Do you know what happens when someone you love dies?

Taegan did. It was the only thing Taegan knew anymore, the only thing she could think about in her idle moments. For that very reason, she tried to allow herself as few idle moments as possible. Unfortunately, she wasn’t a very busy person.

She tried engaging Anther in conversations. She tried endlessly. But it never worked. Because he always agreed with her. On everything. Politics, art, music, all of it he shared her opinion on. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him for that. She couldn’t bring herself to hate anyone. Not even her mother.

Her mother deserved to be hated. That was what Taegan tried to tell herself, what she told herself repeatedly, every single time she passed that closed door in the hallway. Every single time she came home and found no Niamh at the kitchen table, drawing some blitzkrieg induced fantasy. Every single time she found herself about to call out to the taller but younger raven-haired girl in an attempt to get critique on some creation or another.

Niamh was dead. And if Taegan had been capable of playing the blame game, her mother would have been the culprit.

They had been on their way back from the library, a pile of books in Niamh’s lap, their voices loud and joyous as they talked over this and that, or so Taegan imagined. Taegan hadn’t been with them. Taegan blamed herself.

Someone had run a red light. Hit them square on the passenger side. T-boned them. Niamh had died on the scene. Taegan’s mother had been in a coma for half a day and had had minimal whiplash, but was otherwise unharmed. Taegan blamed herself.

If she had gone. If she had pried herself away from that painting for a few hours, Niamh would have been alive. Niamh would have been in the backseat. Niamh wouldn’t have…

Taegan’s thought process was cut off by hands touching her face, and her eyes lifted to meet with those of Anther. He looked concerned.

“Taegan,” he said softly, his beautiful, elemental voice marred by the worry twined with it.

“’M okay,” she mumbled, her eyes shifting away from his with the lie. She was not okay and anyone who took one look at her would know it. She was not okay.

Anther’s eyebrows furrowed, and he shifted to kneel in front of her, one hand moving to push her hair out of her eyes. “You’re not okay, Taegan,” he murmured, his thumb running repeatedly over her cheek, stroking at the soft, delicate skin. The blue eyes flickered, a trace of her now volatile temper flaring momentarily. It faded as it usually did when Anther was involved, and she pushed his hands away without replying.

In the last fortnight or so since Niamh had passed, the Doyle household had become deathly quiet. Taegan’s parents exchanged words regularly, leaning on each other to keep themselves above the tide of depression, but they were always quiet about it. Hushed. But they still had each other. Taegan, however, was not so lucky. She had only Anther, and she was finding him less and less helpful. He was merely a god, an idol she adored. He didn’t have those experiences that she needed her support base to have. He didn’t understand the kind of love she had had for Niamh. He only understood his love for Taegan, that love which, it seemed, she had created herself. And she couldn’t bring herself to assess the situation of Anther. All she could do was what was necessary, and she didn’t even do that. Food had only entered her mouth twice since her sister had died.

Anther was worried to say the least. Taegan’s parents weren’t paying all that much attention to their other daughter, something that irritated him endlessly. He had half a mind to grab them by their necks and force them to do something about her current state, but Taegan had vehemently demanded that he keep himself hidden, and her wish was his command, no matter how unsettling the idea was to his nerves. For all that he claimed to have no race or species, he was easily identifiable as a faerie. He was whimsical and capricious and fickle about all but Taegan. His affection for Taegan was the one thing that remained consistent with him. And he was having trouble with that.

But, for all that he was worried, the last thing he expected was what he found a week later.

-

“Stupid Taegan, idiotic Taegan, ridiculous, ridiculous Taegan. It’s your fault. It’s your fault. It’s all your fault,” she was muttering to herself, her back pressed to her bathroom door. Her pale hands were tangled in the wild mass that was her hair, her eyes squeezed shut so hard that it should have hurt. And it did hurt. But she didn’t care.

“All you fault,” she repeated, the phrase turning into a mantra that calmed her in a perverse way. She shuddered convulsively, her fingers tightening in her hair. Her left arm twinged with the tension in her forearm, and she cracked her eyes open just wide enough to peer at the bare skin there. She sight before her eyes calmed her further, and her breathing evened out. She would do it again. It always helped. She would do it again.

The arm, the thin, porcelain arm was riddled with angry red marks, slices in the delicate, milky skin. Very few of them were old enough to look healed or scabbed. It probably didn’t help that she reopened them on a regular basis.

She felt proud that no one had discovered it yet, this habit of hers. This release. A quick, inherently graceful movement had the drawer on the side of the bathroom counter open. Something metallic flashed in her hand. A razor. A straight-razor. Her father’s. It was an antique that he kept around for some unknown reason, the thing that his grandfather had used to shave. It was beautiful, and it made her smile. It made her happy.

She was vaguely aware of the music still pouring from her bedroom, the CD she had started not an hour before skipping to the next track. Her subconscious identified the song as Happiness is a Warm Gun. The thought made her satisfied.

“Happiness is a warm gun,” she told herself, her voice a whisper in the cold, still air of the bathroom as she turned the razor in her hand. She uttered a small hiss of almost-pleasure as the blade opened an almost scarred wound. She watched the blood pool, lowering her index finger to rub away a few drops. She was well aware that she was probably going insane. Probably.

“Beautiful,” she whispered, smearing the blood between her fingers with a quiet kind of glee. She wanted to paint with it. Wanted to paint Niamh. It was such a pretty color. So bright and rich.

The razor sliced again, opening a new line in her flesh. The part of her mind that wasn’t fogged by depression wondered if she was becoming a masochist. The foggy side told the lucid side to shut up and commanded that the blade come down again, just to prove she was there. Just to prove she could feel something other than shame.

She was slightly alarmed at the amount of blood that came out this time. She had sliced deep into her wrist, unintentionally deep as her hand had slipped on the handle and driven the blade in farther than she had intended. It was a lot of blood.

Laughter bubbled up and out; faint, hysterical laughter. Her vision blurred. Red dripped from her fingertips. She felt dizzy.

She dragged her fingers over the vertical white rim of the bathtub, the red smears forming a word. Niamh. She laughed again, sliding sideways, her vision blurring again.

“Niamh,” she said, laughing as her head connected with the floor and she blacked out.

-

Anther was not prepared for that. No one would have been prepared for that.

Taegan was pale. So pale. So pale.

There was blood everywhere, the pool increasing in size with every passing moment. Her sister’s name was written on the bathtub, a macabre tribute to the girl’s life and death. A note. That’s what it was. A note.

A garbled cry escaped his throat as everything came crashing down around him, and all he could do was murmur Taegan’s name. He fell to his knees, his hands gripping her shoulders and shaking. Her head lolled uselessly, and the metallic scent of blood made him gag. There was so much blood.

The sound of feet in the hallway made him jump, and some hitherto undiscovered animalistic instinct kicked in… and he ran. He ran straight for the window, slipping out to the ground just as Alicia Doyle rounded the corner. Just as Alicia Doyle’s azure eyes fixed on something she was not prepared for. Something no one would have been prepared for.

She screamed, calling for Taegan’s father, and Anther sank to the ground outside, his head in his hands.

Coward, his conscience said. You’re a coward. And he was a coward.

-

Taegan was absent from school again. Sammeth was concerned.

-

She woke up to a lot of light and the worst smell in the world: the smell of a hospital. She felt fuzzy. Fuzzy and fuzzy and fuzzy. She couldn’t remember anything. She wanted to see Anther. Her wrist hurt.

Her wrist.

My wrist…

She blinked at the ceiling, something pushing at the edges of her fuzzy until it clicked, and the blood drained from her face. A steady beep that had just been ambient noise a moment ago crescendoed, and she was abruptly aware of the uncomfortable pounding of her heart in her chest. It felt like it was trying to leap out, and she wished it would stop.

Shit, she thought, clenching her jaw as a sob tried to escape. She remembered now. She remembered.

A whimper slipped out, the sound ragged and terrified. Someone chose that moment to pull open the curtains around her bed, letting in a lot more light and a rather surprised looking intern. The young man disappeared momentarily, leaving the hangings open. He reappeared with a white-coated doctor, a thirty-ish looking woman with honey-colored hair that Taegan had the insane urge to touch. It looked like paint, it was that smooth.

“How are you feeling?” the woman asked, checking Taegan’s chart quickly before looking up at the monitor beside her bed. She frowned slightly.

“How do you expect me to be feeling?” Taegan said, her sarcasm marred by the wobbly tone of her voice. The doctor’s expression shifted slightly, and she stared at the minute girl on the bed.

“Not very well, I’d assume,” she said, shifting the chart in her hands. Taegan looked away.

“I take it you remember what happened, then?” the doctor prompted softly, and Taegan frowned, struggling to keep the tears at bay. It was hard. The doctor took her silence as an affirmative, and she pursed her lips.

“I just need to know one thing, Taegan. One thing and then I’ll leave you alone. I know you just want to be by yourself right now, and I can understand that. I would feel like that, too.” She paused to take a breath, her expression solemn. “Did you mean to do it?”

Taegan broke, and the tears came out along with a silent sob that looked more like a convulsion than anything. “No,” she said, her voice rather loud and choked with tears. A hand touched her shoulder with a reassuring pressure, and the doctor left. Taegan could hear her saying something to the intern as she tugged the curtains closed, and the small girl felt more broken than she ever had. For the first time in years, she cried. Really, truly cried. The people in the beds on either side of her, neither of which were particularly injured, felt concern welling up at the loud, painful sounding sobs that sifted through the thin hanging. It sounded like whoever was in there had just found out that someone had died. And, for all they knew, she had.

--

Author's Note:

So, yeah. I was going to have this be a part of the actual story line, but when I read back through everything that I've written so far, this just didn't fit. It was a bit too dark, completely lacking the sort of... I dunno, sarcastic strength that Taegan has, even when she's 'broken' after Niamh's death and Anther's disappearance and whatnot.

So I drabblefied it, and here it is. Woohoo!