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English
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Published:
2019-01-20
Updated:
2019-01-22
Words:
2,225
Chapters:
2/?
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4
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28
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Love Zoe

Summary:

Zoe Murphy kills herself. This is what happens after.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Chapter 1: Silent

Chapter Text

The house was quiet, way quieter than normal. Connor has a feeling that something isn’t right. It's probably nothing, he can't think of what could be wrong. He thinks he'll just lock himself in his room to avoid his family for the rest of today.

The door of Zoe’s room is open allowing Connor to see inside. To see what Zoe has done to herself. Connor can't move. He can't think or speak or breath. He doesn't know if he should scream, cry, call 911, call mom.
This can't be real. Zoe couldn't have done this. Zoe isn't like him.
“Zoe..” Connor’s voice trembles when he speaks. He wants to look away but he can’t seem to tear his eyes away. He's completely paralyzed with shock. He doesn't know how long he stands there. It might have been minutes or it could have been hours. He hears his parents come home, he still doesn't move.

Cynthia sees him standing, staring. She asks him what he's doing and he can't respond. Then she sees Zoe. The scream she makes doesn't sound human. Connor doesn't really remember what happened after Mom saw Zoe like that. He blanked it all out, dissociated. He can remember a lot of yelling and screaming and the next thing he knows is that he's lying in his bed. He doesn't know or care how he got there.

He can't sleep. The image of finding Zoe like that keeps replaying in his head. Maybe he should be crying. But all he can feel is a sort of numb shock. He never thought it would be Zoe who would kill herself. He doesn't really sleep that night. He just lies awake and stares at the ceiling. He doesn't get out of bed the next morning. He can hear Mom crying. It's not all a nightmare. Zoe really died. She really did kill herself.

He finds her note on his desk and he wonders why it’s there. Why would she leave her suicide note in his room? The writing in the note is so shaky it hardly looks like Zoe’s handwriting. It takes him several minutes before he gathers the courage to read it.

 

Didn’t think it would be me huh? Not Zoe Murphy of all people Not your golden child Well I can’t be that golden child anymore I can’t fucking take it anymore You all think I’m happy and none of you notice how I really feel I know that none of you really give a fuck about me at all I can’t pretend to be happy in this train wreck of a family I’m sorry to whoever finds me like this I don’t know if it’ll be mom or dad I know it wouldn’t be Connor You won’t even care I know that you hate me and you’ll be glad I’m gone You don’t need to threaten to kill me anymore No more stupid little sister to ruin your life Even though you hate me I don’t hate you You’re still my brother And I miss you Or at least I miss who you used to be And I do love you believe it or not I was happy when we where kids Back when we where inseparable Remember that Con? I know you’d kill me for calling you that I’m sorry to leave you all like this But I can’t stay here anymore I can’t stay in this world So I’m making my exit

Love Zoe.

Most of her note is written to him. She thinks he hated her, he never hated Zoe even if they weren't friends and they didn’t get along. He treated her so badly so he understands why she thought that he hated her. He assumed that she hated him and she had every right to but it turns out that Zoe never really hated him Zoe loved him despite everything he did to her. He can’t show this note to his parents.it’ll just make everything worse than it already is. So he puts the note in his top dresser drawer.
He does remember being happy with Zoe. When they where little kids they had been best friends. He misses the bond they had. He was the one who broke it. Now he can never fix it.

 

Connor still hopes this is all a nightmare. That he’ll wake up and none of this ever happened. That he’ll see Zoe’s stupid face again. He’s still in shock, he hasn’t cried and doesn’t even really feel like crying. He can hear his mom crying right now and he thinks that maybe he should be crying. His little sister died and he can’t even shed one tear for her. Maybe he really is a fucking psychopath.

Connor doesn’t do much but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. He doesn’t know what else to do. Sometimes Mom comes in to check on him when she does he doesn’t talk to her or ever really look at her. He can’t handle the look she has on her face. How broken she is.

Connor tells himself that he can live without Zoe. They weren’t close or at least they haven’t been close for a really long time. He didn’t talk to her and she wasn’t a big part of his life anymore. It’s true that they used to be close, they had been best friends as little kids but that was a long time ago. He doesn’t even know who Zoe is… who Zoe was and she didn’t know who he is. She used to know him better then anyone else did. A lot of his good memories involve her but all of his memories of her from the last few years are negative. He can’t think of a single positive memory of him and Zoe that isn’t from several years ago. He isn’t ever going to make another memory with Zoe, positive or negative.

Three days after Zoe dies Connor decides he’s going back to school He can’t handle how the house is pretty much silent except for Mom crying. No one notices when he leaves the house. At school, he can pretend everything is normal. He’s still Connor the drug freak but at least he isn’t Connor the drug freak with the dead little sister. In a few days, everyone will but at least for now he can pretend that it never happened.

Chapter 2: Before

Notes:

I stayed up past midnight to finish this and I'm publishing it in math class, dear god I need to stop.

Chapter Text

Connor Murphy tries to act as if nothing happened. Even when a few days pass and everyone knows that Zoe is dead. Sure people stare and whisper when they see him but they already did that so he’s used to it. Everyone is talking about Zoe. He wishes they could all just shut up already. It’s hard to keep his mind off of Zoe when that’s all anyone is talking about.

He’s reread her note so many times. He’s come to a realization after reading it that many times. That he’s at fault for this. He made her life hell and treated her like shit. He made everything worse for her when she was already feeling horrible. She talked about him so much in the note that it might as well be a letter to him.

It’s been days since she died and Connor still hasn’t cried yet. He doesn’t know how to describe the way he’s feeling. He misses having her around even though they didn’t get along. If they had still been as close now as they where as little kids this would be so much more painful. But maybe if they had still been close Zoe would still be here because maybe he would have noticed that she was hurting. If he hadn’t gone and fucked everything up she wouldn’t be hurting that much and she wouldn’t have been pushed to the point of killing herself.

Larry and Cynthia blame each other, blame themselves. They fight about it. He can hear their quiet but angry voices at night as he tries to fall asleep. He hasn't really been able to sleep since Zoe died. It keeps replaying in his head. Seeing her body on the floor, how small and fragile she looked just lying there completely still. He had known that she was dead but he had still said her name. Some part of him had hoped that she would somehow and not sleeping. Connor is tired, he’s so tired. He can’t keep his eyes open anymore. So he falls asleep for the first time in days and he dreams.be okay and that she’d glare at him and say “what do you want asshole?” or something along the lines of that. But she hadn’t, she had just kept lying there, unmoving.

Tonight seems like it would be another night spent lying awake

He’s standing alone in his or at least he thinks he’s alone until he feels a hand on his shoulder, he turns around to see who it is. Zoe stares back at him. She looks so tired, her hazel eyes dull, empty and bloodshot. She grabs on to his arm and grips it tightly. “Zoe?” Connor says. She just keeps looking at him, not saying anything, still staring. “Why did you do it?” he asks.
Zoe moves her hand off of his arm and then points her finger at him.

That’s when Connor wakes up. That dream was disturbing, to say the least. He isn’t going to be falling back asleep tonight. Dream Zoe had told him what he already knows, that this whole thing is his fault. He killed her by pushing her to the point that she killed herself. If he wasn’t alive Zoe would be, and she would be happy.

Seeing Zoe in his dream makes Connor miss her. He doesn’t really know what he misses about her. The house has been too quiet since she died. Connor never admitted he liked hearing Zoe playing her music but he did. He misses the sound of her music. The odd silence is a reminder that she’s gone and that she’s not ever coming back. A reminder that he doesn’t have a sister anymore. He’s pretty much an only child now. Zoe wasn’t a huge part of his life so not that much has changed.

All though he refused to admit it while Zoe was alive Connor missed the friendship they used to share. He may have broken that friendship beyond repair but a very small part of him always hoped that he could at least fix things with Zoe to the point they could be friends again, they never would have been able to go back to how they used to be but he had hoped they could have something resembling a friendship. He didn’t ever fix it while he had the chance to. He didn’t try hard enough to fix it, he didn’t really even try at all. Zoe died thinking that he hated her. She had loved him even while she thought he hated her and after all, he put her though.

He had convinced himself that he hated her. But deep he knew that was never true at all. He wouldn’t have been able to hate Zoe. He hated things about the way she acted and how she was treated differently from him but he never hated her. He did love her but he sure as hell didn’t show it well. If he had known how Zoe had really felt, how much pain she had been in he would have tried harder. But she never told him she was hurting because she didn’t trust him and he didn’t trust her. She had trusted him with everything at one point. The trust had been gone for years though, just like the friendship and closeness.

He doesn’t know we he keeps rereading her note, maybe causes it’s the only thing he really has left of her. As he’s rereading he keeps coming back to this one sentence. Remember that Con?. He doesn’t know what it is about that sentence that makes him keep c coming back to it until suddenly it clicks. It’s the little nickname Zoe used in it “Con”. He had forgotten that she used to call him that. She had started calling him that when she was little because she couldn’t pronounce Connor. Even after she was able to pronounce his name properly she still called him that. He also used to have a nickname for her he used to call her “Zo”. She’d stopped letting him call her that when they were 12 and 13. That when they had started fighting when they had stopped being friends. She stopped calling him Con when she was 9 and decided she was told old to be calling him the nickname she gave him as a toddler. But even though she hadn’t called him that for 7 years she didn’t forget it.

Connor stops his reading and rereading of the note and he shoves it back into his top drawer. He lies back down in bed and doesn’t even bother trying to fall asleep. Instead, he thinks. He thinks about when things where happy and Zoe had let him call her Zo and had looked up to him. He misses that a lot. Somehow Connor ends up falling asleep and this time he doesn’t dream.

Notes:

I'm so sorry.