Hagen’s P.O.V

I fucked up.

I really, really,reallyfucked up.

I fucked up a lot— I wasn’t the type of guy that got things right on the first try… or the second, but usually, my mistakes had a way of working themselves out. That wouldn’t happen this time. This time was worse than all the rest.

This time… Ifuckedup.

I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here, staring straight ahead, but I can’t even imagine moving. Moving would make it real, and I—…

… I stay still, looking ahead at the empty space across from me, where he’d been standing, and I just keep… staring at it, and the longer I do, the harder it is to keep standing here like I’m not choking on every breath.

My chest cages up, trying to contain the crime scene that was my mangled heart, but despite its efforts, I’m left panting so hard I think I’m hyperventilating, and I know I need to sit down before I fall. But still, I don’t move a step out of place.

I don’t know why I don’t. It wouldn’t make a difference if I waited here until the day I died, he wouldn’t come back.

My hands fist at my sides as my breathing gets worse and Ineedto sit down, but I don’t dare. I keep waiting, even when I know it’s useless.

Nikola wouldn’t ever come back, not in a few days, months or years. When Nikola was finished with something, he wiped it from his mind and put it to bed, and he was finished with me.

I blink past the tears quickly welling in my eyes and try to breathe, cause that’s what you were supposed to do when you were scared, but it wasn’t working. How could it when I was so fucking terrified?

It wasn’t just because of the words he’d said… those painful, bare, torturous words that had torn me and everything about me apart until I was no better than the ruins of our bond. He’d left those words behind, but nothing else.

There were points in my life when I’d thought I’d lived happily without Nikola’s magic around me. Those were the years I was ‘free’. First, it was when his attention had taken the extreme turn that made Dad step in, and then again, when I’d turned 18 and he’d left me alone until the night he’d shown up on my doorstep for our first date, but I’d been wrong.

Nikola’s magic had been there the entire time.

It’d never strayed, it had just taken a new form— a smaller form, but it’d always been there— some invisible, secret tendril that I’d never noticed until he was gone and had taken it with him, along with the parts of him Ihadalways felt.

Now, I was laid bare to the world for the first time and Ihatedit.

I felt naked. No, worse than that. I felt like some layer of me, some second skin, had been stripped away, and I couldn’t fucking breathe without it— without him. But he was gone, and after what I did, after the screaming match we’d just had, he wasn’t coming back.

“Fuck.” The word comes out like a ripple curse and I try my best to relax, but my fingers are shaking and my vision keeps blurring. I’m about to throw up and I don’t know what to do. I have no idea what to do when my thoughts are now so quiet.

A few minutes ago, my head was pounding with thoughts so deafening and so ferocious that I had to say them out loud, and now, it’s so terribly quiet, and… he’s not coming back.

“Fuck,” I whimper as my legs stumble back, and that’s it. I should’ve stayed there, waiting exactly where he’d left me, because the moment I’m not, it all comes crashing down.

Loving you is so hard— you make it hard.

There’s no more blinking away the tears, no more trying to fight the pain. There’s only accepting it and trying to face it, but I’m too weak for even that.

Nikola’s gone. He’s done with us, done with me, and I didn’t know how to breathe in a world where Nikola was done with me.

I don’t know how I end up on the floor, cradling my head, but I do.I rock back and forth like a child trying to will away a nightmare, but this one is too real and even if it wasn’t, I didn’t think any angel would take pity on me.

Zyair howls his misery. Ignoring my attempts to reach for him, he keeps howling and howling as if he’s calling for Neo, begging for him to come back, but he knows as well as I do that he won’t.

“I’m sorry,” I croak, for him, for Neo, for Nik… Goddess,Nik.

I picture grey eyes, tired first, then hurt, and then enraged, and my heart bleeds for having put those emotions there.

I’d never seen him so angry. I don’t think I’deverseen Nikola angry.

Upset, annoyed, agitated, disturbed. I could list a number of things close to anger but not quite, and I’d seen them all. But anger— true anger? It was as rare as him actually hating anyone, and I’d managed to coax both those anomalies out of him.

I think I hate you.

I hold myself tighter, trying to keep something whole while the words replay in my mind, ripping off what little there’s left to me, but it’s useless. Their blade is as sharp now as when he’d said them, and they continue to slice away at my heart, at my soul, at every bit of me, even the parts I thought I’d kept hidden for myself.

I can’t breathe, and I’m not being dramatic. I’m gasping for air and clawing at my chest as if freeing my heart would make this stop, and it’s where the agony is blaring from so maybe it would. My fingers shake too much anyway to get the job done, so I stay gasping, and crying, and clawing at my own chest as I waver in and out of consciousness, and it hurts, but it’s nothing near to the pain licking up my spine as this new reality continues to sink it.

What the fuck had I done?

I can’t stop my mind from replaying it all, from picturing him as if he’s right here, still yelling, still crying, still so terribly hurt. I’d hurt him with those words— those selfish, cruel words, and ‘sorry’ couldn’t fix that. No words on their own could fix that.

I’d been the catalyst for what had been destined to happen for years, for more than a decade. I thought all these months that we could talk it out, bit by bit, and eventually, we’d weed it all out. But even with all our talking, once we were in the worst of it, it’d all come out.

Every resentment. Every unforgiven sin. Every secret agony.

I’d thought I was the one bearing them all, trying to get past the old aches, but I’d never known Nikola was too.

All you’ve ever been is cruel!

I clench my eyes shut, trying to force darkness over my mind, but as I do, I see Nik. I see him crying and yelling at me with grey eyes full of rage, and I see Nik, sobbing silently beneath me in the hallway just outside my childhood bedroom.

“Fuck,” I whimper, rocking and clenching my hair so tight it burns at my scalp. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

Now everything is too loud— Zyair’s howling, Nik’s words, the past, the present, and there’s no running from it this time. It’s just me, and all of it, and it’s too much, but I can’t run from it.

Not this time.

My heart strains, struggling to work, but how could it when everything else was in standstill? It’s like claws are sinking into me, and with each passing second, they dig deeper, tug harder, tearing me apart and punishing me for my sins, for all of them.

There’s no buffer, no one to hold on to, nowhere to run to. It’s just me and everything else for the first time… and it tears me apart.

———————————————

I keep waiting. It’s pathetic and stupid, I know, but I don’t know what else to do, so I keep waiting.

I feed Wreck, and I wait where he’d left me. I do it, day in and day out, and it gets harder the more time passes, but I keep doing it because I don’t know what else to do.

I should. I’m 23 years old. I’m an adult. I should know exactly what to do, but I’m so fucking lost without him that I can’t seem to move past where he’d left me.

At some point in the last few months, Nikola had become interwoven into every fibre of my life. I woke up and went to sleep thinking about him, even when I tried not to. He was here, always here, and now he wasn’t because I’d torn out the only thing more vital to me than the broken heart in my chest.

All these months and I hadn’t even realised it, or maybe I did and was too stubborn to admit it. I’d been pushing Nikola away for as long as I could remember, begging for space and time, and now he’d given me both, and I felt like a carven had opened up inside of me without him.

Nikola hadn’t broken our bond, but it felt like he did. I think he did, in his way.

“I could never.”

He’d left me to say the words and in that moment, as he’d stared at me, tired and hurt and done, I suddenly understood what he meant.

I couldn’t. I could never break our bond. Not even in the worst of it. The thought had actually made me throw up at one point, and when that’d happened, I hadn’t been envisioning myself doing it, but Nikola. Nothing ever felt more wrong.

But since neither of us could do it, we were left with this. This was the closest thing to a broken bond and it was like swallowing acid every time it fluttered, like a burnt home trying to withstand the flames. Our bond had always been rocky. We went through so many stages in this relationship over the years that it was always at one extreme or the other, but it was strong.

Now, those strong foundations had been battered. They were a broken, burning mess that felt like they would break on their own on any given day.

If that day came, I doubted I’d make it past another.

———————————————

Nikola doesn’t come back.

The days turn into a week, and then two weeks, and then that’s when it really hits me. It’s not that it didn’t before. It had, but maybe some part of me had been holding out hope. That part gets demolished now, and then, it’s panic mode all over again.

What happened now?

If we couldn’t even talk about it, if Nikola was done with me, what did I do? Go back to living my life? Impossible. But if I couldn’t live without Nikola, then what did I do? Find him? Apologise and try to work this out? That felt impossible too.

All we ever did was try to work this bond out, and all we’d ever done was hurt each other. But even if I ignored that, and tried anyway, there’d been a finality in Nikola’s eyes before he left, and I knew Nik.

I knew he meant every word he said. Nik didn’t speak carelessly, didn’t let himself get caught up with emotions, and when he spoke, his words were meant to land wherever they did.

I think I hate you.

The tears fall like they’d been doing since Nikola left, but now, they’re accompanied by the sounds I’d been trying to bite down. There’s no point in it anymore because this was it.

It doesn’t feel fair, and I cry about that. But then again, it wasn’t fair the many times I’d pulled away from Nikola, caused him to be alone like this, and now that I know what it feels like, I cry about that too.

I’m left with nothing but tears, a broken heart, one side of a shattered bond, and I cry about that too.

———————————————

I don’t remember falling asleep in my bed, I don’t even remember climbing onto it, but that’s where I am when I jolt awake at the sound of my front door opening.

I move too quickly for Wreck to follow, and I almost fall on my face when my legs tangle behind me, but my hands break my fall and then push me back up so I can race out to see him. Except it’s not him.

Familiar brown eyes sweep over me once before any excitement in Josey’s face disappears and she looks at me with knowing eyes.

“What happened?”

“Please don’t,” I whisper, my voice hoarse and dry from all the crying.

I turn, trying to make my retreat but Josey follows me. “I’m sorry, but you look like shit so I kind of have to, Hagen.”

I ignore her as I drag my feet back into my bedroom. My head spins with the movement and I know I should eat something, but I’m not hungry— haven’t been in weeks— and I don’t feel like forcing myself to eat right now.

Avoiding Wreck, I slump back into bed, curling on Nikola’s side. I bury my face in his pillow and try to inhale what little of his scent is left on the sheets. We’d been together right here before I’d ruined it all, and I could still smell him on them, his arousal and mine. The evidence of what had happened that I’d tried to deny.

Josey watches me, I can feel her staring, but I don’t fucking care. What did it matter now? For so long, I’d tried to run away from how I felt for Nikola, and I had my reasons, but they seemed tiny and stupid now that he wasn’t here. I’d run myself straight off a cliff. So so-fucking-what if she saw what was left when there was nowhere else to run?

A minute passes before Josey carefully eases herself down on the floor beside me, her back propped against the bed. She’s not looking at me anymore, and now we’re both just staring at the apartment across from me.

I’d never noticed it before, but so many couples lived over there. In the day, you barely saw them, but at night, like right now, behind the curtains, illuminated by the lights, you saw their silhouettes.

Some of them just moved around one another, others with one another, some seemed to laugh and play, and some were far apart. I don’t know how I’d never noticed them before, but now, it’s all I could do.

“What happened?” Josey asks again after a while.

“I fucked up,” I whisper, and the admission causes fresh aches to stir all over my body. They’re not the aches I want though— the phantom remnants of his touch that had faded before I’d gotten to appreciate them properly. Those were long gone now.

“How?”

“When we were kids, how I ended things,” I answer, because in these weeks alone, I’d realised that’s really where things had gone off the rails for us. I’d always thought it was what Nikola did after, but at his reminder, it was how I’d broken his heart. “And then we had sex and I freaked out after. I said things, bad things, and Nikola…” his name breaks on my tongue. “I ruined it.”

Josey’s eyes dart down to my shoulders, looking for a mark I wish was there, and frowns when she doesn’t find it. I didn’t have the energy to explain what type of sex we had because, at the end of the day, it was sex. Saying we were ‘fooling around’ didn’t feel right when it’d been nothing like that.

Before the chaos, before I’d lit the match, I’d never felt more comfortable than I did tied to the bed with Nikola taking my body under his command. I realised now that was why I’d freaked out so horribly.

It’d been the perfect day, and it’d barely begun. Breakfast, and touching, and staring, and Nikola being all mine, and only mine, and then he’d made me his, and it’d been all the things I said I didn’t want, and then I’d tried to push it away, like I always did.

Only this time, it worked. This time, he was gone.

“So he left?” She asks, and when I reply only with the spidering ache in my chest, she takes that as the confirmation she needs. “How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know,” I admit while I clutch his pillow.

“That explains the cat food,” Josey mutters, reminding me of the bag I’d kicked over when I couldn’t quite manage to keep feeding him. “How long Hagen?”

“I don’t know,” I repeat hoarsely. “I’ve been waiting here.”

“For him?” She looks back at me, frowning now. “By the plains, Hagen. No wonder you look like shit. You haven’t left this place since?”

I look away, not needing the judgment in her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Can’t you call him up? Try talking to him? That’s if you want to work it out,” she hazards, eyeing me a little. “Maybe this is—”

“Stop,” I snap, a growl rumbling in my chest as Zyair rises up.

Josey’s eyes widen a little, but she keeps her mouth closed and faces the windows again.

“So, now you want him?” Josey asks, not bothering to be kind about it.

I glare at her before I turn around, facing the wall instead.

“I’m just trying to understand, Hagen,” she continues from her side. “This whole time you’ve been in and out, and even whenhefucked up, you hated himandwanted him. You were trying to work it all out, and now, you’re saying that you fucked up, he’s just gone, and you still want this bond?”

You’ve never wanted me.

“I do,” I grind out behind my trembling lips as if now that I could speak the words, he’d hear them.

“You guys have been running in circles for months— no,years, and you still want it?”

You don’t want this.

“I want it,” I wrap my fingers around my neck, holding tight. I’ve always wanted it.”

If I didn’t, I would’ve broken the bond years ago. Goddess knows I had many opportunities, but I couldn’t. I could never.

Josey sighs long and hard. “Okay. Alright. So, are you trying to give him space by waiting?”

“He won’t come back.”

“Hagen, this seems bad, so I know you’re thinking the worst. But we’re talking about Nikola here—”

“He won’t come back.” The words force lead in my veins and denying her sincere claim brings tears rushing back to my eyes, because that used to be the truth. No matter what, Nikola always came for me, even when I didn’t want him, even when I hated him for it. But that wasn’t the case any more.

Maybe Josey hears it this time, or feels it through our bond, because she’s not so quick to deny it again.

“You called him?” She asks, sounding a little gentler this time, a bit more serious.

I shake my head. There was no point. I knew in my heart he wouldn’t pick up and I didn’t think I could face that sort of rejection right now.

“Do you want to see him?”

No.

More than anything.

Yes.

I’m scared to. I want to.

I don’t know how to say sorry. I don’t know if there’s anything left to say. I have to say sorry.

I stay quiet.

Josey sighs again, and then there’s quiet until a soft meow sounds from her side. “Since when did you get a cat?”

“Nik,” I answer quietly. I’d found Wreck, but the same gooey feeling I got from him whenever Nikola was away was the same I had when Knots had been with me, and that was telling enough.

“What’s its name?”

“Wreck,” I mumble while I take another deep inhale of Nikola’s strong scent until I’m almost dazed enough to think this is all a dream.

“Wreck?” Josey echoes, and I know she’s looking at the back of my head with disappointment. “You named it Wreck?”

Never doubt the way you wreck me.

Those sweet words that had once softened my insides now felt like they belonged in an entirely different lifetime, ’cause now when I remembered them, they seemed to have a different meaning.

Had he been saying it then, too? He said I wrecked him, that I overwhelmed him, that I was all he could see when I was near, and then… he’d told me that that’s all he knew his whole life… that I’d always been everything. That I ruined his life the same way he ruined mine.

You wreck me, too.

“Alright,” Josey’s voice comes higher now, and as her hands tug at my shoulder, I realise she’s standing. “Let’s get you home.”

My insides tighten and I try to pull away from her, but my muscles are weak. “No. I-I can’t leave. I have to—”

“Wait?” She fills in sadly. “Wait here, when you know he’s not coming back?”

My eyes fill, blurring the sight of her as a soft whimper tears from my lips.

“You can wait at home, where we can keep an eye on you,” she says firmly. “And then maybe, you can muster up enough… something to go find him.”

My heart leaps and falls at the thought. I assumed Nikola was in the pack, with his parents, and there’d been days when I wanted to rush there and find him, and days I thought I’d never return so he wouldn’t have to see me— so we wouldn’t have to see each other.

I didn’t know how to even start apologising.

“This isn’t up for discussion,” Josey adds. “I’ll knock you out if I have to.”

I want to tell her that she might have to, because just the thought of leaving is painful.

“Why did you come?” I ask instead. She must’ve known something was wrong from the day Nikola left, but she’d only just shown up.

Josey straightens a little, propping her hands on her hips. “It was the soonest I could get here. Believe it or not, I had something going on and I couldn’t pass it up.”

I frown and only just remember how excited she’d been when she’d first showed up. “What happened?”

Josey tries to stop it, I can see by the way she tenses, but her glee gets the better of her and her lips pull apart into a wide smile.

“I got in.”

My eyes widen and once again, my heart is leaping but for entirely new reasons. Those words could only mean one thing— could only refer to one thing.

“You got in?” I echo, forcing myself to sit up as I swipe at my eyes to look at her.

She nods, her smile nearly bursting now. “I got an invitation a few months ago for an interview, and I didn’t say anything ’cause I didn’t want to jinx it or tell anyone if I fucked it up. But I got through that and then I had the trials, and I’ve almost died a million times these last few weeks but—”

“You got in,” I finish for her, a wobbly smile pulling my lips apart.

Josey nods, eyes glowing. “I fucking got in.”

I pull her to me, hugging her as tightly as I can. I wanted to jump up and down and scream for her, throw a party and do all the things I’d promised I’d do when she eventually got into the Academy, which I always knew she would, but right now, this is all I can manage.

It’s cruel that the news comes now when I’ve never felt so hopeless, but I muster what I can for her because she deserves it and more.

Since we were kids and learning about our histories and the supernatural world, Josey had wanted to go to the Academy— the one place where every species learned and trained under one roof, and where the toughest and brightest of our societies came out of.

It was practically impossible for a werewolf to get in, even though one of the founders was one. We were pack creatures, we didn’t do well on our own, so it was a near pipe dream for our kind. It’d been Josey’s pipe dream, and now, she’d done it.

“I’m so happy for you,” I whisper as I hold her tight. “Fuck, Josey. Congrats. This is insane.”

“Thanks, Hagen,” she replies, pulling back and her smile is much sadder now as she looks at me. “Sorry I couldn’t come sooner, and Pops went with me— well, as close as he could get— and Dad was freaking out about the whole thing. We couldn’t—”

I shake my head, “Don’t. It’s okay. I’m sorry I’m not…” my words filter off as the familiar ache smothers what little sparks of joy her news had brought. I try to cling to it. “I’m sorry.”

Josey nods a little, her smile fixed in place. “Come on, Hagen. We’re going home.”

I don’t want to.

I don’t want to leave this place that had gone from mine to mine and Nik’s. I don’t want to leave his side of the bed. I don’t want to leave us.

“I know,” she whispers softly as I try to pull away from her. “Hey, I know. I’ll help you through it.”

I shake my head, heart pounding as I try to breathe, but it never works. Nothing worked.

“Hagen.”

“No,” I croak, trying to move, trying to fight. “I can’t.”

I keep fighting, keep trying, until I feel numb within my own skin and I can barely see my sister as she tries to calm me, tries to help me, but there’s no fixing this.

I don’t care any more.

But I cared. It’d taken me a while— too long, but I knew now that when it came down to it, Nikola was all I cared about.

There’s no denying it any more. I can’t when my heart aches for him. It cries for him like every cell in my body cried for him. I’m barely functioning with him missing, and that’s all the evidence anyone will ever need to know that he’d gotten his wish in the end.

I want you to want me just as I’ve always wanted you.

I did. I wanted him now, wanted all of him, no matter how scary that was. But now, it was too late, ’cause I’d already lost him.

————

The rollercoaster that we call this relationship might actually be my undoing

Thoughts??????????

Thoughts on Hagen’s initial reaction??? The time skip??? Him doing nothing (lool no shade)

I knew going into this chapter that it wouldn’t be a question of whether or not Hagen would feel that he was in the wrong. He is, in this situation, and its making him see that there were other instances in the past where he also was in the wrong

That’s the thing about Control, you can pick a side and say who did worse or who suffered more, but at the end of the day, they both suffered and they both fucked up, its just that Hagen is only now relaising that

ughhhh I love the painnnnn. It hurts so so soooo good!!!!! I hope you all feel the same way!!!

And Josey!!!!!!!! I love that she has a life outside of Hagen and that she’s finally gotten into the Academy!! WELL DESERVED

I’m excited for the next chapter, and I’m hoping I can have that out soon enough! Oh and remember to vote and comment if you’re enjoying this rollercoaster or just can’t seem to stay away!

Next up over on Patreon is more of the AM Rewrite!

Until next time,
Byeeeeeee Humanssssssss