Bill stood alone atop a chilly rooftop of a building in Potsdamer Platz. The highest point in Berlin, besides the TV tower on Alexanderplatz. He hadn't had the access to get to there, no matter how famous he was, so this building would have had to work. He stared blankly out into the distance at the cemetery on the edge of the city, where Adrienne lay, nestled into the earth for the rest of forever.
He sighed, looking down at the nothingness below himself on the ledge he stood on. If Adrienne couldn't come and be with him, he decided, then that night, he would go and be with her.
He'd left his iPod at home, but the song he'd listened to for hours on end rang in his head as he remembered the times he'd had with Adrienne before she was ripped away from him. It was the song she'd dedicated to him once before he'd left to go on tour, and despite it being a bit on the heavier side when it came to his emotions, it, plus many other songs, made him think of her while he was on the road. Now that she was gone, he listened to it a considerable bit more often.
The night was cold, as the nights got in Germany from time to time in the late autumn, but he stood without a jacket, his gaze alternating from the cemetery to the black that lay under him and back again.
He knew about the countless people on the ground watching, calling to him. The police were trying to talk him down. Tom, Georg, and Gustav were on the ground with everyone else. They'd given Tom the megaphone to try and talk some sense into his brother, but it had done no good. "Adrienne wouldn't have wanted this," he'd said.
"This isn't about her yet. This is about me," Bill had thought in response.
Despite the noise going on, he only heard his song for Adrienne, and his recollections of the times not too long ago.
They would be the last things he thought about, he decided as the wind whipped around him. And as soon as the memories became too painful, everything would be over, and he would be back with the love of his life once more.
The time is here again - prepare to be apart.
And it drives you crazy.
Each time I go away, the distance gets longer.
But it makes us stronger.
As she stood there before him, Bill smiled at the one girl he knew he loved. The one he would spend forever with. There was nobody in the world who meant more to him than Adrienne. He was unsure how he could smile, though. She certainly wasn't.
His bags had all been checked in already, and were loaded onto the plane. As much as he knew she wanted to, Adrienne wouldn't look up at him. She always hated to see him leave. She always had, and she always would. The two had known each other since primary school, and their relationship budded as time went on. It would have been faster, but she'd needed time. Throughout their entire relationship, Bill had loved her. He just needed to wait for her to feel the same.
The waiting had paid off, and she became his the summer before Tokio Hotel got signed. Adrienne had been there for him through the entire thing, and he could never have asked for anybody better than she, and in more ways than just that. Without her, he felt incomplete. That, to Bill, meant that she was the one - his love with a capital "L".
"Hey," he said quietly to her as people rushed around them in a hurried fit. The airport was particularly crowded that day, for one reason or another. Most of the time, it was full of fans who wanted a piece of him and his band, but not that day. Nobody knew that the band was flying out of Berlin Tegel that day except their management team, and Adrienne, of course. She knew everything they did. With her big, hazel eyes, she finally met his gaze, and he was taken back for a moment. There was nothing out of the ordinary happening. That was just how he was with Adrienne. "Don't be sad. You know I'm not going to be gone for long."
It was true, but when he was that in love with someone, minutes felt like hours. Days like months. Weeks like years.
"I know," she said, speaking quietly, her voice almost hoarse. "It feels like you will be." After a silence, she shrugged, forcing a sigh from within her. "I have one of my feelings."
He knew that she wasn't insane, and she wasn't saying that just to try and make him stay with her. For as long as they'd known each other, Adrienne would get a sort of feeling when something bad was going to happen. She never knew what, she just had the hunch that they would. And four out of five times, it happened. "Do you know why? Is anything important coming up that maybe you're forgetting?"
"No, nothing that I know of. I just think that something is going to happen."
While he wanted to kiss her and never stop, just to make her feel better, he knew that it would draw attention to himself. Sometimes it was hard being Bill Kaulitz. Instead, he pulled her into him, enveloping her against his chest.
The embrace, though, lasted only a moment's time. "Bill," Jost had interrupted, and Adrienne let her go immediately. Jost, his manager, was never very fond of her. He viewed her as a distraction that Bill would be fine without. In his own mind, though, nothing could ever be fine without her. "I understand you'll miss each other, but this plane isn't going to wait forever."
Tapping the underside of her chin lightly, Adrienne looked back up into Bill's eyes again. He contemplated a long, drawn out goodbye, but what was there to tell her that he hadn't already? When he'd be back? She knew. That he loved her? Done. That he would miss her? He did that last night. So, he settled for finally smiling a faint, half-smile, before leaning over and meeting her lips in a goodbye kiss. It wasn't a lot, but it was going to have to last him for two months, or so he thought.
"I love you, and I'll call you every night after the show. Call me if anything happens with your feeling, okay?"
She nodded obediently, and kissed him one last time. For only a mere few seconds, they stood, memorizing the lips they already knew more than well. With one final smile, Bill turned his back, and walked down the hangar with Jost.
He hadn't known it at the time, but she wouldn't be the one to call him and share the news of what happened to prove her feeling to once again be spot-on. It would be her mother, and it would be to tell him that she had been killed in an auto accident.
These days are dead again.
It's empty from the start.
And it drives me crazy.
The hours drift away.
It hurts to remember.
This will soon be over.
It felt like it was killing him, too, when he got the news of her death.
He'd been sitting in the greenroom, or the "wellness" room, as the staff liked to call it, with Tom and Georg. Gustav had been off doing his own thing, as he always did before a concert. The band was playing to a sold-out arena of fifteen thousand people in Bratislava, Slovakia. They'd been once before and played to a smaller venue of only five thousand, but now that the attendance was up times three, so were his nerves.
He sat and stared at the white-painted wall, thinking about Adrienne. She wasn't all he thought about, but close enough to it. He wondered to himself, what was she doing? What was she wearing? What was she thinking about?
Tom calling his name caught his attention. "It's Mrs. Rauthberg." His brother held his cell phone, since it had been on the table. Bill didn't even notice it ringing. "Are you going to pick it up?"
"Oh, yeah," he said, reaching out for the phone. He flipped it open and greeted with a smile, "Hello?" For a moment, from the other end, the only noise to be heard was sobbing. Seemingly inconsolable sobbing, the kind where you feel like you're going to hyperventilate or throw up. "Mrs. Rauthberg? Is everything okay?"
His world was shattered with only three words. "Adrienne is dead."
For a minute, he sat there, listening to her mother crying into the telephone. Nothing went on in his head, and he was absolutely silent. Finally, his first action was to shake his head, hoping to wake up in his hotel room and have it be this morning. He would have fallen asleep in his boxers with the television on, and Tom would be banging on his door telling him to wake up before he was forced to get the spare key and jump on him. "Excuse me?"
As the details came out, so did his tears. She had been coming home from a gathering one of her friends was having, and while driving through Potsdamer Platz, something had happened to her breaks, and she was unable to stop the car as a person came from the Bahnhof station. Knowing that she couldn't stop, she swerved to avoid them, and in turn, drove head-on into oncoming traffic. Not everyone could jerk their wheels and miss her, and the inevitable crash happened. Neither Adrienne nor the other driver survived.
He'd waited on the bus while the rest of the band announced that they needed to cancel their show for the night due to "personal matters", and Jost ran to the hotel to collect the band's suitcases.
Both on the way to Bratislava-Ivanka to catch the soonest flight back home, everyone tried to talk to him, to console him, but there would be none of that. Adrienne was gone. The one person he cared so much about, the one girl he ever really, really loved, was gone.
Should it call come crashing down around me,
Would you be there should I stumble and fall,
And pick up the pieces?
Bill, or rather, the shell that once had been Bill, helped to make of all of the funeral arrangements made by the family, since they wanted him to be a part of it. They knew they hadn't been the only ones who loved Adrienne. Who still did love Adrienne, even if she was no longer with them.
He hardly slept at night anymore. Instead, he sat awake in bed and stared at the ceiling through tear-blurred eyes, thinking about how perfect everything had been set up to be. He and Tom had moved into an apartment in Berlin the spring beforehand, and Adrienne had lived with them. The night he got back from tour, he decided, he was going to send his brother away for the evening and find a romantic way to ask her to be his forever, to take his hand in marriage. They had agreed that when he felt his career could take it, they would get married, and he hadn't wanted to wait any longer. He didn't care what the fans thought of the decision. It wasn't their life to dictate, anyway, and there was nothing he wanted more than Adrienne, all the time. He sat awake in bed and cried himself to a nightmare-riddled sleep. He stayed true to his side, too, the right one. Hers was still made up. The pillows still smelled like her.
The wake and funeral would have been nice, had it not been for Adrienne. The people who arranged it all were nice and very sympathetic towards the loss, and respected the privacy asked for by the band. Tom, Georg, and Gustav had not only shown up to be there for Bill, but Adrienne had been their friend as well. It would be unrealistic that they hadn't come to know and love her, since they were around her just as much as Bill had been. Of course, they didn't love her like he did. He'd convinced himself that nobody did.
There wasn't a lot that he could remember about her funeral. His mind hadn't generated a single thought from the time he woke up to the time he eventually cried himself to sleep. He barely remembered his name. He jumped when you spoke to him and it took a bit of prodding to get him to say a few words in response.
He blamed himself for her death, he realized the night they buried her. Had he stayed home with her instead of going on tour, who knew what could have been different? Maybe she would still be here, lying beside him with a grin on her face, meeting his eyes with the dreamy gaze she always had for him. Maybe he would be dead, too.
That was when it hit him.
Emotionally, he was dead. There was no way to continue on without Adrienne by his side. So he simply wouldn't continue.
He got out of bed, pulled on the clothes he'd sloppily kicked to one side of the room, and darted from the apartment.
Forget about the shit that we've been through.
I wanna stay here forever and always.
Standing here in front of all of you.
That was how he got to where he was, standing on top of the building in Potsdamer Platz, staring into the night, too lost in his thoughts to feel the nipping cold or hear the shouts of the people on the ground.
His being there had attracted quite the audience on the ground, he could hear. He couldn't see them, but he could hear all their screams, their pleas for him to "think clearly" and not to go through with "this mistake". It felt like the entire city of Berlin was there, watching him, waiting to see if he would come to his senses and come back down, or if he would be getting there by a different method.
But there was one person in the entire city of Berlin who wasn't watching him. How can you watch someone when you're dead?
Coming back from his horrid thoughts, he smiled to remember a more peaceful one. It was the night that Adrienne had dedicated that song to him. The smile she got on her face when she sang the last line of the chorus.
He sighed, looking out across the rooftops at the small cemetery on the horizon. It was there that Adrienne would lay for the rest of time, and there was only one way to be there with her.
Once again, he smiled, hearing her voice as she repeated the chorus. It felt as though she was actually there, singing the words softly into his ear as she sometimes would while they lay in bed together, waiting for sleep to overtake them for the night. She would always sing it through, and he would finish it off for her, knowing the words.
Forget about the shit that we've been through.
I wanna stay here forever and always.
Standing here in front of all of you.
I wanna stay here -
"Forever and always."
And Bill stepped off the ledge, into the night.
