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Fire is all she remembers.
Fire is the only certainty from that night, the only constant in her memory. Flame licking at everything around her, orange and yellow and flickering red; an inferno. Searing through wood and carpet and flesh, anything in its path, relentless. Hungry.
She remembers stumbling, tripping; some heavy flaming piece of the ceiling falling before her, boxing her in. The ancient roof starting to cave in with one last, exhausted creak. She doesn’t remember why she was there, what she was doing. It’s all flashes. In and out and black and white, and red. Everything red. Damningly red.
She remembers arms carrying her out. Strong, steady arms. Familiar ones. Scooping her up and carrying her out and then-
That’s where she loses it. She’d slipped and the memories had slipped with her. She’d heard sirens, maybe. Probably. Hushed voices, murmuring low, indiscernible words. Alive! Someone’s alive! We have a pulse! Move move move!
The pulse belonged to her – she knows that. Even though she feels dead, hollowed out and charred like the fire had gotten to what little soul she’d had left inside her.
She wakes up, and she feels as good as dead. And she finds out quick that she wishes she were.
~
Laurel tastes ashes in her mouth. Dust and dirt.
She’s not sure why. Her mouth is dry and her head is aching and hell, all of her is aching. Something is tugging at her wrist, flowing cool into her veins. She pries open her crusty eyelids and squints at the deluge of white light that floods them, all blinding and too too much. She shifts, and feels something thin and paper-like crinkle on her skin. A dress. No – a gown. A gown she hadn’t put on. This place she doesn’t remember coming to. She’d been brought here.
Through the haze and the heaviness in her head, she manages to make out the face of Bonnie sitting at her bedside.
She isn’t holding her hand; theirs isn’t the kind of familiarity to warrant a gesture like that. She’s waiting and when she sees her stir she perks up, and tries to give her something like a smile but it’s really more of a grimace, a cheerless, mousy little thing just like the rest of her. Her face has lines on it she hasn’t seen her before; she looks older, somehow. Older than she should.
“Hey,” Bonnie says, leaning forward in her chair slightly. “How’re you feeling?”
“What happened?” she croaks, reaching a hand up to rub at her eyes, a dry, stabbing ache burrowing into them. “What…?”
She looks grave, suddenly. “The fire. Do you remember that? You were hurt.”
Fire. Annalise’s house. Yes – she remembers that. There were others there too. Frank and Wes. She can’t remember what they were doing, why she was even there at all. Or what’d started it. Who.
Frank and Wes. They’d been there. She doesn’t trust her memories or think any of them are particularly sound right now, but she thinks she can trust that.
“I remember,” she affirms, weakly. “Where are they? Frank and… Wes? They were there too, weren’t they?”
Something flickers, in Bonnie’s eyes. Her stomach turns. “They were there too, yeah.”
“Where are they?” she presses, voice taking on a note of desperation. She sits up and winces, and something on her arm aches; a burn, maybe, judging by the bandage there. Her throat locks up, goes too tight to breathe. “Bonnie, where… where are they?”
“Wes is okay. He’s being treated for smoke inhalation, here,” she tells her, lowering her eyes. “Frank…”
She holds her breath. Her lungs burn; she must’ve inhaled smoke too and now she doesn’t want to inhale anything at all, not even air, not ever again. She gulps. Her eyes are burning – not with dryness now but with tears. Terror. There’s a look on Bonnie’s face.
The way she says his name is as mournful as a dirge.
“What about Frank?” she chokes out, frantic. “Where is he?”
Bonnie hesitates, again. Then-
“He didn’t make it out, Laurel.”
No.
No.
“No,” she croaks, echoing the word aloud, and it’s all she can do, can’t muster up much more of her voice. She can’t move. A sob swells in her throat and bursts free before she can subdue it, pathetic and hoarse. “No, no, that’s…” She inhales, shakily, face crumpling. “He can’t be… Bonnie-”
The older woman clenches her jaw, eyes misting over before she can help it. She swallows, thickly. “I’m sorry, Laurel.”
“I remember… somebody carried me out,” she insists, voice wobbling. “He did. I-I… I remember it-”
“They found him… by the stairs, they said. Part of the roof had collapsed in on him.” She sniffs, her composure wavering, water and tears seeping out of her cracks like a dam on the brink of bursting. “By the time they found him there was nothing they could do.”
She clenches her jaw, rising up with sudden determination. “I don’t believe that. I- What’d they do with him?” His body, are the words she doesn’t say, but no, no, Frank is not just a body, Frank can never be a body, some dead, hollow thing. “I want to… I want to see him-”
“Laurel…” She lets out a breath, inhaling then exhaling to steady herself as best she can. “He was… burned, on over ninety percent of his body. Third-degree burns. He didn’t look like Frank, anymore.” She pauses, raising her eyes to the ceiling to keep her tears from falling. “You don’t want to see it, please, believe me.”
She sends her away, not long after. Barks the order at her to go, feral as a dog, spooks her and sends her skittering out like a rat, and if she remembered how to feel, if she could, she thinks she’d feel bad. But she doesn’t.
She cries, instead. Hard, gut-wrenching sobs, until she feels sick, until she’s numb, until her eyes are surrounded by hideous broken capillaries – until her chest aches and squeezes and feels like it’s liable to collapse from the abuse. She cries until finally the nurses deem her hysterical and dose her with something to knock her out and she lets them, lets the darkness flow over her, warm but not peaceful, not comforting. It feels like drowning.
It reminds her of death. She wonders what it’d felt like, for him. For Frank to die alone. Die in darkness.
The drugs set her adrift in that same darkness and she lets them.
~
Wes comes to visit two days later.
The others have been in and out too, sporadically. Michaela had brought an overly-cheery arrangement of sunflowers in a braided wicker basket, which she stares at now and then, and frequently has the urge to toss in the trash. Oliver and Connor had murmured some stiff condolences. Asher hadn’t said a word. All of them look like they don’t know how to behave around her, like they don’t want to get too close lest she snap, and she doesn’t blame them; she hasn’t showered in days and she’s wept so often she can’t lift her head, so often she’s drained her tear ducts, made herself too weak to move.
He’s gone. Frank’s gone.
He didn’t make it out. I’m sorry, Laurel.
The nurses have tried to shove food down her throat and she’s refused every time, batted them away. She thinks they might try to force-feed her soon, hold her down. She can’t feel the hunger, even though her stomach roars and ripples and cries out for sustenance. Doesn’t want to touch another bite of food in her life, ever. She wants to let herself wither, starve, although they have her on fluids through her IV so she can’t exactly go for intentional dehydration. Nothing feels real, reality doesn’t feel real, and at the same time it does, feels too real. Feels like a waking hell.
She isn’t eating. Maybe that’s why they ask Wes to come, to persuade her. But whatever the reason he comes, ever the faithful puppy.
She doesn’t so much as roll over to look at him, when he steps in the door.
“Laurel…”
She sniffles, not budging, not making an effort to dry her eyes. She gave up on using tissues hours ago. Snot and tears mingle on her face, dampening the thin pillow beneath her head. She doesn’t move; her back is turned to him, and she doesn’t want to see him. Or anyone. She no longer really feels like Laurel, doesn’t answer to that name anymore. She’s sorrow and that’s all she knows.
She died when Frank did. The fire took him and as far as she's concerned it took her too.
“I-” He cuts himself off, sighing. “I’m so sorry, Laurel.”
She doesn’t answer. She stares, blankly, at the same corner of the wall she’s been staring at for hours, at the same chipped section of sickly grey paint. If she stares hard enough, stares without blinking, she swears she can see Frank’s face there, or in the chair beside her. He looks so real, sometimes, like she could reach out and touch him and he’d be there, tangible, cracking some stupid joke about her looking good in a hospital gown and giving her one of his lopsided smirks.
“Are you…” Wes keeps going, keeps trying. “Do you… need anything?”
Finally, she gives him an answer; her voice a croak, weak, barely audible. “No.”
“They said you haven’t been eating.”
She doesn’t give an answer for that; she has none. No words left in her. She lies there, mute, hoping he’ll get the message and leave. She wants to be alone.
Wants to be dead, as a matter of fact.
“Laurel, please…” He drifts off. His voice wavers. “Please, talk to me.”
Another moment of silence, the heaviest on earth. Then, she sniffs.
“Can you go?”
She can imagine the look on his face; hurt in his eyes, brow furrowed, and tries to feel bad and still, still can’t feel anything really, anything more than echoes of emotion like they’re light-years away, all normal human function having abandoned her. Her head feels too heavy to lift, her heart too heavy to keep beating. She wants it to stop.
She closes her eyes and wills him to go.
“Laurel-”
“Go,” she says, voice like a whisper and a whisper is all she can come up with, her body drained, sapped, every bit of energy leeched out of her. She feels hollow, some sack of flesh and bones all mashed together, stitched sloppily, just barely breathing. Sub-human. “Just… just go, please, Wes.”
He lingers, a moment longer. Waits, for something; maybe for her to come back to herself and reach out to him, but she’s still, still as a corpse. She stares blankly at the wall, fingering her hospital bracelet absentmindedly. She thinks it’s the only thing grounding her; that little paper bracelet bearing her name, who she is. Reminding her of herself.
Finally, he goes. And she listens to his footsteps as they fade down the hallway, growing softer. Like a ghost.
~
They release her from the hospital four days later because they say she’s fine. Except for a burn on her arm, she is.
Except she’s not.
Bonnie drives her back to her apartment, insisting that she has a guest bedroom and that she shouldn’t be alone, and not giving her much of a choice in the matter, and Laurel doesn’t have it in her to put up a fight. She fills her in, along the way. About everything. Annalise is in jail. And she, she herself… she’s all right. At least outwardly, seems like. Mentioning Frank would be like slashing at an open, still-bleeding wound; brutal, merciless. So neither of them do. Laurel pretends she’s listening and even commits to giving cursory hums now and then, as Bonnie goes on about nothing. Things that don’t matter, just to occupy the silence.
Laurel tries, right then, to think of a single thing in the world that still matters to her. And all she comes up with is more emptiness. More nothing.
They get to her apartment. Laurel goes for the guest room like a heat-seeking missile, and sleeps. Sleeps off the meds and tears but when she wakes up her face is soaked with them anyway and she thinks she may have been crying in her sleep. She thinks she was dreaming of him, too, but she can’t remember.
She starts praying to, every night; praying to dream of him, see him again. He’s gone. Frank is dead and gone but he’s so vibrantly alive in her memory still, all smug smirks and dancing blue eyes and laughter, pulling her close and kissing her tenderly.
The things she remembers feels more real than the things she sees. She’s disconnected from the world, detached, like some plug was pulled on her, like some frequency that’d tuned her into everyone else has been jammed and she’s orbiting something distant in the wrong galaxy, suddenly, where no one can reach her. A few days pass and it doesn’t get better. Not that she’d expected it to.
She dreams of him. It’s the only place he’s still real, in her dreams. She dreams of him and every time she does she holds her breath, begging not to wake up, begging to stay with him, sleep there forever.
But she always does. And she opens her eyes, and gets up. And all she ever really looks forward to doing is going back to sleep.
~
She starts to wonder, irrationally, if Frank Delfino was ever even real. Or if he was some figment of her imagination. A dream.
He doesn’t feel real anymore to her, not really, but then again nothing does. Sleep is her only reprieve. She’s been taking more than her prescribed dose of Oxy, too. And that helps. It doesn’t bring him back and it’s a shitty coping mechanism, but it helps.
She misses him so much sometimes she can’t breathe when she thinks about it.
He wasn’t a good man. Maybe he wasn’t good for her. And she’d known him so short a time and fallen so hard so fast and God, really that’s it, she’d just thought she would have more time. That they would have more time – another chance, after everything, after he came to the end of his twisted quest for penance and came home to her.
She’d been so sure he would come home to her.
But he left her. He left her when he ran away months ago and he’s left her again, for good this time. He’s always leaving her, hurting her. And she hates him for that.
And she loves him so much it’s suffocating. Or loved.
(Can you love a memory in the present tense? She’s not really sure.)
She loves him. He’d told her he loved her and she’d told him she didn’t love him back even though it’d been a boldfaced lie, and he’d died not knowing that. Died thinking she didn’t love him. She should’ve told him and now she’ll never get to.
She’s a lot of things and now she thinks she can add fucking stupid to that list.
~
The days pass, lengthy as centuries. And she starts leaving him voicemails again.
She’s very aware she may be losing it. She’s okay with that. Hell, she’s surprised she didn’t lose it a long time ago.
His phone hadn’t been destroyed in the fire; he’d left it behind, somewhere, must’ve because it still rings when she dials his number. She holds her breath after every one, waiting, stupidly, for him to pick up, that beyond all reason and sense it’ll be him on the other end instead of his terse, almost snappish voice message that she’s heard too many times to count.
She tells herself she’s not pathetic enough to call just to hear his voice but that’s a lie too. She’s pathetic enough to do that.
If she’s pathetic enough to call a man who is literally dead she’s probably pathetic enough to do anything.
It’s Frank. Leave a message.
“Hi,” she murmurs late one night in bed, phone clutched to her ear like a lifeline, all hopped up on pain pills and vodka and hoping the combination doesn’t kill her but also secretly praying it will. A lump forms in her throat, heavy as lead and just as impossible to swallow. “Hi.”
She lies there in silence, for a moment. She doesn’t know what to say; there’s so much to say and somehow there’s also nothing, no words that will do either of them any good now. He’s dead. He’s dead and she’s pining for a corpse, for some hollow shell, charred flesh and bone and maggots.
“I just… I wanted to tell you I love you. I never got to and-” Her voice breaks. She knows there’s tears on her face but can’t really feel them anymore, she’s gotten so used to them. “And… I wanted you to know.”
She hangs up. She won’t call again tomorrow.
(She will.)
~
It’s sunny the day of Frank’s funeral and Bonnie has to all but drag her out of bed for it.
Somehow the woman manages to get her dressed and relatively presentable and out the door. She’s hungover from the night before and sagging underneath the fog of the Oxy, and during the drive she keeps slurring something about how it doesn’t matter if she goes or not. How everybody knows he’s dead and there’s no point in announcing the fact.
It’s closed casket, because of the burns. She doesn’t ask to see him. After what Bonnie told her she doesn’t want to.
It’s a small graveyard, his plot beneath an old oak tree, all vibrant autumn shades of red and orange and yellow, deceptively cheery. It’s not cold but there’s a chill in the air, a bite to it. There’re too many Delfino’s to count, including his mother and father, and suddenly she remembers the night he’d brought her home to his family, how much he’d made it feel like her home too.
And it was. He was her home.
The Catholic priest drones on and on about the valley of the shadow of death and fearing no evil. Asking God to grant him mercy and peace. Annalise is there, out on bail and standing stone-faced along with Wes and Oliver and the others. She doesn’t stand with them; it’s like she barely sees them. She doesn’t cry, either. She’s cried all she can.
She tries to imagine, briefly, what he would say to her if he were here.
(Don’t waste your tears on me, princess. I’m not worth it.)
He’d want her to be happy, she knows that. He’d want her to move on and finish school and change the world like she’d planned, do so much good. He wouldn’t want her to do what she’s doing now: destroying herself, chipping off pieces bit by bit and letting them fall away until soon enough there’ll be nothing left. He’d want her to be happy and move on because he loved her – and she has no intention of doing either of those things, ever.
(Please, Laurel. I don’t know a lot, but I love you.)
Frank’s mother hugs her, after. Squeezes her so hard she thinks it could kill her and weeps into her shoulder, and tells her, “I’m so sorry honey, I know how much he loved you, I’m sorry…” She embraces her dad, too, grim faced as he is, but doesn’t linger long with his family; she doesn’t want to talk to them, or anyone. Listen to hollow condolences that people only half-mean. They can save it.
She doesn’t want to hear it.
She crosses paths with Annalise after, flanked by Wes and Michaela and Connor. Anger pounds through her the instant their eyes meet, seeping out of her like magma, and Annalise starts to open her mouth to say something but before she can Laurel raises her chin and snaps at her, words sharp enough to cut, so fierce the woman almost flinches.
“Laurel-”
“Don’t,” she hisses, tear-eyed. “Don’t tell me how sorry you are for my loss. You’re not.”
“I know… you’re angry-”
“You wanted this,” she accuses. “Him dead. He… he told me you tried to kill him and now he’s dead. So you got what you wanted.” She sniffs, clenching her jaw and letting her eyes fall on Wes. “All of you.”
Wes tries to follow her and she shrugs him off, coldly, almost violently. They’ve chosen their sides; his on Annalise’s, hers on Frank’s. There’s no going back from that now.
No going back for either of them.
But she’d been a fool to think Frank could come out on top of this, his war with Annalise. Annalise always gets what she wants, in the end, and this time she’d wanted Frank on the wrong side of the grass and she got it, no skin off her back, without even chipping a nail.
Annalise always wins. Might as well be a law of nature.
~
Sometimes she lies awake at night and wonders what he thought about, in his last moments.
It’d be selfish to think it was her and she’s not a narcissist. Maybe it was Annalise. Bonnie. His family. His mother. Probably it was.
But some tiny niggling feeling tells her that maybe it was her. Maybe he thought of her, of getting to her. Maybe he’d tried to save her. Maybe he’d died with her name on his lips, her face behind his eyes, picturing her. Loving her.
Maybe the last thing he ever did was love her.
~
A week goes by. Maybe two – she isn’t sure. Time essentially loses its meaning and the days blur together into one long expanse of hours and minutes and seconds, all equally meaningless. Without him – the only certainty she has is that she’s without him, that Frank Delfino is dead. When he’d left before she’d lied to herself, told herself she could go on and be just fine. At least then they’d had a chance. The promise, the possibility, that one day, he would return.
Now there’s no chance. No nothing. Just living, if you can call this thing she’s doing everyday living.
Just breathing. Barely existing.
She has class. She should be going to class and Bonnie keeps telling her as much, but she’s already fucking failing everything and it’s not like it matters. The others keep calling her, especially Wes. After a while she just blocks their numbers.
She doesn’t want to see anyone. She can tolerate Bonnie though, oddly enough. If it weren’t for Bonnie she’s pretty sure she would’ve starved or drank herself to death by now – or both. With Annalise in hot water with the university board their clinic is all but suspended, leaving her with nothing to do but reluctantly nanny her all day, make sure she doesn’t choke on her own vomit when she drinks or OD on the pain pills that she should by now probably be weaning herself off of but isn’t.
This isn’t living, whatever she’s doing, and she doesn’t want to do this anymore. She doesn’t think she can; she wakes up exhausted, goes through her day exhausted, and goes back to bed just as exhausted. She doesn’t know how to stop being tired. She doesn’t know how to stop missing him and sometimes, God, sometimes she really wishes whoever had pulled her from the house had just left her there to die too.
Bonnie gets fed up and flushes her Oxy down the toilet, eventually. Predictably.
“You need to get off those,” she chides firmly, when she confronts her about it. “They’re addictive, and the last thing we need is another dead body around here because you’re chasing them with a fifth of vodka every night.”
It’s an insensitive remark, bordering on cruel, and Bonnie seems to realize that quickly. “I… Look, I didn’t mean that, Laurel-”
“Screw you,” she hisses, though she’s too tired to put much fire behind it. She sways a bit, on her feet. Then remembers she hasn’t eaten anything all day and that that's probably why.
“You know, I’m trying to help you here. You think I want to be babysitting you 24/7? That I enjoy this? Because I don’t.” Something tightens in her face, jaw clenching, lips curving into a scowl; everything tightens, puckering up. She raises her chin, looks her square in the eyes. “I lost him too, Laurel. It wasn’t just you – and you don’t… you don’t see me lying in bed all day drinking myself half to death.”
She narrows her eyes. “We all process grief in different ways.”
“Maybe that’s true,” Bonnie concedes, and turns to go. “But the Oxy’s gone. And don’t try to go out and buy more with your dad’s money, because I’ll know.”
Laurel glowers, but doesn’t protest. So she adapts; she’s always been easily adaptable. She switches to sleeping pills, and they don’t numb her quite as warmly and pleasantly but they do their job, and they’re cheaper so she figures that’s a plus. She can adapt.
So she adapts by downing half a bottle of them with scotch and passing out on the bathroom floor, and hoping no one comes to rescue her this time.
~
She wakes up hunched over the toilet with Bonnie’s fingers down her throat.
Her stomach lurches, gag reflex triggering and sending everything in her stomach up in a rush of alcohol and barely-digested pills and the tiny bit of food she’d had for breakfast. She heaves into the bowl, so hard her entire abdomen feels like it contracts, squeezing her insides, and Bonnie just barely manages to sweep her hair back in time before she hurls. She stays there, head bowed, until her stomach settles, and only then does Bonnie exhale sharply, climb to her feet, grab a wad of toilet paper, and hold it out to her where she kneels on the tile floor, shivering and sniveling.
“Jesus Christ, Laurel, what the hell was that?”
Laurel shakes her head, dabbing her mouth off and spitting out the bitter taste of vomit. She leans her head against the wall, slumping. Hopeless and sad and still sort of drunk, and barely awake.
“Why’d you do that?” she croaks, tears forming in her eyes. “You should’ve… you should’ve just let me-”
“What? Die?” she demands. “I’m not going to let you die, God, Laurel, what were you thinking?”
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she confesses, voice barely a whisper, eyes falling shut. She leans her head against the wall, limbs loose and shaky – probably from malnutrition, or low blood sugar, because God knows she’s been eating a liquid diet with vodka, scotch, and bourbon as her three main food groups and that’s not a habit she intends to rectify anytime soon. “I’m so… tired, Bonnie, I’m just tired.” She pauses, shaking her head weakly. “After everything we’ve done… we all deserve to die anyway.”
Bonnie sighs, reaching down and grabbing hold of her arm, but this time her voice is gentle, eyes softened. “Come on. Get up.”
Laurel shakes her head. “No. No, just… leave me here-”
“Get up, Laurel, we both know I can’t carry you.”
She can’t exactly get up but she does find it in herself to make sort of half an effort, and somehow even with her slight stature Bonnie manages to tug her to her feet, sling her arm around her shoulders, and drag her out into the bedroom, where she lays her down none too gracefully on the bed. Laurel lands like a lead weight and that’s what she feels like: all lead, all too heavy, all too full of sadness. Filled up with it.
She expects Bonnie to let her down and leave her there, but instead the older woman sinks down onto the bed next to her, blue eyes heavy with sadness, looking almost too big for her face. She looks older, too, like she’s aged five years within the span of a few weeks, so old and tiny and frail and world-weary, like an old woman trapped in a too-young body. Gaunt, too. If she had to guess she’d say she also hasn’t been eating.
“You could’ve died,” she says, softly, her voice losing its edge. “Why? Why would you…”
She drifts off. Laurel sniffles, the sound thick with mucus. Her tears are silent, though, streaming down her cheeks, and she’s cried so often since that night that she thinks she probably has tracks on her face from them, permanent scars.
“He’s gone,” is all she can manage. “He… he’s just gone.”
“Laurel…”
“I just wanted it to stop,” she confesses. “I kept… wondering what it was like. To die. Feel what he felt.” A ragged sob bubbles up in her chest, and she doesn’t have the energy to choke it back. She sounds as small as a child, feels as small as a child. “I’m sorry.”
“He wouldn’t…” Bonnie drifts off, lowering her eyes. “He wouldn’t want you to do this. Hurt yourself like this.” She pauses, sincere, voice low. “He loved you, Laurel. More than I’d ever seen him love anybody. The way he looked at you when he was with you…” She smiles, and it’s a tiny, cheerless smile, and she reaches out to stroke her cheek gently, “it was like no one else even existed, for him.”
“I loved him,” she murmurs. “I… I never told him.”
“He knew,” Bonnie tells her, and smiles again, though it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I think he knew.”
Bonnie stands, and goes for the door, but turns at the last minute, suddenly serious. “Don’t try that again. Please. I…” She goes silent, for a moment. “I’m so tired, of losing people.”
Laurel nods, almost imperceptibly. And she closes her eyes, and sleeps. And she means it. She won’t try again.
She may not particularly want to live but she doesn’t want to die either.
~
The next day, while Bonnie thinks she’s asleep, she overhears her on the phone.
Her voice is muffled through the door, so he gets up out of bed and inches closer, crouching down and lowering herself nearer to the crack, where her voice carries across more clearly.
“It’s bad. She’s… she’s not okay.” A pause. Bonnie sighs. “She tried to kill herself. Took half a bottle of sleeping pills. I had to stick my fingers down her throat.”
Another pause, longer this time. Then:
“She’s better now. Or – well, depends on how you define better. I’ve never… seen her like this. Seen anyone like this.”
A beat. Finally-
“Look, I don’t know what you’re doing, or what you still need to figure out. But you need to get back here. Soon. I don’t know if she’ll try again, and…” The person on the other end says something. Bonnie lets out a breath. “Yeah, you too. Bye.”
Laurel steps outside, just as she ends the call. Bonnie looks startled to see her.
She frowns, nodding at the phone. “Who was that?”
“Nobody,” she tells her, a bit too quickly to be convincing. “It was nobody.”
~
It gets better. She stops drinking all the time.
She stops drinking all the time and she starts noticing how weird Bonnie is acting.
She doesn’t seem sad. Hasn’t cried once – and maybe Bonnie isn’t the type to cry but somehow she imagines she would be, that Frank meant just as much to her as he meant to her. She seems… all right. Too all right. Too unaffected.
Maybe Bonnie had been in on it, too. Killing him. Maybe this was what she’d wanted all along.
She really doesn’t think it was but she isn’t sure what to think anymore, about anything.
~
Another week. It’s been two, since the night of the fire, or maybe three or maybe more. Everything is still a blur, but she’s drinking less and getting out of bed more. Give her another two and maybe she’ll be somewhat of a functioning human being. Another three and maybe she’ll go to class. Another four and maybe she’ll start to feel almost sort of normal again.
She wonders how long it’ll be until she starts to forget him. Forget what he’d looked like, how his voice had sounded. How his touch had felt – it’ll all fade from her memory sooner or later and there’s no escaping that. Maybe it’ll take a year. Or two. Five. Ten. She wonders when it’ll stop hurting, too. When she’ll finally give up calling his phone over and over every night before she falls asleep with the hope that somehow, some way, after one of the rings he’ll answer.
Another week.
Then, one night as she’s lying in bed, staring off into space and only slightly drunk this time, Bonnie comes to her.
“Get dressed,” she tells her, not harshly, but firmly. Laurel frowns up at her, rolling over, eyes hazy. “Come on. I need to show you something.”
“Show me what?”
“Just trust me,” is all the answer she gives, vague as ever, though it’s clear the matter isn’t up for discussion. “You’ll want to see this.”
She almost protests again, making up some lie about having plans – even though the only plans she has currently involve polishing off another half-bottle of scotch and watching infomercials and trying to keep herself from falling asleep and dreaming she’s being burned alive for the hundredth time. And Bonnie may be being oddly vague but there’s something in the look in her eyes that makes her feel like she can trust her.
Like this is important.
So with some willpower she didn’t know she had she dresses herself, even though she hasn’t showered in roughly three days or looked at herself in a mirror in as much time and probably looks disgusting, hair greasy and face greasy and body not smelling overly pleasant. She goes to follow Bonnie out the door, grabbing the bottle to take with her on the way out, then promptly setting it back down when the older woman gives her a withering glare.
And they drive.
She doesn’t know where they're headed and doesn’t ask, at first, until they’ve been driving for at least an hour. Bonnie turns on some classical music station and lets it play, the warm, lilting tones of violins filling the car, going from slow, mournful songs to chipper fast ones. Laurel tunes them out and listens to the rhythmic thumping of the roadway beneath their tires instead, dulling and deadening her senses.
Finally, she exhales sharply and looks over at her. “Where are we going?”
“A place.”
“What place?”
“We’ll be there soon. Don’t worry about it.”
Laurel rolls her eyes and shifts in her seat, watching the city lights whiz by out the passenger side window of Bonnie’s car. They’re somewhere on I-76 heading east out of Philly, passing by nondescript little exit after nondescript little exit, and Bonnie doesn’t seem much inclined to elaborate as to what place they’re going to, or even talk to her at all. Not that Laurel’s one to make conversation during road trips, that is; but on the other hand a little assurance that she isn’t being kidnapped would be nice, too.
“You’re not planning on murdering me on the side of some deserted road and dumping my body in the woods, are you?”
“If I was going to do that I wouldn’t need to drive this far,” Bonnie deadpans, without looking away from the road. “You guys already proved there’s a perfectly good woods right by campus.”
Laurel laughs, a short, rough, humorless burst; laughs, for the first time in what must be ages. Laughs, and realizes quickly how wrong it feels to laugh, to be happy, be normal, with Frank gone. And she sobers up, quickly.
She doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride, until Bonnie pulls off the highway and down the road towards a motel, with a flickering, pink neon sign out front and only two or three cars in the parking lot. It’s a small place; two stories, with stairs leading up to the covered walkway on the second. The streetlight in the parking lot glows a sickly green color, lending the place an even eerier air and making Laurel wrinkle her nose as she steps out onto the parking lot, circling around the car to meet Bonnie at the front.
“What is this place?”
“Come on,” is all Bonnie says, slamming the car door behind her and making for the stairs. “This way.”
Laurel stumbles a bit, drunk as she is, but does as she says and only opens her mouth again when Bonnie comes to a stop before the door marked ‘203’ with gold numbers.
“Bonnie, what the hell is-”
Bonnie turns to go, nodding at the door, her work here done. “You don't need to knock; it's open. I’ll be in the car.”
“Bon-”
The other woman is gone before she has the chance to finish.
She sighs, and turns to face the door again, staring it down, numb and tired and too drunk to feel much trepidation about what awaits her on the other side. She has no clue why she’s here; she doesn’t really care, either. Doesn’t care if whatever it is kills her, if Bonnie’s driven her here to get her killed. Put her out of her misery.
(Good. Let her.)
She knocks, and the door creaks open, not even having been latched, like Bonnie had said. She furrows her brow and steps inside, too tipsy to bother to steel herself for whatever she’ll find. She can’t see anything, at first. The room is all fuzzy grey shapes which she can just barely discern the outline of; a double bed, a television, a lamp in the corner, nothing particularly remarkable. The moonlight filters in through the blinds and the door behind her, casting silver lines on the carpet and falling on a tall, dark, broad-shouldered form standing behind the bed, across the room from her.
Then they turn. And she sees them.
Him.
“Frank?”
And she isn’t sure it’s real, for a moment, thinks it must be a dream – until her knees are giving out underneath her and she’s falling forward, and the arms that are catching her are real, so blessedly real.
“Laurel,” he soothes, voice low, just like she remembers and God it’s him, it’s him. “Hey, woah, I got you.”
Suddenly he’s there before her; all blue-eyed and bearded, clad in one of his three-piece suits, looking like a mirage. A ghost – he must be a ghost. Frank Delfino is dead; Bonnie had said so. The coroner had identified his body and said so. The state of Pennsylvania who’d issued his death certificate had said so. Everyone had said so and here he is, here he is and this is a dream, she’s sure of it now, one of those cruel awful dreams where he’s still alive, one she’ll wake up from cold and alone. Or she’s drunk and seeing things. Or going crazy. Or both. He’s not real.
He is.
His arms are warm. His blue eyes catch the moonlight and she can see the concern in them, the overwhelming relief to see her. He’s saying something, saying her name and trying to hold her upright as she stumbles, and he catches her, holds her tight, and that’s how she knows he’s real.
He doesn't let her fall. He never would.
She can’t breathe. Can barely speak. “Frank? Frank… you’re…”
“Alive,” is all he says, simply, and manages a reassuring grin. He tries to hold her up but she sinks to her knees anyway and he goes down with her, clutching her firmly, so tightly, like he thinks she’s liable to disappear if he doesn’t. She’s glad for it; she wants him to hold him tighter because she thinks the same. “I’m alive, okay? It’s okay.”
She blinks, shaking her head, half-hysterical. “This is – this is a… dream, I-”
“I’m here,” he urges, drawing her close. “I’m here, hey, it’s all right. I’m real. It was all a set-up.”
“You did it?” she sputters, and she’s crying without restraint now, harder than she’d ever wept for him before, face crumpling and eyes full of confusion, betrayal – almost. “Y-you faked all that?”
He nods, manages a half-smirk. “It wasn’t me, that body. I planted it there and it got burned to a crisp. Wasn’t hard to… convince everyone it was me, after.”
“You’re dead,” she blurts out, again, repeating those two words because they’re the only certainty she’s clung to for weeks and now, now, to have that turned on its head is too much too handle, her heart beating out of her chest, bashing on her ribcage like it wants to break out and go to him, fuse with his heart and never let go, never let him out of her sight again. “You… y-you’re legally dead, the coroner-”
“Takes bribes,” he quips, trying to lighten the mood. “So does the funeral home, to insist on makin’ it closed-casket. No one ever saw the body.”
She’s speechless. All she can do is stare, dumbly, stare because she still doesn’t believe it’s true. He’s dead. Frank is dead and buried and here he is, living and breathing and saying her name. She’s too stunned to cry, too stunned to do anything but stare, looking into those eyes she’d been so sure she’d never see again, run her hand up and down his cheeks, touch him like he might burst into flames the instant she does.
He’s alive. He’s alive.
“That was you,” she breathes, in between her sobs. “Who… who carried me out. Everyone told me it was one of the firemen but-”
“I was gonna leave. I had to get away before anyone showed up. But I knew you were still in there and-” His voice catches. Tears creep into his eyes so, and she’s so close she can see them glisten, can see the way the sorrow makes the corners of his eyes droop down. “I went back. Got you and brought you out. Left you in the backyard. I would’ve… taken you to the paramedics. I shoulda. But nobody could see me or else it would've all been for nothin’.” He stops, choked up, and presses his forehead to hers. “I’m sorry. For all of it, Laurel. Everything.”
She’s silent, a moment.
Then… Then, she unleashes on him.
“You… you didn’t tell me,” she sputters, and lands a hit on his chest – hard, and it must hurt because he makes a low grunt of surprise. But she doesn’t stop; she goes mad, pounding his chest over and over savagely, drunk and fucking furious. She barely recognizes her own voice. “You lied to me! You-you let me think you were… dead, for weeks-”
His voice is broken, when he speaks. “Laurel… I couldn’t… Laurel, stop-”
“Why?” she cries, just as he catches her wrists, stilling them.
“I couldn’t,” he lowers his voice. “I… I couldn’t, Laurel, Annalise would’ve known somethin’ was up if you seemed okay. And I had to do this. To get away. Away from her.” He pauses, licking his lips, and she calms herself long enough to listen. “She was never gonna stop, you know that.”
“You-” She cuts herself off, inhaling shakily. Her shoulders shake – hell, her whole body shakes, quivering violently like a reed in a gale, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to make it stop after tonight. Her voice is barely a squeak, when she opens her mouth again. “Y-you didn’t tell me.”
“I…” He drifts off, and she swears she can see a tear streak down his cheek though maybe it’s just a trick of the light. He places both his hands on her cheeks, tender, so gentle; gentle, like he’d always been with her. He'd always been so good to her. “I’m sorry, okay?” Before she knows it he’s leaning in, pressing a desperate kiss to her forehead, then her hairline, then her lips and chin and all over her, every inch, as she sobs and he starts to sob with her; half-sputtered sobs from deep in his chest. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
For God knows how long they kneel there, clinging to each other, so intent the world could be ending around them and neither of them would probably notice. Laurel doesn’t know how long; time hasn’t made sense in weeks and it doesn’t make any more now. It might be an hour or it might be minutes but all that matters is that he’s here, he’s alive. Risen from the dead in some sort of unholy resurrection, and she’s so furious she wants to beat at his chest until they’re both bloody, and so overjoyed all she wants to do is collapse into his arms and sob. And so she does some strange combination of the two for a while, hitting his chest weakly and also cradling him, holding him, running her hands up and down his back over and over to reassure herself he’s actually real.
He was dead. He was dead.
But if there ever was a person capable of coming back to life of course it’d be Frank Delfino. He’s done the impossible because he’s that much of an impossible man, and she loves him so much right then all she can do is bury her face into his throat and breathe him in and pray, pray to any god or saint or angel who’ll listen, that she never loses him again; that if she is dreaming to let her sleep here with him forever.
“I shoulda told you,” he murmurs into her hair, letting out a shuddering breath. “I shoulda come back sooner. I had to figure stuff out, I just…” His voice is strained. She can hear the thickness of tears in it, still. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
She breaks away, moving back enough to look him in the eyes. She sniffles, and he reaches up and brushes her tears away with the pad of his thumb. “Do you… d-do you know what it was like? Thinking I’d lost you?” She takes in a breath and a sob catches on it on its way out, and she makes some strange, pitiful burst of a noise, something like a hiccup. “It killed me.”
“Laurel…”
“I didn’t know how to do it,” she mutters, lowering her eyes. “Stop missing you. Stop being sad, I just…”
She drifts off. Frank flattens his lips into a grim line. “Bonnie told me. ‘Bout the pills.”
Laurel doesn’t answer; she doesn’t know what to say, how to explain that to him, terrified he’ll be disappointed in her – for being weak. He sighs, holding her closer, so close that it’s almost more than closeness, and in the shadows they may as well be one; limbs indiscernible from one another. Fused.
“You tried to kill yourself,” he remarks, lowly, and she can see in his eyes he isn’t disappointed; he looks more terrified than anything, shaken to his core by the thought of losing her.
“I wanted to die,” she admits, still breathless, still not sure if any of this is real. “I… I wanted everything to stop. I just-” Another hiccup. She shakes her head. “Nothing felt like it mattered, anymore.”
“Oh Laurel…”
The words break something in him, and she can see it fracture in his eyes. And then suddenly he’s kissing her all over again, murmuring apologies against her skin, fervent and frantic, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. He says it like a prayer, like it’s the only prayer he knows and she thinks it probably is; he’s never been a godly man, never believed in much of anything.
But she knows he believes in her. If there’s one thing he worships, adores, believes in, it’s her.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she snaps, long after he’s gone silent, ran out of words and ceased his string of apologies. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”
“I won’t,” he utters, lips pressed against her forehead. “I promise.”
“Fuck you. Fuck you,” she blurts out, angrily, but also with a hint of a garbled laugh in her voice. She sniffles, and laughs again. “I hate you so much.”
“Yeah, well,” he undertones, giving her a small smile. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” She pauses, and laughs again, laughs like a lunatic and probably looks like one, wild-eyed and insane, but she doesn’t care. “I… I thought I was never gonna get to tell you that.”
His smile grows bigger. His eyes dance and soften with so much affection it makes her melt, makes her shoulders slump and body go weak.
“I knew,” he tells her. “But… better late than never, huh?”
They’re silent, for a while. They get to their feet and Frank pulls her into an embrace, something like a slow dance, almost, though neither of them move. He cradles her in his arms and she loops hers around the back of his neck, pulled under again and again by the tide of his breathing, steady and sure, and his heartbeat, which she thinks she could listen to for hours and never get bored of hearing. He’s real. His heart is beating and he didn’t die in that fire and he’s real.
She should’ve known it’d take more than a fire to kill him anyway. To take him away from her. He'd never let anything in the world take him away from her.
“So what?” she asks softly, breaking the hush over them. “You’re leaving again?”
He nods. “Got a new name. Well – names.”
She furrows her brow. “You mean…”
“Look, I’m not gonna ask. I know… you got a life here. And school. So I’m not gonna ask but-” He goes silent, letting out a breath. “I got one for you, if you want it.”
She doesn’t hesitate, not for so much as a second. “I do.”
He blinks. “You sure?”
“I’m not losing you again,” she says, firmly, chin raised in determination and jaw set. “I thought… you were gone for good. And I can’t be without you, I know that now.” She pauses, stopping to think. “There’re other cities. Other law schools. You can’t stay here, with Annalise, so…”
“Just… listen,” he says suddenly, surprising her. He looks grim. “I don’t want you to say that if it’s not what you want. I don’t want you to give up everythin’ you got here for me. You may think it’s a good idea now but…” He pauses, lowering his voice. “One day you’ll get tired, or bored, and hate me for it. Hate me ‘cause you gave up everything to be with me. You-”
“I could never hate you,” she breathes, shaking her head. He goes silent, and she reaches up, caressing his cheek, feeling his beard bristle against her skin. She smiles, a bit shaky but sure. “I’ve tried. Hating you, believe me… I have. But I never could. So… I’m coming.” She steps back, her tone leaving no room for protest. “I’m coming with you and that’s final.”
He kisses her, slow and sweet. She drinks him up and by the time he pulls away she feels warm all over, from the crown of her head down to her toes. And he smiles at her and she feels alive again, wants to break down and weep until she has no tears left but refrains. There’ll be time for tears later; time for words, time for him to explain everything.
Time is all they have, now. Time, and each other.
“Good,” he says, and takes her hand, giving it a squeeze. It feels like a promise. It feels like forever. “I was hopin’ you’d say that.”
~
She tells everyone she’s going home, quitting the clinic and taking a break from school.
Annalise seems sympathetic. She doesn’t try to stop her. Wes and the others don’t protest either; after everything she’s been through they don’t seem like they blame her either, for needing to get out. Bonnie is the only one who gives her a knowing look, with eyes that make it perfectly clear she knows where she’s really going.
She tells them she’s going home. And instead she meets Frank at the train station with her bags that night, giddy as a schoolgirl, and hops on the first train to Atlantic City.
She holds his hand the whole ride there, resting her head on his shoulder but not closing her eyes to doze even though it’s well past midnight. She doesn’t want to sleep, lose a single solitary second of her time with him, ever again. She’d wasted too much before to make that same mistake again. They don’t say a word, either, but they don’t exactly have to. For once in her life Laurel doesn’t have a plan, not even the vaguest, faintest outline of one, and it feels like stepping into some great unknown, just as terrifying as it is exhilarating.
She could do anything, with him by her side. Anything in the world. Fuck plans.
She traces idly patterns in his palm, each one silently declaring I love you, I love you, I will never lose you again. She has time to do that too, now: tell him she loves him all she wants. And she doesn’t know where she’s going but she knows where she’s been, knows she’s never going back there and he isn’t either.
She doesn’t know where she’s going but she knows where she’s been, and she’s never fucking going back there, ever. The bright lights of Atlantic City appear in the distance, and she may not know where she’s going but she’s going somewhere; Atlantic City or any city, anywhere. A fresh start. A new life. A real chance. They have a real chance – both of them.
(Yes, she’s going somewhere. And she’s going with him.)