two || ✓

twelve || scars left

"scars left on my heart formed patterns in my mind..."

-

Zac had, in fact, found Hayley that day, and Taylor is forever grateful. Because if he hadn't found her, and if he hadn't found her in that time, Taylor wouldn't have survived. He would have died, lost his soul and his heartbeat and his life to the darkness that would have taken Hayley.

And Taylor cannot possibly bear to think about it alone any longer without giving himself up to it after all, and so he lifts his head from his hands and his body from the uncomfortably rough chair that every hospital waiting room seems to have, ignoring the pain anyone using it would already be going through. And he forces his way into Hayley's room, deciding he'd rather deal with the resentment the love of his life feels for him and that he had avoided for long enough than deal with the thoughts in his own head of how he had failed this exact girl.

Outside the hospital, falling rain patters along the windowpanes and calms Taylor's ever-troubled mind for fleeting moments. And when he enters the room in which he knows he will lose all serenity, he finds Zac already beside Hayley's bed. The window beside him is slightly open, but he doesn't seem to notice the small droplets falling from outside the window and onto him, too preoccupied with the girl lying blank-faced on the hospital bed, staring up and away from all of them.

"Hayley, God, no. . . you can't just—" Taylor is silent as he walks in, though he notices he does cause an interruption in the conversation that had been occurring.

He says nothing about the newfound silence that greets him when he enters, or the way the previously speaking man turns to him and away from the still silent girl. He says nothing about the beanie Zac loves scrunched violently in his tight fists, or the bandages wrapping Hayley's fragile arms. He says nothing about the fact that Hayley has bruises he's never noticed before, and a black eye that does not typically accompany a suicide attempt on bleeding wrists and critical veins. He walks over to the window and passes by them, and he says nothing about the heaviness in the air or the anger and hatred that he cannot quite place or the tears already formed in his eyes — and only his.

He feels the water hit his face as he stares out the frosted glass of the window, failing its one job of keeping the raindrops outside sooner than in, and so he closes it to allow it to stop being useless and a failure and a hindrance rather than any help. And he grips his hands on the windowpane as he feels his tears start to fall faster than the now faraway rain, realizing that even a creaky hospital window that some sick child probably forgot to close can still have more use than him.

Zac stares silently at Taylor as the crying man struggles to breathe or keep himself upright, hands clenched dangerously tight on the mocking window's edge.

"Hayley." He cannot keep his voice steady, but what is the point? He has already failed her — no need to pretend to be strong anymore. She knows the truth.

Feeling like his feet might fail him at any given moment, Taylor finally steps away from the tormenting sight of the falling rain and sits beside the bed. He cannot bring himself to look at either of the two, the man staring at him with sad eyes and the girl staring at the roof with dry one.

Leaning forward, Taylor rests his chin on clenched hands — fumbling with his fingers, running them through his hair, scratching dry skin with sharp nails. This is the girl he loves, the only person with which he has ever felt truly comfortable. And now, he cannot even look at her.

"Hayley. . ." Something catches in his throat, and as he finally does look up and feel his eyes meet the dried red leaking through the white on Hayley's arms, he cannot tell whether it is a sob or vomit. "Fuck, Hayley, I—"

He takes a deep breath. He knows what he wants to say; he knows what he should say; and he could not possibly know which would be best. But none of it matters, because Taylor eventually finds that he cannot bring himself to say any of it, any of the crushing words. Anything at all.

Before him, Hayley still has not moved. She has not looked at him since before she was found bleeding to death in the studio's bathroom by Zac and soon after Taylor, and she doesn't look at the now-quiet man beside him either. He cannot bring himself to look at the steady way her eyes bore into the ceiling, strong enough to burn through it and let the rain fall down on them all.

He cannot speak. He cannot explain himself, tell her the words that might have prevented this, or tell her the words that might keep her going. He cannot do any of it, and so, he says instead, "Why?"

Hayley blinks. The fiery holes in the ceiling flicker.

"Why?" He feels as if he might sob, but he is in no position to. "Why?"

He does so, anyway. And that suddenly, he is crying, and he cannot see through his tears. The sobs take over his body, rack his shaky chest and trembling arms as he feels nothing but a steady darkness spreading across him. He notices Zac lean closer to him, as if to reach out, but he eventually just drops his head in his hands. And Taylor still cannot see through the tears and his hands and the darkness, but he sees enough to realize that Hayley turns to him.

And for the first time in thirty four days and eighteen hours — as Taylor has steadily tracked — Hayley shows something other than anger, frustration, hatred for the world and everything in it. But as Taylor grasps so desperately onto the sadness, remorse, pure suffering and regret she shows, he cannot tell whether it is much better.

He cannot stop sobbing long enough to ask her again, but she knows the question. She will answer or she won't, and nothing Taylor could do would change that. He can do nothing besides sit here beside her, begging himself, to no avail, to  stop fucking crying.

But she does answer. And he swears he feels his heart spark so intensely, almost enough to cause him to do exactly what he had been attempting, when she speaks. Though it is barely above a whisper, so quiet that he is sure Zac couldn't have heard it either and he has to strain his own ears to hear it, she says it. And this is what he holds onto after they discharge her from the hospital, and after she lashes out at them just the same as before as if nothing at all had changed, and after the others go from pity to fragility to remorse to growing more and more tired of her and her ways once again.

The words linger in his mind, force him to keep going through all of his own exhaustion and exasperation and desperation. They haunt him, as he finds they cannot be apart from his waking conscience any longer than a breath can from his lungs. And he decides he must rid them from both of their minds, and this is how he will bring her back, this is how he will find Hayley again, no matter how long it takes.

"I didn't know what else to do."

-

this chapter was vital for me to write, and one of the heaviest ones i have ever written — for blatant reasons that you can understand to all the other unknown, underlying ones that can only be revealed in the implied darkness that surrounds it. and though it was heavy, and though it was hard, it came easily, naturally. or maybe it is not in spite of it, but because of it.

i'm not sure. but we'll find out in three chapters.