sixteen ♢ spam & voice

[versusnurture]

infirmary spam } after mirror barge

[Dying the second time . . . honestly, it wasn't as bad. This feels like a strange thing to think, but it's most of what she thinks in those days of the death toll that feel like death isn't quite over yet.]

[The difference is, her first death, her real one, was intimate. This was a mercy, sort of, and she doesn't totally regret it, but it wasn't. It wasn't.]

[The same.]

[It wasn't family.]

[She lies back in the infirmary bed and stares at the ceiling with a soft smile. It's very impersonal here, but that's a relief in its own way, too. She's not the only person who died, not by a long shot. She's not the person most choose to focus their attentions on.]

[She can just rest.]

spam } blight

[It's a few days after everything clicks back into shape that Abigail works up the energy needed for speech. She doesn't go back to her cabin, although she sort of wants to. There are pros and cons to everything, she thinks, and the pros of staying in the infirmary outweigh the cons by far.]

[Blight is here, for example. She can see him from across the room. His presence makes her feel safe, in a backwards way, simply because she knows he isn't what he was. He will not protect her, but he will be reeling as much as anyone else. Maybe more. He doesn't seem like a man who likes to lose control.]

[One more day, and she hoists herself up out of the bed and makes her way over to his. A soft, quick smile - an exhausted one.]

Who got you?

spam } hannibal

[She knows he isn't welcome in the infirmary. That's part of the reason she stayed. But halfway through her stay, she did begin to regret it. Because . . .]

[This death lacked intimacy. That's one reason. No one sang her songs. No one told her everything was going to be all right. No one apologized. There was no sense of closure.]

[And because he frightens her at the same time he comforts her. Because the uncertainty and insecurity of her relationship with Hannibal Lecter is secured with a love that doesn't seem to die.]

[When she is well enough to walk, she walks to his cabin, and she knocks on his door.]

inmate filter } minus hannibal

I know a lot of people who are here being - punished, or whatever - they've killed people.

How many of you hunted them?

private } ceres

I'm interested in your answer especially.

Comments

[warisart]

[Their minds are broken, pliable where others' are unyielding, draped against the framework that their lives have given them so that it seems as though they function properly. Sometimes, they do. Others, they do not.

Still other times, they simply function slightly differently but still effectively.

Ben is still beneath her hand except for the faint tremor of fatigue, so recently familiar. This, he knows, will go away though. This he can withstand until his system catches up to itself, until he is accustomed to being alive again. He watches her and does not pull away, though he lifts his head again in surprise when she makes her offer.

Pleasant surprise, almost as pleasant as You're important to me too, Ben. The smile lingers even as he eases back down again to settle.]

I would like that very much, Abigail.

[versusnurture]

[She smiles at him, too. Her smiles are not as rare or as precious as his are, at least not on the surface. But the smiles that are wholly real, wholly genuine, they're pretty unusual. She saves most of them for Ben, these days.]

[Her hand is still, and he is her touchstone. When she speaks, it's in a new and different voice, one that is an imitation of Ben's own storytelling voice. Not exactly the same, though; there is a sharper, crisper spin to her tones, something that is distinctly Abigail.]

There are two animals who live in a dark forest, a forest where there is no moon and no sun - a forest where nobody has ever seen a star. The canopy of trees is too thick to see the sky, and so neither of the animals think there is a sky. They think the top of their world is all leaves, and the bottom is peat, and in between are the two of them.

They don't know what kind of animals they are, because they can't see themselves. They don't know the shapes of their own eyes or the slope of their cheekbones. They've never seen the color of their fur or the tint of their claws. Everything they do, they do by feel, and desperately.

And they do it alone, at opposite ends of the forest, each thinking he's the only animal alive.

But one day there's a storm. A first storm - there's never been rain before, or wind, or lightning. Everything's always been still. The first storm blows them to the center of the forest, past everything they've ever dared to know.

Once they reach the center, there's something new, something they've never seen before. An alien thing, a blinding thing. It's light, the first light, coming through a clearing, the first clearing, which sits in the exact middle of the forest.

The two of them see each other at the same time. One of them regards the other's tawny cheeks and considers him to be beautiful. The other sees the first animal's sharp sable nose and finds it precise and perfect. But neither one of them advances, neither one retreats. It's too new. Nothing moves for a very, very long time. Not even the wind.

[She strokes Ben's hair lightly and is silent. Apparently, that's all there is.]

[warisart]

[Very few have ever tried to do this for Ben, and he is amazed every time it happens; he speaks English better than most, is fluent in several spoken languages, but this is another one altogether. This is one that is more difficult to learn, to explain, and yet one that comes naturally to him. Too naturally to be safe, before.

Now he need only listen, and he does so, eyelids half-closed and his eyes behind them unfocused. He can see the creatures alone in their struggle, as clearly as he can hear the dropoff at the end of the story, how she leaves it there in the middle. Others might insist there be more, that the animals now band together and learn how to live around one another, that they fight because they know nothing else, that they part for fear of one another. That they are happily ever after.

Ben is not other people. He reaches up in the silence to touch her wrist, neither an advance nor a retreat, his voice low.]

But the wind, at the very least, is impatient - it will always move, eventually. Is this true, too, of the wind in the creatures' forest?

[versusnurture]

[Her hand moves slower when she feels his touch, carding through his hair with the gentle precision of a surgeon. Considering his question, she lets the silence stretch before answering, giving herself time to discover the truth of the story within herself. It's funny; feels like a burning in her belly, an inevitable forward motion, being pulled to the future by a hook just under her navel. This is a true story as much as it is a fiction. She can't deviate from it.]

[Is this what it feels like for Ben every time?]

The wind will move eventually. Yes. But it will take a while. There's a moment when it feels like the wind won't come back. A lull in the world, like the eye of a storm.