Hey y'all. It's been a long time. A lot of things have happened in the past year, but you don't need me to tell you that, especially in light of the current international crisis. I hope you're all doing well and not giving in to the panic. Here I have typed up a short chapter to keep you distracted in these turbulent times. As for why I've been off the radar for so long, read the bottom author's note, where I'll bore whoever feels like reading with more details about my personal life. Hope you enjoy this chapter, though I feel like I could have done better. But eh, it's been a long time and I had little patience for editing.

Chapter 24 – The Silence That Deafens

And suddenly, he knew what to write about. He opened his eyes and adjusted himself in front of the computer which was about to become a creative tool in his hands.

And he started. From the very beginning.

"I was seven when my father killed himself."

"He graduated from law school, but eventually found himself working in finance. He had climbed up to a leading position at his firm, when he noticed some irregularities in the books." Paul found that once he had started talking, it was hard not to snowball the entire story out in one swift breath. At least the factual parts weren't challenging to retell.

"Something about fictitious vendors and overstating the payments made by the company, otherwise known as billing fraud. Someone was embezzling and he found out who. He found him out, but didn't oust him. Not only did he not do a thing, but he actually joined the scheme. A while later the other guy quit, but my father continued by himself. And when the embezzlement was discovered, he took the fall." Paul sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "He was fired. He was sued. He was despised by all of his former colleagues and partners. He had no credibility and no one would hire him. We found ourselves knee-deep in debt and legal fees. He was even faced with the threat of doing prison time."

"Why would he do that?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. He probably hesitated at first, but having seen how simple the entire scheme was and how easily it could be missed by everyone else, I guess he just got lured in. Or the other guy had a very good reason and somehow managed to convince him. Then I guess with time it got harder and harder to stop, because he got used to it, plus once you start relying on a higher income, it becomes really hard to scale down. I… I honestly don't know." Paul paused and looked downwards to his hands. "Anyway, that's the official version. Many believe it was the main reason for his suicide."

Dawn hesitated for a few seconds, before glancing at him cautiously. "Do you?"

"I… I'm not so sure. I do believe it was a big part of the reason, but it couldn't have been just that. I mean, his career really was his life, but he had us, too. I can't imagine we were that insignificant."

He cracked his knuckles and looked back up into Dawn's eyes. "He hadn't been getting along with my mother too well. She didn't like that he was doing long hours at work and was always coming home late at night. They had the occasional fight about it. He always managed to find time for me and Reggie though. But with mom… Things were different. It's like she didn't exist outside of her wifely and motherly duties, as if her making dinner and him eating it was all their relationship was limited to. It was a sad sight, now that I think about it, but I guess I never really thought to look at it that way back then. And then there's the matter of my mom's depression. Sure, it was a downwards spiral after his death, but even before that she had her episodes from time to time, though not as intense. She was taking her medication of course, but there seemed to be a sort of tension between them, something that they never really talked about. They didn't really communicate with each other about much, other than 'Reggie's doing well in school' and 'Paul needs new shoes'."

"That must have been tough. I'm sorry," Dawn said softly and gave his hand a light squeeze. Paul looked at it, almost surprised to see that hers had once again found its way to his. The corners of his mouth slightly quirked upwards at the small gesture. He swallowed and willed himself to continue.

"Reggie and I didn't get along when I was a kid. Not that we're exactly the dream team now, but back then we barely even talked. Our communication was pretty much reduced to insults. He would mock me for reading most of the time and call me 'mama's boy', because I didn't like going out or playing with other kids. I, in turn, would call him a girl for the way that he dressed and his interest in baking. And let me tell you, he had no talent for it in the beginning. The cookies he made were God-awful."

Dawn almost chuckled at that, never breaking eye contact with him. "Hard to imagine that," she whispered, giving him the momentary pause he was looking for.

"He… he blamed me." Paul grit his teeth as he recalled the memory of the resentment his brother held for him once upon a time. "He blamed me for what our father did and I remembered. He regretted it, of course, and did whatever he could to rid himself of that guilt and make it up to me. I didn't forget though. I used to look up to him so much in my childhood… I mean, I still do, because let's face it, Reggie is fucking amazing. The way he managed to pull himself together and become a stable, happy, strong person... It's just beyond me. I never really grew out of it, but he… He is my goddamn hero. Just like he was back then. My big brother. For him to say the things he said to me… I was devastated. I believed him and I started to blame myself too. It took a long time to get rid of that guilt."

Dawn watched him relate his story with a quiet sort of pain in her eyes, her fingers tightly entwined in his. "But why? Why would he blame you? It makes no sense, not to mention how little you were."

Paul shrugged. "He had a good enough reason. When dad's embezzlement was discovered, there were lawyers coming to our house all the time, day in and day out. I didn't understand what was going on and I always asked, but mom would never tell me. Then one night I heard her fight with dad about it. That's when I found out what he'd done." He took a deep breath. "The next day I remember going up to his office and saying awful things to him. I think I may have even cried. I told him… I told him that I thought he was one of the bad guys and how could he ever do something to make mommy cry and he better fix it or else. It was all black and white for me then and I truly saw him as the villain. I was sad, angry, disgusted, and I let him know of all that. I… I even told him I hated him." Paul drew a sharp breath.

"After that he stopped talking. He rarely came down to dinner and when he did, he never looked any of us in the eye. He was like a ghost a while before it happened. And Reggie believed it was my fault. Because of the things I said to him. And then… and then one day, he killed himself. No note. Nothing."

Dawn tensed and felt her throat go tight. She kept quiet and resisted the urge to show just how much emotion this story was evoking in her. She was barely keeping herself composed and could only imagine how much effort it was costing Paul to keep on talking so steadily. He had shut up now and his jaw was tightly clenched in a clear indication of how close he was to breaking down.

"I'm fine," he said shortly, but the thick, wavering quality of his voice attested to the transparency of his lie.

She managed to catch the sob in her throat, and hoped that Paul didn't read into – or at least, read into the wrong way – why her fingers suddenly went white-knuckle tight on his.

"It's good." He exhaled and added with some visible effort, "talking about this with someone. Helps."

Dad, I'm sorry! Dad, I'm scared!

Paul's lids shut with a kind of fatalistic acceptance, and he massaged his forehead, as if he could somehow wipe the memory away. He knew he couldn't, though. He would never be able to. Of all the last words, the ones his father had spoken to him before taking his own life had been devastatingly ironic.

Go help your mother, son. I'll be fine.

Dawn listened. She hadn't realized her hands had clenched into fists until she felt the blood beneath her nails. Ignoring the small, stinging pain, she intently kept her eyes on Paul's face. His gaze was unfocused, looking at something she couldn't see, reliving a kind of pain she couldn't even begin to imagine. She wished she could take some of it away somehow, take on a part of his burden herself so that he wouldn't have to carry the weight of his sorrow all by himself. It thoroughly crushed her to see him like this; Paul, the strongest person she'd ever come to know and the one who now seemed to need her more than ever before.

She would do anything to lessen his pain, but it rendered her helpless to realize that regarding this she could do nothing. Nothing, except listen to him retell the most painful event of his life, hold his hand tight and silently vow to herself that she wouldn't let anything hurt him this much anymore, as far as that was in her power.

"I was the one that found him. In his office." His voice sounded as if it belonged to another. As he uttered the words, his mind was far away, back in time and back in that goddamn office, which remained untouched to that day. None of them had had the strength to move anything or even dust. The sight he opened the door to on that distant afternoon was imprinted in his visual memory so vividly that it might as well have been something he witnessed less than a minute ago.

"Paul. You don't have to tell me." Dawn's voice was audibly trembling. He didn't dare look her in the eyes in that moment, lest the emotion in them seep through and overpower him, until his own turmoil was spilled out in an uncontainable mass.

"No. I need to."

She didn't say a thing. She just held him more tightly, if that was even possible. He centered himself on the warmth of her palms and decided to concentrate on that, as to not get pulled down in the agonizing memory. Reality flickered feebly like an old television program that had just lost signal, and slowly faded away to make way for the scene in the recesses of a long buried past.

The world grew foggy, distant, numbly removed. Silence pushed in on Paul's ears, muffling his brother's exclamation and his mother's strangled sob. He could only register the sight before his eyes, the dangling figure of his father, whose life had been ripped away by the piece of rope hanging from the ceiling. A piece of rope, a pile of problems with no apparent solutions and too much desperation in between. A cry ripped from his chest and he made a move forwards, with outstretched hands, as if to touch him, to shake him awake, because no, no, he couldn't be dead, but someone pulled him back harshly and held him in place.

"Quiet, Paul," Reggie's voice reached him through the muffled fog as he held him back. "Quiet."

And Paul was silent for years after that, until silence became so much a part of him that he no longer knew how to live without it.

His mother came behind him. A sorrowful moment passed, and then her fingertips brushed against his hair. He jerked away reflexively, unwilling to experience any physical sensation. He kept hoping that maybe if he just forgot how to feel, somehow this would all disappear and he would wake up, because this had to be a nightmare, it had to be…

He took in the sight before his eyes with a new depth of numbness as his heart screamed in agony in his suddenly too-small chest. It could not be.

Except it was.

"I… I'm so sorry you had to go through that." Dawn was at a loss for words. "I hope you don't still think it was somehow your fault."

"No," he whispered. "Not anymore. Reggie had a good scream at me about it quite recently."

"Oh, Paul. You were a little kid. Little kids know right from wrong and don't filter their words. They speak their minds. You weren't to blame for any of it. For what it's worth, I would have probably done the same thing."

Paul contemplated her words for a second. "Yeah," he said finally. "But Reggie didn't see it that way at the time. To him it was 'my big mouth' that pushed dad over the edge. Later, he spent years wondering why I had stopped talking altogether."

"It was difficult between us after that. It took a long time until we could talk to each other normally. It got harder whenever our family would come to visit. You've met some of them, so you know. Sure, they care, but they just do it so… obnoxiously. And they always come in numbers. Most of the time, I just wanted to be left alone. After a while, they just stopped trying. They probably thought there was no fixing me. Worked fine for me, I was just glad to have them off my back. But Reggie… he never really backed off."

Years of being an alienated member of a family recovering from tragedy had taught him to be careful in everything he said and everything he felt. Now, being open with someone else for the first time in what felt like forever, he felt strangely relieved and found strength in analyzing the skewed way he used to communicate with others. "He never understood it," Paul said, referring to Reggie. "And he called me out on it. 'Why do you have to think so much?' he'd ask me. 'Why can't you ever react with your gut?' I couldn't tell him that it was because of his initial blame for me." Paul paused and smirked a little. "I punched him one time. Nearly broke his collarbone."

Dawn dared to crack a tiny smile. "Your anger was probably justified. But he's a good brother."

"And still, he wouldn't stop pestering me about it. A lot of time had to pass for me to finally appreciate that. He really is a good brother."

"When did you start talking again?"

"I honestly don't remember. It was mostly fights, but they weren't about me isolating myself or his cookies anymore. He wanted me to talk to our relatives, because I wasn't the only one in pain. I wouldn't have any of it though."

"Talk to them, Paul. You'll feel better."

"It's a bit too late for you to care how I feel, Reggie. I don't feel anything, is how I feel. And they can just shove their condolences up their asses. I don't want to talk."

"Fuck, Paul! We're a family! When do you get to say it's too late to stop trying?"

"We're a family when we start acting like one. When have we ever done that?"

"Sounds harsh," Dawn commented.

"It was," he admitted. "My relatives though… What an annoying bunch of idiots. Family is a tricky thing."

"It's a form of unconditional love. Weird love that can sometimes make you almost break your brother's collarbone, true. But love nonetheless."

"It's not really that simple. With love, you're allowed to leave people if it's not the love you want. But with family… it's not like you can ever really leave. You're more or less stuck with those people for life, even if the universe tied you together by absolute chance and you don't have a single thing in common. You don't get to choose family."

"Yeah, you're right, but… you can choose your own family, you know. Forget what people say about blood being thicker than water. The choice to make someone so significant to you is a much braver one when they can leave you at any given time." Dawn studied his eyes for a few long seconds. "That's why you can't have love without trust. And it makes it all the more valuable."

"Yeah." He looked down and slowly blinked a few times as he curiously examined the pile that was their hands. "Wow, you really made a sport of holding my hand there."

"Yeah, I think I'll try out for the Olympics this year," she deadpanned and looked at him with a playful glint in her eyes, effectively relieving the air of some of the tension.

He looked at her blankly for an uncertain second before he laughed. They were weak, relief-born chuckles, but it was laughter nonetheless. He looked back down at his clean hands and wondered if the blood he felt would ever go away. But then he noticed that she was still not letting go and all previous thoughts immediately vanished.

For all the ugly things they had gone through, their entwined hands looked beautiful together. He breathed out and glanced at her face. "Thank you. I never would have been able to get this out if it weren't for you. You don't know how much you've helped me."

The only thing she did in response was smile.

Maybe this was what moving on was like. Maybe this was the first step towards the elusive destination called closure.

And maybe sharing that road with someone else wasn't all that bad after all. The fact of the matter was that he felt immensely lighter now that he had delved into the center of his trauma, carved it out and laid it out for her to see, bloody and disgusting as it was. And she was still sitting there, still not letting go, and smiling.

He had never before realized how frozen he was until someone had started to melt his ice away. He looked at her now and he knew.

He felt warm. He felt alright.

That ice was now nothing more than a puddle.

They sat together in silence and just reveled in the other's mere presence. It wasn't the tense quiet of untold secrets and concealed demons, it wasn't the electric charge of undeclared feelings and suppressed emotions, it wasn't even the indifferent silence of those who were numb, those who found solace in nothing but isolation with their own selves.

It was the blissful kind of quiet. The one you could sit in for the rest of your life, as long as you had the right person there with you. The one that told you that you were right where you needed to be and volumes more, without there ever being a need for a single word to be uttered.

And that's chapter 24 for you. Can't say when the next one's coming, and I've honestly given up on making any predictions of the sort. Anyway, I feel like I owe you some kind of explanation for my long absence, so I'll try to give you the shortened version. The past year has been arguably the most nightmarish one of my life up til now for a number of different reasons. I have had 2 people in my immediate family pass away in the past year, one of them being a parent. I haven't coped in the best possible way and my sleep schedule was out of whack for nearly 3 months. You can imagine how much sleep I got and how my brain started to malfunction as a consequence. Before that I spent some time abroad for education purposes and upon coming back, I needed to find myself a job, which I then tried to juggle with university. It sort of worked for 6 months and that's when the situation really escalated on the family health front and it just got a bit too much. I've been knee-deep in depression for a few months now, but on the bright side my sleeping patterns are starting to improve. I quit my job (which may not have been the best decision, taking into account the economic crisis that's on the rise; regardless, my health, both physical and mental, was suffering from the exertion, and I'm glad to be done with it for the time being). I nearly gave up on all my academic work and dropped out of university. Thankfully, I decided against it, and though I'm a bit behind with my studies, and not really that motivated to keep going, I'm going to see this degree through and find some purpose in it all. That's all of it, in a nutshell. I'm sorry if I've seemed unresponsive or uncaring about this story. The pressure just got to me, I guess. I'll hopefully get back on track with it as well sometime in the near future.

In the meantime, take care of yourselves and don't give in to the negative part of things (trust me: it's a trap and you fall in it like it's a rabbit hole; the climb up isn't easy). Thank you for reading and sticking with me through the years! Feel free to let me know what you think in the reviews! Until next time! ~Ella