Chapter Text
She’s awake again. She doesn’t sleep so well in the dark now. She’s awake and she’s cold. She’s always cold now, too.
She’s sitting in bed, a blanket round her shoulders. The light was on anyway, it’s always on, so Mom and Dad won’t know she’s up. In the first few days they knew she was up because she’d wake up screaming and clutching at the sheets like she was being dragged through the woods, and one of them would come in and cuddle her like she was a little kid. The meds have helped with the bad dreams, taken the edge off them, but they don’t help so well with everything else. She’s sitting in bed, with her phone (a new phone. Another new phone) watching videos of kittens and puppies. Sometimes it tries to show her stuff with people in, friends messing around, but she can’t watch that kind of thing any more, it makes her start freaking out. People just mess around and they think it’s okay until it isn’t, until it isn’t and you don’t know it isn’t until something comes up behind you and rips you away from everything –
A wave of twigs and stones against her skin, blood in her mouth, clutching at the ground but she can’t hold on, earth under her fingernails is all, she can’t hold on, she can’t stop –
She starts crying, but quietly, like, just tears dripping down her face and onto the screen, so it’s okay. That’s being like a little kid, too, just crying all the time even when nothing’s happened. It makes her colder. She puts down her phone, reaches for the stuffed bear with uneven eyes. Little kids need little-kid stuff to feel better. Before, she mostly hid him away in a drawer, she hadn’t taken him to college with her, she was trying to be grown-up and a cool girl, and then it had come up behind her and literally dragged her through the mud to show her how dumb it was to even think –
They’re saying like she should probably get some counselling. Now the cops have stopped interviewing her, now they believe her when she says she didn’t know what it was and didn’t know what happened and didn’t recognise anyone through the blood oozing into her eyes, everyone’s saying she can get some counselling. She doesn’t think she wants that. When you’re a little kid again, you can’t really explain why you’re feeling like this or that, you just feel it and start crying. Sooner or later Mom and Dad are going to start telling her to pull herself together but that’s the problem, she got pulled away from herself and couldn’t hold on no matter how hard she tried. A bunch of her fingernails were torn off even, isn’t that enough proof? She huddles up tighter, hugs the bear. Once she was loud and confident and acted like she knew it all. Being loud attracts predators. She hugs herself as small as she can.