Abandon

a·ban·don

1. vt: leave somebody behind

2. vt: leave a place because of danger

3. vt: halt something in progress

4. vt: give in to emotion

n: lack of restraint: complete lack of inhibition or self-restraint

A/N: Good God, it's been a number of years. Anyway. I do need to finish this one. The next chapter will probably be the end.

Warnings: Language, implicit graphic situations.

Disclaimer: I own none of this and I make no profit writing my little stories.

Monsters

There are things you avoid admitting at all costs. Especially to yourself.

Sometimes it feels like the world stops. Time is suddenly inconsequential. I might have slept for days and I could keep sleeping forever.

Everything hurts. I don't understand the time of day (night or early morning) and I don't want to. I'm staring up into space and there isn't a ceiling at the end of it. There is no end of it. I feel like I've had the air knocked out of me but not as hard as when he actually did it, and slow and constant. Tears are leisurely streaming out of the corners of my eyes, across my temples and into my hair and I don't feel a need to blink.

Purpose appears to have gone altogether. There isn't any reason to get up. There is no sharp realization, when my eyes snap open and I freak out because I remember what happened. I know before I wake up. And I slowly become conscious but the knowledge is there already. It chokes. But worse, I can still breathe, no asphyxia comes, I don't pass out. I just know. And it's harrowing.

There is a strange sense of surprise. I hadn't thought him capable of this. I didn't realize that he actually wouldn't want me at some point. That he would get fed up enough to hurt me. To kick me around and then pay my cab fare back. But I suppose I hadn't thought of many things.

I've never felt this before. I had never been close enough to anyone for them to tear my heart out of my ass. It doesn't let up. There is no concentration factor. It's just all you think about. I've heard songs about this, seen movies, read books. It's just like they describe it - you pretty much want to die. And until you experience it you can't relate. You don't see the gravity. You think it's cheap and melodramatic and it only happens to fools.

But it actually isn't, as I latently find. Start to finish, nothing is up to you. It just happens. Your guts are someone else's to play with as they wish, and sometimes you're lucky and they're careful. Other times luck doesn't favour you. The books, the movies, they never manage to tell you quite how grim it is.

I've adapted this avoidant lifestyle quickly and relentlessly and now it seems too late to stop. I'm in too far. I've let it sit too long. And the knowledge of all these things was seemingly right in front of me all this time. I complain so indignantly that no one made it clear enough, but I knew. I must have. Instead I chose to ignore it. To let myself fall, scream, say yes.

Maybe I just needed to say yes to someone.

He doesn't want me. I meant nothing. The words ring in my head. And at that point my entire being is encompassed within their meaning. I don't know what I imagined him to feel for me, because I never stopped to compartmentalize the entire situation into what was happening, the implications and what future there was for us. There was just so much urgency. And the future seemed so far away. And I was cheating and it was horrid and I hated myself and him and I wanted. Wanted so much.

The want, the need - it all sounds like such a comfortable excuse. The only absent factor is truth. What I'm thinking is the closest I've come to objectivity in weeks. Yet it feels like months passed since he caught my glance at the kitchen table. But they haven't. No time passed at all. There have only been a few encounters. And a myriad of thoughts in between that finished the encounters for me. Thoughts that wrote the story in my head the way I wanted it to sound.

I wonder absently about how everything went to shit before I could stop it, where all my demons came from - if he made them up in me or if they had been hiding away all this time. The outcome of everything is here and everything inside me hurts.

I don't feel myself fall back asleep.

Insistent knocking wakes me. I might have slept for days.

Her agitated voice rings out from behind the door, muffled but audible.

"Open the door, I know you're in there!"

I open the door and we just stare at each other. The guilt is in my face, but it's an afterthought. I'm too tired to feel guilty. In fact, I'm too tried to feel anything but abandoned. Truth be told - I forgot she even existed. I don't bother thinking up a cover story or lifting the neck of my shirt as her compassionate/infuriated eyes travel from my face to my neck. She pushes past me and walks into my living room. I follow her, dazed, walking to the slaughter having accepted the outcome. I collapse onto the couch. She just stands in the middle of the room. Watches me.

"Have you had enough?" she sounds as tired as I feel.

"What are you talking about?" my voice is raspy from disuse, I have to clear my throat.

"You don't want to talk, you don't want to leave your house, you're a mess, you've got hickeys I know for a fact I didn't give you, and you're not even trying to lie about them." she is shaking with rage or pain or something like that. She doesn't yell. She just accounts for all of my recent faults. There is no accusation in her voice, because accusation would have to be proven. Sakura just states fact.

"What do you want me to say? Because I think you already know everything you need to know." I mutter, not looking at her. I just need her to hate me.

"I know you cheated, I didn't need hickeys to tell me that." The words ring and leave silence in their wake. She knew. I want to laugh. My hand goes to my mouth. The hysteria is bubbling up in my throat and the corners of my mouth twitch madly but it subsides before it ever leaves my lips. All this time she just wanted me to get it out of my system.

Suddenly I'm no longer hollow, and there is anger and guilt and it's everywhere. And there is fear, because I don't know how much she knows.

She isn't crying. Her face looks like it's aged ten years with worry. I can hardly believe she's worried. "I want to know why. I need you to explain to me what I did wrong. There must have been something-"

"NO!" I come alive. "It was all my fault! All of it!" I'm yelling as hard as my lungs will let me. "You will not take this upon yourself!" she flinches away from me.

"You wouldn't have cheated if you were perfectly happy with me." I look at her and I can't believe my eyes. She has aged. She has grown up into this person of substance, and kindness and selflessness. And all this time I didn't see her. She wasn't enough for me.

"You don't get it. This isn't about you. You-you are amazing. You are perfect. You were always there for me. I-" and here I pause, because I don't know how to explain to her why it happened. "I don't know what possessed me." his face surfaces in my mind, his eyes, the need, everything.

"If I'd been a better girlfriend, if I'd loved you more- maybe, maybe then-" she is looking at me desperately, and she comes close to me and touches my face and I can't look her in the eye. Her fingers stray to my lips, she isn't crying - and I'm surprised that there are so many things about her that I didn't know. "Jesus, what happened to you?" Sakura whispers shakily, her hands quickly move through my hair along my neck and there is no anger when she touches the hickeys, she goes to my chest my stomach. There it hurts.

"Who did this to you?" lifting my shirt, she looks at the single dark bruise that the kick left me with. She considers the split lip, the light bruising along my jaw. The laughter comes now. I let out a grim, disbelieving snort and step back from her.

"It doesn't matter."

"Yes it does! Tell me what happened."

"So that you can go fight them for me?" I am beginning to sound derisive but this is too bizarre for me not to. "You see? This is what I'm talking about. I cheated on you. I cheated more than once. I wasn't drunk. I wasn't forced. I just couldn't stop myself. Fuck if I'll ever know why, with the kind of girlfriend that I had. But you… you see bruises and you forget that I ever did anything. You first blame yourself, and then worry about me." I'm looking at her now, and nothing is more painful than her face.

"Sakura you let me ride it out." I whisper. I want to blame her. To make this as ironic as possible, I want to accuse her of letting me cheat. "You knew. And you didn't freak out, you didn't yell at me, you sure as hell didn't dump me. You gave me time and space to just let it pass. I'm right aren't I?" I collapse on the couch, forgetting bruises, flinching. She only nods.

"What's more, is that you let me use you to get over myself. To get over my shit. You made cheating as comfortable an experience for me as you could. So my fucking question to you is, why?" my voice shakes. I am furious, guilty, abandoned, and I never wanted to laugh more in my entire life. The tears come slowly and she watches. Nothing but compassion. Nothing but understanding.

"WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?" I'm shouting because she isn't. I'm bordering on hysterical because she isn't. Perhaps also because everyone breaks eventually. "I did everything possible to make you hate me. I fucked up enough for you never to speak to me again. I made so many mistakes, Sakura. If ever I tried to fix this it would turn on me. I lied so much." my head drops - I've exhausted myself.

"Is it over?" she finally says.

"What?"

"Between you and that girl. Is it over?" there is no anger. Still, after everything. The laughter is threatening to burst out of me again, seriously this time, I hardly have time to wrap my mind around the importance of not laughing out loud at this moment.

"Does it really-"

"Yes it matters." she cuts me off, the closest she's come to being sharp with me this entire conversation. "Is it over?"

"Yeah. Yeah it's over." The first time I've said it out loud. His face reappears in my head again. The knowledge hurts. I wonder when it stops hurting.

"Okay." she says and nods, staring off into boring mid-day outside my window. After a long time she continues. "You wanted to know why I'm still here. Well, here it is." her eyes travel from the window to me. "I love you Syaoran. I love you, and you don't even realize how glad I am that you only cheated, that you didn't leave me." her voice is more or less impassive as she says all of this, but miraculously, she is smiling.

"I am still here because you owe me an explanation. Because the way you've been treating me requires for you to explain yourself, but I think you've suffered enough. You're guilty enough. That's why I'm not yelling, I'm not upset with you. I'm just… Glad. Glad that you've come back to me. We can talk it through later. When you're ready." I listen to her, and I try to absorb.

"I don't deserve you." I mutter, as she goes to sit down beside me, and takes my hand into her tiny fingers. "You have no idea how much I regret ever hurting you." I can't look at her again.

"Of course you deserve me. You're a decent person. I know how horrible you feel. I know how much you regret it. That's why I'm still here. That's why I love you. You aren't heartless." she leans in, and kisses me on the temple. "I'm not giving up on you."

Oh no, I think. No I don't deserve you. But I certainly deserve all the memories I'm left with. And everything about my little dalliance into the world of your older brother that you will never, ever find out about. That's when the sobs come. My face collapses into my hands and I'm shaking with the sheer force of the thing that is tearing out of my chest.

I think of everything I've done to her. To me. To him. There is a certain bitter sweetness when I think of her. I think of forgiveness. Penance. Hope. I think of things that I will have to overcome, but it is a source of something that is inherently good. I avoid thinking of him altogether. I am afraid. Because I know, I feel that my desire for him comes from a dark place. He let my monsters out. And abandoned me. I've never missed anyone more.

I don't notice when she pulls me into her lap, and my I bury my face in her knees. Sakura is draped over me, and she protects me that way, with her tiny hands. They comb through my hair, and she tells me it will be okay, and that she understands. She tells me that she won't let anything happen to me. She senses my fear. Fuck me if I know how.

In between sobs I chant apologies. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. We aren't listening to each other. The meaning doesn't verbally come across. But somehow calm spreads. Her calm. It soothes my mantra and my ragged breath. We remain like that for a long time.

We eat dinner together. We do this most days. No one speaks. I can hear myself chew. I remember the way it all started, I was sitting in this very chair, and he was sitting opposite of me. Today his chair is empty. He is not watching my every move.

I've been trying to write him off as a failed experiment. It's not a bad idea, considering that I'm experiencing the special variety of numbness that only prayer can bring.

A few more days and all of this is over. I don't have to put any more effort into anything.

Sakura lacks her usual zeal and takes smaller bites. She looks tired. I presume that he told her. I absently worry if she knows it's me, but dismiss it. She isn't hard to read - if she really knew I would see it in her face. She isn't even looking at me.

I know I'm responsible for what transpired, but I can hardly feel it. I apologized, and it seems as though someone forgave me. And I've been drowning myself in liquor ever since.

Yuki wondered if I was alright - I didn't want to fuck, just drink and drink and drink and go out and be in loud places with bodies all around so that I couldn't hear anything and I didn't have enough space to be isolated.

I want to be far away. I'm numb but I'm distinctly uncomfortable. I avoid the thought of hurting him. I don't think about what he said. He is a kid, what does he know.

My chair screeches against the floor boards as it slides back - I stand up from the table. Dad looks up, Sakura doesn't.

"I'm going for a walk." I announce to a mostly empty room.

I'm at the same park, on the same bench. He is everywhere. I smoke without tasting it. I don't wonder about what I've done.

But I've lied before.

A/N: Sorry this took so long - I forgot to finish this chapter as my life was taken up with other things. Haven't written fiction in a while. Hope this is pleasing. Not the end quite yet.