PEARL

EIGHTEEN

TRACK 18
BOYS DON'T CRY
THE CURE

everyone's gonna Love this one

🚬

MICAH's worry didn't lessen in the unsurprisingly dim light of a new day.

If anything, it got worse, because he would be on the other side of Highgate's spiked iron bars in under twenty-four hours and Rowan still hadn't spoken to him since storming off the previous morning.

Not properly, at least.

That, and the sick and tired air hanging around him didn't seem to have cleared in the slightest. The deepened bags under the green eyes Micah cherished as much as the memory of holding his little siblings for the first time and what the gold cross he always ran over his bottom lip when he was anxious – now included – symbolised suggested that Ro hadn't slept much, and on top of that, Micah was pretty sure that he'd been in the broken-windowed bathroom for the seventh morning in a row.

(He hated seeing him like this, but most of all, he hated how useless it made him feel. He may have helped Rowan with his t-shots ever since their smuggling had started, but he hadn't been able to make his sickness any better over the past week. Rowan hadn't made that any easier, though, by refusing to let anyone approach one of the many nurses Nate and now Ida seemed to have countless bones to pick with, to either ask them on his behalf for medicine or a check-up at the infirmary.)

Not that Micah would truly know if either of those things had been the case, because he and Rowan hadn't shared a bed for two nights running – an occurrence as rare as a moon that would never be blue enough to outdo how Rowan's revival of cold shoulders and clamshell attitude (along with Lily's mystery illness, relayed by Nate to Micah and Ida) was making the former feel.

Naturally, he would've curled up next to Rowan in a heartbeat whether they were fighting or not, but he hadn't been given the chance. Rowan had stayed shut up in his room for the rest of Thursday, and hadn't unlocked his door to seek out Micah for his shot (although admittedly, this was understandable, seeing as there was little to no doubt in Micah's mind that the last one was responsible for how ill he had been feeling over past seven days), let alone to come sleep in his bed.

The latter had made Micah hurt much more than it had worry, because the moments he and Ro spent together were like diamond dust now that time was limited and mercilessly ticking away.

And yet, however much the wasted hours had made him ache, Micah had taken Nate's advice and backed off. He'd only tried Ro's unyielding door handle twice, tried knocking and asking him to come out once, then retreated to the communal room to flit between worrying himself into a banging headache (which Lily had tried to make better by weaving invisible garlands of unspecified flowers into his hair) and sloping off to smoke the remainder of the weed Ryan had snuck in for him under the broken bathroom window on his own, less due to the addiction that trying to calm his increasingly compulsive tendencies had left him with and more in an attempt to take the edge off of his self-shredding nerves and the looming prospect of waking up in a more comfortable but colder bed for many mornings to come, seeing as Rowan wouldn't be by his side for God knew how long.

All that anxiety had swelled like a never-healing hot water burn upon leaving Lily and Nicole on the same couch and catching sight of Rowan in the hallway at the start of that afternoon, presumably going to meet Ryan (and pick up another shot he wouldn't use) and looking as concerning as he had the day before – a sight that Micah had burnt onto the backs of his eyelids, regardless of whether Rowan had pushed him away, because for all he knew, it could've been the last time he'd seen him.