He watched me grieve him.
He watched me unravel. And he still hurt me tonight anyway.
Why? What did I do to deserve that?
I grab one of his old hoodies from beneath my pillow and clutch it against my chest desperately. The scent faded years ago, but I still pretend sometimes. Pretend if I breathe deeply enough, I’ll smell cigarettes, leather, and Hayden again.
“I waited for you,” I whisper into the fabric. “I never stopped loving you,” I say, my voice cracking apart. “Why would you do this to me?”
But no answer comes—only silence.
And somehow, that hurts even worse now because he isn’t dead anymore.
He’s alive. Breathing. Existing.
Choosing not to love me the same way.
That thought slices deeper than grief ever did. Because mourning a dead boy is easier than accepting that the living one came back differently.
Eventually, exhaustion drags me beneath the waves of my own heartbreak, but even then… I dream of him.
Not the angry man in the cage but my Hayden.
The boy who used to sneak through my bedroom window at night with scraped knuckles and crooked smiles. The boy whoheld me against his chest and whispered dreams into my hair about escaping Brimstone together someday.
In the dream, we’re laying beneath the stars, cuddled under a blanket.
“You know what my favorite sound is?” he asks softly.
“What?”
“Your laugh.”
I smile sleepily against his shoulder. “That’s cheesy,” I tell him, and he chuckles.
“Don’t care,” he says, then kisses the top of my head. “I’d burn the whole world down for that sound.”
Tears slip down my sleeping face.
Because somewhere between then and now… the world burned him first.
Hayden
“Boulevard of Broken Dreams-Green Day”
“You’re alive…”
Those words have been lodged in my skull since she said them.
Soft. Shaky. Broken, like she couldn’t breathe around the truth of it.
At first, I thought she was being dramatic.
But the more I replay that moment in my head, the more wrong it feels. Because my Firefly didn’t look shocked—she looked haunted.
Shoving open the apartment door, I stalk into the dark space. My place in Daggerspoint isn’t much. Just a one bedroom with bare walls and a black couch I barely use. But it’s mine.No guards. No bars. No Whitestone.
Still doesn’t feel like freedom though.
