Page 196 of Chaos

Panicked hazel eyes.

And the desperate, all-consuming urge to make sure she knows he is desperately, all-consumingly in love with her.

Numbly staringat the tiled floor, I turn a wooden figurine over in my hand, again, and again, and again.

My legs ache from standing in the same position for so long, the wall behind me hard and unforgiving against my spine, but I don’t move. I don’t dare. I stand and I stare and I count the rotations in my head, and I try to ignore the gentle hum of conversation coming from the waiting room around the corner, only partially within my line of sight. The same as I’ve been doing for…

I have no idea. I have no idea how long I’ve been here. Long enough for the sun to come up, streaming in through the window at the end of the hall. Long enough for the waiting room to fill with familiar faces.

Not long enough for the phantom burn of cold metal against my forehead to recede. Nor the sting of a abused skin. Not for the memory of warm, viscous liquid gushing between my fingers to fade either, but I’m okay with that. Just like I’m okay with no one approaching me, with no one looking at me, with being alone.

I deserve it.

My fist tightens around my wooden four-leaf clover. I hold it against my chest, chin dropping so my lips brush my knuckles, my fatigue-stung eyes drifting shut.

A millisecond later, they fly open again. Heart thundering, I tilt my head back so I can stare into the shockingly bright ceiling lights in the hopes they’ll scorch the images playing on repeat behind my eyelids, erase them from my brain.

They don’t. No matter how hard I try, I can’t stop seeing it.

Him.

Finn pressing a hand to his chest, frowning when his fingertips come away tainted red. Finn dropping to the ground, blood pouring from a bullet wound and pooling on the grass. Finn in the back of an ambulance, an inch away from me, but I wasn’t allowed to touch him, I couldn’t do anything.

I couldn’t do anything, and I’d already done enough.

It’s karma, I think, how I remember those horrible images so clearly yet everything after is such a blur. The ride here, refusing to let an EMT treat my wounds, being grateful when they draped a blanket around my shoulders because it meant that I could hide my injuries from the hospital staff who greeted us on arrival, all of it is hazy. Fogged by a fine layer of disbelief, like none of it was real, like it wasn't actually happening to me.

Later, when I have my wits about me a little more, I’ll recall a nurse ushering me to the waiting room, telling me to sit, and staying on my feet instead. I’ll remember numbly wiping my stinging hands, soaked in the blood of another, on the tank top already stained with my own blood, and fumbling for my phoneand hitting the speed dial. I don’t think I’ll ever remember what I said to my sister—I’m not sure I actually said anything beyond the name of the hospital—but I do remember her flying through the emergency room doors.

The relief… I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.

My hands are clean now, the injured one wrapped since I couldn’t hide that burn, and I changed my shirt, but Lux is still here. Eliza too. Jackson came and went hours, minutes, who knows how long ago, and I think he tried to talk to me. I think he sat with our sisters for a little while, held their hands the way they hold each others now, helped soothe the pain I caused.

I close my eyes again before realizing my mistake.

When they re-open, though, it quickly becomes clear I should’ve just sucked it up and suffered through the assailment of memories.

A couple rushes into the waiting room. Before they even make a beeline for Lux, I know who they are. The woman, tall and fit and distraught, looks exactly like her son. The man doesn’t have the same lean build, he’s stockier and shorter, but there’s no mistaking the resemblance there either.

Finn’s mother embraces my older sister with the kind of familiarity that makes me wince. Warm and comforting and emotional, tears in both of their eyes while mine are dry as a bone because I haven’t cried, not once. I didn’t cry out when I realized what had happened, I didn’t weep over his body like the main character in a movie, because there’s something so very wrong with me. That’s just how fucked up I am. I can’t summon a single tear for the man cut open on an operating table or rotting in a fucking morgue for all I know, who took a goddam bullet for me,becauseof me, who—

The mirror image of the obsidian eyes I know so well flick in my direction, and I take my first step in hours, almost tripping over my own feet in my rush to move out of sight around thecorner. Like a pathetic coward, I hide from the approaching footfalls, willing my legs toworkand take meaway.

But they won’t. They can’t.

And it’s a small, sad miracle that the person that rounds the corner is someone I can just about stand the sight of.

“How ya doing, kid?”

I don’t respond. What am I going to say?Just fine, thanks?

As Lux rests against the wall, her shoulder brushes mine. My uninjured one, yet I still flinch as it burns from the simple, brief contact. I itch at nothing, frowning at my hand, and that’s when I spot the flecks of dried blood stubbornly clinging to the underside of my nails.

Curling it into a fist, I drop my hand.

My sister tries again. “Can I get you something?”

A drink. A meeting. Self-control.

---