InsaneJournal

Day Twenty-Two; afternoon
Who: Andy Gallagher and OTA
What: Getting high and mourning Luna all over again
When: Day 22, mid-afternoon
Where: In Andy's van parked near the gym
Status: Active
Rating: TBA


Andy thought he'd made it pretty clear in his journal that everyone - even Elliot - should keep their distance today. Every day was becoming more and more traumatic and even as Andy tried to dust off his shoulders and make himself wake up every morning, it was getting harder every day. Each day brought more challenges, more bad news; more death. Andy wasn't sure how much more of it he could take before he really did go "mad," as Rose had put it. It helped, probably, that it didn't matter what time it was, the sun was still down. It was well into the afternoon and Andy was still sleeping in all of his clothes, curled up in the fetal position and crushed up against the side of the van. He'd been awake for all of twenty minutes, during which he'd written in his journal and smoked the last of his stash. Well, the last of the stash he'd had before he'd gotten to this place. There was more hidden in the van from the cooler Sid, Jay, and Bob had broken into what felt like ages ago in the gas station. The only other thing Andy had bothered to do before going back to sleep was spare Elliot a thought and hope that she would, first of all, understand, and second of all, not hate him for his behavior.

The van doors were all locked and he was in the back - the mattress turned up on end to block him from sight through the front windows and windshield. Books were scattered about haphazardly from where he'd tried to force himself to sleep the night before with book after book read by the ever-wavering light of a half-assed attempt at a tiny torch - the tube socks from his kit wrapped around a piece of metal that had been under the mattress and had, once, been part of the bedframe - lit by the last of his matches. His eyes had started to hurt and he still hadn't fallen asleep after getting at least twenty pages into at least three different books. It wasn't worth trying, so he'd laid there in the darkness, having blown out the not-quite-torch.

Andy couldn't blame Elliot for staying in a building the previous night, but it would've been nice to be able to depend on her emotionally the way she'd depended on him. He wouldn't ever tell her that, though. Not even if she asked. He wasn't about to put out the proverbial cry for help, either, the previous night because he knew no one would come out of the relative safety the dilapitated buildings provided them; he couldn't blame them, really. And, honestly, he wasn't sure he was in the mood for company, anyway. Least of all from Connor or that other guy that had shown up. Connor, Andy decided, would remain his friend in writing and nothing else, at least for now, because Andy couldn't look at the other man and not think of Luna's re-animated corpse. Couldn't look at Connor and see anything other than the rock he'd thrown at Andy's former friend. As much as Andy couldn't blame the guy for defending himself, it didn't mean he wanted to be around him in person. At least on paper, he would be free of mental images of the previous day. At least on paper, if Andy got angry or upset at the memory, he could close the book and throw it at the wall; it wasn't like he could do the same to Connor, himself, after all. Even if he could, he probably wouldn't want to.

And so, Andy slept for lack of energy, for lack of interest, and for attempt for lack of emotion. It was better to be alone and sleeping, missing her and trying to remember what she looked like before she'd been burned to death and her eye had fallen out of its socket than it was to be awake and reliving the previous day over and over in his head. Hopefully, if anyone was brave enough to knock thrice on the door and call out their name for him to approve or deny entry, it would at least be someone who wouldn't ask him a million questions about how he was feeling or what he was thinking. Hopefully, if someone felt the need to interrupt his grief, they'd have the common courtesy to refrain from asking questions that Andy didn't want to answer. If he was really lucky, if someone really did knock, that someone would be a hot chick. Especially Lex or Elliot. But, at that point in his slumber, Andy could've cared less if he became nothing more than writing on a page from then on and no one ever saw him in person again. That would've been perfectly okay with Andy.