~Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us.~
-Donna Tartt-

Self-destruction. It was an art that I had perceived Cara Evelyn to be perfect in. Over the span of five months that she had spent lurking in the shadows of moonlight painting the alleys filled with numerous mysteries, I had seen her destroy herself silently. Despite of no further suicidal attempts, I had felt her dying in front of my eyes..slowly and gloriously.

I had absorbed the depth of her words and the scars hiding behind the crashing oceans of her blue eyes but what haunted me the most was her everlasting smile. While drowning deep into the waves of insanities and nostalgia, lost in her tears and pains, fighting for her every breath, one thing had always remained the same; the slightly upturned right corner of her rosy lips.

Walking the path of a wilting life with her, I had formed an opinion that somewhere in the middle of that night when she had crossed my paths on a rushing train, she had hit the point where one either changes or self-destructs. Looking at her with each passing day, I had felt as if she had embraced both of them with open arms.

There had been moments when she had radiated this eternal sunshine and played about like a little child whose laughter ringed our ancient library. This Cara Evelyn had given me the illusion that she had changed. Then there had come days that she had spent hidden in the shadows and this had brought further damage to her soul in various ways. This Cara Evelyn had haunted my dreams and reflected self-destruction in its true essence.

However, it was in the middle of a very rainy night when I realised that she had embraced neither change nor self-destruction because 'destruction' itself had intertwined into the sketches of her fate and all she had been trying to do was deny it. Cara Evelyn had been in a severe state of a painful denial and the dreadful moment of epiphany had finally arrived to shake her out of it.

"Please wake up.....please!! AARON TROY! WAKE UP PLEASE!!!!!!!" A strong jolt went through every nook of my body as trembling hands shook me repeatedly. My mind started whirring like a train engine and instantly, I absorbed constant sobs around me. Opening my eyes to the most horrible scenario, I jumped off the mattress hurriedly. There she was, trembling and crying and completely lost. Cara Evelyn had always been a mess but never this much.

"Cara..are you okay? What's happened? Hey...relax." I held on to her shoulders firmly and tried to steady her. In the blink of an eye, she pushed me back with extreme force and I fell on the mattress behind me.

"DON'T YOU DARE RELAX ME, AARON TROY!!" Her swollen eyes flashed furiously at me as she raised a finger to my face. A broken sob escaped her throat and she closed her eyes in agony as her teeth bared and the veins in her neck throbbed violently.

"We are...leaving. Take me...oh my God. Aaron...take me please. Please TAKE ME THERE. I NEED TO GO THERE!!!" Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks as she fell to the ground and snatched the silver mess on her head wildly. I got up quickly and enclosed her scattered frame in my arms.

"Okay okay. We are leaving. Right now. Cara, calm down. Right now, I promise." I nodded repeatedly but she didn't even look at me. She was helplessly lost in a terrible pain and I didn't know what it was. Getting up, I picked up my notepad that was placed under my pillow and tore out a page roughly. My hands shook as I scribbled down following words on it with my pen blindly.

Leaving with Cara. Don't worry. Call me when you wake up.
-Aaron-

I stuck the note under my pillow for Rob and turned around to pick up the broken mess on the ground in my arms. It worried me that she was light as a feather and weighed impossibly less as compared to her age. Stepping out of the library, we were hit with a heavy downpour and I squinted my way hurriedly towards the car that I had brought two weeks ago from my savings in the last two years. Tucking her in the passenger seat, I ran towards my side and entered the enclosure hastily.

Light sobs escaped her vocals repeatedly as she murmured unintelligible words now and then. I couldn't make them out but I knew that she was not in her senses. I asked her to name our destination and what she named snatched the floor beneath my feet. Cara Evelyn was asking me to drive for two hours in this severe rainstorm and what a tragedy it was that I knew nothing about her reasons.

Trying my best to rush through the continuous rainfall, I drove insanely towards an unknown future and for the second time in my life, fear enveloped my heart completely. I noticed that she was holding on to her cell phone and her knuckles had turned white from the force she was putting into it. All the way, she had been shaking her head and crying without break.

Reaching the respective town, I asked her for directions and her guidance led us to a place that reminded of my haunting past. The car rolled to a stop in front of a hospital and Cara Evelyn dashed out wildly into the sheet of unforgiving rain.

After parking and locking the car, I ran towards the entrance and rushed into the building after her. I couldn't see her anywhere so I ran towards the counter and asked the assistant about a girl with silver hair. She looked at my drenched and soaked frame with worry and gave me intructions to a room far off at the end of a certain ward. Running wildly through dimly lit corridors, I followed her instructions and met all the fears that I had in my heart as the sight of her silver messy hair crossed my eyes.

"Let me go! LET ME GO!!!!" She was fighting a doctor who held her thrashing physique in the circle of his arms helplessly.

"Sarahhhh! Tell him to let me go!!!!" I ran off to the locale of this wild situation as she shouted at an afraid girl standing in a corner. All the blood had escaped her face and she looked extremely pale. A grey scarf rested on her head and tears rolled down her cheeks relentlessly.

Just as I reached the trio, Cara freed herself from the doctor's hold and turned around to punch him cruelly in the face. He winced in pain and held his jaw tightly.

"No one can stop me from meeting Zayan! NO ONE!" My heart raced furiously as the red threads in her eyes watered once again and she spat the following words at the doctor before running inside a room and closing the door behind her quietly.

The rest of the things were rolled in a drunken fog as I waited in the corridor for her. Sarah, the girl with the scarf, hadn't moved an inch. It was like she was a wax statue and the only movement in her entire frame was depicted by tears rolling down her cheeks and soaking in the grey of her scarf. I asked her to take a seat atleast but she looked right past me as if I didn't exist....as if nothing existed. Giving up on her, I paced the corridor helplessly and tried to imagine what was going on behind the brown wooden door but in the middle of my tiring steps, I realised that I couldn't capture the ongoings behind that door in my wildest dreams even.

After a painful hour, the door opened with a loud crack and Cara ran out wildly, shrieking for the doctors to look at...Zayan. A team of doctors ran past us and she followed them inside. It was then that Sarah finally registered the things around her and ran after them all into the dimly lit room. I stood in the doorway and looked over at the bunch of struggling doctors who were bent over someone lying in the middle of white sheets. Several plastic tubes surrounded the entire mess and Sarah was holding on to a Cara Evelyn whose existence revolved around that steel bed and nothing else. Everything was in the sphere of my sight, yet I couldn't see the face of that one person who resided in the depth of her soul.

It hardly took fifteen minutes before I heard a faint apology and the team of doctors exited the room. The girl in the scarf fell down on the marble floor and started sobbing loudly. While for Cara..she let out a long heart-wrenching call of a name that no longer lived. Shouting out her denials, she hugged the dead body like the last specks of life had been sucked out of her tonight. Cara's shrieks pierced right through my soul and I shut my eyes in agony. I knew nothing of him yet all I knew tonight was...Zayan.

The staff entered and rolled off the stretcher out into the corridor. The sight of his peaceful smile poured itself in my soul and I knew that he had taken the last remains of Cara Evelyn tonight. She ran off wildly after the staff and stopped them from wheeling him away. I didn't restrict her. I knew I couldn't restrict her. She was a thunderstorm and I was a broken umberella tonight. That brown boy had stolen her heart for centuries and no one could do nothing about it. The only thing that clawed at my heart was that I won't be able to look into the eyes that provided the passage to her soul because they were shut forever tonight.

His body was resting in the hospital morgue on the door of which, a haunting red light blinked just like my heart. By the locked door, the remains of Cara Evelyn scattered everywhere on the floor in front of me as she hoarsely repeated the only name carved on her heart. I didn't console or hug her for support because I knew that Cara Evelyn was devoid of every little piece of solace tonight.

Banging her head with the cold door, she cried her heart out all night and no one dared to tell her to leave. The staff of the hospital had seen a thousand deaths and a million broken hearts crying over them but none of them had seen the love of a thousand centuries dissolving into the cruel hands of death and leaving behind a shattered masterpiece outside a cold morgue.

It was until the first light of morning that I sat there, my head resting against the hard wall and my ears absorbing the heart wrenching screams of the only girl whom I had loved in my entire life when an aged couple walked over to us. A very pale Sarah dragged her withering body behind them as they ran to Cara who was crying after the whole night even. Picking her up from the floor, the very handsome middle aged man hugged her tightly and started crying without hesitation. The lady, who had a scarf on her head as well, banged on the door of the mortuary and let out loud cries filled with sheer agony.

One of the staff members came running with the keys and unlocked the door before rolling out the stretcher and rest of it passed in a strange haze. I felt an unknown numbness dissolving in my veins as Cara clung to the cold and lifeless body and shrieked the life out of us. The lady almost fainted at the sight in front of us and had to be held by her husband who was already holding on to an almost dead Sarah. I felt non-existant among them and I knew that this young boy had damaged a lot of lives with his departure. What haunted me the most was the light smile on his lips that showed that he had left this world in utter satisfaction.

The ambulance driving off to the nearest cemetry had Cara and the lady in it along with him while I followed the car that was driven by the man who had Sarah by his side. However, the ambulance stopped outside a religious building that seemed like a mosque. The body was taken inside in the custody of the man while all of us waited outside for him. It took hardly fifteen minutes when he returned with the lifeless being and once again, the ambulance aimed at the cemetry.

The burial was heart wrenching and it shook my breath out when Cara crawled over in the wet mud to throw brown Earth over the love of her life but what shook my entire existence was when she started showering herself with the same material. Dry Earth mixed in her silver hair as she laughed madly in between her cries.
The man stepped forward and picked her up from the floor before enclosing her in his arms once again. The family cried by the grave and I cried far off under a tree. They cried for the boy while I cried for Cara Evelyn.

It was a fleeting moment between consciousness and numbness when her wild eyes met mine and I saw the right corner of her lips turn upward in a heart stopping smile as a sea of ancient agony rolled out of her blue eyes. Slowly, the source of her everlasting smile dawned upon me. The universe had witnessed infinite deaths but it had never seen the soul of a dead person living in the body of another. The girl whom I had loved with all my heart had no identity because this boy, Zayan, breathed inside Cara Evelyn.

Author's Note

The character of Zayan is played by Zayn Malik. He is one of the major characters in this novel.

I'm so sorry for this heart wrenching chapter. It has taken the life out of me and I don't know how I have described his death because he is close to my heart MORE than Cara Evelyn. :'( The novel is going to untangle from now on I guess. You'll know more about Cara's life and the mystery will be revealed. :x

How was this chapter? Honest reviews please. I have never written about a death before. :((((((

Much Love xX
Hazel *-*