The Sun And The Stars •completed•

No Serenity, No Silence

"Did you really leave because you got yelled at?" Eli asked after a long silence, the car pulled up outside the hospital. "I don't expect you to understand," Craig sighed, hands gripping the steering wheel, "We were young, far too young to have a kid." He shook his head and looked over at the boy beside him. "I was scared, but I took advantage of the situation... I know what I did." He explained. 

Eli still refused to look at him, instead staring blankly out the window. "Do you?" He asked, not bothering to wait for a response before getting out and slamming the door behind him. Slowly, Eli heard the car pull away. His heart raced as he walked in and went to the front desk. A large, bespectacled  woman sat at the desk, typing away at her computer. 

"Excuse me?" 

"What do you need?" 

"I'm looking for someone. She was brought in by an ambulance, she-"

"Name?" The woman interjected, staring up at him like she was already bored with their interaction. "Audrey Kepler, but they didn't ask for her information, so-" The woman was already typing, her hands seeming to fly across the keyboard in one swift motion. 

"She's in Emergency Care." The woman interrupted again, and seeing the confused expression on Eli's face, she elaborated, "She had a Medical Emergency Card on her person." 

"C-Can I see her?" 

The woman snorted in response to Eli's clueless questions. "She's being treated. You can see her if she gets into Recovery." 

"What? What's going on?" Eli asked, feeling his voice getting croaky again. 

"This is a computer, not a camera, hon." The woman retorted. She looked Eli up and down, noting his disheveled hair and blood stained clothes. "Who are you, exactly?" She asked suspiciously.

"Her boyfriend." Eli responded without thinking. He swore he saw the woman roll her eyes before shifting in her chair. "Look, find a place to sit, and I'll call you when I've got any more information. What's your name?" She glanced at the people who were starting to line up behind him with contempt. "Eli Davis." Eli said quietly, watching her scribble it down. 

She shooed him away with a flick of her hand. "Go on, now. There's a line." Eli backed up and looked around. The waiting room was full. His heart continued to race as his throat closed up. There were too many people, and he couldn't sit among them and cry. He just couldn't. 

He wanted to run outside, find a quiet place without all the coughing and crying and that horrid, foreboding hospital smell. But he had to stay. He had to stay for Audrey. After a bit of aimless walking, Eli found himself in front of a steel door leading to the stairs. 

After slipping into the stairwell unnoticed, he walked up, unsure of where he was going. Once he reached the top, he leaned over the black railing, staring down the small, square abyss in the middle of the spiraled steps. Alone, surrounded by the grey concrete, Eli felt himself get lost in his emotions again. 

He at down on the cold floor and cried tears of both anger and sadness, of both mixed together. A million words jumbled around his brain. From the ominous way that the woman at the desk had said "If she gets into recovery", to the screams of his Step Father, to the cold tone of his sister telling him that it was his fault. 

Everything scrambled together to become a hazardous cloud. A cloud of every wrong he'd ever committed. He soaked in the cloud for a while, waiting for it to become background noise, as it often did. "What does depressive disorder mean?" Phoebe had asked him. Eli knew now that this, right here- this is what it meant.