I was woken up with Andrea screaming and bursting through the door.
"She's gone ape shit!"
Confused and half-awake, I sat up.
"What?"
"She took all my shit and locked herself up in the bathroom!"
My head whipped to the side where Angel should have been lying in and sleeping but the sheets were cold and empty. I got up, following Andrea as she ran back to her room just as Jude was running out of his with Stella behind him.
"What happened?" he asked, panicked.
No one had to say anything. We just listened.
"Shut up! Shut up!" we heard her scream. "Go away! Go away! Fuck you! Leave me alone!"
We heard a crash and something breaking. And then she screamed.
What the fuck is happening?
Jude reacted immediately. "Angel?" he called frantically, banging his fist against the door. "Little Angel, open the door. It's Jude."
She screamed again. A long painful cry. It clawed at my skin.
Jude dropped to his knees, an ear pressed to the door, his face a picture of horror and panic.
"Little Angel... open the door, sweetheart. Open the door. Let Jude in," he urged in a consoling voice.
"Jude..." she sobbed. "They won't go away. They keep hurting me. What did I do?" she cried.
His eyes screwed shut and he gripped the door knob, forcibly trying to open it.
"What did you do, little Angel?" he fired back the question to her.
"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know!" she cried, a banging at the door coming repeatedly.
"Don't hurt yourself!" Jude immediately said.
"It hurts," she cried. "They won't go away. I tried. I tried."
She screamed again, the sound of it piercing my chest more than my ears. I stared, horrified and confused.
What is this? Why is this happening?
"Ssshhh… I'm right here," Jude soothed. "We're okay. We're okay."
For a moment, all we heard was her sobs.
"We're okay," she echoed. "We're okay," she said, crying so hard it was becoming harder to listen to her. "We're okay."
"We're okay," Jude repeated, looking relieved. "Breathe, little Angel. Count to ten."
"One," she said, choking the word out. "Two."
There was a pause. She went on crying. Crying so hard that I couldn't just stand there anymore.
I started for the door but Jude held out a trembling hand, shaking his head. I pursed my lips, looking at the door, waiting for anything, but the sound of her crying was all that we heard.
Fuck this.
"Angel?" I called and her crying stopped for a moment. "Baby, what's wrong?" I asked, trying to catch up.
When she came back to bed last night, she was okay. She was okay. What happened?
"Everything," I heard her broken voice say. "Everything's wrong!"
I didn't know what was happening behind that door, but it sounded familiar. It sounded like the time she had torn her room apart in a fit of rage.
I pushed Jude aside and with one solid kick, I broke the door open and found her breaking the mirrors surrounding the room. She was hitting and kicking them. Trying to pull them off the walls while she screamed.
I knew two things to do when she gets like this.
1. Don't touch her
2. Wait it out
I threw that away and went for her, putting my arms around her from behind and trying to restrain her as she kicked and screamed.
"Calm down. Calm down. It's me, baby," I whispered.
"Get away from me! Stop touching me!" she screamed, kicking at the floor.
"Stop it! You're hurting yourself!"
"Fuck you! Leave me alone! Go away!" she screamed, trying to get out of my hold but I kept my arms firm.
She reeked of alcohol, that much was easy to catch. And when I took a glance at her face, her eyes, it was like looking at someone else. I've never seen her like this. I've seen her drunk and angry before, but not this. That was when I realized I was completely out of my depth.
I pinned her on the floor, putting all my weight onto her and holding her arms, ignoring how her hands were covered in blood.
"Look at me!" I yelled through her screaming, shaking her. "Fucking look at me!"
She wasn't listening. She just kept screaming, telling me to get off. To leave her alone. That it hurt and she needed to make it go away. In a desperate effort, I dragged us both to the shower stall, turning it onto the lowest temperature.
Freezing jets of water rained down on us from three different directions. Piercing my skin. I ignored it, holding her tightly as I leaned my back against the wall.
"Ssshhh. Calm down, baby," I murmured, locking my legs around her while holding wrists. "Come back to me."
She stopped screaming and went back to crying, her struggling became weaker until eventually stopping.
"It hurts. It hurts," she sobbed.
"Where? Tell me. I'll make it go away."
She shook her head, her hand clutching her chest. "Inside me. Everything. It won't go away."
I took a steadying breath, ignoring the scent of cigarettes and alcohol in her. Ignoring the broken shards of mirror and bottles in the room. Ignoring the white powder and pills littered on the sink. Ignoring the blood on the floor and the walls. I ignored everything. I had to or it would have scared the shit out of me.
This was more than what I bargained for, I knew. But I ignored that. I ignored the alarm bells ringing in my head as she mumbled incomprehensibly and sobbed uncontrollably. I ignored everything for her because she needed me and no matter how much my head told me to get the fuck out of there, I went into the dark side of Angel Lastor. Far more darker than what I had ever dared to imagine.
"Why does it hurt?" I asked.
She kept shaking her head, doing it repeatedly as she trembled in my arms.
"I don't know."
I closed my eyes briefly, taking a deep breath. "How do I make it stop?"
"Don't know."
She was out of her head. Or way inside. So deep inside I couldn't reach her.
"Let's play a game."
"Don't want to," she protested.
"Do it for me," I pleaded. "I need you to come back now, okay?"
She whimpered, clutching her head. "Can't."
"You can," I said softly. "It's easy. Just follow my lead."
She nodded, biting her lip so hard it was bleeding. I ignored that too.
"Turn around."
I loosened my hold on her, enough for her to move. She hesitated for a moment but slowly, she turned and straddled either side of me. What I saw when I looked at her face ripped me apart. Her wall was gone and I could see her so clearly. She was in such agony and I didn't know what to do with it, but I knew I had to do something.
"Put your arms around me."
Carefully, she slid her arms around my neck. I embraced her, placing a soft kiss on her shoulder.
"Kiss me."
A sob broke out of her and she shook her head.
"Kiss me, Angel."
She brought her bleeding lips to mine and I kissed her softly, trailing my lips all over her face.
"Come back to me," I murmured. "I need you to come back, Angel."
"I'll hurt you," she whispered.
"You won't. You would never hurt me."
She shook her head, pulling away again. "I will. I always hurt people. I don't want to hurt you."
I closed my eyes, not bearing to see her like this anymore.
"Let's sleep. Do you want to sleep?" She shook her head. "What do you want to do?"
"Be with you."
I let out a breath, her words tearing through my chest. Be with me. She just wanted to be with me. I can give her that.
"Okay," I said, pressing my face into her neck. "I'm here. I'll be with you."
She moved closer to me, holding me tighter, as if she was afraid I'd leave. God, what's happening to her?
"Don't go. Promise me you won't leave me too," she mumbled, pleading in a hush voice.
"I'm not going anywhere," I promised.
I felt her smile as she buried her face in my neck.
Worth it. She's worth it.
We stayed that way for a long time. I was aware the others were watching us from outside the room, but no one dared to come inside. Almost as if they were afraid of stepping into her darkness.
After a while, the freezing cold water was becoming unbearable and we were both shaking. I slowly got to my feet and I felt her arms tighten around me.
"I'm not leaving," I assured her immediately.
She relaxed and I carefully walked out of the bathroom, carrying her in my arms. They were watching us, their eyes wide and wary. Angel hid from them and buried her face against my neck, whispering how she didn't want to see it. I didn't ask what it was.
She wouldn't let me go when I tried to put her to bed and I had to assure her that I just needed to change her in dry clothes. When I told her I needed to get some medicine to tend to her injuries, she started yelling. Saying things about how I was a liar and I was going to leave her too. That I was going to throw her away too. That I was like everyone else. She said a lot of things. Things that didn't make any sense, but I knew, they held a deeper meaning.
Against better reasoning, I didn't tend to her injuries and just laid beside her, holding her till she fell asleep. I stayed for a few more minutes to make sure she was fully asleep before I went out of the room to get the other firstaid kits in the suite.
I ignored Jude's questions. The idiot was useless. He couldn't even look at her when I showed him her unconscious body filled with cuts from her hysterical fit.
"Take care of her," he just said, refusing to look at her still. "Don't let her out of the room when she wakes up."
I scoffed. "She's not a prisoner."
"No, but she's unstable."
I wanted to hit him.
"She's your fucking sister and you won't even look at her," I hissed lowly, trying to keep my voice down.
He turned away. "I can't look at her, Rick."
I shook my head in disbelief. "How long are you going to live in denial, man?" I spat. "She needs you. You can't help her if you're doing it behind a closed door. That's not how it fucking works."
He glared at me as if I had offended him. I bet.
"Just because she let you in, doesn't mean you've got an all express pass into her life," he bit out. "I've dealt with this longer than you have so don't misjudge me. You don't even know what's happening to her. I do, and it's killing me that I can't make it stop."
"Yeah? What is happening to her?" I stepped closer to him. "Where did all that shit come from? Why is she like this?"
He closed up immediately. His guard came back up as he looked away.
"You'll know when she tells you. It's not my place."
"So now you know where your place is?" I scoffed. "You're full of crap, Golden Boy. You probably don't even know what's happening to her either."
He gave me another glare but I didn't back down.
"She had a breakdown. That happens more often than you think. She drinks and gets high to escape from everything, but this time, she went overboard. She drank too much and took too much. She probably blacked out too and won't remember a single thing that happened," he spat, his voice deovid of emotion. "You want to know why she's like this?" He closed the distance between us, glaring down at me. "She's shown you everything. There's nothing else that needs to be said. Just need to stop denying what you already know."
* * *
I sat on a chair beside the bed, watching Angel as she combed her hair. She's been doing it for the past half hour while staring at the wall, a small smile on her lips.
She's been awake for nearly two hours now and after asking for a comb, all she's done was get into these nonsensical spiels about life and the suffering that it gives us. She had asked for Andrea a few minutes ago and they whispered in French for a while before the girl left and came back with a small purse. And then they went to the bathroom. I tried not to wonder what they did in there.
"Pity, isn't it?" she mumbled.
She was staring at her feet now, an intent look in her eyes as if she was engrossed with the blood staining the gauze wrapped around her foot. She had cut herself from head to toe with all the broken mirrors and glasses in the bathroom, and I had to stitch her injuries without any form of anesthesia because she wouldn't go to a hospital.
"We expose ourselves only to be hurt. We let our guards down. Strip off the walls preventing the world from touching us and all we get is pain," she said, her voice hush. "The world has nothing to offer but pain. All it does is bleed us dry. Take everything until the very last drop. The very last piece of life inside of us. And then when there's nothing left, we become nothing. We lose our lives before we are even dead. It's a pity. How life itself could be the reason why we lose our lives."
She dipped a finger into the wound on her foot, pressing her finger into it so firmly that blood started to spread on the gauze. I curled my hands into fists to prevent myself from holding her down. I didn't want to touch her. Or even talk. I was afraid of doing the wrong thing.
She pulled off the bandage on her scarred calf. A broken piece of mirror had dug into it earlier and blood slowly gushed out of the woun as she trailed her finger along her skin, forming a trail of blood as she wrote her first name. A name didn't really know nor have heard anyone call her, apart from her father. Vivien.
"You're hurting yourself," I said, forcibly restraining the urge to scream at her. "Please, stop."
She lifted her head to look at me, a deep intensity in her eyes catching me off guard. It seemed as if her eyes were a pool of liquid silver. Heated and threatening to burn me.
"Pain isn't a bad thing," she said, smiling, "It's a reminder that we are still alive."
I sighed, shaking my head in dismay. "You're high, aren't you?" I finally spat out my suspicion.
She often talked like this when she was high.
She chuckled, her lashes fluttering softly as her smirk appeared. That Angel Lastor smirk that no one could imitate. It wasn't so much about the smile itself, it was what hid behind it. And so much was hidden behind that smile.
"It's the only way to live," she murmured. "To feel the pleasure that comes with being in pain. Pain isn't a choice. But pleasure is. I choose pleasure and dismiss pain. I ignore the pain simply because I cannot make it go away. It's a better way of living. There's no such thing as conclusion in life. Death is the only end. As long as we live, nothing ends. Pain is perpetual. It is not a choice to feel or not to feel it. It's a matter of if it's all you feel."
She was talking in circles and riddles. The whole deep profound bullshit that I used to think was her way of embodying the character of what people expected her to be. The mysterious Angel Lastor and all that nonsense. It only made me think she was weird before. Before, when she was merely an idea in my head. But now, she exceeded whatever I could have ever imagined.
I've only recently realized that her words were facts, hidden underneath flowery bullshit. Made people wonder what she meant. Dug deeper into its philosophical integrity when all along she had been blunt.
She was saying, in the simplest form of it, that she'd rather live in the pleasure of a lie than feel the pain of truth.
"Why are you in pain?" I asked, humoring her.
Her smile grew sad, although the more I knew her, the deeper I got into the darkness she dwelled in, the more I realized she had always been sad. I just never saw it. I couldn't see beyond what she chose to show me.
"The why's are always the hardest questions to answer," she said, sounding amused. "Why am I in pain?" She chuckled. "It should be why am I bearing the pain," she said, laughing inwardly. "But that question is also as hard. Why do you ask? Do you care?"
I frowned. "Of course I care."
She bit her lip, lifting a hand and gesturing for me to come closer. I obliged, sitting beside her on the bed. She smiled, brushing her fingers over my cheek and leaving a trail of blood on my skin.
"Pain has always been a part of me. I don't know a life without it. When I met you, I finally saw what it was like," she mumbled, her thumb trailing back and forth my lower lip. The copper tang of the blood seeping into my mouth made feel sick. "You didn't show any pain. It was so fascinating. How at peace you were. I envied you so much.You made me want to die. That's why I tried to kill myself in my bathroom while you were asleep. Maybe in death I could finally feel peace."
I stiffened, my eyes widening at that knowledge.
"But now, you make me want to live. To be better. To be deserving of you so you can love me and not be ruined by it," she went on, so high I was sure she wasn't hearing herself. "Why am I in pain?" she repeated the question. "I'm in pain because of you. Because you make me want to live. Because it hurts that I can't let you love me. It's wrong and it hurts that loving me is wrong. I want it to be right. So much. To be good for you. That's why I'm in pain. But I bear it for you. Any pain would be bearable as long as it's for you."
I clutched her hand as it held my cheek. My head was swimming. The different sides of Angel Lastor leaving me reeling.
"But if the pain is from you, I don't think I'd bear it," she said, shaking her head. "I'd die if you hurt me. Do you understand, Frederick?"
I sucked in a shaky breath, nodding. "I think I do."
She smiled. "You make me want to love, do you know that?"
I moved closer to her. "So love, Angel."
She frowned. "I can't."
I closed my eyes, feeling defeated. "Why not?"
"Because loving demands a heart to be given," she murmured. "I cannot take yours because I don't deserve it and I cannot give you mine, it's broken. What good could that be for you?"
I let out a harsh breath, opening my eyes. "I'll fix it."
She shook her head. "It will only hurt you. I know, I tried. I tried to fix it. To make it whole again. It hurt too much. You don't know how much," she whispered, her voice breaking. "Don't love me, Frederick. Don't waste your heart on me. I don't deserve it."
"What happened to you?" I asked desperately.
She smiled. It was one of her beautiful ones but I knew, deep down, the more beautiful her smile was, the more painful it was for her to make it.