PEARL

TWELVE

TRACK 12
AWAY FROM THE NOISE
NOAH KITTINGER

listen im sorry it's the longest one yet lmaoooo and that's fucking hilarious bc it was meant to be a filler but honestly i really really love this chapter idk why

pls comment! n stuff! i know it's long!
i love hearing what you guys think!!

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ROWAN and the rest were about to bid the lily-padded lake goodbye by passing through its encircling trees when Micah caught up to them, grass-stained sweater in his left hand and reaching for the one Rowan hung back to hold out for him with the right. As he caught his breath and copied everyone by crunching twigs beneath his muddied sneakers, Micah ran his thumb over Rowan's smooth white knuckles, which were even smoother in comparison to his own Dove-damaged skin.

Micah's touch may been rock-face rough, as it always was along Rowan's inner thighs, but it was as warm and protective as cotton sleeves on bruised skin and Rowan wouldn't trade it for the world.

"How long you reckon we got?" Micah asked him, nodding his head towards the duck-egg blue pocket of Ro's sweats that housed their disfigured bobby pin. "You're good at guessing."

Even though dawn didn't seem to have left Micah's skin, which was golden hour glowing despite the drugs and his hangover, Rowan figured that it had to be approaching six in the morning. That left them with an ample window of forty-five minutes to unpack his brother's bag, dump it behind the bins for him to collect after visiting Ro that afternoon and return the remaining meds inside it to the exploited store cupboard before the hospital staff rolled out of bed.

"Long enough," Rowan smiled, both Micah's dawn-warm hand being in his and the last of the pseudo-molly in the body that had only just begun to be kind to his brain (all of because of Ryan and his difference to their parents) softening any usual sharp thought of needles and no one turning up in the visiting room. Both made Ro feel as feather-light as Lily looked up ahead, with her dripping white dress and star-bright curls floating about her far more than those of the other two girls.

The billowing of Lily and Ida's nightdresses in the morning breeze took Rowan back to the very first time the group had broken out of the hospital, on a Thursday night two months ago, in the days that shadowed Rowan's arrival and led up to Nicole's. Surprisingly, he, Micah, Nate and Lily hadn't originally pulled their stunt to get high behind Highgate's red brick walls, but to set fire to a nightdress identical to Ida's that had rather insensitively been put on Rowan's pillow the day he arrived, and had been shut away in his bottom drawer ever since. Seeing as recent events at the time had included Micah and Rowan's first frosted-window kiss and Ryan's first smuggling of Ro's shots, Micah came up with the bright idea of asking Ryan to also bring him a lighter on his next visit (not initially for the purpose of fuelling the weed addiction Ryan would later enable), while Lily came up with an unpopular way of using Nurse Winterson's caught eye to everyone's advantage.

After Ryan's black bag tactic, the group's escape and their lake-side arson had proved successful, which Micah considered to be his and Rowan's first date, they decided to do the same thing weekly, only with less fire and more drugs – every Thursday night, in commemoration of their first victory.

Two victories, in Rowan's case, seeing as remembering the smell of the burning pink fabric still brought about the tooth-showing smile that was seen once in a moon as blue as Micah's lighter.

"It's so lovely and cold," Lily called over her curl-dusted shoulder. "Pretty and cold like a crystal."

She began humming a tune that Rowan didn't know while wiping liquor and lip gloss from her mouth, still looking as white and light as a swan feather as she danced across the frozen forest floor with bare bridal-colored feet and morning-blue eyes to music nobody but her could hear. As she swayed petal-like in the wind, she held out her hands, the five fingers of one drooping like snowdrops and the others wrapped around the bottle she had only just finished draining. Its glass sparkled in what must've been the golden sheen of her halo hair, seeing as there was little to no sun shining so early in the mystified morning of what was likely going to be another gray day anyway.