Triple Crown

More added.

May
Re-Education (Through Labor) – Rise Against
Survivor Guilt – Rise Against
Entertainment – Rise Against
13 Suicide Attempts









































“So what did you want to talk to me about, Lizzie?” Kodiak asks me as he meets my gaze over the top of his cup.
We’re sitting in Starbucks, sipping lattes and peoplewatching. I called Kodiak up three hours ago, telling him that I needed to talk to him about something, and he, being the amazing gentleman he is, immediately drove up from Colorado Springs and met me here.
I hold up my left hand – I had kept the scar hidden up until now – and Kodiak audibly gasps in surprise.
“What happened?” he asks me concernedly, his eyes locked on mine.
“Do you have any idea how painful it is to be burned alive? Well, I know exactly how painful it is to be burned alive,” I tell him, to open my mind for a second and let him absorb all of my memories of the Triple Crown.
After a few moments, I cut him off, and he exclaims, his eyes widening in amazement and horror, “Oh my God! I’m so sorry Lizzie,” he adds sincerely, and I can’t help but smile slightly. It figures that he would apologize for it; he just is that kind of boy.
“So that’s why you invited me up here, to talk about it?” Kodiak asks, and I nod my head in confirmation.
A moment of silence passes in between us before I murmur bitterly, my eyes locked on the top of my cup, “I was Lizzie Lightning, the spark, consumed by my own flame.” I then look up at Kodiak to meet his gaze and add quietly, “Who knew being burned alive would hurt this badly?”
When Kodiak doesn’t say anything after a few moments – undoubtedly he has no idea what to say; I mean, it’s not every day a close friend of yours wants to talk about an interdimensional, incredibly scarring trip they took – I say, not able to keep the self-loathing out of my voice now, “Luke kept me whole and sane and myself for the four most trying months of my life, and how do I repay him? By burning him with me.”
A few more seconds pass in silence without Kodiak saying anything, and I begin, looking up at him to meet his gaze, “But do you know what hurt the most?” Kodiak shakes his head no almost warily – I suppose I can’t really blame him for his wariness, considering what I’ve said so far – and I finish, “The realization that my promised always wasn’t going to happen.”
After a half-second more of quiet, I add bitterly, “But I guess this is just what I get for falling in love with a mortal.”
I sigh deeply, and look up to find Kodiak watching me with sad, sympathetic golden eyes. He gives me a smile, and I look back down at my coffee, the fingers of my left hand beginning to tap spastically on the side of the paper cup.
“You know,” I begin after a long silence, “there’s something Beatty says, in Fahrenheit 451: you don’t face your problems, you burn them.” I look back up again to meet Kodiak’s gaze and finish, “I wonder what that makes me.”
I adjust my hand ever so slightly, and Kodiak’s eyes follow this motion to rest on the thin scars and scabbing cuts on my wrist. Without saying anything, he reaches over and takes my hand to trace the scars and cuts gently with his thumb, then looks up at me to ask, “Why are you trying to kill yourself?”
“Because I don’t want to hurt like this anymore,” I answer, to have Kodiak immediately respond.
“And killing yourself is the only way to stop the pain?” Kodiak shoots back, his eyes locked fiercely on mine, but I don’t bend to his will. I’ve gone through too much and had too many people attempt to bully me for Kodiak to succeed now.
“Kodiak, I will do whatever it takes to find an end,” I reply evenly, staring him down and keeping my calm. “If that end ends me, so be it.”
I then rise to my feet and turn towards the door, giving Kodiak one last look over my shoulder before leaving.

More added.

June
Tip the Scales – Rise Against
Blood-Red, White and Blue – Rise Against
Under the Knife – Rise Against
Injection – Rise Against
Careful – Paramore
Drones – Rise Against
27 Suicide Attempts





































“Thank you,” I tell Jackson with a smile as he hands me a huge bowl of popcorn. We’re watching the Cabin in the Woods – both of us find horror movies like this to be downright funny, with all of the real horrors we’ve both experienced – and generally just having a nice time in each other’s company. In fact, this is the sixth huge bowl of popcorn we’ve blown through; I’m afraid we’ll completely kill Jackson’s stash of popcorn by the end of the movie.
“Of course,” he replies, giving me a smile of his own as he settles down next to me again and wraps his arm around me comfortingly. I lean my head on his shoulder and sigh as we watch one teenager get eaten by a werewolf-like thing that Jackson and I both agree looks pretty fun to shapeshift into and run around as.
Jackson’s and my relationship has been... interesting ever since we came back from El Tiempo. I, of course, have been so torn up over Luke being gone that I’ve tried to kill myself every day and am probably only alive right now because Jackson found me before I was able to bleed out after cutting my wrists last night. In fact, Jackson’s saved me many times since we came back, much to my family’s happiness and my chagrin.
The only days that I haven’t tried to kill myself so far have been ones that I’ve spent with Jackson, because he makes me happier, and tricks some part of me into thinking that it’s worth it to keep on living, that I can’t die because he needs me alive to have a reason to live. He’s basically been my crutch, the person who’s kept me up and fighting and alive, and I don’t know what I’d do without him, besides finally succeed in killing myself.
However, Jackson doesn’t really want to be my crutch; he wants to be my boyfriend, my soulmate, my love – my replacement Luke, basically. Unfortunately for him, that’s not really possible – after all, Luke was my always, and the only person who will ever be my always – but I haven’t had the heart or the energy to tell Jackson that because I don’t want to alienate him and be left all alone in my misery. In fact, just for the sake of not being alone and keeping him around, I’ve agreed to kind of be his girlfriend, this semi-date that we’re on being my birthday present to him. It’s the first date that I’ve allowed myself to go on with him – I didn’t think I could handle the pain up until now – and it’s been going pretty well so far.
Jackson, like always, is the personification of chivalry, and insists on doing everything so that I don’t have to move or, in his words, ‘waste any of my precious energy on doing things he could do instead.’ He made us dinner, an amazing shrimp scampi – he happens to be an amazing cook, along with everything else that he can do – and then we – well, more like I – opted to watch a movie, Cabin in the Woods in particular.
It’s probably one of the best dates I’ve ever been on, just because it’s so personal and private and we get to spend the most time together, but, despite that, it just doesn’t feel right. Some part of me seems to think that I’m betraying Luke’s memory by doing this with Jackson, even though I know that Luke would want me to be happy with another person rather than drowning in misery over him, and that part isn’t going to be ignored for much longer.
Sighing deeply, I press the pause button on the DVD player without moving by using a column of solidified air, which causes Jackson to turn and look at me with a curious, almost wary look on his face.
I reach out, set the popcorn bowl on the coffee table, and whisper, my eyes on the frozen TV screen, “Jackson, I miss him.”
“I know,” Jackson replies quietly, to reach over, hold me and give me a gentle kiss on the forehead when I break down and begin to sob.

More added.

August
Brighter – Paramore
Roadside – Rise Against
I Caught Myself – Paramore
The Good Left Undone – Rise Against
Fences – Paramore
Always – Switchfoot
29 Suicide Attempts






































“How was your summer, Lizzie?” a voice calls out to me, and I look up from my phone to find a friend of mine, Meghan McManners, walking up to me. I don’t really want to talk to her – to be perfectly honest, I didn’t really want to go back to school to begin with, but my mom forced me; something about the socialization being good for me – but I force the best fake smile I can muster onto my face – and it’s probably pretty convincing, considering I won a whole country over on those fake smiles – and wait for her to sit down at my table.
“Pretty good,” I answer, nodding my head. Besides the eighty-something suicide attempts, it was a pretty good summer. “Went to the Olympics, won a couple gold medals, set a few world records – you know, pretty normal summer.” I give her a smile, and she nods her head, a grin crossing her face now too.
“Yeah, I saw you on TV. It’s amazing how fast you are,” she tells me, and I nod my head in recognition. A half-second passes by in silence before Meghan asks me, “So did you do anything else?”
“Well,” I begin, thinking that I might as well tell someone the basic synopsis of what happened to me, “I got burned alive, watched the boy I loved get blown up and tried to kill myself eighty-something times.” A bitter half-smile crosses my face as I stare down at the table and I say, looking back up at Meghan to find a look of sheer horror on her face, “I guess the rest of my summer didn’t go so well.”
No one else comes up and talks to me after that.

More added.

I stare down at the gleaming blade in my hands, admiring the sharpness of the steel and the way the metal shines in the light. It’s fitting that such a beautiful thing will be the object of my demise.
This is it; no one will be around to save me before I bleed out if I cut my wrists now. My parents have gone out for the day and, for some reason, decided that the therapy they had sent me had cured me of my depression enough to leave me at home. Of course, they still left the lock on the knife drawer, but that was almost too easy to break.
I can finally end it all, and stop this heart from aching so terribly, and maybe even see Luke in the afterlife. I can finally reach the end I’ve been hunting after for so long, and let death save me from my pain. Finally, after such a long and painful wait, I can free myself from this life and the scars it has given me.
I have raised the blade to my wrists and am about to press the metal in and begin my end – I can see it on my tombstone now: Lizzie Lightning, 2/13/95-10/10/12, died of a broken heart – when the doorbell rings. I’m incredibly tempted not to answer it – after all, I can’t really kill myself in privacy like I want to if there’s someone else around – but something tells me that I should answer it, so, with a sigh, I set the blade down on the coffee table, rise to my feet and walk to the front door to open it up and almost have my jaw hit the ground in shock.

“Luke,” I whisper, throwing myself at him and locking my arms around his neck before I even realize what I’m doing. I inhale deeply, and the clean, fresh scent of his cologne fills my nose and intoxicates me. After a few seconds of just holding onto him with all of my might and him holding onto me just as tightly, it occurs to me that this shouldn’t be happening, that he’s dead, and I pull back to stare up at him and meet his gaze.
As soon as I do so, I know that it’s him, because those are his incredibly beautiful, impossible to imitate ice-blue eyes staring down at me with so much warmth and love in them that I can’t help but wonder how on earth I didn’t have the patience to wait for him.
“Dear Cassius,” I murmur, my gaze glued to his, “I think our stars have finally changed.” I then lean up to kiss him passionately, my arms locking around his neck as I try to convey all of the emotions I’ve felt over the last four months about him in one embrace.
I fail miserably, of course, even though I end up kissing him for at least ten seconds, but that doesn’t matter. Now that he’s back, I have all the time in the world to tell him exactly how I feel, and no reason to lie about it anymore either.
“How are you alive?” I ask him in a whisper when I pull back to meet his gaze again. As I stare into his eyes, I realize with a start how my memories do their ice-blue depths no justice in capturing their beauty. Of course, my memories don’t do any justice in capturing the love and kindness pouring out of them either.
Luke has opened his mouth and is about to respond when suddenly we both feel something moving against our legs, and look down to find our hands – my left and his right – twitching together.
Immediately, without having to communicate, we both raise our twitching hands to about shoulder level to intertwine our fingers and stop our hands from twitching. Luke then finally answers, “It turns out that machine gun Max gave me put out a small force field strong enough to keep me alive. He then had Lars patch me up enough that I wouldn’t die before coming back to this dimension and gave me to completely heal to a doctor friend of his in Denver the day you came back.”
“Oh,” I exclaim quietly, my mouth dropping open in surprise. Even though Max’s decision to not tell me that Luke survived caused me much heartache, I know it was the right one because, if I thought that Luke was going to live and he didn’t, I would be even more depressed than I was a minute ago, and I can’t find it in my heart to be angry at Max in the slighest, especially not when so many more important and better emotions, like happiness and jubilation, should be and are filling me.
A small smile crosses Luke’s face at my amazement, and I just stare up at him and he just stares down at me, both of us drinking in the other’s presence, for a few long, blissful moments.
After a while, Luke seems to come to his senses, and breaks the peaceful silence that’s draped us for the last few seconds by beginning, “Lizzie, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you since I first laid eyes on you four years ago.” After pausing for a half-second to make sure that I’m following, he questions, his eyes locked on mine, “Do you honestly and truly love me?”
Without thinking, without second-guessing myself, without allowing my mind to get in the way and screw things up, just answering from my gut and my heart what I know to be true, I immediately answer, “Always.”

The Gambler – Fun.

And they lived happily ever after…

Well, it's finally finished! :) Mods, if you could please move it to the completed and critique forum now, that would be great.

Moved c:

Thank you. :)

Well, now that I'm done with it, any comments and/or critique would be greatly appreciated. :)