Mikey to get hurt.

He’s sweet and shy and shaky, and he doesn’t deserve the horrors Danny will hound him with if he tries to stand up for me.

“Mikey, fucking go!” I shout furiously, twisting my head from Danny’s vice grip in attempt to breathe.

Danny, laughing loudly, draws back his fist once more in preparation to punch me. I brace myself once more, but again, the impact doesn’t follow.

What does is an angry shout that completely takes me off guard.

“Let him GO, you fucking looser!”

I blink and stop struggling. Danny’s fist falls as he looks up in complete shock.

Mikey is standing, seething, shaking with pure anger at my side, eyes full of a hatred I didn’t think he had within him. His eyes are almost like those of a different person’s; I’d always marvelled at the purity and innocence of them, but now they look as tainted with the horrors of reality as my own do. They suddenly remind me of someone’s; full of a broken history and pushed away memoirs, of hurt and anger and misery and the unmistakable scars that the monsters of reality always leave.

He turns to look at me, the same churning blur of complex, half-hidden memories writhing through the golden hazel of his irises, and I suddenly know exactly who they remind me of.

They remind me of Gerard’s eyes last night.

“What did you just call me?” Danny snarls in cold fury, his deadly voice slapping me from my thoughts as he dropping my collar so abruptly that I stumble back, narrowly falling over as he towers threateningly over Mikey, looking ready to kill, his chest heaving with increasing anger.

“You heard,” Mikey growls, still shaking and not backing down. “Leave Frank alone.”

“And who’s gunna make me?” Danny snorts sceptically, grabbing Mikey’s collar in a similar fashion to mine, only this time it looks, if possible, even more vicious. Anger judders through me and I start forward furiously.

“I am,” Mikey snaps, making me blink again in complete surprise.

“You?” Danny’s laughing now, the sound cold and cruel and forbidding, with no humour whatsoever to it. “You try that, geek,” his voice drops ominously. “And I’ll fucking kill you. You and Freak Iero.” His grip around Mikey’s throat tightening so as I can see the veins in my stepbrother’s neck vividly, convulsing desperately for air.


I’m about to lunge at Danny, but before I can do so, the silence hanging heavily over us while Mikey struggles desperately, looking terrified, is broken.

“You might wanna rethink that,” a quiet voice says behind Danny, who jumps slightly and whirls round. Once his thickset, beefy body has moved from obscuring my vision, the person of the voice comes clearly into view.

Black, rebellious attire. Carefully dishevelled gothic hair. Hiding eyes.

Gerard.

Danny looks completely taken aback.

“What?” he snaps angrily at Gerard to cover up for his shock, yanking violently at his grip round Mikey’s collar.

“If you hurt my brother,” Gerard growls threateningly. “I’ll make you wish you’d never been born. So don’t even think of laying a finger on him, okay?” his voice is quiet, but there’s a silently strong, steely tone to it that makes me shiver, even though I know he’s not talking to me.

Danny just stares at Gerard for a moment through narrowed eyes. Gerard refuses to bow to the venom in Danny’s vicious gaze, out-staring him so as Danny eventually has to admit defeat. Looking murderous, he lets go of Mikey, who stumbles back gratefully, gasping for air and massaging at his throat.

“Okay,” Danny whispers softly, not taking his eyes from Gerard’s defiant stance. “This once, I’ll let the little freak and the ugly geek off. Seeing as he’s new. But I’m warning you, you’re all gunna pay for this someday.”

Gerard raises his eyebrows mockingly.

Danny’s expression darkens dangerously and he throws Gerard one last cold, threatening stare. “You ugly, messed up looser,” he hisses venomously. “No one’s gunna like someone who looks like a gothic fag. Why don’t you just go slit your wrists and die?”

And with one last withering glare at Gerard’s mask-like face, Danny sets off across the now completely deserted yard in the watery sunlight, a dark, twisted shadow in the soft gold and sparkly white coating of frost.

Gerard turns to look at us for a moment, and the expression in his eyes surprises me; there’s s hint of raw hurt in there, I’m almost certain I see, but then he sweeps his raven hair from his face and his eyes are as expressionless and mask-like as ever.

“You alright, Mikes?” he asks quietly, looking seriously at the skinny, mousy haired teenager who’s gone back to trembling inside his navy blue duffel coat, his sudden burst of angry confidence apparently evaporated along with Danny’s threatening presence.

Mikey nods silently in reply.

Gerard turns to me, eyes eerily empty as he glares. “If it wasn’t for you, midget, Mikey would be just fine. This is your fault.”

Anger surges through me, red-hot needles of fury and hurt at the truth I didn’t want to admit to myself.

“Gerard, it’s not Frank’s fault,” Mikey says quietly, looking seriously at his older brother.

“How isn’t it?” Gerard asks sceptically, throwing me another glare.

“I’d have run into someone like that sooner or later,” Mikey says, buttoning and unbuttoning the same toggle on his duffel coat and not looking up at his older brother’s sceptical gaze.

“Yeah right,” Gerard snorts. “Why couldn’t you just have left so you didn’t get hurt, Mikes?”

Mikey suddenly looks annoyed. “Gerard,” he says snippily. “Would you leave your friend to get beaten up?”

Gerard suddenly looks ashamed of himself, ducking behind his gothic tangle of raven hair.

I’m stunned into silence at Mikey’s referral to me as a ‘friend’, and oddly touched that he’s standing up for me against Gerard. I smile a little uncertainly at him, and he half-smiles in return.

“Fine,” Gerard says bitterly, starting to walk towards the main entrance, Mikey at his side. I follow them a few paces behind, not really sure whether they want me to be there or not.

“But seriously, Mikes,” he looks over at his brother. “Watch out for yourself. Don’t take shit just because you happen to have taken pity on a vertically retarded elf.”

“Don’t call me that,” I snarl from behind them, furious as we push our way through the double doors to the main entrance, into the warmth of the empty corridor.

“Ooh, why not, Frankie-boy?” Gerard sniggers, ignoring Mikey’s glare. “Will it hurt your goblin-sized feelings?”

I grit my teeth shut and scowl angrily at him.

“That’s a pretty face, elfie,” he sniggers again.

“Well at least my face isn’t some kind of emotionless mask of a freak,” I snap before I can stop the words spitting from my mouth.

Gerard stops.

Mikey freezes, starting to nibble at his lip anxiously, his hazel eyes darting between me and Gerard apprehensively.

I instantly realise I’ve crossed some kind of invisible line.

Gerard just looks at me for a moment, the corridor around us uncomfortably silent.

I reply with a questioning look.

Something flashes across Gerard’s usually mask-like eyes, but he covers it before I can establish what it was.

Then he’s leaving us, walking briskly down the corridor; a streak of slim, sauntering black, his hips swinging cockily as he rakes a carefully casual hand through his hair. But his hand is shaking.

I can’t see his face, but as he grows more distant and becomes more just a distant figure nearly a whole corridor away from where I stand, I can’t help wondering if his walk is maybe less of a smug, self-satisfied strut, and more of a silent limp.

*

It’s very strange having company at school instead of just being the angry, sarcastic little punk kid with serious attitude issues who’s always alone. Of course, I’m still alone in most of my lessons, getting balls of scrunched up paper thrown uncaringly at my back along with spiked words that stick into me like knives.

And anyway, I have to stay that angry, short, messed-up little punk kid practically dripping in sarcasm and his own blood. If I’m not, everyone will see how weak and broken and vulnerable I really am.

I half managed to kid myself that school might not be so bad when I’m feeling a little more confident, but I was wrong. The teachers are all still infuriatingly patronising and sympathetic, the students either treat me as if I’m carrying some mutated and repulsive form of the plague, or as if I’m dying and should be treated with revolting amounts of sympathy. I hate it all, everything about it, from the sound of the teachers’ voices and the squeak of the whiteboard pen on the board, to the sickening stench of overcooked school dinners wafting through the swarming, claustrophobic corridors.

But lunchtime is marginally better than those previously; instead of skulking around on my own, scowling at everyone or getting beaten up, I’m sitting under one of the trees with Mikey, looking out over the vast, frozen muddy green of the sports field, shivering in the golden air and sharing a pair of headphones to listen to Wednesday 13.

I’m feeling oddly nervous about the fact in less that three hours time, I’ll be sitting in my guitar lesson. With Gerard. My stomach churns uncomfortably at the thought, filling my body with uneasy jitters, despite my determination to go.

“You okay?” Mikey asks slightly nervously, from where he’s sitting, knees pulled up to his chest, huddled into the warmth of his duffel coat, looking round as I let out yet another frustrated sigh.

“Fine,” I snap, and then instantly feel bad as Mikey’s cheeks colour and he drops his gaze to the floor, fingers fiddling nervously at the fraying laces of his grey converse.

“Sorry,” I mutter, fiddling with the harshly chopped, dying grass beside me.

“It’s okay,” Mikey mumbles quietly, ducking behind his fluffy fringe.

There’s an awkward silence. We’ve spent the majority of the lunch hour in silence, as well as break this morning; I’m still embarrassingly new at spending time with new people, and don’t really know what to say to Mikey, especially after the event of this morning and knowing that I am really not the most approachable person with my snappy tendencies. Mikey also seems like such a shy, vulnerable person and I don’t want to vent my frustrations on him

“Um, how was your morning?” I mumble, feeling idiotic and plucking harder at the grass beside me, shivering in my thin hoodie.

“Oh, it was okay,” Mikey replies, looking up fleetingly with those wide hazel eyes. Then, slightly hesitantly- “How about yours?”

I shrug dissmisively, not really wanting to think about it.

“Listen, um,” Mikey sounds nervous, and his nibbling at his lower lip again. “About what Gerard said this morning…I’m not just hanging out with you because I’ve taken pity on you or some shit like that.”

“Oh,” I duck behind my hair, not sure how to respond.

“Um, Gerard’s okay really,” Mikey sighs, his voice sounding very small as he looks out at one of the benches on the grass where Gerard’s sitting causally, arm slung round some slutty looking girl with orange and red streaked hair, laughing loudly.

I let out an unintentional snort.

“Really, he is,” Mikey mumbles, straightening his glasses and looking round seriously at me, brown eyes sincere. “He’s just…he’s been through a lot.”

“Like what?” I ask, curiosity suddenly getting the better of me.

“I can’t talk about it really,” Mikey replies, chewing at his lip.

“Oh, okay,” I say, disappointed.

There’s another silence as we both gaze out across the field to where Gerard now has his tongue stuck down the throat of the slutty, wild-haired girl.

Something similar to revulsion writhes up uncomfortably in my stomach, churning sickeningly through my innards and making me want to throw up.

“I love this song,” Mikey says suddenly, as ‘Bad Things’ comes on.

“Mmm,” I rely distractedly, somehow unable to drag my gaze from where Gerard is tonguing the scene girl on the bench, my innards writhing with something horribly uncomfortable and repulsed as I watch the scene.

A particularly uncomfortable jolt churns through my stomach, and I drop my gaze to the floor, searching for any kind of topic to strike up conversation with Mikey.

“Why did you stand up for me with Danny?” I blurt out without thinking.

Mikey blinks. “Um, this morning?”

I nod, embarrassed at my question.

“Because what he’s doing is just not right. I can’t stand watching people getting hurt,” Mikey breaks off, shaking his head wordlessly. From between strands of his straightened, mousy hair, I catch a glimpse of ghosted sorrow in his hazel eyes, not unlike the same ghosts I saw in his expression this morning, only then it was manifested as anger.

“Yeah, but you hardly know me,” I point out. “And I’m not exactly the nicest person in the world,” I add, laughing humourlessly; the sound hollow and almost bitter.

“Don’t say that,” Mikey says seriously. “I know I don’t really know you, but you remind me so much of someone…” he trails off, shaking his head and starting to shred the grass at his side with long, pale fingers similar to his brother’s.

“Who?” I ask curiously.

“Someone who got picked on just like you,” Mikey says simply. “They used to be so much like you before…” he sighs, trailing off and shaking his head, glasses reflecting the weak chill of the sun. “I guess they still are, deep down.”

*

Soft shards of weak winter sun seep through the grime-coated windows that surround the silent staircase leading to the music room, the watery rays of ghosted gold illuminating the air so as tiny little particles of dust become visible, drifting through the atmosphere like fireflies or feathers of warm snow.

My footsteps echo loudly off the grotty, peeling walls as I apprehensively ascend the stairs before me, each step closer to the top feeling more effort, until it feels almost like wading through treacle as I reach the door leading to the music classroom and stop to catch my breath, my slightly tired exhales resounding round the deserted silence of the staircase.

Everyone else has gone home; leaving the school silent and empty of the raucous, uncaring swarms of harshly laughing students. A lot of people seem to find an empty school spooky and uneasy, but it’s how I like school best. When there’s no one to stare at my injuries and judge me, when there’s no one to taunt and ridicule and hate my battered being.

I associate a silent school with relative serenity; whenever I’m hear after hours, I’m here for a music lesson, something that soothes and calms me. Somewhere I feel safe.

But now it’s all changed.

Someone else is going to be there. Someone who seems determined to make me angry and hating and seething.

I don’t know what to expect anymore.

In all honesty, I’m scared.

It’s manifesting itself as anger though; nervous, scared tentacles of anger curling round my ribcage and constricting my lungs so as it’s hard to draw a breath, red-hot needles prickling my churning stomach of dread.

I could just turn round and walk back down the stairs.

I could run away, and lose the thing I love more than the choking world.

But I’m not going to.

Instead, I take a deep, shuddering breath, grip the handle of my guitar case tightly, and step shakily into the music room, heart pounding anxiously.

It’s deserted, just discarded tables and chairs.

Nervously, palms sweating, I cross the oddly empty classroom to the little adjoining side room behind the teacher’s desk; a smaller, separate room specially for after-hours music lessons.

I glance at the clock over the whiteboard. Just after half past three.

This is it.

I take a another deep breath of the stuffy air, gripping the handle of my guitar case painfully tight, and then I grasp the door handle and go inside.




What did you think? Like I said, this was a bit of a risk, so I hope it’s okay…I’m sure you’ll all find the next chapter interesting xD so, yeah…I’d really love to know what conclusions you guys are starting to form about the lovely Way brothers after this chapter…please R&R and let me know if you have the time? I’d really appreciate feedback on this chapter (: thanks so much for reading….I love you all so much, seriously :’) will update as soon as I can (reviews help speed me along xD)!

CosmicZombie xo