˖ ࣪ AGAIN, AGAIN, 𖥔 ࣪ ᥫ᭡
AGAIN. . . !

━━━━━ ( 030. real life )
✶ ・・❛ NOT THIS TIME. ❜

( ☼ )

CHRIS HAS TO RESIST from rolling his eyes the longer that he sits in his living room listening to the loud background noise of the people chatting in his kitchen.

he sighs underneath his breath as he reaches forward to turn the tv volume up with the remote. he can still hear distinct voices though, so he turns his head to glance down the distracting direction in question.

he finds the sight comical, because in what world is this group together in his kitchen? this one apparently, and he is just not having it. he can't even enjoy his ridiculous suspension because their loud conversation keeps reminding him the exact cause of it.

usually, this whole plan that they're trying to force upon chris would be right up his ally, but he's honestly so sick of putting up a fight for someone who has yet to fight for him. at this point, it feels like an unrequited thing, which is so hard for him to face, because clementine was once all or nothing when it came to him. he gets that he made a mistake first, but at least he put in effort to patch it all up—a tremendous effort, might he add. now, it's like he doesn't know her anymore.

it's time for him to face the music: the clementine he once had the pleasure of calling his is not the one who willingly went back to jax. when he looks at her now, he sees a stranger, but he once knew her like the back of his hand, and it's hard to believe she would run right back to jax after such a night with him.

they were fucking laughing at jax calling her—who does that shit and then goes right back to the joke in question? it's laughable really, because when chris looks back on it now, all he feels like is a pathetic fool.

so as he glances over nick, matt, astoria, and finnley all sat around the kitchen table, he knows he has no place in their discussion. he then looks over to bianca stood in front of a counter busy shooting daggers at astoria, and that is the only comedy he gets out of this whole ordeal before he goes back to watching the tv.

it becomes apparent his silent observing did not go unnoticed however, because he feels like he's tripping when their conversation suddenly grows significantly quieter. his brows draw together slightly in suspicion, and right as he's about to turn his head, astoria appears around the corner. he quickly sighs, turning to glance at the kitchen as she makes her way to the couch he's sat on. every person in the room is watching him, but once he notices, they make poor attempts to look busy. no way they sent stori to talk to him.

"chris, you know you should be in there," she says first, her voice articulated and delicate. chris knows where she's coming from, and he knows that everyone else in the other room feels the same, but he still rolls his eyes.

he looks up to where she stands in front of the couch arm closest to chris and shakes his head. "i have no place in there," he tells her, causing a sigh to fall from her lips. her frustration with his response only irritates him further, so he continues, "i don't even get why you guys are doing this. clementine doesn't want to be helped."

"but she needs help," she replies sternly, her arms crossing over her chest defensively. she's not used to chris having such a downer perspective, so she tries to get him to see where she's coming from. "you think i want to spend my time plotting with bianca fulkerson of all people?" she questions, raising her eyebrows. chris remains silent. "news flash, chris, i fucking don't. i'm doing it because i care about clementine and i—we all know her better than this." chris looks away from her, fixating his eyes on the tv. she glances over to it for a second before sighing and looking back to him. "especially you."

"evidently not," chris mutters, making a frown appear on astoria's face. she gets where he's coming from, because she's been a firsthand witness to all the fighting that he's done, but that doesn't mean she's not going to try to get him to turn around. when he looks back to her, however, his face looks to be set in stone and she knows he's a lost cause. "you care about her now? where was that energy for the past months?" the frustration he feels has him making digs at her.

astoria feels a wave of anger shoot through her, but she tries to ignore it because she knows chris just isn't himself right now. she remains calm. "our falling out was so, so complicated," she explains to him shortly. "you don't know what you're talking about; you're just upset."

"maybe," he shrugs carelessly, looking back to the tv as he wishes she would just go back to the other room already. "but the only reason i don't know is because you never tell us shit."

astoria narrows her eyes intensely at the boy, and chris feels as if he will finally escape her presence, but she has him dumbfounded by walking over to sit next to him. he snaps his head around to give her a strange look, as he's continued to only bicker with her for the entire time she's approached him. she looks at him like she knows him, and he hates that, because she does. "you're trying so hard to piss me off so that i'll leave you alone, but it's not happening."

chris sighs, giving up his argument by now and sinking further into the couch cushion behind him. "whatever, stori," he grumbles.

he tries his best to focus on the tv show rather than her, but he can feel her looking at him, and anytime he glances back at her he can tell that she's trying to analyze his feelings. that unfairly pisses him off. no one understands how he feels. how could they? he got so, so close to getting back everything he's ever wanted, and then it fell from his grasp right in front of his own eyes.

"i saw her the night you guys broke up."

chris is snapped out of his trance immediately, his eyebrows drawing together as he slowly turns his head around to her. "what?"

"i remember, i was eating dinner with my family and my phone started ringing. i saw clementine's contact and i didn't think anything of it, so i let it ring. but when she called me a second time, i knew something had to be wrong," she explains to him, her tone soft. this time, she's the one avoiding eye contact by keeping her eyes on the tv. "when i picked up, she didn't even tell me what happened. all she said was that she needed me and i was on the way," she tells him, a frown creeping up on her face as if she can still recall it vividly.

"you stayed the night with her on christmas eve?" he asks, his voice questioning as he has never been told any of this before—him nor his brothers. even in his current state of anger, he doesn't like hearing about the night in question. he tries his best to block it out most of the time.

"she was a wreck, chris," she tells him, giving him a look before her attention goes back to the tv. "she fell asleep crying and i had to explain to tiana why she didn't feel like opening presents in the morning," her voice grows quieter as she talks, her frown spreading to chris.

"is that why you were so pissed at me over christmas break?" he questions.

"everyone was pissed at you over christmas break," she responds knowingly, almost laughing when he rolls his eyes.

"yeah, but you were so much harsher," he reminds her. he understood her anger back then, as well as everyone else's, but hearing this now makes much more sense. it doesn't make it any easier though. subconsciously, his hands find his hoodie strings. "were there any other times you saw her without telling me?"

it surprises him when she shakes her head. "she stopped responding to my texts after that," she says with a heavy chest. "but..."

"but...?"

she finally looks back to chris. "i knew what she was doing. she was trying to push me away because she thought losing you left her with no one," she explains to him, his expression becoming an understanding one as his eyes soften. the words pain him to hear, but he nods for her to continue. her face is completely guilt ridden when she says, "but.. i didn't try going to her house once. i never stopped by. i didn't try."

chris' eyes swirl with realization of something that he hasn't understood for a while now. "that's why you don't like talking about her," he reads her easily now, astoria pressing her lips together when she nods her head.

"i could never not care about her. i just carry my guilt differently than you," she tells him knowingly, chris nodding his head as understands completely now. when guilt is eating him up from the inside out, he needs to do anything he can to escape it, but escaping for astoria is just shutting down.

"fuck guilt," he says with a heavy sigh, feeling relieved at the air expelling from his chest. "i'm done with that."

"it's true, you have no reason to feel guilty anymore," she starts in agreement with him, but her words linger and chris already senses her next ones before she says them, "but it's not over, chris. you have to know that."

chris shakes his head, sick of hearing that from everyone who does not understand. "it was over the second she left my house that morning," he tells her sternly, his eyebrows fiercely furrowed with frustration. "i can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved."

astoria ignores the j. cole lyrics which instantly come to mind, and puts up an argument. "you think she'd willingly choose this?" she gives him a dubious look, finding his thought process plain stupid. "even her new friends know something's not right."

chris blocks out everything she says, sitting up to stand up from the couch. once he's on his feet, he turns to face her. "yeah, i do. she willingly went back to him. she chose him, that's it," he shrugs, the emotionless features of his face causing astoria to frown. "i don't want to save someone who doesn't want to be saved," he rephrases his previous words, turning around and beginning to walk off before calling out one last thing, "just let me be, stori."

he feels the eyes of not only her, but the entire kitchen, as he exits the living room and he ignores it all. he quickly realizes he doesn't know where he's headed, however, and decides on the bathroom. he needed to go earlier, but postponed it due to being invested in his show.

when he reaches the bathroom, he is not expecting the door to be open, nor the memories which spring out at him at the sight of the dark and empty room. his mind is suddenly taken back to the day he woke up to brush his teeth and clementine followed soon after.

"he never could, baby," she had said. baby, she called him. was that nothing to her?

when his mind begins to wonder what pet names she uses on jax, he takes in a sharp breath and shuts the door, finding it to be too much. yeah, he'll use the other one.

he ventures all the way to the other side of the house, using the bathroom along the hallway to his bedroom. once he's done, he begins walking to his bedroom, when the creaking of the floorboards slows him down. the creaking of the fucking floorboards has him thinking of clementine. that's how pathetic he is. he just can't help but remember when everything was easy—long before christmas and long before jax was a real problem for him—and how they'd have to watch out for the pesky noise when they snuck around the house together.

he throws his back to groan in frustration before getting over himself and making it to his bedroom. he instantly heads for his phone that he left charging on his bed, in dire need of a distraction.

wifey 4L (🤞)
i'm sorry. please don't hate me
1h ago

oh.

chris isn't sure if it's his breath that's taken away from him, or his life, because it feels like both as he reads her message one time, two times, three times, fo—

he doesn't understand at all how she can just say something like that. the ache in his heart is suddenly back ten times as strong. she's never texted him since he got her new number, and he can imagine her quickly deleting it from his recents afterwards.

hate her? he's not physically capable of that.

he decides she does not get the privilege of knowing that anymore, however, and clears the notification with a heavy heart. he feels like the walls are caving in around him as he lays down on his bed and blankly stares at the ceiling.

he wishes he could go back to the morning he got to spend with her before she left—or actually, maybe last october. sometime simple. if he had a time machine, he's not sure where he'd choose to go first, but he knows it would be somewhere with her.

he sighs loudly, filling up his quiet room with the noise. he glances around for something to do, maybe play his xbox or continue the show he stupidly left playing in the living room. nothing seems fun. he's not sure how he's going to get through this suspension.

when the door ringing meets his ears, he rolls his eyes. he expects someone in the kitchen to get it, since they're obviously the closest to the door, but chris is sure the universe is doing everything possible to irritate him today when it rings for a second time.

he gets up from his bed with a scowl on his face, annoyance with his friends and family for leaving him to have to leave his room and get the door filling his body. when he stomps his way to the living room, he looks to the group in the kitchen immersed in conversation. "there's someone at the door, yknow," he says aggressively.

not a single person turns around. he refrains from sighing for the millionth time today and heads for the door. when he swings it open, he's really not sure who he's expecting, but it's definitely not tiana.

his eyebrows raise to the very top of his forehead at the sight of the little girl, no idea what on earth she could be doing here. her face is one of her determination, and she has some sort of box in her hands. "tiana?" chris says questionably, glancing around his yard for a sign of how she got here and finding clementine's father's truck parked. he spots clint in the drivers seat and quickly looks away.

"this is yours," she says with no further explanation, shoving the box she has into his chest and causing his face to twist up with even more confusion.

"what?" he mumbles, glancing down to what she's attempting to force into his hands and freezing when he sees himself. his eyes quickly travel from picture to picture of either him and clementine, or clementine and their once shared friends, and he feels his own face falling at the sight. he looks back to tiana and shakes his head, now trying to give it back to her. "it's not."

"it is," she argues stubbornly, chris furrowing his eyebrows when she shoves it into his chest even more aggressively this time.

"tiana," he says, giving her a look. he really has no place having all this.

"chris," she says as well, pushing the box yet again.

he narrows his eyes at her, not understanding why she's remaining so persistent. "why are you trying to give me this?"

"because i don't like seeing my sister sad." she frowns, chris' eyes softening. he knows how deeply clementine and tiana care for one another, but he also knows how little they show it. she looks down to the box, her realizing before chris that he's willingly taken it from her grasp now. he looks down when she lets it go, allowing all the weight to fall into chris' hands. when she speaks again, he looks back to her. "don't let her throw her happiness away."

a deep crease forms between chris' eyebrows, and he looks back and forth between her pleading eyes and the box before he sighs, "okay."

tiana's face visibly lights up. "okay?" she repeats, chris reluctantly nodding. she then practically beams at him. "great!"

"great," he repeats much less enthusiastically, pressing his lips together and backing away. he lingers for a moment though, he's not sure why. he just isn't used to being in tiana's presence anymore, so he forces a smile. "bye, T."

tiana smiles at him. "i'll see ya, chris."

he closes the door and a frown instantly takes his plastic smile's place. he barely even gets a moment to process what's just happened, because the overwhelming feeling of eyes on him causes him to turn towards the kitchen. he scoffs at everyone staring at him. "now you notice the door?"

finnley shrugs, and nick is the first to point at the box in chris' hands and ask the question they are all clearly wondering. "what's that box?"

chris walks over to the kitchen, simply mumbling, "clementine's." he watches their jaws all drop and sets the box on the table, bianca walking over from the counters as everyone leans in to see it's continents.

"what the fuck?" matt says, being the first to grab one of the pictures. he looks up to chris hovering above them and immediately asks, "who gave you this?"

"tiana," he answers shortly, watching a multitude of them share strange looks. he then decides that now is the best time to make his departure before he's bombarded with more questions. "you guys can have it," he mumbles, beginning to turn around.

he hopes that he can leave in peace, but astoria's voice stops him in his tracks. "you're not staying?"

he turns around to see her frown and a couple hopeful eyes, ignoring the tug at his heartstrings and sighing, "no."

not this time.

💌

bet u didn't think i was updating this fic first

loml is on repeat and this fic is now plotted out til the END! we WILL finish this fic chat BARE W ME

<3
jaden