~Warning~
Grab your tissues and hold off from killing the author......this is the reason i didn't update for a year🤧🤧

......

Yusuf still used that same earthy perfume he’d always used. Kubra realized that the second she was in a car with him. She hated it. The smell that used to turn her on made her skin crawl. It reminded her of all the things that had been taken from her.

“Come on, now. Stop frowning. Hopefully, we won’t ever see Yusuf again after this,” Huma said from the passenger seat, looking at her in the rearview mirror.”

Kubra hated that she knew Yusuf had just rolled his eyes with the way his head tilted upwards. “I’ve been getting reassured of this for quite a while now, yet he always keeps popping up.”

She heard him sigh. Again, she hated herself for catching onto the longing, hurt, and self-disappointment in his voice when he asked, “What would it take for you to forgive me, Kubra? I’d do anyt-”

“Can you give me back those four years? Make the clock reverse and bring me back what once was mine?” As a child, she’d always loved these lines from Tangled. Life really had the cruelest humor sometimes.

He swallowed. “No. But I can spend the rest of my life trying to make you forget it.”

The grip on her throat that she was just beginning to forget returned and gripped her in the claws of the horrid past again. I will spend the rest of my days making you feel like the most beautiful girl in the world that you are. Such empty words he used to throw around with such sincerity that the wisest of all could’ve believed them.

But you were not wise, were you? The voice she was trying to keep at bay but was always lurking somewhere in her subconscious spoke. You were the most idiot girl in town. That’s why you’re in this whole mess, aren’t you?

No! She screamed in her mind. Or was she actually yelling? Her breath came in short puffs. But she was easier to reach now. Her best friend’s voice consoled her through the fog.

“Breathe now, Kubra. You’re here. You’re free. Everything else is beneath you now. You hold the power.”

And after blinking a few times and breaking the haze, she could see the worried faces again. She used to hate it and get annoyed by all the worries. But she’d come to terms that with her, they were inevitable. How they were driving in a straight line was beyond her.

“Then do me a favor, Yusuf, and just stop trying to fix things that you broke! Just come to terms with the fact that just as I suffered and Saad suffered and all my loved ones did? This is your suffering now. Even if everyone else you wronged forgives you, I cannot, and I will not! You can roam free around but I hope and I pray that your own conscience be your prison.”

Tears glistened in Huma’s eyes but she stayed silent. Her heart broke for her friend, but she couldn’t help but feel a little pity for Yusuf. He looked like a man who had lost something he could never hope to find. And in all meanings, he really did.

But Huma could not help but wonder if somehow she ever found herself in such a position as Yusuf, could she be forgiven? But she could not ponder upon this question for long for the heavy silence fell upon the car that was so loud, it drowned out the noise of one’s own thoughts. It was even louder than the one that befell the court moments before the judge ruled out the sentence.

And in way, a sentence had been ruled here. The cruelest one Huma had ever witnessed. And this time, the judge hammering down the gavel was Kubra.

*~*~*~*~*

The sound of music none of them was paying attention to filled the car after that. The grey skies painted everything in shades of gloom and grief. Couldn’t it tell that today was the day the country’s greatest filth was going to be punished for the horrible crimes he had committed against his own son, Kubra and the entire nation? It should be celebrated. It should be the most beautiful of days.

Or did it know something no one was aware of?

Something so horrid and so painful that it could even surpass the horrors Jamal Bajwa had inflicted. After all, there was nothing scarier than the jokes life sometimes played.

The skies began to cry for the unaware hearts that were going to suffer and if they’d had lips to form words, maybe they would’ve warned them of what awaited them.

But Alas! No one saw the flash of headlights that came at them at full speed from the crossroad until it was too late. Yusuf tried to steer the car out of harm’s way, but of no use.

The grim reaper was there to take a soul and he was not going to go without one.

*~*~*~*

The sharp stab of metal in Kubra’s side had her gasping for breath as the car flew off the road and slid across the bushy periphery. Her whole life flashed in front of her eyes as rod impaled her. She could feel blood leaving her arteries and filling her cavities, wanting to choke her.

There were so many things she wanted to take back, so many things she wanted to say, so many things she wanted to do. But as the car stopped rolling the steppe, regret filled her for she knew she would never get the chance.

She tried to breathe, imagining Saad in front of her, kneeling there and urging her to hold on. But she couldn’t. She was trying, but death was stronger. There was fight left inside her, but it would just burn down like the spark which is suffocated with ash.

She could feel herself trembling, her body going cold. But at the same time, she was burning up with pain, a million knives burning her every receptor of pain with the cruelest of heats.

She tried to turn her head and this time, she succeeded. If it could be called success, for her head dropped to the side and couldn’t be held up again. She could see with blurred vision an unconscious Huma and a coughing Yusuf. She wanted to reach out to him. Tell him that she didn’t want to go with resentment in her heart. That she forgave him. That she wished he could live and breathe without guilt weighing him down.

But words were not her slaves this time.

She wanted to call out to Huma. Wanted to make sure she was breathing. That she was okay.

But she couldn’t.

She wanted her parents to be there with her, her mother holding her hand and father caressing her head.

But they weren’t.

She wanted to listen to her mother’s emotional rant one last time, let her father’s encouraging words soothe her one last time, feel Saad’s love one last time.

But she would never.

She wanted to go back to the days when she was eighteen and was sneaking out of her house at night to go surprise a friend for her birthday with Huma, when they were strolling through the bazaars of Old Lahore, when they were eating Pani Puri at roadside.

But she would never experience these ever again.

She gasped air through the blood gurgling at the base of her throat, wanting to exhale out all the regrets and ‘if’s’, but it didn’t leave her. . .

Not even when she couldn’t draw a breath in anymore. . .

*~*~*~*

A head-splitting pain had Huma groaning. She slowly came to her senses, invisible hands forcing her to keep her eyes shut but the loud spattering of the rain again metal and the distant sound of ambulance tugged at the part of her brain that worried immensely for others safety.

She opened her eyes and was immediately horrified by the sight of crimson blood trickling down Yusuf’s forehead, his entire face painted in the sticky fluid. But he was breathing. She could see him coughing as the medics injected him with something.

She tried to move but a sharp pain in her neck stopped her as a groan left her. A doctor who’d probably stopped to help the paramedics put a support around her neck. He checked her pupils with a light and yelled something to the paramedic over the roaring rain.

“What . . . happened?” she asked in a scratchy voice, throat hurting as if a sandpaper had been rubbed against it.

“You were in an accident. The car door is stuck. We’re going to get you out of here as soon as possible and then you can be properly treated.”

Only then did she notice the mechanic trying to cut through the metal and realized what the grinding noise was about.

There was an insistent tugging in the back of her mind which probed her to find out about something she knew was important but could not muster up strength to neither try to remember it nor ask about it.

“Yes, we’re bringing two critical patients to the hospital.” The drenched doctor talked on the phone loudly. Two? That meant Kubra was fine. Right? Yes, Kubra! She ought to ask about Kubra! “Ask Doctor Layeba to come in as well, we’re going to need a neurological consult . . . No, unfortunately the girl died on the scene.”

What?!

Apparently she had yelled it, for the doctor looked at her with wide eyes. She didn’t feel the pain as she spun around to look at Kubra. The doctor immediately rushed forward to urge her not to move her neck but no power on earth could’ve stopped Huma at that moment. There lying on the backseat, Kubra looked like she was sleeping.

“Kubra?! Kubra, my friend, meri jaan, please wake up!”

But no, since when did Kubra sleep so still? At that moment, Huma wished she had been sleeping. She wished that it were all a dream. A terrible, horrifying dream, but still a dream.

She looked at Yusuf and uncaring of his pain or injuries, she shook him hard despite someone trying to keep her.

“Yusuf, you bastard! Wake up and tell her to cut the shit! This is all your fault! Please wake up. Either of you. Pl-” Her voice broke. Was Huma crying again? She didn’t care. “Tell me this is a dream. Please wake up and tell me this isn’t true!”

But there wasn’t supposed to be so much pain in a dream. Every nerve in her body screamed in agony. She didn’t know if it was physical or mental. All she knew was that she wanted to drown in it and not fight against the ocean of pain.

A couple of hands tried to grab her arms and she realized she was thrashing, trying to reach the backseat, to touch the body she hoped wasn’t called, so that she could pretend that she was merely in an unusual dream.

And my God! Who was screaming?

And then she realized, it was herself.

Was it true then? Had she accepted the reality she’d been hoping was a dream? Was Kubra really gone? Her friend with whom she’d spent her every waking moment she could remember together really not in this world? How could life be this harsh? How could Kubra be this cruel?

How could she just sentence them all to a life sentence of misery?

*~*~*~*

Ahem.....
Hi🙋
Okayyy....
Assalamualaikum...
Soooo, we're back in full circle aren't we? Hey, I'm sorry, but you were warned and i write misery well🤧🤧
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