2019-08-05 - What We Don't Say
August lets his curiosity get the better of him.
IC Date: 2019-08-05
OOC Date: 2019-05-29
Location: Gray Harbor/Branch & Bole and Out on a Limb
Related Scenes: 2019-07-28 - Special Delivery
Plot: None
Scene Number: 1029
It's late, the store's closed up, and August is about to head home. He's shuffling around things on the old oak desk, getting it squared away, when he opens the drawer and finds the note that came with the saffron crocus arrangements.
He stares at it for a while, and it stares back. He knows who it's from, doesn't need to use a single ounce of power to tell him that. (She signed it, after all.) Literally no one in town hasn't heard about what went down at the bridge, and he'd be a liar to say he wasn't curious about that whole mess and how it tied into the problem she'd admitted to him a couple weeks back. But he can't visit people in the hospital, much less people he barely knows. (Though Meg would call in a xanax scrip for him if he said he needed one, no questions asked. So he could.)
This is the next best thing, he supposes, even if it's also a little like spying. (Who are you kidding, Roen, it's entirely like spying.) So he picks up the note, turns it over in his hands and runs his fingers on the edges of the cardstock, getting comfortable with it.
As August skims the memory and emotion related to the note, he feels bandaging on one hand, the pen in his other hand, gripped while writing because it's not Lilith's primary writing hand. She's trying so hard to write normal, to seem normal, even while alone in the room like a defense mechanism. But her emotions are out of control and it's overwhelming, making everything a battle. Fucking Grant. He was her tipping point, all these flowers, she wants to kill them, she wants to kill the machines she's hooked to, she wants to kill herself to make it all stop, stop, stop.
She doesn't really, but there's so much frustration in the middle of grief and fury while trying to exert some semblance of control and normalcy for outside view. She could have killed them all at the bridge. She hears Hank's neck snap, sees him fall. Guilt. She focuses. She makes herself go cold with sheer will. She knows she's going to have to do that a lot now. She tries to make something good out of bad with this note and delivery. Someone should get something pretty out of all this awful and wrong.
Bile rises in the back of his throat as his mind shouts 'hospital' with increasing urgency. He takes steady breaths to confirm he's not, in fact, in or anywhere near a hospital. The smells of the various plants in the office come to him; the sense of their slow, steady pulse. Outside the walls of building, more of the same. This isn't a hospital.
The threatening panic subsides. Now that he's not in a hospital, he can focus on the rest. Of course, the rest is quite a lot, but it's not unfamiliar territory with him. How many vets did he talk to who felt much this way? How many times had he toed the line of similar thoughts, especially in those first few weeks, having titanium bolted to him in various places and sitting in hospitals listening to everyone's misery? (He remembers the first day he realized he could just stop listening and did. The blessed relief of silence.)
The vision fades. He sighs, looks down at the note. Well, he wasn't sure what he'd been expecting. Maybe not that, precisely, but certainly something like it. So why had he looked?
He knows why a second later: the twin orange jessamines in the private greenhouse out back, slowly reaching maturity. One of them would be ready to go back to her in another day or two. He could have made it go much faster but thought she might prefer it if they had some time to come into themselves. Clones of the original she'd almost killed.
...almost. There'd been enough left to keep going. As little as it was, it had been enough. Sometimes that was all anyone had.
"We work with what we've got," August says to no one in particular. He tosses the note back into the office desk, locks the drawer, and heads home.
Tags: august lilith psychometry