Summary: She fastens her seatbelt and tells herself that this is not running.
Mentions: Flynn Reynolds, Philip Gregory
"You want to be regular people? Hm? Do you? Well, go ahead, go on. Go do that. They’re crying out for foot soldiers down there. Go and have your life run by bosses, bank managers, and politicians. But if you want to be a grifter…
Don’t have anything in your life you can’t walk away from in a second.”
You store away your carry-on and tell yourself that this is not running.
One piece of luggage. That is all you bring with you on the flight to nowhere in particular. Your entire life and person, distilled into a hand carry; reduced to only the bare essentials and nothing more. No reminders. No mementos. No sentimental little trinkets to bring back fond memories of a time and a place that you are determined to leave behind.
Except the two bracelets you’re wearing. One on each wrist.
On the left, a simple, delicate gold chain—it has little to no monetary value, but it is an enduring symbol of the eight years that you have considered Flynn Reynolds to be your one and true family. A symbol of all the years to come that you will continue to consider him the single most important person in your life. No matter how much time passes, no matter how many miles you put between yourself and him, or how many years you go without speaking. He is your brother. Your best friend. Your other half. Yes, there is the distinct possibility that somebody else out there might be the love of your life, but Flynn? He is your soul mate.
(You trace the loops on the symbol in the centre. Infinity. Forever. That’s apropos.)
You chide yourself for doing this to him again, before you even have a chance to properly make up for doing it to him the first time. Then you chide yourself for using him to romanticise a past that wasn’t as perfect or as emotionally healthy as you like to believe that it was.
Still, rose-tinted fantasies about your late teens aside, you can’t even bring yourself to contemplate the brand new, silver bracelet currently sitting snugly against your right wrist. Because if there’s one thing that’s worse than thinking about all the things that you once had?
It’s thinking about all the things that could have been.
You fasten your seatbelt and tell yourself that this is not running.
You got an apartment. You furnished it. You made friends, real friends who accepted your real identity—who knew the real you. Against all better judgement, you put down roots in this town, with these people, that you are now forced to rip from the ground. It’s as painful as it sounds.
But you already knew the day was coming, didn’t you? You’ve always known that staying in any one given place for too long is unfeasible. Not impossible, per se—but unfeasible. Because you are a con artist, and con artists live on borrowed time. You either get arrested, get killed, or… Keep disappearing.
You hate the thought of jail. You’re not too fond of the idea of dying, either.
So, disappearing it is.
You put on your earphones, turn up the volume, and tell yourself that this is not running.
You switch your music to shuffle mode and immediately regret that decision. Not that you’ve ever been one to put much stock in fate, or in the significance of song lyrics; but as the opening riff to that one Jason Walker song that you really like starts playing in your ears, you wonder if maybe the universe is playing you the world’s cruelest prank.
After the silence, after the last words, caught in the silence, caught in between… After the madness, after the slow shock, before the wave hits, the flood comes rushing in…
You close your eyes. You will yourself to change the track but for some reason you can’t. You think about a man with soft lips and piercing blue eyes, and suddenly the urge to put your head through the seat in front of you grows much, much stronger.
You take one moment to be grateful that are you still above crying in public.
This is the bad before the worse, this is the storm before the storm, and I haven’t even hit the bottom of this ocean floor… This is the bend before the break, this is the mercy, not the grace, this is the proof and not the faith I try to find…
It’s a joke, right? It has to be. You have been through close encounters with law enforcement, near misses with gunfire, the corruption and consequent dismantling of your childhood memories, life-changing issues with your own morality, even watching people you care deeply about come in and out of hospitals and having to bitterly accept the fact that you do, indeed, have emotions. None of those things have broken you—they have changed you, they have pushed you to your very limits. But they have not broken you. And yet somehow this does.
Your heart is actually broken.
How is that rational?
(It isn’t. Love isn’t rational. But this is not love, so that argument is invalid, anyway.)
You let the song run its course. Then you listen to it again.
Completely irrationally.
There shouldn’t be a good in goodbye.
You stare at your reflection in the window and tell yourself that this is not running.
It’s surviving.
(Please. This is running. You are running from him and you know it.)
Rosalie wanted to be a pessimist. She wanted to walk right around in that little survivors community with absolutely zero expectations--not looking for a familiar face, not holding out hope for a happy reunion, for anything. But even after weeks of practically nothing good happening, that flicker of hope turned out to be a tough thing to beat down, and she found her eyes wandering anyway, while her mind tried desperately to stave off the disappointment. But that sinking feeling she was waiting for? It never hit.
Instead, she found herself looking straight at Flynn Reynolds.
For several seconds, all she could do was stand in awe and stare at her best friend, blinking uncomprehendingly as if the sight was too good to be true. A part of her was afraid that he would simply disappear again if she thought too hard about it. Running up, she threw her arms around the familiar brunette and held him tight, face buried against his chest as she both laughed and sobbed in relief. "You idiot," she mumbled into him, refusing to let go. "You stupid, stupid, stupid idiot."
Task: Write about a defining moment.
Featured Character(s): Flynn Reynolds
Having a late dinner on the living room floor was their thing. They had a kitchen table, but they never bothered to use it--at least not in order to eat dinner. Instead, they filled the empty bottle of an '82 Bordeaux with whatever cheap red wine one of them managed to swipe from the store, poured their alcohol into mismatched wine glasses and served it together with a large pizza. They always split one--half pepperoni, half whatever horrifying amalgamation of ingredients Rosalie felt like trying out that week. Flynn always joked that she should simply pick a nice pizza topping and settle down with it. In return, she always retorted that life was much more exciting if you never settled down with anything.
He couldn't argue against that.
Leaning against the wall, the young blonde casually sipped her wine when her friend suddenly tossed a brand new pack of cigarettes her way. Somehow, he always knew exactly when she would run out of smokes. And he knew exactly when she was in the mood for them too. He knew what she ate for breakfast, knew how she took her coffee, knew all the strange homemade remedies she wanted when she was sick, and especially when she was hungover. In fact, Flynn Reynolds knew everything there was to know about living with Rosalie Briar. And he used that knowledge to do all these thoughtful little things for her that nobody else would think to do. On one condition, of course.
That she never commented on it.
Because being sweet had never been a problem for either one of them--but acknowledging that real affection was what drove them to do nice things for each other, that was something they both wanted to avoid at all costs. They knew exactly how they felt about each other. They certainly did not need to talk about it.
True to form, Rosalie therefore ignored his gesture and simply opened the small cardboard box, counting the cigarettes in it as she spoke. "Who'd you lift these off?"
"Bought 'em, actually," he replied casually, refilling his wine glass.
The blonde quirked an eyebrow in surprise. "Really? How old school of you." Plucking a smoke from the pack, she placed it between her lips and gave Flynn a conspiratorial look--the one that they always gave each other when they both knew that they were thinking the same thing.
"Roof?"
"Roof."
Tenants weren't technically supposed to be on the roof, but that, of course, had never stopped them. A couple of times, their landlord tried changing the locks, but the only thing that happened was that they ended up swiping the key and making a copy, or that they simply learned how to pick it. In the end, the man simply had to concede that the two of them were going on the roof, no matter if they were allowed to or not.
When they were not out and about, this was where they spent their evenings--drinking, smoking, watching the sun set over the city lights, just glad to have survived another day. Every time, without fail, Flynn would try to do something incredibly stupid. And every time, without fail, Rosalie would be completely unsuccessful in talking him out of it.
"You're going to fall," she chided to no avail, as she watched him play a game of how to be tipsy while walking along the ledge of a ten-story building. "And I'm not paying for your health care. Or your funeral."
"Please, if I fell, which I won't, but if I did, you'd be devastated." He took another few steps, holding his arms out to maintain his balance, but still managing to sway a little too much for her comfort. "What would you do without me?"
"Lead a less stressful life, probably."
Flynn simply laughed and shook his head at her words. "A less exciting life, you mean. " He stopped in his tracks to give her one of his trademark grins. "Remember the Chinese curse, Blondie. May you live in interesting times."
In return, she merely rolled her eyes at him and reached for the now half empty pack of cigarettes, lighting another one before replying. "You know, that's the first of two curses."
"Yeah?" He jumped down from the ledge with ease, sauntering up to their spot and taking the smoke right out of her hands, nonchalantly having a drag before handing it back to her. "What's the other one?"
She smiled innocently before exhaling a breath of smoke right into his face.
"May you find what you're looking for."
And he sighed, and she laughed, and he retaliated by promptly picking her up by the waist and carrying her toward the edge of the roof, grinning widely as she kicked and screamed for him to put her back down. Which he did. Eventually.
That was it. That was their life. Not every day, but most days. Most days, Flynn and Rosalie lived some version of that wine-soaked evening on the roof--more or less, at least. While they did not have a routine, per say, there was a certain element of predictability, of dependability, to their shared adventures. They always came home to each other. They always split a large pizza. They always drank cheap wine out of an empty bottle of '82 Bordeaux.
For someone who claimed that she would never settle down for anything, the life that she had with Flynn certainly felt an awful lot like it--like settling down. They had lived in this apartment together for longer than any other place they'd had separately, for one. They belonged to the same shared circle of acquaintances, who might not have known them that well, or at all, but still knew them together, as an entity. They were Flynn and Rosie. Rosie and Flynn. And she was comfortable. Content. Perhaps too much so.
After all, when she ran away from home, was this really the life she'd set out to have?
----------
It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon when she made up her mind.
She had to leave.
Flynn might not have been her boyfriend, but for all intents and purposes, he certainly filled the role that a relationship would in her life. They lived together. They worked together. They went everywhere together. Their friends joked that one could never have one without the other, but it was practically true--they were always by each other's side, always whispering secrets and laughing at inside jokes, always incredibly protective, especially in the presence of others. And naturally, people assumed that they were a couple.
It was an assumption that drove Rosalie crazy. She hated it. She hated the way that everyone treated her differently once they'd met Flynn--like she wasn't her own person anymore, like she somehow belonged to him. She hated when people told their friends not to hit on her because she was Flynn's girl. She hated that even when she sighed, rolled her eyes and corrected them, no one ever truly believed her. That no matter who, or what they thought she was, they ended up thinking of her as his in some capacity or another.
But what she hated most of all was that she ended up thinking of herself as his, too.
And it was too much for her. Flynn enjoyed getting into trouble, and he enjoyed getting in over his head--somehow confident in his belief that he lived under a charmed star, that nothing could ever really happen to him. And nothing ever really did. But my god, there were close calls. So many close calls. Over and over again, and every single time the blonde found herself in that situation with him, the fear she felt for his safety was unbearable. Once a week, it seemed, he managed to scare her half to death with his shenanigans, making her terrified of losing him, terrified of even letting him out of her sight.
Sitting in that hospital room, watching as he happily joked around and flirted with the nurses, not a care in the world, not even acknowledging that his minor injury could have easily been a pretty major one, she finally realised that she couldn't do it. She was too dependent on him. Too attached to the life that they'd built together.
When she told him, he completely and utterly understood. He understood why she had to go. In fact, the look in his eyes as she calmly tried to explain herself said that he'd already seen it coming, that he even agreed with her reasons. After all, he knew her better than anyone else. And he felt the same way.
While she was glad that he did not fight her on it, at the same time there was a small, small part of her that wished he would. Just like in the movies she'd watched growing up.
Fight for me. Make me want to stay.
But mostly, she was relieved. She was relieved when she packed up her things and told him that she'd leave in the morning. She was relieved when he nodded and said that he'd see her off then. Because he knew, and she knew that he knew, that when he woke up the next day, she wouldn't be there anymore.
She was relieved about that, too.
She hated goodbyes.
----------
"So, what's the deal with this bracelet? Can't be worth much, can it?"
Rosalie glanced down at her wrist as the man brushed his thumb over the golden charm. He was a renowned gem expert, slash jewellery thief, that she was taking out for drinks in order to celebrate a job well done. And being in his line of work, he had seen the kind of accessories that she wore otherwise. The simple gold chain didn't fit in among them.
"Oh, it's merely a keepsake," she replied, subtly but quickly pulling her hand away from him. She was still uncomfortable with having anyone else touch that particular bracelet. "A relic from another life. It's value is purely sentimental."
He raised an eyebrow at that. "Oh? Sentimental how?"
She shrugged. "It reminds me of the last time that I was truly happy." Having a sip from her gin and tonic, the blonde could tell that her answer, delivered without an ounce of sarcasm or a sense of humour, had completely thrown her company for a loop. She decided to continue anyway. "It was given to me by the last person who made me feel like I wasn't entirely alone. Probably the last person that I really cared about. But you know what they say: all good things must come to an end. Or rather, all good things must be put to an end, by yours truly. So. There's that."
For a moment, there was nothing but uncomfortable silence between them, during which Rosalie seriously contemplated calling it a night. Then he finally spoke up.
"Why'd you leave?"
"Oh, that's the million dollar question," she stated bluntly, finishing the rest of her drink in one fell swoop. "You know, I thought that I had a good reason. A really good reason. But some days, I swear, I honestly can't remember what it was."
He looked like he didn't know how to answer that, and she looked like she couldn't really be bothered to stick around in order to find out. Putting enough cash on the bar to cover both of their drinks, and more, she grabbed her purse and her coat and left without another word.
Instead, she picked up a large pepperoni pizza. When she got home, she filled the empty bottle of an '82 Bordeaux with cheap red wine, poured a hefty amount into one of her polished, pristine, crystal wine glasses, and sat down on the living room floor. She turned on the television and raised her glass in a toast to nothing or no one in particular at all.
Remember the Chinese curse, Blondie.
"May you live in interesting times."
May you find what you're looking for.
Congratulations, Rosalie. Looks like you finally found everything you've ever wanted.
