AN: aaaahhh we've hit 15k reads!! thank you guys so much for all your support, i'm so thankful for the love you've given my story :'D here's something I wrote for my 15k milestone! it's in Nolan's POV, and it takes place two years before the start of YASTMT. sorry for not updating on Friday, i couldn't finish writing in time :( Monday's update will proceed as usual though of course! hope you enjoy!

Nolan's thoughts aren't very happy, just a slight warning. i tried not to be too dark with that but yeaaah bear that in mind before reading!

note: i reworked my story timeline and edited the necessary parts in my previous chapters. Nolan transferred to Fairwood Academy a little over a year ago, not two years ago.

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Two years ago

Kicking away a stray tree branch that had the misfortune to land in front of his feet, Nolan watched as it easily flew several yards away from him. He scowled down at his mud-soaked sneakers, the result of trudging through the forest despite the raging storm.

He ignored the howling of the wind as he stalked past the swaying trees around him.

The need to scream continued scratching desperately at the blank mess that was his mind.

He pushed his thoroughly dampened fringe out from his forehead and wiped across his eyes with the back of his hand. The water didn't bother him, but he wished it did.

He'd spent the whole day cooped up in his room again, unable to take one step out of it.

His father hadn't even bothered to speak a single word to him today.

Another fresh wave of rage crashed over him, and Nolan shoved down the caution that had always been a large presence in his mind. What did he care if he was being indiscreet? It wasn't like his father was being all that discreet about his lack of involvement in his own son's life.

Falling to a squat, he clutched at his head and screamed out all of his emotions.

Frustration, fear, fury—they were all the same to him these days.

His vocal cords, which were already rusty from disuse, were left aching and sore. He pushed out another scream to relieve the heaviness in his mind, but all that came out was a hoarse squeak. His voice was done.

He spotted a flash of lightning several feet away and laughed humorlessly.

If only it had hit him.

He wasn't sure it would've made a difference.

The harsh rain pelted mercilessly down on him. The pain from the impact almost felt good. Despite the thoroughly drenched state that he was in, he refused to entertain the thought of returning to the quiet safety of his room.

This place—this large green expanse, where only animals lived—was his one small freedom.

Slowly, he got up and began walking towards the dense gathering of trees a little ahead of him.

A slow stroll under the tree canopies was the only activity he could really engage in since there was no chance of viewing the stars tonight.

As he walked, thoughts of his latest Algebra assignment swam to the fore of his mind. Out of all the useless subjects his tutor was teaching him, he hated Algebra the most.

Ironically, he had nothing better to do during the day except read his textbooks and work on his assignments. Every time he stopped working, Eri's bright smile swarmed his thoughts.

The only way he could get her out of them was to keep his mind occupied with other things, even if it had to be math. Constant drills were still better than thinking about her.

He didn't care that it was merely a temporary fix, and that she entered his mind every morning when he lay in bed, ready for sleep.

Band aids were all he had for this broken part of his mind.

No therapist could cure this part of him.

Nolan relished the sloshing sounds under his shoes as he walked through a deep puddle on the forest floor. As he looked down to admire the complete mess he had made of himself, his eyes caught sight of a tiny twitching figure a few feet away from him.

Blinking, he took a few careful steps towards it.

The figure didn't budge.

The forest animals were quick to scurry away from him, so his curiosity was piqued.

Nolan walked over and bent down to take a proper look at it.

It was a small gray and black bird that was lying on its side. There was a small white patch on its throat. Its eyes were closed, and it didn't open them even when he hovered over it. Its wing twitched slightly.

It was a sitting duck just lying here without moving. He doubted there was any way it would survive the night, especially with the unrelenting way the rain was pouring down over the entire forest.

As he stood there, staring down at it, the pitiful state of the bird nudged a soft pang into his heart. There was nobody here to protect it. If he left now, it would probably be dead in the morning.

Gently scooping it up from the ground with his hands, Nolan cradled the bird close to his chest to shield it from the rain.

"You're just like me," he muttered to the little bird, which stirred weakly at his touch.

It was helpless.

He had never owned a pet before, much less taken care of a wild animal, but he could figure it out.

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Eri's dark eyes loomed over him, so large that no matter where he ran in this darkness, he couldn't find a way out. Every step that he took to get away brought on another stream of her vibrant giggling that haunted him in every dream.

Nolan jerked awake, acutely aware of the sunlight filtering into his room through his thick black curtains. They were normally good at keeping most of it out, but it seemed that this morning the sunlight was harsher than usual. He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but the image of her cruel laughing expression was seared on the back of his eyelids.

He reached over to his small nightstand drawer for his sleeping supplements. They didn't seem to have much of an effect on him anymore, but they were the only crutch he had left. Even if it was only false comfort that they brought him, he couldn't bring himself to let go.

Dazedly, he lay back down, wondering if there was a way to sleep without closing his eyes.

Her presence in his mind plagued him everywhere that he went. It didn't matter if he was hundreds of miles away from Ohio. There was no escape.

No matter where he went, he couldn't leave his mind behind.

Drawing in a sharp breath, he gritted his teeth and shut his eyes once again. He wasn't going to let her take over his days, not when she'd already conquered his nights.

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"Good evening, Nolan," his tutor said, sliding into the spare chair Nolan's father had placed in his room for him. "How was your day?"

"Fine," he said shortly, ignoring the way his voice cracked at the single syllable.

His tutor—Nolan couldn't even remember his name—gazed at him for a moment before opening his own bag. "Well, that's good to hear. Let's get started, then. Did you have any problems doing the assignments I gave you last night?"

"No."

Nolan pretended he didn't see the disappointed look on his tutor's face. He was always trying to make some form of small talk with Nolan, in spite of the latter's obvious disinclination to engage in it.

What was the point of all these meaningless conversations? All they did was grow his attachment to someone who would leave his life soon enough.

He didn't need any of it.

His tutor opened up his math notebook to check his work.

Nolan tapped his fingers on the desk, determined not to look in the direction of his bed, under which he'd hidden the little bird he'd brought back from the forest.

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It had taken him a lot of online research, but he eventually learned that this was a young nighthawk, and that its wing was injured. He'd used a self-adhering bandage to wrap around its left wing, and now he was waiting to see if it would heal.

He almost didn't want to name it, but then he realized that the bird would probably be with him for at least the next month or so while its wing healed.

Nolan sat there silently, watching it sleep in the small fluffy towel it was now ensconced in. It had attempted to escape from him a couple of hours ago, which was a rather healthy attitude for a wild animal to have. Unfortunately, it was still weak and barely struggled much as he wrapped the towel around it. After that, its panic seemed to have calmed a little.

It took only a few minutes for the perfect temporary name to come to him.

"Blue," he said aloud finally, hating how rough his voice sounded.

He would call it Blue for the duration he was nursing it back to health.

Lying on the ground that night, drenched and barely twitching, it looked both pathetic and pitiful.

He and the little bird had that in common, at least.

Blue was the color of his days, staining the already nonexistent brightness of his nights. Blue was the color in his heart when he stared emptily at the blank walls in his room, so tightly engulfed by Eri's haunting laughter and eyes and smile that he couldn't move.

Blue contaminated every area of his life, binding him tightly into a little defective cocoon, where he tried to hide away from the world, defective because he could still hear the voice he wanted to forget the most. It wrapped around him like a hungry python, squeezing everything he had out of him.

He leaned forward on the table, propping his chin up on his elbow.

The bird was just like him—and strangely, the thought comforted him.

He wasn't alone.

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"Stop, I'm trying to finish this," he told Blue, which had hopped up onto his shoulder.

Obviously, it didn't understand a single word of his sentence.

Despite the disturbance to his chemistry homework, Nolan felt an involuntary but genuine smile spread across his face. The action felt almost unfamiliar to him.

He'd spoken more words in the past couple of weeks than he had in the last year, all thanks to the presence of this little nighthawk in his room.

It had only been two weeks since he'd taken Blue in, and it was already rapidly warming up to him.

Its wing still wasn't fully healed yet, but it was already hopping about with energy.

"Blue," he warned when the bird strutted down his arm and onto his paper.

The last time he'd made the mistake of allowing it onto his notebooks, Blue had released its droppings onto one of them. Nolan had to replace it and redo his assignment for that subject.

"You can't walk on my homework," he said, scooping Blue up and placing it carefully in the open shoebox he'd lined with a fluffy towel.

When his tutor wasn't in, he usually kept the shoebox on his desk. His father had seen Blue the other day, when he'd opened Nolan's bedroom door to ask why there was an unusually pungent smell coming from the trashcan.

When he saw the bandage on Blue's wing, he hadn't said anything.

Nolan had thought he would at least tell him that he shouldn't be keeping a wild animal in the apartment, even if it was an injured one. His father didn't have love for animals. He didn't have love for anything.

He didn't know if it was because his father felt like he owed him too much not to let him keep it, or if he simply didn't care.

He knew that, as estranged as they had become, he still wanted it to be the former.

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He was curled up into a tight ball on his bed again tonight.

He wanted to pull all his thoughts out of his brain.

Even as his mind was drowning, Eri's face wouldn't leave him.

He couldn't even cry because his tear ducts had been wrung dry months ago. All he could do, as he lay there on his side, was to clutch at his head and try not to scream. His mind was a pile of soggy spaghetti, an incoherent mess that insisted on undoing itself and scrambling the fragments into something so broken it couldn't be put back together.

Nolan jolted when something unexpectedly touched his forearm.

He pulled his hands away from his face just enough to see what it was. Blue looked up at him. Reluctantly, he put his hand out so that Blue could step up on it. The last thing he needed to deal with right now was bird droppings on his bedsheets.

The first few days, Blue hadn't moved much from the shoebox he'd placed it in, but as the days passed it eventually grew bolder and began exploring Nolan's bedroom. Nolan figured it wouldn't be long until Blue was ready to return to where it belonged. He didn't have a cage for it, and it wasn't a good idea to allow the nighthawk to freely roam about in his room, either. He was constantly aware of how it might render his stationery ... unusable.

"Sorry," he said, forcing the words out of his dry throat. "I know it's a little later than your usual mealtime. I promise I'll go and get you some food soon."

As soon as he could pull himself together enough to stand without needing to burrow himself into the earth and never surface again.

Blue chirped softly, and Nolan couldn't help but bring it close to his chest.

"I know that you're not really my pet, but ... stay still for a minute and let me pretend."

Although he knew that Blue couldn't really comprehend his words, when it really stayed there without a fuss for the next few minutes, some of the pain in his heart unknotted.

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"Bye." Nolan lifted his hand in a wave to Blue, which he'd placed on a nearby tree branch.

It continued to look at him.

"You'll still be seeing me around," he said. "I come here very often."

He would still be able to differentiate it from the other nighthawks—it had its own slightly distinctive color markings on its plumage, so it was the opposite that he was worried about. His stomach churned at the thought of Blue not recognizing him after a few weeks.

Nolan turned away and strode towards the clearing, suddenly desperate to clear his head and to look at the stars.

He knew that this was coming. He knew that he would have to say goodbye eventually.

He knew that he couldn't keep Blue, but he still let his guard down and let himself get attached.

Mirthless laughter left his throat, but it swiftly broke off into a choked sob.

For the first time in a long while, his tear ducts started working again.

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A week later, Nolan found himself walking through the part of the forest he'd left Blue.

Initially, he had promised himself never to set foot in that area again. He didn't want to see Blue and have his fear of being forgotten be realized. With each passing day, however, he found himself increasingly tempted to look for it.

Was it doing well? Was it able to find food on its own? He wanted to know if it was at least still alive.

It was with that in mind that he slowly strolled past each tree, scanning every single one before he moved on to the next.

To his surprise, he heard something flying straight towards him from above. When he looked up, a bird had just landed softly on his shoulder. He immediately recognized it.

"Blue," he said, and it chirped.

It remembered him.

He was significant enough to be remembered. With that realization, the weight that had been pressing down on his chest suddenly felt a lot lighter.

As he looked down at it, Nolan thought that maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't be the end of the world for him to grow the tiniest bit of attachment to another living creature.

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AN: if you have any questions, most of Nolan's backstory will eventually be covered in the main narrative, don't worry! thank you all so much again for 15k reads and have a great Sunday! i appreciate you all so muchhh, I LOVE YOU (∩˃o˂∩)♡