Prologue
The boy hadn't moved in the past twenty minutes; not that she was watching. No matter how many times a girl walked up to try and speak to him, murmuring comforting words, he wouldn't listen. Instead, he would just stare ahead at nothing and make a point of not paying attention to them.
She brushed her long blonde hair behind her ears, as she turned sharply away from him and whipped out her phone. Of course, thanks to her complete lack of numbers that were in it, there were no new messages. If only Allyson texted more or it didn't take Gemma over a day to get anything she sent.
When she glanced back up, it was just in time to see another girl walking away from him, a light frown gracing her features. She sighed. Alright. Enough was enough.
She stormed over to the couch and stood right in front of him, crossing her arms as she stared down at him, willing him, to move. To look at her. Just once. Just one time in this whole God forsaken wake. At the beginning, she would've been able to chalk it up to the fact that it was his older brother's wake, but there was only so much she could excuse.
It took a moment, but finally those light green eyes moved up toward hers. He brushed his curly brown hair out of his eyes and stared at her through a half-dead gaze. For a second, she thought he was just going to stare through her, unseeingly like he had been doing for the past half hour, but then she realized that even if he did, it was going to be her job to make him stop.
"Come with me." she stated. "I want to show you something."
His green eyes narrowed ever so slightly, proving that he could in fact see her. "Why should I?"
She rolled her own blue eyes and backed off. "Fine. If you want to stay here-"
"I'm coming." he jumped up, and moved to follow her.
Obviously he didn't want to be there anymore than she did, but probably for completely different reasons. He didn't want to be there because he didn't want his brother to be dead and she didn't want to be there because she simply didn't want to. She'd never talked to them before in her life, despite being the same age as him and living next to them for as long as she could remember. But their mothers were best friends, and so she had been dragged there despite the fact that all she wanted to do was sit at home and watch Inuyasha until she collapsed from an anime overdose.
She led him out of the church, somehow managing to keep from being noticed on the way out. Snow crunched under their feet and slipped into her shoes, freezing her toes, but she didn't really care. Instead, she drew her arms around her and shivered harshly against the cold air. Dammit, she should've remembered to grab her coat on the way out.
He didn't speak to her the entire time, which she was slightly grateful for. He was annoying, and she had no doubt that if he if said something, it would probably result in her slapping him.
They stopped by a bench that overlooked the mall, abandoned. She slid onto the icy seat, before patting next to her. He hesitated for a second, before sighing and doing as she had asked. For a while they didn't say anything, just stared at the mall and the people running in and out, getting their Christmas shopping out of the way while it was before Thanksgiving and there was a chance that prices hadn't skyrocketed yet.
"I'm not going to say it's okay and whisper comforting lies in your ear." she finally said, her teeth chattering ever so slightly as she spoke. "Because I don't know what's actually going to happen."
"You took me all the way out here to say that you weren't going to do the one thing that's required of you?" he hissed, even as he shrugged off his jacket and placed it over her shoulders. It didn't offer much shelter against the cold November air, but she couldn't help but wrap it closer around her.
She glared over at him and, for a second, considered standing up and just leaving him there. But then she reminded himself that not one week ago, he had watched his brother die right in front of him and that at his wake, he had given her his coat. Even if it wasn't much of anything. So she bit back her anger at his arrogance and turned back to the mall.
"What I'm saying," she forced through clenched teeth, "Is that if there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that nobody can promise you that it's going to be okay. That nobody can make it okay, except for you. I can't make you get better, and neither can anyone else in the world. It's all up to you. That's all."
He didn't respond to that, merely wrapped his arm around her shoulders and tugged her closer to him. And there they sat, until their fingertips turned red and their lips tinged blue, just staring at the snow that began to fall, blanketing the ground and allowing them to start anew.