This is a bit more personal than my usual stories, but do not be alarmed, I'm still alive and writing! I've got a big project I think you guys might like soon!

Prompt question: How would you react if your SO broke up with you? Where do you think it would happen?

….

She could feel it.

Something wasn't right with them.

From the moment she walked into his room, she knew.

Her stuff was packed neatly into her bag, her blanket and stuffed owl beside it.

Any evidence that she had lived there for the past three months was stowed in her bag, and she couldn't bring herself to move from the doorway.

"You need to go." He rumbled from behind her. She cringed inwardly, for his voice no longer held the warm tone he had reserved only for her. He was cold, angry.

And she knew exactly why.

She'd failed, again, somewhere. Messed up some decision, something, and it had pushed him to his limit.

She'd fucked up badly, and now she was paying the price for her inability to appease.

He was done with her, and he wanted her gone.

She bit her lip and steeled herself, stepping forward to scoop up her blanket and owl before groping for the handle of her bag.

Without a word, she turned, avoiding the cold stare boring into her, and with measured steps walked past him to the door. She shifted her belongings, trying to free a hand, and he didn't move to help her.

That's when the tears began. She tried, oh how she tried to stop them, but then the door opened before her and his roommate stood awkwardly in the doorway, a confused and worried expression plastered on his face.

"Hey, are you-" he began, but she didn't hear the rest as she bolted from the room, still trying to suppress the sobs ripping themselves from her throat.

Behind her, his roommate was yelling at him, and yelling for her to come back, and doors were opening up and down the hall, people poking their heads out to see what the commotion was, and she could feel the eyes, the gazes, judging, cursing her for interrupting their peace and quiet. She hurried to the stairs, not bothering to wait for the elevator, and ran.

Gripping her bag tightly, blanket and owl stuffed under one arm, she ran. It was early, the only people up and about on campus being professors and ROTC cadets on their way to morning drills.

She burst into the arts building and hurried to the one place she could hide and break down.

Sinking to the ground in one corner, clutching the stuffed owl to her chest, she sobbed. Not the quiet, shuddering sobs, but the ones that tear at her insides on their way out, that leave her lungs and throat burning while her entire body shakes and she feels sick.

She tries to calm herself, to regain control, but it fails and she's sobbing again because she can't control herself, she can't control her life, she can't control anything and that's why he left her.

All she did was make him miserable, she figured. He'd been hiding his true feelings for some time.

She sobbed until there were no tears, and then took huge, shuddering breaths.

She was just numb, and nothing she tried to tell herself or feel would work. She was empty once again, and she knew it was her fault. She was stupid, stupid, stupid for thinking she could be anything more than useless to him. Anything more than an accident waiting to happen.

She should've been prepared for this. She should've known. She could've avoided all of this if she hadn't introduced herself all those months ago, if she hadn't let her friend convince her that he was okay that she was leaving him for someone else.

If she hadn't let herself love him.

She would be okay now if she hadn't.

But she had, and her stupidity had paid off once again.

So she sat in the corner of the building where she was alone with her thoughts and pulled out her phone.

I have to delete it. All of it. She told herself. Every one of their conversations, every picture, every 'I love you' ever exchanged.

It was part of the process, she mused. She needed to forget him and forget what they had in order to start fixing herself again.

She knew she'd lost pieces to him. Big pieces that left gaping holes in her soul. But it was his choice to leave. She should've expected it sooner. She should've….

Nothing.

She deserved everything she got. She let her guard down so she deserved to be conquered. She let her heart feel so she deserved to have it broken. She didn't deserve his affection, or his love, but he gave it and she took it without realizing she gave him so much in return.

She selected his name, pressed the delete button, and forced herself to breathe. She'd done this before, she can do it again, he's no different from the last man who caught her eye.

She repeated her mantra over and over until she felt like she could feel something. She repeated the process with photos, found every photo of him and deleted it, and again with her memories. She worked at it over and over, but she couldn't forget him, couldn't force him away.

So she gave up. Sooner or later she would see him again in person-after all, they were friends with the same people-and she wanted to be able to look at him and not feel like she wanted to cry.

But that day wasn't today.

She took a deep breath and calmed herself down, then stood, straightening her jacket and grabbing her bag with a purposefully relaxed grip. She walked back to her dorm and up to her room, and bit her lip as she opened the door.

Even though she had no roommate, she liked sharing space with someone. The empty space she felt was now like a void in her mind, one she couldn't escape.

Stop it! You can't possibly be this weak!

She placed her bag on the desk and began emptying it, carefully putting away all the clean clothes and throwing the dirty ones into the laundry basket. She took a moment to calm her raging mind and tossed her blanket onto the bed, the owl following quickly behind.

He was just another guy to her, she told herself, yanking off her jacket and thrusting it into the dirty laundry.

He's just like everyone else. He didn't love you. No one loves you. You're pathetic.

She quickly grabbed a towel and a change of clothes and went down the hall to the private bathroom. Locking the door carefully, she stripped and turned the water on, as hot as it would go.

And then she cried again. The scalding water burned her skin, but she didn't notice or care enough to change the temperature.

She stood in the shower and cried until her body burned from how hot the water was and then abruptly turned it to ice cold.

She shivered and hissed at the cold as it spattered across her back and ran down her legs. At least she could feel physical pain again.

She turned the water off and stepped out of the shower, grabbing the towel and wrapping it around her shivering self, rubbing violently at her skin to warm up again before drying off.

She looked at her reflection in the mirror, at the broken girl who stared soullessly back, and sighed, reaching up to dry her hair.

You look terrible. That's why he didn't want you anymore. You're not pretty or funny or talented or anything, you're just a plain girl with an ugly face and a broken heart.

She slid into a pair of lacy underwear that-before now-had never failed to make her feel somewhat sexy and then pulled on a worn pair of black fluffy pajama pants and one of her dad's oversized t shirts (something from her childhood that always made her feel better). Then she gathered her dirty clothes and trudged back to her room, closing the door with an automatic click of the lock.

She tossed her clothes into the laundry and her towel over the closet door to dry and then dragged all of her blankets and pillows off the bed and made herself a nest on the floor in the corner, where she curled into a ball with her stuffed owl and leopard. Holding the owl close to her face, she breathed in, expecting a wave of lavender and vanilla, but instead got a wall of his smell and threw the owl across the room with a strangled cry, withdrawing as far into the corner as she could while squeezing the leopard, who had always stayed in her room and thus smelled like lavender.

She stared at the owl in fear, as if it were some horrid creature that would lash out and bite her at any moment, and the realization dawned on her that she would either have to get rid of it or give it back to him, since he was the one who bought it for her in the first place.

The memory rose unbidden in her head and she reenacted seeing the stuffed owl on the shelf in a secondhand store and scooped it up, grinning, and him plucking it from her arms to buy it, and then handing it back to her outside.

She remembered grinning at him, then standing up on her toes to-

oh no. no no no no no no no no STOP-

She remembers it. Feels the butterflies rise up in her stomach and the soaring, flying sensation when he kisses her.

Unbidden, unwillingly, she smiles at the memory, then her stomach flips as it hits her that she won't kiss him again, and just like that, she's in tears.

She bites her lip hard and wipes them away violently, repressing the urge to give in. She'd cried enough.

Right?

With a sigh, she freed herself from her nest and picked the owl up, cradling it close to her, and turned on her desk lamp.

Turning off the main light, she looked around at her room, awash with soft yellow light, and returned to her nest, the owl cupped in the crook of her arm, and settled her blankets around her.

It wouldn't hurt to have the owl around for one, maybe two nights, would it?

She'd return it, she decided, and tomorrow she would make sure anything else of his that she had here would go with it.

That in mind, she nuzzled the owl, blankly staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars scattered across her room. She ran through a mental list of things she could've done wrong that might've ended her good streak, and listed off any number of things she could've said or done differently, but she couldn't find one reason that she believed above all others, and it bothered her.

Was it a combination of all of them that pushed him over the edge?

That seemed like the most likely reason.

She bit her lip again, harder, and tasted coppery blood in her mouth.

Good, her mind whispered, the hurt will go away. All you have to do is bleed.

"No I don't," she muttered, wiping her lip angrily, "I don't have to bleed. I won't bleed.

Another memory, unbidden and unwanted, rose.

She was explaining why she picked at her skin, why she drew all over her arms.

"To hide the cuts," she murmured, both in the memory and in life, tracing the one scar on her forearm that showed.

"Well, why don't you tell me next time you feel it, okay? I'll hug you till you feel better." He was smiling at her, his hand on her arm, and she remembered diving into his embrace, reveling in his warmth, his strength, and feeling like there was nothing in the world that could separate him from her if he didn't want to go.

"Some love story I turned out to live," she whispered angrily, slamming her head against the wall, "so full of happy endings and true love and all."

She shrank into herself, clutching the owl and breathing in his scent, trying desperately to understand what she did wrong.

There would be no sleep for her for the next few days. She went to class, did her homework, maybe ate some leftover pizza, but not once did she feel like she was healing at all. Once everything was done for the day, she collapsed into her nest and curled into a ball.

One night she cried, another she could only stare blankly at the ceiling, and the third she spent angrily shuffling things around in her room.

Finally she decided it was time to return the owl and the other two items she found around her room: a beanie she'd stolen a long time ago, and a book she never finished reading.

Do keep in mind this is a prompt. And while this is somewhat along the lines of what I'd expect, it's not something Iam expecting, so don't worry.