#i’m like mayyyybe almost done but i hope that i’m able to finish it soon!!

[chryzuree]

stitch me up

ALT TITLE: (send me back out to dance)

AUTHOR’S NOTE: impulse fic or w/e. ummm, there’s going to be more parts than this, since i’m not immune to elaborating on ideas 🫶🏻

Next ->

———

At the funeral, the only thing he could think was that he was responsible for Chrysi’s death. 

Jacks had no illusions otherwise. But even if he did, a simple look into her casket would drive the point home. 

Again, and again, and again,

and 

again. 

She looked so deceptively prim, in her neat little dress that he’d never once seen her wear—dark, collar buttoned up to her throat, all lines strong and crisp from the ironing board. Her pink hair curled away from her pale, pale face, waxy with embalming fluids and corrective makeup. The expression on her face was set as something too serious for her, like a Victorian portrait.

She looked like a stranger, but for none of those reasons. 

Whoever had prepared her hadn’t remembered to put a ribbon around her neck. 

Jacks wanted to grab one of the funeral home employees and beg them to get a ribbon. Hell, even a choker necklace from the Hot Topic at the mall down Main. Anything to prove that the girl in the casket was his best friend and not some nightmarish physical form of his failures.

But then he would get cold and itchy whenever he thought about whoever prepared her and he wouldn’t do anything but stare at her still body in the casket. 

He didn’t want to think of someone taking her battered body from the car crash. Didn’t want to think about someone clinically taking her internal organs from her before sewing her back up and shoving her in a dress she never wore. If he got too far down that line of thinking, his stomach would drop and he forgot how to breathe. 

Somebody came up to his side and said something. When Jacks didn’t reply, he heard them mutter, step aside. Something about him being rude, maybe. Maybe something about their condolences. He didn’t know, and frankly, he didn’t care. He’d stopped caring the moment he woke up to the fifty-three notifications on his phone and a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.

There was a line, he knew. Murmurs in the room behind him, stuffy with too many bodies and the heater cranked up too high to combat a relatively mild chilly day outside. People that would step up beside him and crane their necks to get a look at the head cheerleader, set so perfectly in repose that it no longer looked like her. Words mumbled to him—some kind, some annoyed, some worried. 

Jacks merely stood closer to the head of the casket to give them space. 

He hoped they would take the hint and stop talking to him. Let his intent studying of a dead girl be response enough. 

I’m sorry, he thought—transmitted, really, and desperately too. I’m sorry, Chrysi. Is that enough? I’m sorry. Please come back.

He’d not been able to stop it, this silent prayer: I’m sorry, I was wrong, come back, come back, come back. 

Sometimes, his apologies made sense. Other times, they didn’t. He didn’t care. If admitting that he’d wished he could’ve given Chrysi mono too made her eyes flutter open and her mouth twist in that self-satisfied smirk, then he would’ve screamed it aloud to the entire room.

I’m sorry. I should’ve said yes. I should’ve ignored Castor. I should’ve kept kissing you. I’m sorry. 

It all seemed stupid now. What did he care if Castor Valor had a crush on the same girl as Jacks? Castor had never made blood pacts in the summer, or accidentally swallowed one of her baby teeth, or crawled into her window for an illicit sleepover (which, coincidentally, meant more blood pacts). Jacks would’ve been fine ruining that friendship forever, if it meant he got to be with Chrysi.

Staring into her still, dead face, Jacks couldn’t believe it was only two and half weeks ago that she’d confessed to him, that they’d fallen into her trunk, legs tangled and lips locked, that he’d ruined any future relationships with her. Not that he’d been counting. Not that he’d tried to ignore the passage of time and their fight, and instead replayed their kiss over and over again in his mind, clipped to be without any of the unhappy missteps afterward.

I was wrong, he repeated, for the thousandth time during that awful viewing. Can’t you come back now? I was wrong about anything you’d like me to be wrong about. I’ll let you make fun of me forever. I won’t complain when you bring up that stupid kissing booth. 

“Just stop being dead,” he finished, begging aloud, under his breath. 

A familiar hand touched his elbow, like many other hands had clasped him there. He’d shaken off all the others. But this time, Jacks pulled away from the casket to peer into his sister’s sorrowful face. 

“The service is about to start,” she said. Her eyes darted to Chrysi. Her face crumpled and she dragged her attention back to Jacks forcefully. 

Jacks remembered once Chrysi said she never would go up to the casket during a viewing. 

I don’t want that to be my last memory of the person I care about, she’d said with a tiny shrug, so alive as she wasn’t now. I already know they’re dead—I’d rather remember them as they were than as the mortician’s vision of them.

He didn’t know if his sister was of the same opinion as Chrysi, but he knew that his lingering at Chrysi’s side was enough to make it the same opinion. But knowing that didn’t mean that Jacks was willing to step away. 

Muse’s face dropped a bit. She bit her lower lip, like she might cry too. 

“Jacks?” she whispered. 

It was so rare she wasn’t trying to kill him. He almost wished she’d hidden some electric shock buzzer in her hand, just to make this situation feel normal. But he still waded through it like a waking nightmare. 

He dipped his head. “Yeah. Sorry.” His mouth felt wrong, and his vocal chords rebelled against making any noise that wasn’t the scream he could feel building up. “I’m coming.”

He cast one more look at Chrysi's corpse and, when Muse turned to join the rest of the funeral-goers, he tucked a sprig of wisteria under her folded hands. 

—

Jacks didn’t go to school that week, to the concern of… everybody, if he tallied it all up. He barely even got out of bed, and that was only to drag himself, zombie-like, to his door to take whatever food his parents handed him. His limbs moved slowly, heavy, like he had a fever. He didn’t even sleep—not really. 

He just curled up in his bed and ignored his phone buzzing with text after text after text. After the third day, they started getting repetitive—Lyric, asking if Jacks wanted to get out and hang out, even if they were one short of their trio; Missy, with her box of Chrysi’s things that she said she somehow knew Jacks would want, even when he didn’t think he wanted the reminders of her at all; Aurora, desperate like always, begging him to spend time at the Valor household, never knowing when to stop. 

Most days, Jacks tried to remember every tiny thing Chrysi had done. Her Chrysi-isms. The catlike smirks, the feeling of her metal rings grinding against his fingers whenever they held hands, the wicked sense of humor that sent them to detention more frequently than not. The list unspooled more and more and more. Jacks didn’t think he’d reach the bottom before some of the details grew hazy, and the thought terrified him.

Others, he practiced not breathing. 

He’d gotten better. It was a good distraction, he thought. But thoughts of Chrysi always broke through. 

He felt bad, not grieving Castor as much—but then he’d remember the panicked gleam in Chrysi’s eye from across the parking lot and Castor’s tiny shake of his head, and Jacks stopped feeling as bad. 

He replayed the night as what ifs, maybes, as if he’d manage to get a time machine and step into that night to change everything.

Maybe he’d have been willing to reluctantly step into the gulf that had sprung up between them after their failed make out session. Maybe he would’ve gotten Chrysi home. Maybe Castor would still be dead—but when Jacks weighed the options, he knew he’d take Chrysi over Castor any day. 

Jacks burrowed into his bed. He knew it smelled musty, probably. Thick with sweat and sleep and greasy hair and grief. He knew it was nice enough in the middle of the day to open the window and air out his room, when none of his family was home to hear him move around and rush upstairs to ask if he was finally feeling better, and more importantly, was he willing to go back to school now? 

No, and no. No, no, no, no, no. Jacks couldn’t go back to school and look at the F-wing wall and remember Chrysi’s squirrel-like climb to the top. He couldn’t go back to school and peer into Mr. Nielsen’s room and remember how he’d wedged himself at the end of the table Chrysi, Castor, and Aurora were seated at, even though he wasn’t in AP Literature. He couldn’t go back to school and see their lockers, next to each other, and know that hers had been emptied out and that he’d never be able to slip notes into the angled slats again.

Just thinking about it made him feel like drowning all over again.

He pulled his blanket over his head, buried his nose into the oppressive softness of his pillow.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

With a start, Jacks jerked up to a seat. His blankets spilled to the ground in a waterfall. 

He peered oddly at the window, his heart pumping in his chest. That was knocking, right? 

His heart surged, then fell to nothingness with an anvil-heavy thunk. 

“Lyric,” Jacks said, warningly, with the threat of tears in his voice. 

Rat-a-tat-tat.

“Lyric,” Jacks repeated, aggravated. 

Don’t use her knock, he wanted to warn, but he knew if he said that aloud, he’d burst into the tears he’d been holding back since Chrysi and Castor’s deaths. 

As if he could sense Jacks’s distress, he withheld. 

Trembling, Jacks curled his hands into fists. He made no move to open the window. Instead, he held his breath. One, two—he’d gotten good with his practice, up to a minute and a half now, even though he knew Chrysi could hold hers for two and a half minutes, and—God, God, God, it wasn’t like she needed to breathe anymore. 

The world began to swim. He’d forgotten—none of his breath-holding practice had been done while standing. His bed was far more comfortable, and it was safer. Cradled him when he wanted to forget, held him together when he realized he’d never feel Chrysi’s warm breath against his ear whenever she whispered to him in class. 

Jacks turned back to his bed. Lyric could fuck off—Jacks hadn’t answered any of his texts for a goddamn reason. 

RAT-A-TAT-TAT.

The ground beneath his feet slid. The world tilted at a sharp angle, swung around wildly.

It wasn’t until Jacks was tearing back the curtain at his window that he realized he’d been the one to pivot and run—not merely the floor beneath him. Fury roared in the blood in his ears—a shitty patch slapped over the cracking thing in his chest that had once been a heart. 

“Lyric,” he cried, “fucking stop!”

Then he looked through the window and all the air went out of him. 

On the other side, a girl in a neat black dress smiled through a face covered in dirt. She clutched the tree branch as she leaned from tree to window—squirrel-like and raining more dirt to the ground below.

Muffled by the glass, Chrysi Solstice said, “So when are you going to let me in?”