Autumn Tears And Winter Leaves

"So he's definitely gone, huh?" Pasco asked as he tapped a random rhythm on his drum kit.
"Yeah." Conall replied, draping his guitar over his shoulder and sighing as his eyes scanned the basement.
"About fucking time." Pasco said, dropping his sticks onto his drums.
"Pasco!" Conall warned.
"What?" Pasco protested. "He was! He was a two-faced, hyper-sensitive, sly, conceited, arrogant, moody slug... And those were his good points."
Conall smirked down to his guitar despite himself, "Yeah I know. Just don't let Lawen hear you say that."
"She's in bitch mode, is she?"
"Well, what do you expect? She thought she was gonna be with this arsehole for the rest of her life. She's heartbroken."
"Slug." Pasco spat.
Conall's smile was split in mid-birth as the basement door snuck forward. The two men raised their eyes in trepidation and let out the breaths they didn't know they were holding as Torben stepped into the room. "She's coming down now." he announced simply.
As Torben picked up his bass and strapped himself to it lovingly, the basement door vaulted open and Lawen pummeled down the stairs. "Right, let's get this thing over with." she demanded. Turning back to the band, she added, "And for fuck's sake, don't bathe me in sympathy. I can just about handle my mistakes, forget your over-exaggerated mothering tendencies, k?"
Passing an expression laced with fear between them, the group solemnly nodded in an unspoken promise before morphing music with their inanimate instruments. One fact declared itself blatantly as the practice progressed; the emotions that mauled Lawen with an intense passionate anguish had also tucked a throttling grasp around her voice too. It dived from her lips, damp with the tears she caged behind her sealed eyes. It was an alluring despair that was so intriguing to watch.
Conall watched Lawen wind her lyrics around the music, while she coiled the microphone lead around her wrist. He couldn't help thinking she was attempting to rope herself into reality. The way her posture sloped towards the microphone stand for support was almost tragic compared to how she normally reacted to a song. There was no doubt that this was an incredibly difficult time for her, attempting to reconstruct a life out of crumbled ruins. At the same time, he was extremely aware that Lawen would bind her demolished heart with her feelings in an attempt to revive some of her misplaced senses. He lowered his eyes mournfully and gratefully strummed the final chord of the song.

Two hours after "Our Teenage Kicks" abandoned their practise, Lawen still hadn't hauled herself from the basement. Torben anxiously pressed his ear to the basement door, attempting to tune into signs of survival. A blanket of silence overwhelmed him and, against his better judgement, he twisted the door handle and let himself into the darkness.
Hooking his hand over the railing, Torben gently eased himself down the shadowed steps. He added pressure to his clutch as he found himself pooled deeper in the eclipsed room. As he reached the bottom, he clamped his eyes tight before peeling them open to peer around the room. In the claustrophobic darkness, Torben couldn't even make out the shape of his beloved bass, snoozing against the wall although he remembered specifically where he had placed it. It was no surprise to his panicking mind that he couldn't locate Lawen.
"What do you want?" Lawen's voice bombed through the darkness, jolting Torben from his paranoid thoughts.
Laughing nervously at his reaction, Torben stepped further into the plunging shadows. "Lawen. Where are you? Fuck, I can't see anything in here."
"What do you want?" Lawen repeated in a voice as dark and oppressive as the room.
"I... Er... I just wanted to see how you were." Torben answered, frowning.
"I'm fine," Lawen retorted. "Now leave me alone."
Torben pressed his lips together fiercely and inhaled the frustration that lashed around the room. "No," he stated simply. "Geez, Lawen. Just because Craig abandoned you doesn't mean that you can cut everyone else out of your life. And just because he treated you like shit doesn't mean that you can do the same to everyone else for some kind of retribution against his actions. It ain't right. We're only 'mothering' you because we care about you. And, personally, I hate this whole melodramatic, over-pathetic act you've been draping yourself in recently. It's not you, Lawen. It's not you at all." Taking a gulp of his own vented anger, Torben stepped back towards the stairs. "You know what, Lawen, I'm really beginning to give up on you. This has gone on for too long. You really need to pick yourself up before you bury yourself forever. No one can love a corpse. No matter how hard they try." With that, Torben placed a heavy foot against the bottom step.
"Torben." Lawen pleaded.
As Torben rocked his weight on the step, there was a sharp click and light drowned the room, chasing the shadows underneath the relics resting in it. He turned back cautiously to see Lawen curled against the wall, her mascara streaking her face with her ash emotions and her eyes weighed down with her guilt. "Lawen." Torben sighed.
"Don't be mad at me," Lawen tremored. "Not you too. Please. No more arguments."
As a tear leaked onto Lawen's stumbling lip, the last of Torben's fury drained into resignation and he crossed the room to pull her to him. As he began to sway her lightly in his arms, Torben felt the tremulous roll of her body as she sobbed against his chest.
"It hurts so much." Lawen whined.
"I know," Torben soothed. "I know."
"I can't believe it's happened. I'm so stupid!" Lawen spluttered with a razored voice.
"No you're not," Torben corrected. "He was just extremely talented at manipulating innocence."
Lawen sniffed. "I'm hardly innocent anymore, Torben." Leaning back against his arms, Lawen looked directly into Torben's eyes with a vision clouded with grief. "I'm twenty-two. I'm not that giddy, blushing school girl anymore." Shaking her head dejectedly, Lawen dashed the tears off her face with the sleeve of her jacket.
"But you're just as beautiful." Torben responded. If not even more."
Offering a diluted smile, Lawen raised her eyes. "And you're just as charming."
"I try." Torben replied, tracing a finger across Lawen's jaw line.
Lawen threw her head down onto her chest as a sigh slipped past her lips. "It's just Craig was the only good thing in my life. Now I've got nothing but memories. And they're not going to get me anywhere." Sensing Torben's confusion, Lawen spun her eyes towards the microphone. "Don't get me wrong, Torben. I love being in this band more than anything, but it just seems like we're tracking for miles and heading nowhere."
"Something will come up soon." Torben pressed with desperate assertion.
Sighing, Lawen cupped Torben's face to steady his rampant thoughts. "Will it?" she quizzed. "It was so much easier to believe that when we were fifteen, but we're adults now, Torben. We've got to embrace reality and let go of that dream. Before it keeps us in this quicksand lifestyle."
Torben absorbed Lawen's prophecy with a thin pout before he shook his head. "You're upset. This is the depression talking. It's gonna happen. It's scribed in the horizon for us. You'll see."
Shaking her head, Lawen pulled Torben to her in a comforting embrace. She rested her resolute thoughts on his shoulder, no longer determined to tell him that horizons set with the sun. Instead, she cast a spectral smile into his shoulder as she looked through the window to the thickening night sky.