In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet, for just a moment, a yellow sky...

[wolfishflame]

Characters: Aly Haskell and Devin Parker
Date: April 7
Location: The roof of the Dreaming Bridge
Situation: Aly's absolutely losing it. Continued from here.
Warnings/Rating: PTSD, maybe?

The words are unclear at first, because she's mumbling into Devin's shoulder. She doesn't deserve this, because she's screwed up so badly that it's all going to fall to pieces around her. It's all going to collapse, and it's her fault. She could have done so much to prevent it, but looking back won't change anything.

Nothing will change anything.

Ever.

"It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault. I screwed up. It's my fault, I didn't...it's my fault."

Comments

[annihilist]

"T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets." If she's interested, Aly will be the second person here that he's shared it with to bring some order into chaos, though he's not sure how much it'll help here. It had worked well with X because he'd just read Devin's universe, and so had the value of the book etched into Devin's memories.

The vampire props himself against an empty stretch of wall, glad that Aly is taking his advice on this point. He imagines that each step of this process is going to be one level of difficult or another; the fewer she fights him on, the more he can assist (but the faster she may unravel). It is going to be a long night.

The sound he hears through the door has Devin pushing off the wall immediately and approaching the bathroom. This part of the process, the emotional blowback, is where he is least experienced. He recognizes the feeling behind that sound, though, even if he's never properly learned how to deal with it himself. "Aly?" Devin flounders over what to say for a moment. "You're not going to have to deal with this alone. All you have to do right now is breathe."

Breathe, and try not to drown in the sorrow and guilt and anger.

[wolfishflame]

Aly's bent over the sink when he comes in. Her hands are washed clean of the blood - mostly. There's still crust where it had dried around the edges, and there's some under her fingernails. She's shaking, and tears are making tracks down her face, mingling with the blood around her mouth and chin.

"I can't let it come off," she whispers. "I need to...this needs to be a reminder of what I did, because if I let it come off, I'll forget how I failed!" The last word upscales to a scream.

[annihilist]

It couldn't be more obvious to Devin that there is no way in nine hells that Aly will forget this, but telling her so isn't going to sink in right now. He knows the look of a turning point in someone's life. Those moments remain keen at the edges with whatever emotions carved them, remain crystalline in the memory longer than anything else.

Gently, slowly, Devin takes Aly by the shoulders and tries to coax her back, away from the sink and onto the edge of the tub. Kneeling in front of her, Devin holds her hands firmly in his for a moment. "Your hands are not so dirty as to be full of ruin."

If he lets her, he'll grab a washcloth and soak it, and begin cleaning what remains of the blood on her fingers. As he does so, he murmurs softly and steadily from Eliot's poems: "Time present and time past, are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable…" And he'll keep going while he works, the words for Aly as much as himself this time.

[wolfishflame]

She almost snaps at him that he doesn't know what ruin her hands have wrought, but she falls silent as he recites the poem while scrubbing her hands. She recognizes the general tone, but not the specific words themselves.

"What's that?" she says after a moment, quietly, hoarsely. Her anger is running out and transmuting into lead, a feeling like nothing that might be worse than her screaming hate and guilt.

[annihilist]

"Four Quartets," Devin answers simply, standing briefly to rinse out the cloth before resuming cleaning off Aly's fingers. He'll see if he can find a nail kit, if she'll let him go so far as to use it to scrape away the last remnants of blood. Later, when he's a little surer of her mental state. If he can be sure; they may react similarly to some things, but they are different enough that Devin has to be careful not to lend her his worst habits.

"I find repetition helps," he says without context at first, wondering how best to explain. After a few seconds, Devin continues: "It's like listening to the same song before you go to sleep every night; eventually, the brain associates the song with sleep, and it helps you drift off. I use the poem for something similar. For those times when I have no other solid ground."