At 10:53 p.m. on that Friday of April the 6th, 2018, Finn went into Darren’s room to tell her goodnight. When he found her, passed out on the floor with her laptop laying open but blank in her lap, he moved the laptop off and picked her up to lay her down in her bed.

At 10:54, Finn felt something strange, but it wasn’t what he could feel – it was what he couldn’t. Not only was he unable to feel it, but also he was unable to hear it either in the dead quietness of the nights. When he laid her down on her bed, he couldn’t help but notice that though her legs were warm from where her laptop had been sitting, her skin was almost ice cold. Normally if she were cold he would pull her blanket over her, but this cold was not normal.

At 10:55, he tried to wake her up by shaking her body and whispering her name. Being a generally light sleeper, she should have woken by now. He took one of her wrists in his hand, and at 10:56, Finn dropped her wrist onto the bed, picked up his phone and called for help.

At 11:10 an ambulance came to analyze the scene, and Darren’s body, rid of life, was tucked away in a black bag.

~

While everyone else who was close and on personal terms with Darren is downstairs, Harry sits on the hard wood flooring of Darren’s room trying to put himself in her shoes, but the more he stares and stares at the collage of pictures pinned and tacked up on her gray walls, the more he gets distracted from his goal. He finds himself wanting to smile at pictures of Darren smiling and being so happy, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Then, there are the pictures where she is just frowning unemotionally in the frame, showing raw and real emotion. He looks at those pictures and can almost feel her pain, and he starts to wonder if maybe that’s what she looked like just before she died. Perhaps she was smiling though, as she is in more recent pictures of her and Harry from when they had hung out together. As Harry observes those pictures and remembers those times, he starts to miss her more and more.

Harry can almost cry, but just as he can’t smile, he can’t cry. The second he found out about Darren’s death two days ago his emotions just shut down. His band mates couldn’t help but solemnly, on the side, think, ‘Here we go again.’ However, all of them were also in deep remorse for this sort of situation having happened twice now to Harry.

Darren’s pass has not only crushed Harry’s current stance in life but also brought back memories of when Leanna had passed. The big difference is that the last time Harry had been crying and screaming for the first day that he was alone in his apartment. It wasn’t until the second day that Louis, Liam, Niall and Zayn had come to check in on him that Harry lost his emotions and started a fast construction of his walls. This time that one-day didn’t exist. From the second he heard the news his mind and heart went numb.

A single drop of rain taps against the window. Harry’s head turns at the sound as one turns into two and two turns into a few until he loses count to the constant tapping of the rain in its return. Soon, the low rumble of thunder shakes the ground, and the sky has gone dark. Harry hangs his head between his knees, folding his hands together behind his head. A bolt of lightning strikes and lights up the sky. He can tell by the reflections of the light bouncing off of the shiny wood floor and more specifically by Darren’s blank laptop screen.

Oddly, Harry feels some sort of a pull toward the device, so he reaches out and grabs it. He pushes his back against the edge of Darren’s bed frame and places it flat on his lap. Tapping the scroll pad once, the laptop powers on. The first thing that pops up is a box asking for the password. In the background, a candid picture of Darren and all her siblings lying atop a pile of leaves and laughing at something. Once Harry finishes looking at the picture, he types in the password that he knows only because he had once or twice before seen Darren type it in.

The screen goes black for just a second before Safari pops up, its current page being tumblr. Now, Harry isn’t quite sure how tumblr works from a blogger point of view, but he has seen parts of tumblr before, including fanfiction written about him and a few tumblr texts posts from other medias. Though he doesn’t really know much, he knows for a fact that what he is looking at right now is Darren’s online blog.

At a first glance, he wouldn’t have been able to tell, but to the left of the screen towards the top is a little sidebar with her common username as the title: ThatInvisibleGirl. The description reads, “A daily blog journal written by a girl whose life was lived lie after lie after lie – past tense.” Harry’s face scrunches up. Past tense? His immediate thought is suicide, but the reports clearly stated that her death was no of suicide. A slight lingering smell of beer was on in her mouth, but the measurement of alcohol was insignificant and clearly not the cause. The medics’ best theory was that Darren had died of natural causes, not to any known or logical specifics.

Harry scrolls through the most recent reblogged pictures and posts on Darren’s page. Soon, he comes across a self-made entry dated April 5, the day before her death. A sense of Darren comes to mind as he reads about her major point from that day. She had gone out in the rain on her penny board and almost fell into a puddle. Later, she had called Harry to laugh about it and explain how she nearly had a heart attack and died. Harry can’t help but find it ironic how one day she is joking about almost dying and the next day she’s just gone.

That phone call wasn’t the last he had heard from her though. He had called her on Friday morning to discuss final plans for Saturday. On the phone that morning she had sounded so happy but with a hint of nervousness. Reason for the nervousness is still unknown to Harry, but with every passing minute he continues to try and find a logical explanation as to what had changed between that call and when he found out that she was gone. Nothing adds up.

Harry switches over to Darren’s archives, reading through some of her daily posts. At some moments, he fears he is invading her personal space, but then he remembers that this is a public blog. Anyone can see this, these posts – her posts about her life. All of the major parts are there, and even the not as important parts (like her boredom post for example, that she writes about the days where nothing really happens and she stays in her room all day doing basically nothing). Anyone with Internet service can access all of this information. She has posts down to the last detail of anything and everything – when she nearly covered his house in packing tape, when Jack moved out, when she got her driver’s license, when she broke off a long time relationship and finally vented to a real person about her life, when she sort of made up with her dad before he died, when her boyfriend didn’t even acknowledge her on her birthday, when she met someone she for the first time and things went better then expected, or when she broke her leg after falling off her roof as a result of her “idiot brother”. Harry sits there, skimming through little things and reading over stuff he knows. To him, it’s interesting to be reading about events from the inside of Darren’s mind, and there is one post that sticks out to him a lot more than most of the rest of them do.

{

January 4, 2018

Today’s post was meant to go up earlier, but my computer had other plans for me. The second I hit – well, tried to hit at least – post, my screen went black. Oddly enough, the screen wasn’t completely black as I saw the little blinking type placer thingy (if anyone knows what that is, please say something because I feel like an idiot saying that). As if this sort of thing was natural, I naturally typed out a little test note and hit send. The note immediately pops up on my screen along with my username and a colon before it. Weird, right?

Well, it gets weirder – sort of. So I sit there, confused beyond words because obviously my computer had a virus or something. Then, not a minute later, another little message pops up from someone under the username JustYourNormalGuy. Of course, I laugh at the username for a few minutes, because what kind of username is that? Ha!

Anyway, so I just start talking to the guy because at that point I just figured, “Might as well, right?” I don’t really know who he was, but here’s what I do know:

1.He refused to admit he has a tumblr and that he was on it before his computer also crashed

But wouldn’t that be absolutely adorable? I swear the tumblr boys in this general blogging area so rare, and maybe it’s because guys don’t care about daily blogs about girls’ lives in a non-creepy point of view. Sure, I have a boyfriend, but maybe if this JustYourNormalGuy user had admitted to being on tumblr before his computer crashed I would’ve dumped my boyfriend’s sorry little ass by now. Hell, you could’ve called it love at first type. Not really though, haha. Anyway…

2.He wasn’t quite sure why he was typing back

To be honest, I wasn’t too sure why I was replying either. Obviously my laptop was being stupid and I should’ve gotten someone to fix it for me right away. On the other hand, it’s not like I had anything else to do. And…

3.Sometimes you meet people – in the oddest of circumstances – and you realize that in some ways, they’re just like you

We had some time, so I learned a little story. I don’t feel like I have the rights to say his story, because that is his to tell. Listening to his short story about something that was presently happening to him, however, made me think more about my story. For some reason, everyone around me seems to think that love is the answer. It’s some sort of human default that everyone seems to have.

}


Darren’s blog posts are sort of confusing and a little all over the place, but that’s just how she is. Harry knows that, in real life and online, Darren doesn’t care if other people can’t understand her. She had once told him that she “didn’t give a fuck” if people couldn’t understand her. As long as she understood what she was saying it was fine by her. It only helps that Harry can understand every single word that comes from her.

Harry clicks off to the side to exit the post. As he tries to click on another post, Harry’s hand slips and brings him back to the top of the page. When he goes to scroll, he accidentally clicks on Drafts. Only one draft remains on this page, but one draft changes everything. The date at the top of the draft is April 6, 2018.

{

April 6, 2018

I claim to not have a heart, but the truth is that I do. After all, once cannot live without one. However, I have learned that ignoring your heart does not mean it is not there, does not mean that, in certain circumstances, it cannot be hurt.

Today, my heart went from normal beating to being pulled out of my chest to being put back in and drowned in sorrows. I remember I was laughing over the phone with my best friend. Then, I find myself walking up to my ex’s apartment so I can collect a few of my belongings I had left there and forgotten to get back until today. Seeing him didn’t hurt me anymore. We were a ‘thing’, and I’ve moved on now.

After today, I don’t think I can look at him anymore though. I don’t think I can look at anyone ever again. All those times when we were together he told me that he loved me. I believed him, of course, and at some point, I had loved him, too. My love for him was genuine, but he never wanted more than sex out of me. I let him lie to me for two and a half years of my life while all that time he had had a boyfriend. They have been together for five years now, and his boyfriend had known it all along. And I remember trying to breathe, but I was choking on my own heart. I could feel it beating inside of my throat, and after I got in the car and gathered myself together, all I could do was scream.

I decided to stop by a party I was invited to by one of my old friends from high school. I only stayed for ten minutes and one drink before I realized I couldn’t put through with the stupid mistake I was making. I had plans to drown away the pain by revisiting an old sin. After all, another huge part of my life had been a lie, and I here I was thinking that the first thirteen were enough. But I couldn’t find it in myself to stay and go out that way, so here I am. Altogether at least fifteen and a half years of my twenty-two year existence consisted of lies. This being said, over half of my life has been a lie, and I really don’t want to hang around longer just to find out that the rest of this life is a lie as well.

At least I’ll be sure of one thing in my life. I know for sure that a few months ago my computer had a weird bug. Some call it absurd, but I prefer to call it fate. I met a boy that day, and though I did not know him on a personal level, I related to him. Though I don’t think he knows, that day a broken girl met a broken boy. Now, months later that boy has become my best friend and I know that this is true because a broken person does not lie to another broken person. After all, we know that the answer to how we are doing is not, “I’m fine,” but rather, “No, I’m not, but I don’t think you’d understand what I’m going through anyway.”

Well, there’s that, and then there’s this question that, through all the lies, I have asked myself: what is happiness? I ask this constantly because after every lie, there is only one thing I have ever truly wanted, and that is to be happy. By dictionary definition, happiness is the state of being happy, but as a morning radio show host once said, “there is no such thing as happiness. It’s a myth created by advertisers and marijuana dispensaries”. Well, agree to disagree, happiness does exist, but people can’t fully comprehend this concept of happiness.

Some people claim to find happiness in an object, a song, or an idea, like love. In my life, I have found the idea closest to what happiness must be in that broken boy, and I’d like to believe that he found the idea of happiness through me as well. Separately, we’re all kinds of fucked up and screwed over, but when it’s just the two of us, we’ve guided each other along that path of happiness. We’re not necessarily on it, but we’re pretty darn close to it, and that’s all I could have ever asked for.

Still, we’ve been lying to ourselves. When we found that happiness that we had both been searching for, we let ourselves believe it was something like love, but as much as I liked him, we were lying to ourselves about it. We were too blind by finally achieving happiness that we let ourselves deny that we were only doing it to fill in places where other people had come in and destroyed parts of us to an extent that no one else could understand. I allowed myself to stupidly believe that love was the answer as most people say it is, but the truth is that it isn’t. And I know it was the same on his side, too, because I know a certain ex that still holds a place in his heart. That’s complicated though. My point is that love isn’t the answer to everything – sometimes you just need a really great friend. He was that really great friend, my BFFWIKHS, nothing more and nothing less.

Even if no else gets this post I know that you will. Thank you, Harry, for you have shown me happiness, and I hope in some ways I have shown for you the same. My time here is done. Though you won’t find love in me, I know that you’ll find it in someone else someday. Just let it come to you. Don’t linger on me. Take the happiness that I’ve seen be restored in you and show it to the world, popstar.

}

A part of Harry feels like he shouldn’t have read it, but he how could he not? This draft contains the last whereabouts, the final answers, and the last thoughts of Darren Frayn, and it’s mainly directed toward him. He gets it. The thoughts may be jumbled, but when one thinks of the circumstances that it was written, it doesn’t really matter. To anyone who can understand it enough in its context, the point is clear. Because Harry is the seemingly main focus, he understands it more than anything else he has understood before, and he accepts all principles of it.

So maybe it wasn’t “love at first type” in a romantic sort of way and maybe the two of them never had really affectionate feelings for one another. Deep down, Harry knew this was true, but he just needed something like this, written down, for him to accept that it’s the truth – it always has been. There was only one thing left for him to do. He puts his finger on the scroll pad and pulls the cursor across the screen. Then, with one click of button, he posts the blog for the world to see.

“That way everyone knows how your story ends,” he murmurs. Then, he looks up at the quote on her wall and he brings out that smile, the one he thought he could only get when she was there with him. “Now, it’s time for me to change directions and figure out a better ending for mine.”

Notes

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” –Maria Robinson

Last thoughts? Questions?

This chapter is longer than the average chapter, but it's too short to break into two parts. I do hope that this covers everything though (and that it isn't too confusing or all over the place - yeah, Darren gets that from me), because it's been nearly two weeks, a million rewrites, 3,249 some odd, and a final I-Need-To-Just-Put-This-Up for this chapter (aka: the last chapter). And even though I still feel like this chapter kind of sucks, there is no epilogue to this, nor will there be a sequel or any spin-offs, so consider this my final thank you:

Thank you to anyone who has read, subscribed, commented, voted, or messaged me about this story. I definitely could not have pulled this out without all of the support I got throughout the duration of this story. We didn't reach 100 votes, but I'm honestly just grateful to have had so many of you who supported LAFT, no matter when you started reading it. :)

LAFT definitely isn't the end of ThatRandomUnicorn. I currently have a story, Mainstream, that I'm writing with iceskatez. It's on hold at the moment, and I really don't have any clue as to when it will come off hold but it will be continued eventually. There's also Fanfiction 101, which is the best way to keep up with me usually. I've been slow on reviews trying to finish this story up while still trying to do everything else I have to do in my life, but if you want to know when a new TRU story is going to be written, that's the best way to go. Speaking of new fanfics, I don't have any other fics I'm working on, but I've got a list of ideas that I've kept record of. Being that I have so many ideas, they may or may not just turn into a series of random one-shots as I'm obviously not too great at keeping up with full stories, but I'm not sure just yet.

I'll let you know. For now, I guess this is kind of, like, (at least for LAFT) goodbye :(

xx
~A