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the fabric of her cell is worn in places. her new home has been lived in. people with pasts came here, have tried to create futures in the white padding. she did not want to be one of them. she steps inside.
the orderly doesn't pay her much mind; he watches her step inside, marks the way her bare feet curl on the foreign floor, and nods at her before bolting the door shut behind her. she wonders how many people he has seen into into this cell. she wonders how many he has seen leave. they are both dressed in white.
for the first few weeks, she doesn't speak, lets her voice grow hoarse. she wanted a place where she would not have to explain herself, where she fit, somewhat. she thinks of home, of grandage place, and then, after a while, she teaches herself to pick at the worn bits in the fabric of the walls instead of thinking.
the doctor tries to ask why she isn't eating, tries to pick at her story in angles instead of directly. they inject her with something the next day, through a thick tube. force it down her throat. instead of digesting it, she throws it up later, back in her cell. she can still feel the tube where it was stuck in her throat hours later, and the phantom pain makes her gag.
she thinks of ethan, and she rips a hole in the wall. stuffing floats down to the floor in gentle puffs.
after weeks, sir malcolm learns where she is, somehow, and comes to see her. she hears the blurry echo of the orderly that took her to her room on her first day as he turns him away.
good, she thinks.
sir malcolm thinks she can handle herself, he has too much faith in her after everything they've been through. he refuses to believe that she is harmful. that she is a weapon, a bullet. he doesn't believe that she actually might need help dealing with herself now.
she sees him pass the inch in her door that is her window. he is wearing black, like someone has died.
she goes away.
she doesn't remember any of it, this time, except that before it happened, there was a pressure building in her chest like the air over the ocean before a storm. she spoke more than she has ever spoken in this place. her throat is sore, and her skin is more purple from bruises than white from skin. the orderly, with an eye blacker than before, tells her that she was gone for three weeks. he looks just as tired as she feels.
her stomach growls, she eats, and she falls asleep.
it comes back to her in dreams and snaps when she isn't thinking. a yell. hands like a vice. a sedative. a face she hasn't seen before. the orderly.
the walls are torn to shreds. fabric hangs from the walls in sheets, and stuffing ends up in the corners of her cell. she finds a sort of peace in cleaning it and sweeping the mess into a pile. she finds stains that weren't there before her episode, some red, some brown, and she has to sit down and breathe for a while before she stands again.
when she does, she tears down the whole sheet of fabric from the wall and wads some up to make a pillow. the rest she uses as blankets. she lies, in between sleep and waking, for four days before anyone checks on her. she spends her time in silence.
in the moments when the silence becomes too oppressing, she scratches the skin in front of her ear just so she can hear something. she might say a word, softly, so only she can hear it, to break the monotony, but she only says it once, afraid that someone might hear her and use it against her.
she won't say it again.
she feels the pressure build in her chest. déjà vu.
the demon comes again. more of the walls are torn apart. there are more stains than before, except that they look like less of an effort was made to clean them up. three weeks, again, but she is so much more tired. she remembers everything, this time, in crystal hypercolour. she doesn't sleep. they medicate her for it, in her food, but the first night yields nightmares she cannot wake from, and that scares her more than not being able to sleep.
(she remembers knowing that ethan is alive in america, and the devil is clever, because the knowledge has her mixed up inside.)
there is a new doctor. she hears a new voice in the hallway, female. she hears snatches of conversation, hears words she doesn't quite understand, hears her own name, and knows that this woman has come for her and her particular problems. for the first time, she wonders what they have diagnosed her with, what the drugs they are putting in her food are treating her for. what are they teaching this new woman about her, what lies are they using to cover up the fact that nothing is working, that no matter how many times they change the drugs, she always feels helpless, and the demon always gets his way.
she recognises the new doctor from her first episode in the asylum. she is kind to her, but is firm. she doesn't play around like her old doctor, doesn't poke at her with side questions to get her to open up. once she made it clear that she wasn't going to speak, the doctor gave her a pen and paper, and folded her arms.
she wants to ask this new doctor for a cigarette, but she decides instead to leave the paper untouched.
the new doctor tells her that she has no interest in getting better. vanessa nods.
after that, they don't take her back to her room. the cell next to hers is taken (which. she hasn't seen anyone other than the orderly and her doctors since she arrived, how she aches to see someone else in here, to confirm that she is not alone) so they take her to the next one along. it looks just like her first one looked on her first day. worn fabric. white walls.
she looks at the orderly, refusing to step in. he tells her that her old room is being refurbished, that she tore it up and she should take better care of her living space. she will stay here until the work is done.
vanessa misses the blanket she made.
in the morning, the new doctor instructs that she be taken to the gardens and walked around.
she takes in her first breath of fresh air, and lets herself smile. it's a small thing, she doesn't show her teeth, but it's wide enough that her eyes wrinkle at the corners. there are leaves, here. and the sky, she forgot how wide it is, how, unlike the small expanse of a ceiling, it never ends. she forgot the colour of the clouds, she forgot the feel of water in the air.
(is this the same air he is breathing?)
"how long has it been," she asks, relishing in the feeling of a leaf between her thumb and forefinger. how could she have forgotten?
"eight months," her orderly says, scuffing his shoe in the dirt.
time passes strangely, here.
she grows tired easily. the open air makes her paranoid and her shoulders are taken over with cold. she is returned to her room, with a blanket and the reminder that she is welcome to the grounds at any time, as long as she schedules it in and it is cleared with her doctor.
she feels the most free she has felt in a year.
pressure builds. the demon comes a third time. they find her tearing her dress into strips like rope. they tell her she kept repeating a name, and words in six different languages over and over and over again. (when she is well enough to speak, she tells them she can only speak three).
(she didn't need to be reminded what the name was.)
her wrist is broken. a number of small bones shattered while she was away. she feels light headed sometimes, and others, her head spins so much she has to clutch the walls for support. sometimes her chest tightens the wrong way and she panics.
she mentions none of this.
her doctor asks her about her religious affiliation. she says she is catholic, but refuses to speak further on the subject. her doctor lets breath hiss past her teeth, and walks to the back of the room where she pulls a sheet of fabric from where it was hiding a mirror. she tells her to look at herself. vanessa stands from her seat, minding her broken wrist, and looks at herself for the first time in nine months.
she looks broken, is the first thought that springs to mind. Her skin is dry and cracked and itchy. her eyes are sunken and yellow, and heavy with bags. her legs are too skinny. her hair is too long and heavy.
slowly, like actions in a dream, she lowers the dress that they gave her on her first day and holds it at her hips. her stomach is only ribs.
she pulls the dress back up and sits in front of the mirror. just looks at herself for a while. she can feel her doctor's eyes on her, cataloguing everything she does. she ignores them. her hands, of their own volition, separate her hair into two halves, and brush. flakes from her scalp catch under her nails, and her hands become slick with oil. she continues until all the knots are gone and her hair is puffy and light. they took all of her pins when she arrived, so she plaits it, and lets it sit on her back. she makes her own way back to her room.
she returns to her old room. the walls have been re-padded and sewn up. the stains are gone. it looks like nothing ever happened. it looks almost comfortable, as if the thought of spending another night in there doesn't make her want to throw up the lunch she didn't eat. she lets herself in anyway, and closes the door.
days pass, and nights. time is strange, here. she eats her food, balls her fists because of how terrible the food makes her feel, and sleeps, mostly. the devil doesn't visit, and she tries not to think about ethan living his life without her. he deserves it, she reasons aloud to herself. he lived long enough having to sedate her every other day; he deserves freedom. he deserves happiness. she believes that.
it's getting easier to think about him, she tends to rip grass out of the ground instead of tearing sheets of fabric off of the walls. she is improving, maybe.
the doctor, again. "vanessa, why are you here?" she doesn't say it like a question. seward is speaking but vanessa is looking out the window. the grounds seem to sprawl out for forever.
(would she find him if she just kept walking?)
vanessa considers her answer. she talks now, in her sessions with her doctor. it helps, somewhat, to relieve the pressure in her chest. sometimes she talks for hours, and seward cancels her meetings to hear what she has to say, and sometimes she barely speaks a word. she is debating just what kind of day this will be.
"i am lost," she says to the clouds turning black in the sky. what she wants to say is that there is nobody for her. sir malcolm does not want her. she brought too much death into his house. ethan is gone. victor deals with his own problems. and she could not trouble mr lyle after all of the kindness he has shown her.
she is too tired to say any of this aloud, though.
the next day the orderly tells her she has a visitor. she doesn't reply. she is too busy picking at a worn patch of fabric that she is determined to break open. she misses seeing the way stuffing would float calmly down and litter the floor.
the door swings open.
"van?"
he looks different. his hair has been cut. how time passes. in these walls, it feels like none has passed at all, yet there are lines on both of their faces that neither of them are acquainted with.
she stands, slowly (she is dreaming, she thinks) and puts a hand through his hair. he lowers his head to meet hers, and she presses her forehead to his. even his eyes are different, they have revisited ghosts. maybe he will tell her of them. she smiles.
they cross a shadow, and for a moment, his eyes turn black. she tears herself from his hold. she does not know what to think. or how. in an instant, she is a year ago, hidden inside her room with the devil inside her. she thought she was getting better, here.
"vanessa?" he wants to take her arms, fold her into him. she will spook if he comes any closer; she holds her arms out to stop his approach. her head spins like it has been doing for weeks, she reaches out to catch a wall before she topples, her legs too weak to hold her, all of a sudden. her hands catch his arms. the spinning stops, eventually.
he looks up. the light catches his eyes. they are brown. "i apologise," she says. she doesn't look at him. it is embarrassing, how easily scared she is now. "i thought i saw him. he has used your face before."
he pulls her towards him and wraps his arms around her. he smells the same. different around the edges, he has not been in london long, but fundamentally the same. he kisses her forehead and she smiles up at him. no matter how much she wishes he would just live his life instead of dragging himself down with her affairs, it is welcome to see a familiar face.
she steps back, finally, and is completely conscious of how thin she has become, how small. weak. her hair is greasy, she has not washed for so long. she is not herself. he doesn't seem to mind.
having him stand in front of her; she wants to smile, can feel her muscles tugging at the corners of her mouth. he is here for her, her protector, the lupus dei. she doesn't know why, but he is here. she watches him take notice of her cell for the first time. he takes in the cleanliness, the white. she wants to show him the way it used to be, how she tore down the walls, how she tore it to pieces, made the white into colours. "i want to go outside," she says. he is wearing blue.
the orderly clears it with her doctor, and smiles at her as he escorts them outside. ethan doesn't speak, just notes the absent friendliness between the two.
she sits in the grass, letting morning dew ruin her dress. the sun has just come up, and everything is wet. she picks a handful of grass and rips it out of the ground; she does it more out of habit that anything else. he sits closer to her than is proper, their shoulders and thighs touching, and ignores the other patients around them.
"i thought you were dead," she says conversationally, breaking blades of grass in half one by one. "and then the demon showed me that you were alive. he showed me that you were happy." it was cruel, she wants to say. she does not.
he has questions, she can tell, about the demon. "i wasn't happy." he says. "i should have stayed." he looks straight into her eyes.
she avoids his. "i should have run after you," she says. "there is no use in trying to place blame. we are all guilty of something."
her answer seems to satisfy him. they are quiet, for a while after that, content in being near each other after months of being apart. ethan takes her hand in his, after a minute, and squeezes. if she was another woman, she would have blushed. "sir malcolm came to see me, did you know?"
"he sent me here," he says, and perhaps it's a shocking thing, vanessa can't really decide. "i went to the house first when i arrived here, hoping to see you. he told me where you were and that you refused to see him. he hoped maybe you would accept me."
she smiles at a memory long past. "you know i do," she says, with meaning. "did he send you here to take me home?"
her being here startles sir malcolm, she knows. she hopes one day he will accept that she is not well, and that she does no harm here, that one day she will let him into her life without refusing to believe that she is ill.
"yes," he says.
"you know i don't want to be here."
he smiles at her, and it breaks her heart.
"i said your name, you know." she says. she watches him raise his eyebrows. "while i was - while the demon was with me. and again. there was a time when i was left alone for days, and it was so quiet in my room, just still, and i said your name to ease the silence."
he is still. "vanessa," he says. "come home with me."
"i can't," she says, and her voice breaks like waves. "it's easier like this."
she has seen him upset before, she still shocks by it.
"for who?" he says. he doesn't raise his voice, there are other patients milling around the gardens. "easier for me? for malcolm? if we just forget about you? vanessa, i will never tire of taking care of you."
she is broken by the way he uses her first name like he has been doing it for years. "im not ready," she whispers. and she is breaking, she can feel him getting under her skin, he knows her too well, and she loves him too much.
he pushes himself to his knees and takes her face in his hands. they are so close, he is warmth and the sunshine on her back. "it's okay," he says. "just say the word."
she closes her eyes, letting the sun in, letting ethan in. it's hard. she is safe here, there is nobody here that really knows her, and their clinical hands almost feel like kindness. she wants to stay, wants to submit to this ease.
but home is calling. grandage place, the moors. how she longs to feel their floors under her feet. he says he wants to take care of her. she breathes out. "take me home, ethan." she lets his christian name right itself on her lips. she says it like a prayer.
her words are more dusty air and memory than voice, but she says them. "take me home."