I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday - Astrid, open to Miles
Although she still technically lived at Victoria Lane, Astrid spent most of her time at Miles house, where her bedroom continued to gain more and more of her own character, more and more items migrating slowly over. Once a week (sometimes more) she slept in Miles' bed, but mostly she stuck to her own. She was still very careful not to be too much in his space, just in case he got too annoyed with her. Astrid didn't want to get kicked out.
She'd brought her guitar over in the hopes that she would start playing it again, but as yet she'd barely been able to touch the strings. She hated that Toby had taken music away from her. It used to bring her such peace, and now all she could remember were those long days when he'd locked her away and she'd sung desperately at the door to try and win his favour back, her throat feeling torn and raw by the end of it, her voice almost gone.
Astrid had thrown a blanket over the guitar so it didn't watch her.
There were two opened letters sitting on Astrid's desk and she chewed her nail as she gazed past the both of them at at the swirling wallpaper ahead, feeling disconnected from it it. The official seals on both of them really wanted her to care and pay attention, but she couldn't be tricked by fancy letterheads. She wondered how long she could ignore them. She wondered if one would just cancel out the other anyway.
The first letter was from Astrid's school to inform her that since she'd made no contact with her classes since school began and hadn't replied to their emails, she was being removed from the course. She had failed her previous year as well - this was her attempt at a do-over, another shot at getting her final high school year finished, but she found it hard to care: she'd spent four months in captivity with Toby and since then hadn't felt motivated to do anything at all. She was supposed to be going for her GCSEs in May but instead had stopped doing anything school related at all.
How was Astrid supposed to even care when she couldn't stop thinking about the past (Toby and Mitch and that whole nightmare) or the future (Miles and his deal with Little Moscow)?
She would have to repeat her final year (again) when it started up next September.
Or maybe she wouldn't.
The second letter from was her neurologist at Charing Cross Hospital. Astrid's most recent yearly scan had showed up some 'dark spotting' and they wanted her to come in for further tests. It might be nothing, the letter said, but they wanted to rule everything out considering her history.
Astrid had first read the letter with a grim blankness and a lack of surprise. Her occasional headaches had been worse recently, low and rumbling and always there. She had wondered, a lot, about whether that meant what it had meant last time.
She pushed both letters to the back of her desk and said she would deal with them later.
Two weeks later she hadn't touched the letters again, both of them still sitting on the same place on her desk. (At least, she assumed that was where they were sitting. She had decided that if she didn't look at them, then they didn't matter.)
She tried not to think on it, tried not to get distracted every time she felt a stabbing inside her head, or when lights were too low. She didn't tell anyone about what she'd found out, because she knew they would all have so many things to tell her, so many things that she should be doing. She wasn't ready for any of that. So if she was a little distracted, who cared? She'd been a little distracted since her kidnapping, just like she'd been a little into avoidance and a little quick to frustration.
Just don't think about it and maybe it will go away - this was Astrid's current mantra (that wasn't really working.)
It was a Sunday afternoon when she picked up her guitar, brushing any dust off the body, and took it downstairs and into the sun room, glass walls looking out into the back garden. Outside it was raining and the sound of it surrounded her here, cushioning Astrid from the outside world.
There she sat down cross-legged and held the guitar in her arms, letting in sink into a familiar position. She tried not to let it panic her. It was just a guitar. It was something she'd once loved. She just wanted that something back again.
Slowly, cautiously, as though it were about to summon ghosts she didn't want to see, Astrid began to tune the strings. It didn't matter if it wasn't perfectly in tune - Astrid had played many guitars over her life and half of them were so old and cheap that they were barely capable of being in tune.
When she began plucking idly at the strings and thinking on a song, she found that all of them led back to another memory of Toby. She had played everything she knew for him over her months there, all of them more than once, some of them so often she'd felt like she was doing it on auto-pilot alone.
She didn't have anything that Toby hadn't touched.
He'd gotten his grubby hands all over Sound of Silence and Layla and Hotel California (a song she had only ever played once for Toby because the 'you can never leave' had almost sent her over the edge.)
His face was watching her with adoration when she thought of Ain't No Sunshine and Heart of Gold and Jolene.
His fingers brushed through her hair at Country Roads.
His hand found her lower back at Have You Seen The Rain?
So while Astrid began playing a few different chords to start those familiar old songs, she gave them up just as quickly and leaned forward, letting her hands fall away from playing and instead using the guitar as an instrument for leaning instead of music.
Outside looked cold and bleak, and Astrid was glad for the heating inside, glad to be somewhere warm and safe. It had been cold when she was with Toby as well, a long winter still lingering around that mansion and dusting her entire view with snow. That was eight months ago and the seasons were bringing her back to be with him again.
She forced herself to look around the room so that she could observe that, yes, this was where she was now. It wasn't that luxurious library, or that pastel coloured bedroom, or that tiny bathroom with the bath ripped out.
Miles' house and Toby was dead.
Astrid ran her hands across the strings again. Maybe she just needed to learn some new songs.