Ordinary Life - The Weeknd

A/N: if i see any thea slander in this chapter, i'm revoking your rights. this is a girl with androphobia seeing murder for the first time!!

THEA'S POV:

Death had never been a prominent figure in my life.

He was quiet, his cold lips sewn together by the final word of his subjects. In fact, in my eighteen years of living, I'd hardly noticed his presence at all. He was a mere ripple, a shift in the air when I walked into a hospital; a harsh whisper when I passed the crumbling gravestones at a cemetery; a brush along the nape of my neck when I heard of a girl's father passing in an accident just two blocks away from school. My family members having been kept safe from his wrath, thoughts of Death didn't possess me often nor worry me in my state of blissful ignorance.

What I didn't expect was to find him standing in front of me on a Sunday morning, a stain against the warm, pulsing sun.

My ears rang as I stared up at him.

At the knife in his hand.

At the blood smeared across his still, tattooed fingers.

A warmth spread over my lungs and tunnelled through my ears, blocking out his voice as he spoke to me, said words I didn't wish to hear. But it didn't block out the feeling of his hands as he knelt down in front of me, knife somewhere in the leaves, and cradled my face. They were cold. I didn't recognise them. They were someone else's. A man wearing Synn's face, his sharp, chiselled cheekbones and his swimming blue eyes knelt before me, but I didn't recognise him.

My gaze floated from the figure in front and switched to the body behind him. To the blood spilling lavishly from his neck and painting the leaves and twigs with messy fingers. I never thought it would be so... red. For it to be so vivid. A liquor of life emptying from the man's mouth as he lay dying. Was it supposed to be so red, so energetic as it flowed through the leaves towards me? Was there supposed to be so much of it?

No, of course not.

It wasn't supposed to be like that.

It wasn't supposed to taste like that.

"He's... dead."

The words glided from my tongue with no meaning behind them.

"He's dead," I whispered and stared at my world holding me tight, his strong fingers grasped around my jacket. "He's dead. You killed him."

Silence swallowed the forest whole but even then it was hungry. It came for Synn's throat, rendering him speechless for the first time I had seen him. Even though he could be quiet, his eyes were always speaking: murmuring words of comfort or a whisper of cold, flaming anger. But, for the first time in my life, Synn was silent. His eyes said nothing. He simply stared with a blue, empty gaze, emptier than the glassy marbles in the face behind him.

"You... killed him."

My vision blurred and I shook my head. A tear trickled down my cheek. I licked it away and shook my head again, blinking widely at the mess around us.

"You killed him," I whispered hoarsely. "You killed him. You killed him. You killed him."

The tears continued to fall. My face grew so wet, I became unsure of what was blood and what was water. Whatever was in my mouth all tasted the same and I swallowed it, my chest and throat throbbing from the effort. An aching pain speared through me in that moment and I physically reeled, clutching my chest. I hopelessly grasped in search of what was wounding me. There was nothing. An excruciating band of agony was ripping my body apart but there was nothing.

When I felt Synn's hands again, electricity powered through me. I jerked away from him. My eyes were wild, no longer a part of me.

"You killed him. He's- He's-"

Tears leaked hotly down my face and I grasped my shirt again, struggling to force air into my body. I needed to get out of here. I needed to escape. The trees were closing in and my vision was a pool of blood and tears. Red was in my lungs. I could feel it swimming.

Synn reached for me again and my eyes widened.

"Stay away from me!" I shrieked but I could feel my throat closing up, my jaw quivering as I struggled for air.

"Thea, you need to breathe."

"No!" I forced in a desperate attempt to keep him away from me, but his bloody hand was already reaching for the side of my neck and he was pulling me straight into him. "No! Let go of me! You killed him! You're a murderer! Murderer!"

I thrashed in his hold like an animal snagged in a hunter's net. His hands wouldn't release me and I cried loudly, achingly, but he refused to hear. He refused to let go. As I threw futile throws at his chest and battered his arms, his hold only grew stronger, more desperate. I realised then that he was trying to keep me. He was scared. He wanted me to forget. How could I forget? How could I forget when a dead man lay there staring at me?

He had been breathing, talking, laughing only hours ago. He was a person. He was real. Did he have a lover? Did he have children to go home to? Every ounce of humanity had leaked past his lips like the blood bubbling in a pool around his throat and yet he still stared. Why was he staring? Why was he still looking at me?

"You killed him," I sobbed loudly, my throat squeezing with every word. I trembled and pounded Synn's shoulder with every ounce of strength. "You killed him."

His voice came like a gentle wind. It quivered with uncertainty, with something like fear. "He was going to hurt you."

My face screwed into one of agony pressed against his chest. I tried to pull away. I didn't want his hands on me, his bloody hands that stained us both. Those same hands I had grasped with such tenderness, such curiosity into the world in which he knew. I wondered if he'd painted with them, if he'd cooked and baked, if he'd plucked flowers and placed them in crystal vases. How could I have let him touch me? How could I have let a murderer touch me and hold me so tenderly, and let myself do the same?

"You-You should have let him," I wept. "Even if he hurt me, even if he-he tried to-"

Suddenly, Synn was gripping me by the shoulders and holding me in front of him. I whimpered as he looked down at me with such ferocity, my thoughts were skewered by his gaze. "Over my dead body would I have let him do it," he said. His fingers imprinted on my skin. "It was you or it was him. And I would choose you a thousand fucking times, a million times over him. I would do it over and over. I would not let him hurt you."

My chest grew thick with tension as I held back more tears. "But he's dead. He's not gonna wake up again. He's just- he's- I didn't want him to die. I didn't want him to die!"

Synn's eyes blazed and he thrust an accusatory finger at the corpse beside us. "He deserved to die." I let out another sob and screwed my eyes shut, only for him to tilt my chin towards the dead body once more. "He was going to kill you. Do you understand that? It would have been you not waking up. It would have been your parents waiting for you to come home."

"Don't-"

"Do you know what a man like that does, Thea? Do you have any idea?" his harsh breath came and he gripped my chin tightly, forcing me to look at the body. I cried louder. "Think about the number of people he's killed. If he could do it with you, he could do it with anyone." I tried to pull away but his hold was relentless, bleeding with the need for me to see. To understand. "You expect me to show mercy– did he show you any mercy?"

"Stop it!" I shrieked and felt a hole tear through my throat.

His hold loosened and I fell forward, grasping the leaves on the ground desperately. My fingers were numb and so were my lips. So was my face. I felt nothing and yet I was being burned from the inside and out, flesh bubbling and spitting out emotion I couldn't bring myself to bear. Bitterly, I turned my head to Synn and shook my head. My hair fell over my eyes as I looked at him: took in the great brute of a man before me. Dark strands concealed half my vision and in turn, half his figure remained in shadow; the other glowed, glittering in the cold sunlight seeping through the branches.

"Thea," he breathed hoarsely, his voice so pained it hurt more than the scalding of my body. He curled one hand into a fist. "Why... are you looking at me like I'm more of a monster than him?"

More leaves crunched beneath my palms. I shook my head tearily and whimpered again.

"I... need to go home."

The beautiful killer froze, his cracked lips catching more sun. For a brief, fluttering moment, he looked like a boy. All the tattoos and the piercings in the world wouldn't be enough to conceal the loss in his eyes, nor take away the tremor in his hands as he resisted reaching, holding, begging. Another tear rolled down my cheek at the man I cared so much about.

"Are you afraid of me, Thea?"

That question had my heart screaming in agony.

"I don't... know anymore," I whimpered.

There was quiet as I dragged my knees to my chest and swallowed the lump of tears in my throat. He didn't stop me when I pushed myself up from the ground and stumbled. My world tilted like the rocking of a boat at sea. I balanced myself, panting, heaving hoarsely. Synn didn't move an inch. His gaze remained fixed on the spot, bloody hands placed on his knees as if in prayer, in a state of immediate repentance. Repentance wouldn't be enough.

I staggered the other way. He didn't stop me.

"I'm sorry," I whispered through another cry. I wasn't sure who I was apologising to - the dead man or Synn.

—

All was quiet on the road. Birdsong had ceased, bloody feathers trapped in their beaks, and not a cricket chirped in the haze of sunlit grass. I staggered forward. My body swayed like a pendulum dragged by the wind and cold. In the distance, I heard a car crunching against tarmac. I barely looked up. As the car approached and the driver hesitated at the sight of me, I didn't meet his eyes. Instead, a loving hand of sun tingled over my face and told me to keep going.

I dragged another foot forward.

—

The next minute, I was at my front door.

How did I get here? How long had I wandered the roads for? Hours? Days? The flesh at my fingertips had been eaten away by the cold, leaving ice bones behind, and my knees ached like the weight of the world had been hammered into each socket. Somehow, my schoolbag was on my back. I stared emptily at the wooden door. I stayed there, waiting with blood still on my face and dripping over my hands.

—

I was in the shower.

There was no one at home. A small part of me wondered where my parents could be, but the bigger part wondered if I had left blood on the stairs. It would be a nuisance to get out of the carpet. Mama would probably yell at me.

—

My bed was cold, colder than it was supposed to be. I stared up at the ceiling and watched the images of the day replay like a movie in the darkness. Somewhere, softly, I heard a sneeze. Small footsteps approached through the thicket of my duvet and a familiar, furry face came into view. I looked at Ruffles. She placed a paw on my neck for attention and I felt a claw catch my skin. Drag across my throat. Hastily, I pulled away, eyes welling with tears.

For the third time that evening, I slipped out of bed and hastened to the bathroom.

—

This time, I stayed in the shower for a few years. Legs bent, back pressed against the wall, I rested my cheek upon my knees and stared through the fog of the glass. Water pelted upon my back like hot bullets in the misty bathroom.

Time passed by emptily. My fingers turned to prunes.

Thoughts orbited the man that would haunt me for nights to come and the days of many. There he lay in the shower in front of me. Blood slipped stealthily down the drain in rivulets of red but the colour was too vivid, too lucid for it all to disappear. Some inched near my toes and I curled them tight. The man stared at me through inert monolids and I looked back at him, shoulders trembling. Clutching myself tightly, I rocked myself backward and forward.

"I'm sorry," I whimpered. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

His body stayed there, staining the shower floors and the glass behind him.

The more I stared, the more I trembled: how was a person supposed to feel after witnessing a murder?

I had never really thought about it before. I never thought I would need to. But as I sat in the shower, tears and guilt trickling down my bare body, I wished that I could have prepared myself for the surge of emotions which took me by storm. Seeing someone die in front of you - that in itself was a weight - but to see him do it. To see Synn, the man I was falling for; the man who'd saved me so many a time and clouded me with tenderness; for him to wield the weapon. I didn't want it to be true. I wanted us to go back to yesterday, where our only problems were dealing with teenage boys and learning how to hold hands.

"He deserved to die."

I shook my head, fingers pulling at strings of sopping hair. He was wrong. Synn was wrong, wasn't he? Did that man deserve to die? Did anyone truly deserve to die? Even if he were about to hurt me, kill me, it wasn't inside of me to wish death upon him. But what about the other people he may have stripped the lives of? Synn said the man had done it before. We weren't the only ones. For killing so many, did that man not deserve punishment?

I couldn't decide. I didn't want to decide.

Desperately, I raised my hands to my face and grasped at something, anything in hopes the man in the shower would disappear. "I'm sorry. I said I was sorry," I said meekly, my voice shrilling to a pathetic whisper. But he couldn't hear me through the thunder of rain and tears were soon sliding down my face into the crook of my neck. I sobbed and my nails dug into the dark skin of my knees. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

My stomach frothed and my sobs turned into small convulsions. I curled into the corner of the shower and cried loudly, as nakedly as my body, but the pain wouldn't cease. It wouldn't stop. Instead, my head pounded and pulsed with images of the body lurking past my eyelids, forcing me to relive the moment Synn tore through the man's neck and the knife thudded to the ground. Even now, I could see him standing. I could see the expression on his face.

There was no remorse.

Synn was a ghoul. He was a demon. Death incarnate. And yet-

And yet.

"I'm sorry," I cried and clutched my chest. I opened my eyes and looked at the bloody corpse in front of me. "I'm so, so sorry."

Balled in the corner of the shower, I sobbed to the man with no words and no soul left behind.

—

"Thea."

"Thea, you've been showering for more than two hours. What's going on in there?"

"Thea?"

Water rushed past my ears. Blearily, I opened my eyes. I was shivering. The water had turned cold long ago.

Hiccuping, I reached for the knob with one weak hand and turned it shut. Final drops pattered beside me as I struggled to level my breathing, my fingers having grown numb and my skin a sickly pale. Somehow, I managed to slide the shower door open and heave myself out, dripping wet. I grabbed a large shirt and slipped it around my body.

A moment later, I was on the floor and my vision went dark.

—

For how long I slept, I didn't know. In a desperate attempt to escape the reality that had fallen upon me, my mind was determined to take the form of eternal bleakness, not a thought in place. Every time I tried to wake, I would only fall deeper into my pit of sleep.

It must have been years later when I finally overcame slumber. I was lying in bed, draped in blankets and a thick duvet along with the thickest clothes imaginable, and the afternoon sun washed the room in shades of grey and white. There was something wet on my forehead. Confused, I shifted my gaze to the right and found Mama kneeling beside the bed. Her head was turned to a basin beside her, swirling a cloth in the water with one hand.

Carefully, I took her in. I traced over the wrinkles lining her forehead; the soft patch of brown at the top of her left cheek, a birthmark that took nothing away from her beauty; the black curls that fell to her shoulders, looking more matted than usual. Her face was in a frown. Eyes focused on the water, she wrung the cloth tight before bringing it over to me. She froze when she saw me.

"Thea," she said lowly as her eyes widened. "You're awake."

I opened my mouth to speak, only to wince. My throat was filled with stinging nettles.

As if reading my mind, she hastily grabbed the glass of water on my bedside table and brought it to my lips. I swallowed it gratefully, earnestly, and licked my lips.

"What," I croaked, then cleared my throat, "What happened?"

"You've been sleeping. You fainted in the bathroom."

"Fainted?"

Mama's face tightened with a knot of concern. I swallowed again and made an attempt to sit up, only to find the blankets weighing me down. "Don't try to move for a little while," she said and raised the duvet up to my chin. "You've been asleep for more than a day. You might feel dizzy."

Instead of replying, I let my head fall back on the pillow and looked up at the ceiling. I remembered why I'd fainted, despite my mind's numerous attempts at giving me amnesia. Bitterly, I kept staring at the ceiling. My eyes welled with tears. I could feel my mother's gaze on me, her hands shaking as she dabbed the wet cloth on my temples, wiped down my cheeks and neck.

"Why have these things been happening?" asked Mama. At first, I didn't understand her question. "This isn't the first time you've fainted. You know that. And now, even now, it feels like you've been keeping things from me. I know you have."

I said nothing. My lips quivered as a tear rolled down my cheek.

Mama shifted and sunk down on her heels beside me, raising a hand to my cheek. I almost flinched. My eyes fluttered shut and I let out a slow, shaky breath but the tears continued to fall.

"You can tell me. You can tell me anything, you know that? I'm your Mama. That's what I'm here for."

Biting my lip, I turned to her. I looked at her, really looked.

I can't tell you, my eyes told.

Why?

Because I witnessed something... awful. It'll only hurt you.

You know that's not the real reason.

Another tear trickled down the bridge of my nose. My face screwed and I looked away.

Because you're going to beat me after you find out what I've done.

*****

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HEY FUDGLINGSSSS

I actually really love this chapter. Especially that opening sequence where Synn is introduced as Death HUHHHHH- stop. That's so cool

What did you guys think? I will say that I appreciate Synn killed to protect Thea and saved her life, but that doesn't suddenly make it okay. It doesn't make Thea ungrateful either. Seeing the way she's been brought up and the fact she has a real fear of men, this was horrific for her. I really tried to convey her conflict of emotions and how she struggles between her feelings for Synn and understanding what he's done. I FEEL SO SAD FOR SYNN AT THE SAME TIME MY BABY BOY HE TRIED SO HARD TO KEEP OT A SECRET FROM HER BUT IT WAS ALL FOR NOTHINGGGG and I also love the part at the end with Thea and her mum :( brings everything full circle

ALSO A LATE EID MUBARAK TO MY LOVELIES!! My uncles, auntie and grandma are coming over today for a late celebration so I need to get dressed up :3 bro I used to absolutely hate wearing makeup and I didn't even know how to do it but I've only started getting into it since entering university. I USED TO DRESS LIKE A HOBO AS WELL IDEK WHAT I WAS DOING DURING MY SCHOOL YEARS but I actually put effort into my appearance now ,_, I love having makeovers now and wearing pretty dresses

Potato question of the day: if you were an aesthetic, which would you be?

Bruh this is a hard question but I'd probably say soft girl? WHICH IS SO EMBARRASSING WTF I really don't consider myself a soft girl but that's how most people perceive me I guess ,_, I like to wear long dresses/ abayas and dainty jewellery and I'm generally a quiet/ soft-spoken person so it makes senseee BUT I WANNA BE MORE TRENDY AND LOOK MORE COOL TBH

Anyway, thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed the chapter. If you did, please do vote, comment and share this book with your friends!

Love, Fudge x