2019-08-01 - Dr. Glass Will See You Now

When Vivian Glass gets to work in the morning, her personal assistant will tell her that a new patient would like to go on a trial run - a one-time session, as it were, and should the glamorous blonde look at her appointment book, she would find a name in her list of today's sessions that would very much be familiar to her.

Isabella Reede is her last appointment of the day, but considering what she knows of the green-eyed archaeologist, it probably isn't surprising - she would probably spend the entire day trying to convince herself to go, her acknowledgment of a certain need warring with her relentless sense of self-reliance and independence. The would-be Oxford doctor is the kind of personality to solve her own problems, herself, without anyone's help. The fact that she has set an appointment in the first place probably speaks more to Vivian's powers of persuasion than anything else - the woman didn't even suggest coming to see her, when she checked on her last night, and yet, here she is.

The sun is touching the horizon when she finally arrives, sneaking a peek outside of the corners of Vivian's penthouse office to make sure that certain familiar faces weren't around (Byron), before slowly moving into where she has set up her work space. She's carrying a gift basket of a kind in her hand, wicker wrapped in clear cellophane with multi-colored ribbons, an assortment of delicately scented bath bombs nestled within, along with a designer candle and several tins of luxury tea - a few things a sophisticated woman needs to have a relaxing sleep. She leaves it with her personal assistant, along with a card:

Thank you so much for everything.
~ I.R.
p.s. This isn't a bribe so you'd go easy on me this first time, I promise.
p.s.s. I lied. This is a bribe.

She has largely been out of sight since the word hit the papers about her mother's murder, though several others have seen her since then: Captain de la Vega, by virtue of him being a member of the police department, Byron Thorne and Alexander Clayton, part of her regular party of three in their City Hall visits. Her familiar brisk, businesslike strides take her out from the waiting are and into Vivian's office once her personal assistant tells her that she is now ready to see her. There isn't a stitch of black on her, with the exception of the braided length of black ribbon around her left wrist; her eyes are clear, her expression set, but somewhat apprehensive. In deference to the heat, she is dressed in a short, pale-blue romper with spaghetti straps, and sandals that laced up slender, sun-touched calves. Her hair is pulled up in its usual fetching dis-arrangement, her only accessory her moonstone pendant and very little makeup, with the exception of a touch of clear gloss on her expressive mouth.

"Hey, Vivian," she says. "Um...where should I...?"

Her usual confidence has telltale fissures here and there; the trailing question, the skeptical look. Should she sit on the couch? Should she lay on the couch? Would she be allowed to pace, because she really feels like pacing.

After everything recently Vivian's resumed working from the Penthouse until she's satisfied that Byron is fine, and everyone else is fine. Then it'll be back to the office, and out of Byron's hair.

Maybe. He might just be stuck with her, and it makes it a lot easier to get to work in the morning when she just walks across the apartment. Today, for instance, she's had a relaxed day filled with fancy coffee and random appointments. But when Isabella arrives she's nursing one of those cups of coffee, the clicking of her silver pen almost loud in the silence of the office.

"Ms. Reede." Professional boundaries. "You can sit anywhere you'd like." She offers, getting to her feet, buttoning the navy blazer as she does so. "I find that if you sit where you are comfortable this is often easier...so anywhere. Just not the desk."

Just not the desk.

"Take the joy out of everything, why don't you?" Isabella quips. "I won't sit on the desk, Doctor Glass, I promise."

It takes a while for her to get comfortable, and perhaps she isn't really, though she certainly does her best to hide it. She quietly takes in Vivian's space with those green-and-gold eyes, seizing the opportunity before her to learn more about this striking woman who has become a fixture in Byron's life; the books she keeps on her shelves, the little artifacts or knick-knacks she keeps on her desk, the scent of coffee and the color and emblems of the mug she holds in her hand. She picks up something off one of the decorative tables to examine it, but it's a testament to her nerves that she nearly drops it - reflexes enable her to catch it before she causes an embarrassing accident, and hastily puts it back down the way she finds it.

Eventually, her pacing strides has her going around the couch, before she finally forces herself to sit down on it, her shoulders straight, fingers linked on her lap, legs crossed.

The couch is comfortable...and expensive, because of course it is. She sinks into it, a silent as a grave.

Oh, god. What am I even doing here?

"...I...did some research about how these things are supposed to go. Something about how it's normally not protocol to see people you know," she begins. "But...in a small town, that really can't be helped, and I figured as long as you're not the one prescribing me anything, we should be alright. I..."

Her teeth clip gently into her bottom lip, spurring a flush of vibrant color as blood rushes to the surface. "...I've never done this before," she confesses. "I was never...I never thought I would...but after our appointment in City Hall and the way I was acting, I thought I should, before my temper gets worse. I'm..."

She takes a deep breath, and exhales slowly, leaning forward to brace her elbows against her knees. "I'm a diver," she tells her. "I was a diver before I became an archaeologist - the latter was just an opportunity I found to combine two things in this world that I love. I thought if I was going to be working for the rest of my life, it might as well be work that I enjoy. But the first thing my father taught me, other than the basics, is one incontrovertible necessity that you must adhere to when you're down there: To keep calm, no matter what happens. If you panic, if you get careless, your buddy could die, and you could die, because the ocean is unpredictable and filled with beautiful monsters. I'd like to think that over the years, I've developed a lion's share of it under pressure."

Her fingers tighten their grip on one another. "This place is damaging my calm. I think...if I'm to do what I need to, I need to reclaim it. But I don't know how. I'm so..."

Tell her.

One key thing that people forget about this business is that it's not actually Vivian's job to talk. Instead it is to listen. So she listens, once seated near the couch she just listens to Isabella, taking in not just the words though, but the pacing, the fidgeting, her tone, what she does with her hands. It's all done calmly, without reaction, until Isabella comes to a stop and she tilts her head, "You're so...?"

"...angry."

A deep inhale expands her chest. Isabella forces herself to sit back against the couch, feeling expensive leather depress against her negligible weight.

"At...myself, most of all, I think. I never wanted to come back here, and I've tried over the years to get my parents out of here, but they wouldn't leave. When Alexander said..." Her jaw tics faintly at the delicate hinge, where it meets her neck. "...that generations of Baxters were being killed off left and right, I couldn't help but wonder why I didn't try even harder to get them out. Used that to convince them. I knew what...no, I assumed I knew what my mother's answer would be. She was always determined to stay, I didn't see any reason why that would change. She knows what this town is, she was..."

She was waiting for someone.

She was waiting for Sid.

She says none of these words out loud, however, her fingers reaching up to toy with the moonstone pendant dangling against the pale blue of her bodice. "I only involved myself because I wanted to stop it," she continues quietly. "I was determined."

And I failed.

I failed again.

"If your mother knew the situation here, and knew about the Baxter curse, then it's not your responsibility. She made a choice, and that is her choice." Vivian shakes her head faintly, "We're each our own person, responsible for the things we do in life. You can only take responsibility for what you can control, and short of physically dragging her from here...which is illegal and really wouldn't work long term, you couldn't do anything else."

"She was bound here by grief," Isabella tells Vivian quietly, though she doesn't clarify, once again wrestling with these internal blast doors of her own devise - most of the deeper things regarding Isidore were verboten, details she hasn't discussed for over a decade after his disappearance. "In the end, I couldn't begrudge her of it because..."

She falls silent, rolling her thumb gently on her pendant.

"I'm hoping I can regain whatever control I managed to lose," she confesses instead. "I was angry after the incident with the Ring, I was angry that I couldn't do much to actually help Byron with that problem. I was angry that after all of it, Alexander made it very clear that he didn't want anything to do with me - in retrospect, I couldn't blame him after everything I put him through under the influence, but the way he did it was so...I would have respected it more if he just looked me in the eye and told me to get out of his life, instead of making me feel like I was the one walking away. That I was the one quitting."

Giving up. Surrendering. That was galling, too. It gnaws at the pit of her stomach, wounds at her pride.

I was only giving him what he wanted. It was the least I could do. Right?

"I was so tired of everything that I ended up burning the bones. And during that meeting on the Other Side, I broke away from the pack, because I was desperate for answers and I wouldn't take no or later as acceptable ones, and I know better than that. Not there, not within the Veil...it's too dangerous. I've been told it was dangerous my entire life. Given his newly-discovered ancestry, I ended up compounding Alexander's suffering instead of alleviating it, because he was connected to the bones by blood. I was reckless, Doctor Glass. I'm in my right mind again, and at great cost, and I'm still unable to..."

She sighs, lifting a hand to scrub the side of her face, frustration imbued in every movement.

"I see." Vivian replies, her thumb absently clicking that pen again as she takes the entire thing in, mulling it over, "First, you're not responsible for your mother's grief, or her reasons for staying. Unless something you did caused it, then that is an entirely different situation that we can discuss."

She sets her pen down, lacing her fingers together, "I'd suggest that you approach Alexander and discuss things with him, now that he's out of the hospital, hopefully in a better frame of mind. But you need to be calm when you do it, try to not start from a place of anger." Which speaking of. "I suggest taking a breath and repeating this to yourself, as trite as it is...This too shall pass. Nothing remains changeless. This'll past. Accept it, take in the changes, make them a part of you, but move forward."

The click does have her lifting her head, falling on Vivian's fingers and the gleaming pen held on her elegant fingers. It's only the second or third time since she's heard the telltale sound, but it leaves Isabella wondering whether it is habitual or something else.

It does, however, focus her back to the present, feeling herself reach for that inner space once again that she had once shared with Isidore; a decade and change vacant, and yet in spite of it, regardless of knowing that he is lost, every single mention of him keeps sending her back to the empty room they shared between their minds, where she was a part of him, and he was a part of her.

I might have a problem letting anything go, Isabella observes silently, dryly.

The words that occupy the air between them, the fact that she isn't responsible for her mother's grief, is replied to with a quiet, but weighted silence. Fingers grip the moonstone in her hand, feeling the delicate, lovely thing claw into her skin, its pervasive chill as sharp as a blade cutting through flesh. For the first time in this entire session, the young, green-eyed woman seems elsewhere.

The words Vivian chooses doesn't escape her notice, either, when she uses terms like 'can', not 'should', and 'unless you' instead of 'did you.' She would never be able to develop the patience necessary to shepherd troubled hearts and minds like this, but in spite of her overall skepticism - and self-castigation at appearing so weak to need this - she can't help but admire the fair-haired, cool and composed beauty sitting near her couch, attempting to sort through the fragments and pieces of her history in an effort to make sense of the overall product before her. She's liable to ask her own questions in the end: What made you decide to do this for a living? What happened to you that inspired you to help people this way?

And she will ask them, one day. When she's Vivian and not Doctor Glass.

Ultimately, she doesn't respond - she neither answers positively or negatively at the open-ended query Vivian poses, whether she was responsible, or believes she was responsible, for her mother's grief, and all the jagged shards of regret that would end up spilling on the table once that jar is opened. The advice does get a nod, because it is perfectly sound advice that she believes she can adhere to, though she knows herself enough to realize it might be easier said than done. Try not to start from a place of anger.

"Wouldn't that be excusing him, if I reached out first?" she asks. "I recognize that all of it was probably a defense mechanism, but if he isn't bitten by the consequences of engaging it, wouldn't it prevent him from reflecting on it? And I know he's capable of it, Doctor Glass. He's capable of self-reflection, and while I haven't known him long, I've spent enough time with him under stressful situations to be very aware of the fact that he's egregiously intimate with his flaws."

"No." Vivian shakes her head, "It's not excusing him of his own responsibilities to be the one that opens the discussion first. You can speak with someone and not take the responsibility for actions not your own, or consequences you didn't cause. I think we've...as a society, begun to think that reaching a hand out is a sign of weakness. A way of saying it's okay, you can be as bad as you want and I'll still be there. Which sometimes is correct."

Which is a really poignant thing at the moment, and Vivian pauses a moment to dwell. But then continues, shaking her head, "But simply saying I'm here to talk is not absolving them of responsibility, it's taking your own responsibility for initiating conversation to work through an issue together. If they are unopen to them, then you turn inwards and reflec on the issues, and process through them as an individual with the full knowledge of your own efforts into it."

As the psychiatrist speaks, she listens intently - and she must, because for a precious few moments, her expression is completely indescribable, followed by a chuffing sound, because it is poignant, and she is good at her job for a reason:

"Oof."

Vivian's verbal prescription for one aspect of her overall situation has Isabella tilting her head back against the couch, closing her eyes and managing, thankfully, not to groan out loud.

Because you're so great at talking about those things when you don't have a good, desperate reason to unload.

"Between you and me, I was kind of hoping you'd tell me something like 'you're a big girl, just let it go'," she says ruefully, lifting both her hands to her face and pressing the heels of each palm against her eyelids. "May I take that under advisement, Doctor?"

"You are a big girl, and you do just need to let it go. But you have to process it first, you have to work through things...that's the only way to really let it all go. Otherwise it just lingers, half in and half out." Vivian picks her pen up again, idly toying with it, but she doesn't click it this time. "You can. I can't make you do anything, not even listen to me. I can say what I think, but the power to change your life and situation is going to come from you."

The power to change your life and situation is going to come from you.

And that was something she has always known, has based her life around. But with Vivian spelling it out for her so clearly, it forces Isabella to look back, and wonder whether in the throes of everything else, she was losing sight of that too. In the midst of obsession, rejection, horror and grief...and the disturbing, lingering sense of inevitability that she can taste in the air, getting in the way of the usual brightness of Summer.

In Gray Harbor, they only have a month of it left before the cycle of shadows intensifies once again.

Green-and-gold eyes find the clock, and she manages to muster up a smile. "I think our time's up," she says, mindful of it - a one-time session, a short one, but some would say it was miraculous that she would take this baby step at all. "Thank you, Doctor Glass. For listening, as well as the insight and advice." She starts to rise from the couch, smoothing down her romper's hem. "Brunch sometime this week?"

"I'm willing to listen any time." Vivian replies, getting to her feet, tucking her pen into the pocket of her jacket, "Brunch sounds wonderful. I've a few things this week, but I think I can arrange one free morning at the very least."

She can do what she wants, really. Self-employment has it's benefits.

"Great, I'll touch base mid-week. One of the beach-side cafs by the Boardwalk, I think? I'd cook for you, but the last thing I need on top of anything else is the two of us being admitted to the hospital because I overestimated my culinary prowess," Isabella remarks dryly.

With a wiggle of her fingers, she pivots and heads out of Vivian's office.