A/N: I feel like I express my gratitude in every chapter (because I really do mean it!) but I'd like to say how grateful I am for having such thoughtful readers. Seriously, all these long comments with story theories, extended readings, contextual extrapolations, relations to their/your lives etc. are honestly so amazing it's unreal. I expected (and would still be happy with) a simple "this is good"/"this isn't so good" or whatever but I never thought it'd be anything like this. Seriously, thank you.

Also for any Weeknd fans reading this (probs a few since it's Weeknd themed lol), I've added a single reference to an older song of his in here. Bonus points if you catch it :P

Enjoy! <3

XV. NOTHING WITHOUT YOU

"I'd be nothing, nothing without you."

She watched the bus come skewered and distorted from out of the murk like the shape of an object animate through bad glass or some other form of glass where its true proportion was not beheld in any reality but one of fever and with two suns of headlights arrant in approach out of that night whence lingered still some feeling of more sinister origins with its shadow tethered to the wet tarmac where wheels of unassailable size rolled and by those same shadows the windows like paintings of glass where stars danced in some fathomless tremor of a night she had long since detached herself from utterly and she watched it pass over the avenue in victim to its own witless locomotion pursued by exhaustsmoke and then like a ghost of that same thing it was gone and she was alone.

She had been alone for two weeks. Yeri had been the last person she had talked to. In truth it was easier to play it off as some form of self-reflection but it was nothing of the sort nor had it been though she wished. She longed for the courage for that precise thing but courage had not been afforded to her and was not a part of her character nor had it ever been. She stood there on the edge of the path with the grass banks descending behind her into some gloom where the eve held yet more turmoil and lashed by rain the herringbone like the shape of a path leading to where she had no inkling or recollection of ever remembering and why should she? What was this place to her but the site of some former memory? A burial of a memory without funeral or celebration. Just an empty shell of such.

She could remember it though she tried not to. The day they had sat there hand in hand watching fireworks break across the sky in a spectrum of glycerine, these magenta streams of some bleeding glory burning ardent then to nothing. How content they had been in that silence they held. When it had been pandemonium around them who held their tongues but they? And who would. Now to never speak again. What of this misery and its origins. What of its purpose and its ending. She stood gathering herself against the cold, pressed against the front of her coat like some native of a land whose geology was not soulless concrete but frost. Her hands tucked deep into her pockets. Numb in the ears and numb elsewhere. Where she remembered those times and mourned for them, wanted them back.

It had gone so well for a while. For maybe a day or two, three if she was being generous. From when they had separated in that cordial and false tone and neither had known the long-reaching implications of such ingenuine a parting. And Yeri had believed her too, because she had believed herself. She had believed in that self-courage for however short a time. That she could with as little as a passing thought summon the strength to resolve all that weighed on her shoulders, all she carried like a burden through life, these toils and tortures of the heart and the spirit, this job and these people and this unfulfilled wish, this burgeoning yearning for something else. But it had not been so, nor would it ever be. She was not strong enough. Never had been. She was Irene and she was hopeless in life as in love and now they were forever separate.

For a while she stood in darkness with her back to the water watching the traffic. And the shapes of buildings like menhirs erected before man was man with lights oblique and reticent cast back on her endless in some counterculture of formless appearance and in which her loathing manifested itself entirely. What was life for her if it was this and yet what was life itself if not this? What else was there but to be a part of this, to play her role as all others must? What to being an adult if not acting as one? It’s not fair. I don’t want to. I hate it. I’m sick of it all. I want to change and I don’t know how. How do I do it. I’m scared and I’m alone and I don’t want to be.

She took her phone and thumbed it and looked over her contacts. First over Yeri. Then Wendy and Joy and then Seulgi. She did not ring any of them nor text. After a moment she put in back in her pocket and turned and took the stairs down to the waterfront. The moon had come up bluely in the sky like a great polyp or coin vaguely luminescent and suffocated by stars in their belts and arms, the arrangements of gods in their shelterless halls, forever dark and distant. She walked with the moon in her face so that she was not separate from that light but walking amongst it. They say the window to the heart is through the stars. Oh, so they do. And she could see it clearly.

It was in some sense absurdly upsetting. She did not cry but she wanted to. Thinking of all she had said to Seulgi and in honesty all she might have well have said to herself, for what was their difference now? They were both scared and they were both alone and both hurting. And she had been foolish to ignore that. To push it away. Pretend that she was better, she was superior in suffering silently and pretending otherwise. She was wrong to Yeri, too. Her adventures or misadventures with Seulgi had not blinded her to the awful truth of her miserable life nor had she forgotten at all. It had served as a sort of salve, a theriac or healing in other areas, if only for a short time. It had helped her through those times as it hounded her down now, and Seulgi had been her guiding light where neither had recognised or acknowledged it. And would continue to be for a long time. Seulgi had offered her something nobody else had. She had given her the genuine connection she had always longed for, an escape from the mundanity of a life she was neither interested nor entertained by, away from the prospect of a career in a field she had ever extracted any comfort or joy or even financial security from. Seulgi had offered her a brilliant glimpse into something more, into the warmth and loving of a proper relationship, a coupling she could rely on for support. And she had mistaken it for something else. Mistaken it for a distraction, for something to take her mind from the mounting problems elsewhere in her life. In truth it had been a much-needed crutch. Seulgi had provided her the support she so desperately had been looking for and she had ignored it. Her problems were her own but what of solving them alone? And why? What reason to draw from Irene for that? As well draw reason from a stone, for it holds the same response and that is naught. She found upon reflection that pushing Seulgi away had been her own selfish response to believing she must suffer alone, must persevere for the sake of some false and inimical independence when in truth cooperation would have sufficed. And what of Seulgi, too? Of her suffering. So much stronger than Irene’s own. So crucial, so filled with heartache. A broken time from a broken life now only just healing, with the help of Irene as Irene had been helped in turn. And she had thrown that away. She had thrown away their mutual bond for a moment of insincere bravery and now all was ruined.

She walked with this curious and alarming introspection breathing down her neck like a spectre. It hurt to think of anything related to Seulgi but she could not help it. The shape of her face, the soft architecture of her cheeks and her pouted lips and her hair whether messy across her face or tied neatly back or pooling loose and effortless over her shoulders, and the scent of honey and amber at and against her nape and on the back of her wrists and tasted when she held her palms up to Irene’s face and that scent was there, just there, so close and now so eternally far, and the slender shape of her chest and her hips and everywhere else and above all Seulgi herself, her gentle and intimate nature, her love of heftier topics and literary giants and colossi from dead ages and her propensity for extended speech, the way curved into a great subconscious smile whenever she would speak on those that she loved, the way it had come across so heartbreaking, so utterly aching to witness in the sense that it appeared to Irene as if she had been deprived of such a basic interaction for as long as she had been an adult, as if such simple conversations on interests of hers had come as a luxury afforded in some quiet secret, so much so that her words in whispers would not have come as a surprise then and there.

She had been as alone as Irene and much more sheltered, cut off from a world she believed did not love her or even care about her and perhaps she had been right, perhaps in brutal honesty it did not nor would it. Scorned and abused by a lifestyle she had no intention of ever remaining with and yet circumstances beyond her control had forced her to stay, to be weighed as Irene had by events allowed to form into bitter insecurities and twisted manipulations of truths and other invocative horrors. And when she had needed Irene the most Irene had pushed her away with as little as a sentence or two. I need to be alone. I think it’s for the best if we split for now. Just to get ourselves together. And that nod from Seulgi. That nod of doubt, that glint in her eyes when she said okay and watched Irene go, watched her walk out on her life like a ghost come in the night and gone forever in the morning. That quiver of her lips so soft and small and vulnerable. That quiver that said: Help me, Irene. Stay with me. I need you by my side. I need to get through this with someone supporting me and I can’t do it alone and I’m scared, I’m so ing scared. I just want to be normal. I just want someone to tell me I’m okay again. Tell me I’m alright. Everything’s going to be fine. And Irene had missed it. She had walked out of that door and passed through the lobby and then like the phantom of some unspeakable torment had vanished from her life.

Those two weeks had felt like two years. Each day passing so very slowly. As if time itself served to punish her for those misdeeds. She worked in quiet solitude and she did not speak to the others for she felt like a penitent deserving of such woeful misery, a gothic miscreant cast out by her own indebted fortitude, her own self-recommended misfortune. This was her fall from grace and there was no reprieve or escape from those newly plumbed depths.

After a while she was crying. In the cold her tears formed like ice on her pink cheeks. To her right the cars passed sightless beyond the banks, their sound and the stink of motoroil the only indications of their passing at all. She was still crying as she sat on one of the old benches and wiped at her eyes and she could not stop.

It would be alright to just call her but what would she think? Would Seulgi understand and was she even deserving of such understanding? She sat there with her phone in her hand debating herself on these possibilities like a judge presiding over her own trial where there was only one outcome and it was guilty of all possible crimes by association and always would be. It was almost nine. She stood taking in the smell of the river for a minute. A cool and soft breeze running over her windswept face. There were no boats out there on the water. No lights either. Just a sightless dark receding against the faded wireframe image of a city in lights far beyond. On the banks of another civilisation that was not her own.

After a minute she rang Wendy. She answered almost immediately. ‘Hello?’ she said. Her voice small and quiet in the wind.

‘Hey,’ Irene said.

‘What’s up?’

Irene was quiet for a long time and then she said: ‘Can you come out?’

‘What?’

‘Can we meet up?’

‘Now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s nine. You’re not wanting to go out, are you?’

‘No,’ Irene said. She wiped her eyes with her free hand and sniffed. ‘No, it’s not that. I just need to see you is all.’

‘You need to see me?’

‘Yeah.’

There was a silence on the end of the line punctuated eventually by a sigh. ‘Alright,’ Wendy said. ‘Where are you?’

‘By the river.’

‘Where exactly?’

Irene told her precisely and then she said her goodbyes and hung up. She sat there on the bench anticipating and not at the same time and she was still crying. Small tears this time. Behind her the city turned against the night in some ceaseless torrid motion with its lights and its tumult of noise cold and uncaring and singular in its stance against her. Or perhaps hers against it. But whatever it was she did not feel a part of it any longer. A vagrant cognate wandering the abrogate waste of her own lost history step by step, passing day to day afraid of her own shadow. What have I become. Why did I think I could do it alone. What use would that be? Where would I be then? And who even cares? Who but me.

When Wendy arrived it just past half nine. The streets still wet from lashing by rain early in the evening. She was wearing a heavy coat and she smiled softly and with great sympathy when she saw Irene sat there, face red and swollen, eyes soot with the piping of her run makeup, coat high on her shoulders and head tucked slightly down, that frail and endlessly ill leptosome with her limp and inchoate will and her breathing so small and alone and frightened. As she was, as she would be. Irene turned to see her standing there at the foot of the bench as if inspecting a member of some foreign species, head tilted slightly to the side, still smiling.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ Irene said.

‘Can I sit?’

Irene nodded. Wendy sat but she did not speak. For a few minutes they watched the etiolate husk of that night sky coiled with stars, wound around each limb of the cosmos in their adumbrate outlines, Orion and Regel and the crosses of light burst across all the universe. It was Wendy who spoke first and she said in a firm and yet small voice: ‘So what’s up?’

‘What?’

‘What’s up?’

‘Why do you think something’s up?’ Irene said. She did not turn to Wendy.

‘You wouldn’t call me out here for any other reason, would you?’

‘Why not?’

‘That’s just not your style. Unless you were drunk. Which you’re not, I can tell that from a thousand miles away.’

Irene laughed softly. Wendy studied her a moment. The windchill at her cheeks and her wet breathing. ‘Are you okay?’ she said, and there it was. That motherly instinct of hers, so strong it was overpowering, that instant defence of all she was close with. It was very much endearing and Irene had always thought that and always would.

‘Irene,’ Wendy said.

‘What?’

‘What’s up. C’mon now. You’ve been crying.’

‘Yeah,’ Irene said. She wiped her eyes again.

‘Do you want a tissue?’

‘No, I’m good.’

‘Are you going to tell me what’s up or are we going to sit here all night? Because I will, you know that. I will.’

Irene laughed. ‘You’re such a fool sometimes,’ she said.

‘I’m the least foolish person you know.’

‘Yeah, but that’s not saying much when I know people like Joy and Yeri.’

Wendy shrugged. ‘You make a good point,’ she said. ‘But still, what’s up?’

Irene sighed. ‘A whole lot of ,’ she said.

‘Well, yeah. That goes without saying when it comes to you.’

‘What?’

‘Am I wrong?’

‘I mean, no. But still.’

‘You kind of have a habit of taking way out of proportion and overthinking everything.’

‘Yeah, well. I’m not overthinking this. I’ve been underthinking it, if that makes any sense. Or maybe I have been overthinking it, maybe they’re both the same thing from two different angles. I don’t know. I don’t care.’

‘You sound wound up.’

‘Yeah,’ Irene said. She wiped her eyes again. Sore and red and glassed over. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s alright.’

‘I kind of needed someone to talk to and you were the first person I thought of.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, you were the best person I thought of. I told Yeri something the other week and I’ve realised since then that literally every single word I said to her is wrong, and that I disagree with everything I told her. And I know if I admitted that to her now she’d be disappointed.’

‘She wouldn’t.’

‘Alright, probably not. But still, she’d tease me about it or get wound up or whatever and I can’t be doing with that right now. I love her and everything but you know what I mean?’

Wendy nodded. A motherly smile on her lips. ‘So what’s wrong?’ she said.

‘A lot.’

‘Start at the start.’

‘Okay, so, you know about Seulgi?’

‘Through you, vaguely, yeah.’

‘Alright, so a bunch of happened and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to get it all off my chest again right now, but we went through a lot. We got together, we broke up, this happened a lot. I kind of stalked her, except not really but kind of. It’s weird. She sort of wanted me to but wouldn’t admit it.’

‘What?’

‘Okay,’ Irene said. ‘I’ll skip all that . Sorry, I’m rambling.’

‘It’s okay. Take your time.’

‘I just don’t know what to do, Wendy. And it’s really getting to me because I’ve been here about five times in the past month and I can’t seem to figure anything out and I hate myself for it. I feel like I’m going round in circles and I feel so ing useless that it’s eating away at me. I don’t know what to do about any of this.’

‘Is it about Seulgi?’

‘Kind of. A lot of it. Basically, she’s damaged goods. I don’t mean that in a rude way, or to be disrespectful. She literally told me that herself. She’s been hurt in the past by all the fame and the money and all that . Really hurt. She joined the entertainment business when she was still a teenager and it really took a toll on her, that much is obvious. Even I could see it. But she wouldn’t admit it because she was so damaged by everyone using her for their fifteen minutes of fame that she couldn’t believe someone actually enjoyed her company. Couldn’t believe I was real. That’s why she kept pushing me away, in her words, more or less. Because she was scared of it happening again. Scared of being chewed up and spit out by a world she didn’t want any part of it. By a world she hated and still does.

‘And that’s what happened between us. That’s why it felt so toxic. Because I loved her – still do – and she loved me, at least I think she loved me. Or at the very least she wanted to be around me. But she was too scared to admit it or to come to grips with what she was feeling because of everything that had happened to her before. She was terrified of it. That’s why she said she was broken. That’s what was wrong with her. And I understood that. I came to get it. But I was too ing stupid and too ing blind to realise what it actually meant. God, I’m an idiot. An actually ing idiot and I hate myself for it. God. I can’t believe it.’

She was crying again. Wendy put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Hey,’ she said calmly. ‘Hey, it’s alright. It’s okay. Just say what you’ve got to say. Get it all off your chest.’

Irene wiped her eyes again. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘God, I’m so sorry. I’m such a mess.’

‘It’s okay. Really, it’s okay.’

Irene took a long breath to calm herself. ‘So what happened was that I thought all of my problems were so big and so important that I blindsided her. I totally forgot about her, about how messed up she thought she was, about how vulnerable she felt, how much she actually needed someone. In the time we spent apart I was so preoccupied thinking about how I feel with my life and how much I want to change and do something else and just go in a completely different direction that I totally ignored what she wanted. What she needed. And I ended up pushing her away. I ended up getting rid of her.’

‘How?’

‘A couple weeks ago,’ Irene said, ‘I went over to hers and told her basically that I think it’d be better for the both of us if we spent some time apart, so that we could sort out all of our problems separately. I thought it’d clear my head. I thought if I could stop thinking of Seulgi every ing moment of the day that I’d actually be able to realise what I want and what I don’t want and how to get rid of it all. I thought I’d be able to fix all of my problems. And I told Seulgi that. And then I told Yeri and she said she was proud of me. Probably because I looked so happy saying it. I looked like I genuinely believed every word I was saying and you know why? Because I did. I honestly thought I was doing it for the best. For both of us. And I look back on that now and think: What a complete crock of .

‘And now I’m stuck doing knows what for no apparent reason, and I’m back to square one. I’m back to moping over something I should’ve never got into in the first place. I’m in a situation that’s because I made it . And I hate myself more and more for it as time passes. Because I’ve come to realise in the past two weeks that trying to sort out separately doesn’t work because I still have no clue what I’m doing or what I want to do and I have no one to lean on for support, I have nobody to properly vent my issues to on a daily basis, nobody I can rant to and cry to and have to support me. And I know I have you and the other two but it’s not the same, you know? And I don’t mean that in a bad way. You’re amazing. All three of you are. But it’s a different thing. I don’t expect you to be there for me every day and I bet you don’t either. It’s not that sort of thing. But a relationship is. And I almost had that with Seulgi. Almost. And I swear she felt the same thing. Maybe she never properly said it but she felt it. I just know she did. And now I’ve gone and ruined it all.

‘I wish I could go back. I wish I could’ve just not said a ing thing. I should’ve kept my big mouth shut and smiled and nodded and gone on with my life and I wouldn’t be here crying on a bench in the dark to you. I bet you’re thinking about what an idiot I am.’

‘I’m not,’ Wendy said.

Irene wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. ‘Well I wouldn’t blame you,’ she said.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.’

‘I think you should talk to her.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. And I’m not just overthinking things. I know she won’t want to see me right now. She’d think I’m being an because I am. I’m literally going back on everything I’ve said because I’m this great idiot that’s always been ing useless and I always will be.’

‘Irene.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Irene. C’mon.’

Irene was crying again. Wendy held her tight. Patting her back and shushing her and telling her it was alright to be an idiot sometimes. We’re all human. We make mistakes. It’s looking back on those mistakes and correcting them in the future that defines who we really are. Irene didn’t say anything. She wept like a child, boneless and incunabular in Wendy’s arms. It hurts. It hurts to know I’ve ed it all up. Why do I have to be so useless. Why do I have to be such an idiot.

I wish I was someone else, she mumbled. I wish I could just not be Irene. Please. Please help me.

The truth on what she had to do came to her while she was half a bottle of whiskey down. It sat on the table in front of her smoking and bubbling bronze in the faint red ceiling light and it hurt against the back of and along her tongue. Her eyes already redrimmed and sleepless. Seulgi lay back against the couch in great breaths of stale air. She had not gone outside in more than two weeks. Did not know the date but she knew by way of strong recollection that it was a Saturday. She had been crying almost constantly.

She checked her phone again. So many missed messages, missed calls. Too many to quantify. Casting agencies and managers and ex-managers and associates who called themselves friends and others associated with those associates and so on, so forth. Where are you, they said. Why didn’t you come in today. You were scheduled for so-and-so time, so-and-so date. You had this this and this to do. Where the are you, Seulgi. It occurred to her in that quiet and dark eve of reflection that none had come to check on her nor had the police been alerted by their messages as to her entire lack of correspondence. That had come to define her life in sad truth. They cared enough when she threatened their income but not enough to genuinely care. She could be dead for all they knew. Their prized cashcow milked dry, emaciate and run ragged. And was that not what she was?

She checked the last message she had with Irene. Sixteen days prior and nothing since. Not a thing. Soon she was crying again. She studied the bottle on the table. It was a square bottle of Jack Daniels and in the dim iron gloom of the living room it looked almost black and very bitter. Her breath smelt of Jack Daniels, mouth tasted of it. Lips, too. She had become naught but a tippler in the weeks following Irene’s announcement. Had seen little save the bathroom and the drinks cabinet. Occasionally the bedroom for sleep. Here and there in intermittent modes. But otherwise a constant drunk. For a moment she was almost thankful that nobody had checked on her for what would they say if they could see her there, or even think of her? This shambling unwashed inebriate in her week-old clothes, ragged as some mendicant absolved of precisely nothing and stinking of all the wine in the world. It hurt to think of herself of such. Hurt worse to try and change.

Irene. She thought of Irene again. Irene had been real, Irene had been her rock. Irene had been real where nobody else had, Irene had been the anchor tethering her to some semblance of normality, Irene had been her last flickering embers of sanity in a cold and heartless void of a world, Irene had been her caring companion, Irene had been her one true friend. Irene had been so very beautiful, so exquisite in whatever she wore and no matter what state she was in, Irene had been there for her in times of dark solitude, Irene had been there to watch over her like no other, Irene had been her everything, Irene had been what she had needed to cope with the pain of each passing day, Irene had been her key to returning to a sense of standard living again, the nostrum she so desperately needed, Irene had been that, Irene had Irene, Irene Irene Irene Irene. Irene was gone and she would not return.

Seulgi was sure of that now. Irene had realised what she was: a broken drunkard, too much hassle for what little she was still worth. Perhaps she was still pretty, in the sort of effortless natural beauty so often touted as perfect in the modelling world. But what else was there save a daily struggle with her own shattered adulthood? Nothing much worth saving. And Irene had seen that. That was why she had disappeared so clearly, under the pretence of time apart. Seulgi couldn’t blame her for that. Could in truth only applaud her for the courage of leaving. Of removing the poison of Seulgi from her life. Soon she was crying again. She took the bottle in one hand and tipped it but did not drink. Could not through the tears. It hurt to cry and it hurt to not, it hurt to do anything. Years of her life like this, wasted in drink and casual encounters she could not remember nor wanted to. In this place that reminded her each day of those times, of times still ongoing, times set to always continue for where was the exit? Where was that place she could escape to. She drank off the whiskey again and she was still crying. No. I don’t need to leave. This is a happy house. I’m happy here. In this happy house. Yeah.

She was still crying when her phone quivered. She fumbled about for it, hands running over the glass table like the hands of some sightless sot belaboured by the dark. She expected it to be another associate or companion or perhaps somebody she had once run into at a party or social gathering and had exchanged numbers with in promise of greater glories one day, perhaps an agent for another magazine or modelling firm or swimwear brand, or perhaps drinks company or advertising firm, but it was not. It was not any of them at all. Nor was it her manager nor friends of her manager nor associate at all. It was Irene and it was four words.

Hey, it said. Can we meet