as she was leaving, it felt like breathing

Jules is still reeling from everything about the Purge when the call comes in. Mostly, she's lucky, she knows she's fucking lucky. She still doesn't entirely know how Sabrina did what she did, healing after what could have been such a grievous injury, but the important thing is that it happened, that they ultimately made it through the night in one piece. She feels rattled, uneasy, as life starts to resume throughout the city, but at least there's the sense of being able to exhale. That is, until she gets the call — from Eddie's girlfriend, who heard from a panicked Robin about Rue being stabbed during the Purge and all its chaos. The way her stomach swoops and the world seems to tilt under her feet isn't an entirely new sensation, but she tries her best to ignore the ways in which it's familiar as she gets herself ready to go.

After all, she's not just going to not see Rue. No matter what they once were to each other or how awkward things have been ever since she got to Darrow, the long and short of it now is just that she cares so deeply and always will. So she lets Brina know where she's going and does her best to keep it together, wringing her hands the whole way over, nails digging into her palms, to try to keep from shaking out of her skin with anxiety. She's been scared for a long time of something happening to Rue. She just always assumed it would be an overdose she'd have to worry about, not something like Rue getting fucking stabbed.

Maybe she should have expected that any efforts at maintaining her composure would be useless. As soon as she gets to the doorway of Rue's room, Jules is blinking back tears, swallowing hard against a lump in her throat. "Rue?" she asks, her voice coming out small and unsteady. "Can I come in?"

Jules is counting the days until she turns eighteen. Literally — she has an app on her phone with a countdown, set to hit 0 on February 28th, at which point she'll be a legal adult and can stop living in the stupid fucking Children's Home. Really, it's not the worst place. It's putting a major dent in her sex life, but at least the staff are all pretty nice, and even the other kids aren't terrible. She just hates it, being minded like a child, or like she's back in the Unit. That's the part that really gets to her, a piece of her past that she typically prefers to keep there, that she's spent the last two and a half months feeling newly haunted by.

She's not sure if that's better or worse than all the shit with Rue, though in all fairness, at least that's mostly just in her head, too. The two of them were friends before they were anything else, and the last thing Jules wants is to fuck up her life now. So she keeps a distance, and it hurts, but at least it's better than Rue hating her guts.

Everything, really, is just strange, neither good nor terrible, a weird sort of in-between that leaves her feeling deeply unsettled even now that she's been here for a while. And, for that, the best remedy she has is distraction. She's back to using dating apps again, names like Kindling and Poundr more than a little hilarious to her, and if she feels like she's regressing somewhat, undoing progress that she made, she ignores it. At least she's having fun. There's always her art, too, but bored and on a whim, she buys a copy of a video game that looks like a knockoff Animal Crossing, called, appropriately enough, Critter Junction.

As it turns out, knockoff is probably kind of unfair. It's really fucking fun, and super customizable even before she starts reading about different mods for it online. She's spent the past few weeks toying with it, seeing what she can do and what she wants to do, glad to have something to focus on that's engrossing but low-pressure. Today, that brings her to the park, handheld console on a picnic table in front of her and a sketchbook beside it. She won't have the measurements exact, but it helps to sketch out what she has in mind beforehand.

She's planned ahead, too, bringing a portable battery charger and the cord for the console with her. What she doesn't realize, though, until her phone chimes with a low battery warning, is that she's forgotten her phone charger. "Shit," she sighs, then glances up to see who else might be around, calling out to the first person she notices, a girl maybe a couple years older than she is. "Hey, sorry, you don't have a phone charger I could borrow for a few minutes, do you?"

Leave all phone messages for Jules Vaughn here.

When the play ends, Jules is on her feet with everyone else in the auditorium, in no small part because she doesn't know what the hell else to do. It's been an absolutely wild afternoon, enough that her head is still sort of spinning, though she hasn't done anything but sit and watch. Lexi's play would have been a roller coaster even if it hadn't taken a seriously fucking meta turn halfway through, with Cassie storming the stage and Maddy storming after her. Jules can't even say she blames her, though if there's anyone on the planet who doesn't deserve all that trouble, it's Nate fucking Jacobs. Between the raucous highs of that phenomenally unsubtle musical number — Jules kind of wonders if maybe it was going a step too far, but, again, Nate fucking Jacobs — and the lows of seeing some of the love of her life's most intimate moments dramatized for public consumption, it's hard to get her bearings now, harder still to do anything but look over at Rue, watching how she reacts. She seems happy. She seems pleased, at least, with what she's seen, and Jules finds a little of the tension in her chest unraveling as a result.

She supposes, really, that she should just be relieved that none of the last year of her own life made it into Lexi's play. That would be the very last thing she needs with everything already in such a shambles.

Everyone starts filing out, moving on with their lives as if nothing has just happened, and all she can see is that wreckage, like the room is the ruins of an ancient amphitheater or some shit, housing the Greek tragedy of their lives. Rue is only a few yards away, but she might as well be miles, a distance impossible to cross, forever just out of reach. Granted, she seemed like that when the two of them were still together, too, but this is even worse, and Jules is sick of it. Being at this impasse, not even saying hi when they cross paths in school, is exhausting. Before she can talk herself out of it, she weaves through the sea of people, across the aisle rather than up it, until she can take a seat at Rue's side.

"Hi," she says, then nothing else for a moment, both of them lapsing into silence, barely sparing glances over at each other. She's practiced this in her head, but she still doesn't know what to say. There's probably no way to make this right. She could apologize, but she's not sorry — or, well, she is, incredibly sorry, but not for the things she thinks Rue would want her to be sorry for. She could tell Rue everything, but it would feel like cheap excuses, and it still wouldn't change anything.

She settles on the simplest thing she knows. "I know you're probably still really angry at me," she starts, slow and awkward and uncertain, "but I just wanted to tell you that I love you, and I miss you, so much." They sit in silence again for what's probably just a few seconds but feels like an eternity, her broken, bleeding heart ripped out of her chest and held in front of her like some sort of peace offering. Finally, as Jules sits there, wide-eyed with her lower lip trembling, Rue turns to her at last, still wordless as she presses a kiss to Jules's temple. Jules reaches for her instinctively, fingers curling for just a moment against Rue's wrist —

And then Rue is gone, heading out of the auditorium after everyone else, leaving Jules to sit there alone and stare after her, confusion and heartbreak written plain across her face. Rue doesn't look back. Jules doesn't move, arms wrapped around herself and tears brimming in her eyes. She doesn't know what happens now, or what any of this means. She knows that she loves Rue, has always loved Rue, will always love Rue, and that love wasn't enough to make it work. If Rue still never speaks to her again but lives a long, preferably sober life, then what she did will have been more than worth it. It just hurts, and there's nothing to lessen that ache.

A few tears spill down her cheeks when she closes her eyes, and she reaches up with one sleeve-covered hand to try to dry them. Something happens then, though. The quiet of the auditorium vanishes, replaced with indistinct chatter, what she might have assumed was the result of people coming back in if not for the rest of it — the sudden heat, the unmistakable sound of waves crashing on the shore. Her eyes snap open then, still red-rimmed, but this time filled with panic, too. She shouldn't be anywhere near a fucking beach, and yet she is, somehow, inexplicably, sitting on a bench on a boardwalk, facing out toward the ocean. Her breath catching, she turns to look over her shoulder as if that might hold some clue to how she got here, but there's nothing, or, at least, nothing that actually helps her. It would all look normal if she hadn't been somewhere very different just seconds ago.

She should stop and ask someone what the hell is going on, or at least for directions or something, but she doesn't want to make herself sound completely insane. Instead, she fumbles to get her phone out of her pocket, nervously sending off a text. It immediately gives her an error. "Fuck."