2019-07-28 - A Thousand Shards of Glass

Oh I've gotta turn and run
The places that you never see
Oh I've gotta save my blood
From all that you've broken
Pack up these pieces of me
-- Broken Pieces, Apocalyptica ft. Lacey Sturm

The touch woke her up sometime before dawn.

Her gradual forays back into the waking world were always nondescript affairs, no matter how intense the dream, or how bad the nightmare; several years of diving into uncharted waters have instilled in her the ability to keep calm in high pressure situations no matter how hot her blood runs through her veins, because the reality of being embroiled in such a dangerous profession meant that the risk of dying due to panic and carelessness was very real. Tonight was no different, but it wasn't in any means gentle. Her eyes once opened were wide, her heart thundering so loudly that it threatened to drown out everything else. Against the sound of the relentless engine protected by her ribcage, the calming waves of the Pacific felt so far away.

She stretched out a hand, as if she could physically snatch traces of what she felt within her grasp, knowing it was impossible but unable to help herself. It felt like a woman, her whispered note filling the space that Isidore had left empty and unoccupied for eleven years.

...on the same night...

Nothing else, utterly devoid of context. The shaking of her head had the tangled, dark waves of her hair falling over her face and down her shoulders; while the temptation to think it was simply a nonsensical dream was very real, it lingered, the voice clinging to her mind. An unwanted nettle, rendering her uneasy in a place that already left her restless, imbued with the unshakable feeling that something was coming and whatever was lurking in the horizon, it was impossible to stop. Undeniable. Inevitable.

And for a woman so determined to build her own future and destiny, it left her feeling...

With the ring's curse broken, Dr. Vivian Glass - rapidly becoming one of her most trusted friends in Gray Harbor - had seen it fit to return her phone to her, without its SIM card, which she wasted no time destroying. In the end, what was important was her contact list, which her laptop had back-ups of. For as much as she had her favorite periods in history, she loved living in the twenty-first century when it made managing her professional life so easy.

The sound of her newly-returned phone ringing cut through the darkness, from a number she didn't recognize. Isabella's fingers reached for it.

"Hello?" Her voice was low, clotted with sleep. Bleary eyes fixed on the glowing red letters of her alarm clock. 0400 hours; all the clocks in anything owned by George Reede were set on military time.

"Miss Reede? My name's Officer Bellomy from the Gray Harbor Police Department. I think you better come to your family's residence immediately-- "

In the end, she didn't hear the rest of what Officer Bellomy had to say, cutting him off mid-sentence when she thumbed the End Call button and tore the sheets off her bed in her haste to get out of it.

There was no point. Deep down, she already knew.

The glass paperweight by her dresser tipped in her haste to leave, shattering in a thousand shards of glass.

~ * ~

For a young woman who had decided that one of her reasons for returning to a city that she hated with every breath she had in her body was to spend more time with her parents, she did everything she could not to spend too much time in their actual family home. Ever since her arrival, she visited when her mother didn't feel like spending any time downtown, arranged brunches and dinners out, and even in these brief windows of time, she refused to go upstairs where the bedrooms were. Over the years, Irene Baxter Reede had taken pains to keep her children's rooms exactly as they had looked, always clean, always ready, their personal belongings always accounted for, as if she expected them back home at any moment despite her refusal to return and her twin brother's disappearance.

Isabella's cherry-red Jeep peeled into a stop within the police-erected barricade, its yellow tape a glaring sign that a crime had been committed. Leaping out of the vehicle, sneakers raced past the patrolmen guarding the very edges of the scene, their cries to stop falling on deaf ears as she tore past them to get to the cement walk leading up to her family's home. The Reede House was no modern build, an old Tudor with charming brick facades that had remained with her father's family since their settlement in Gray Harbor back in the 1890's. But it was so well-kept and maintained, with the market on vintage houses running hot, that it had seen its share of offers to buy; all of which George had refused.

Green-and-gold eyes fell on her father immediately.

Even well into his sixties, Captain George Reede held the posture of a man accustomed to command, and one which his career-ending injury failed to destroy. Walking stick clutched on one hand, his fingers caked with blood, he bore the stoic resolve of a man who had taken lives and had seen lives taken around him. But even the hardened armor shaped by many seafaring engagements had to cave somewhere; his eyes, of the color and clarity inherited by his only two children, were distant, though he was present enough to answer the questions that the GHPD detective was asking him, his baritone pitched low and his answers clipped and perfunctory, but overall honest.

Animated life returned to him in a rush at the sight of his daughter bulling past the gates.

The archaeologist froze in her tracks, identical eyes meeting a short distance. Her own averted quickly towards the rest of the house.

"Mom?!" she called, long legs picking up a dead run. "MOM...!"

George's walking stick clattered onto the cobblestoned walk, forgotten; bold, hurried strides moved to intercept his daughter, strong arms reaching to snag around her center mass as she tried to break past the crowd of policemen and crime scene examiners filing in and out of the porch. His grip was unyielding, his face visibly twisting at the sound his daughter made; a cry, frustrated and indecipherable and filled with everything she couldn't express with her usual eloquence. Her body twisted against his, struggling against his efforts breathlessly, somehow stubborn and fiery still, even in the midst of her shock and grief. His fingers tangled fast into her wild hair and pressed her face against his shoulder.

"Daddy, let me go! Let me go...!"

"Isabella." His voice was quiet, but firm. A tone that she remembered well, and the only one in the world that could immediately bring her to heel with the syllables of her name. "You can't."

You can't.

Coming from anyone else, it would be insignificant, and easily ignored. But from the aged, injured Navy man, it felt like a fist to her stomach, rearranging her insides with a single blow and wringing the breath out of her lungs. In her early childhood, he had been her greatest influence, going far and beyond what a father actually needed to do to empower his only daughter in a world that tended to grind up children from poor small towns. Coming from him, those words were alien, anathema. Throughout her entire life, it was always you can.

It felt like stepping out of her body, floating detached from the ill-fitting vessel that contained her raging spirit. Numb, nerveless fingers slowly lifted to grip the back of his shirt, crumpling the fabric between them. Wide green eyes looked over the hard curve of his shoulder towards the main entryway of their home.

"...I was going to stop it," she whispered, hating everything about how her voice sounded at this very moment. "I knew it was coming...I was going to...I was on my way to. A couple more days and I would've...just a couple more..."

She turned her face further into his shirt, her frantic mind assailed by the images of the people she loved the most, but was unable to save, and buried her scream against it.

~ * ~

During the prevailing hours afterwards, it didn't feel like her body was her own.

She had followed the demands of the authorities, unwilling to leave her father's side while he was questioned by the police. Unwilling to move while she was questioned by the police, and unable to help but follow the wake of the gurney that carried her mother's covered corpse into the back of a police van to be taken for processing. She waited next to him in a dingy room covered in green-white linoleum as the coroner examined her mother's body, collecting evidence in an effort to divine her last moments, before following the black parade to the mortician who, used to death and grief in a town that had seen more than its fair share of it, reassured them that he was going to do whatever he could to make sure that she was presentable for burial.

She breathed the necessary air, made the necessary movements, said the necessary words, but none of it felt like it was her.

At the moment, the only thing that felt real was the way her father clutched her hand as they sat together in another waiting room, the desperation in it belying his hard facade; as if he'd be able to anchor her there if he held on tightly enough, hard enough, buttressed against any and all comers, against whatever else followed. What would follow, if Gray Harbor had its way.

"I don't want her buried," George said; his first words in what felt like hours.

Her phone chimed with the first text of the day. Absent fingers reached for it, her green eyes falling on the words within the screen.

(TXT to Isabella) Alexander : I read the paper. I am sorry.

It was strange, to feel hot, blistering fury, the urge to laugh hysterically and throw her phone away all at once; to feel the sudden heat of unshed, unwanted tears burning underneath her long lashes. Because of course, that would be the first thing he would do the moment the night fell away and he was conscious again. Because of course, he would be the first who she would hear from, nevermind the way he passively ejected her out of his hospital room the last time she saw him.

Because of course. Of course.

Isabella took a deep breath and shoved her phone deeply into the pocket of her jeans. Her fingers squeezed her father's own.

"Neither do I," she replied, finally, turning eyes glittering with traitorous moisture her father's way. Even her tears were stubborn, refusing to fall, her jaw setting in a hard, determined line. "Take her, Daddy. As far away from here as you can."

I don't want this place to have anything else of hers.

She wound her digits even tighter around his, closing her eyes and embracing the churning storm within herself.

"This won't go unanswered."

I swear it.