gone ✧*｡ luke a.u.

47: october 21 2011

LUKE

TUESDAY, 21ST OCTOBER, 2011

Silence hung between them for a while, weighted and heavy. Luke felt as if he was being strangled, as if a rope had been tied around his throat and was being pulled tighter and tighter the more he stared at her.

Her. Ellie. She still looked the same, if a little bit more tired, her eyelids still a little bit heavy from the sedatives—her dark hair a cascade around her shoulders, those expressive eyes he had fallen for, the high cheekbones and dark, tired shadows and skin that was too pale to be healthy, stretched too tightly over her bones.

Still the same, but how different things had become.

"Luke," she whispered. A spark of panic seemed to flare in her eyes, something wild and scared; she looked around the room, to the soft insides of her arms where the tubes were taped, to the monitor that beeped every half-second with her heartbeat. They watched it together for a moment, the mountains made by her heartbeat as it spiked up, fell back down. Then she looked back at him. "Were you—there," she managed, her voice hoarse. "Before."

"No," Luke said, knowing she meant when she'd woken up, when she'd panicked. He wondered, distantly, if it would have happened had he still been in the room, if he'd never left to go with his brothers to Candee's. "It was the only time I left since it happened."

Her lips parted slightly, her eyes still trained on him as if she was enraptured with the sight of him. "You stayed? This whole time?"

Luke swallowed past the burning knot in his throat and nodded. "I couldn't . . . The thought of leaving, and coming back to you lying here, dead . . . It was too much. I didn't want to leave you again."

A shadow passed over her face; she looked away from him, towards the other side of the room. "This room feels so empty now," she said. "Each time I woke up it felt like there were hundreds of people in here. I'm not allowed to be alone. The only reason they left is 'cause you're in here but even then they're probably watching through the cameras."

"Ellie, you tried to kill yourself," Luke said, unable to mask the bite in his voice. "They're not just gonna let you walk. No one here is gonna let you die, the way you want us to."

She closed her eyes and slowly lifted her hands to rub them over her face. "Do you hate me now?" she asked softly, from behind her hands, so couldn't see her eyes.

"Yes," he said. "No. You—you broke my fucking heart, El."

Finally, finally, she looked at him then, and the look in her eyes almost shattered him all over again. "I never meant to," she whispered.

"It doesn't matter! It doesn't matter what you meant to do!" He leaned forward and grabbed her slim wrists in his hands, her skin cold as death beneath his. "You still did it. You gave up. It doesn't matter what you meant to do because I still had to run in there and find you lying there on the ground in all those pills. I thought I'd found your dead body. Nothing—nothing­—will ever be worse than the way I felt in that moment. I could feel it; I could feel my heart breaking. And not a moment has gone by since that I haven't had the image in my head of you lying there. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't make sense of what I'm feeling—whether I hate you or I love you, the guilt I feel for pushing you away that day, the hatred I feel towards myself and the—the pain of it—"

He broke off as a sob tore from his throat, his face crumpling. It was too much, all too much; he wished he could go back to that morning and take back everything he'd said to her, not let her leave that damn house until he saw a smile or fed her breakfast. He pressed his face against her hands and felt the tears slip from his eyelashes down his cheeks, pressed his thumb against the inside of her wrist and felt her pulse beat steadily, as if it was saying, Alive. Alive. Alive.