InsaneJournal

Who: Max and Cerise, and Jack intervening toward the end.
What: Max finds Cerise and they hug! Except not really. Fisticuffs ensue, and Jack shows up to get Cerise to a medic and I finaLLY HAVE AN EXCUSE TO USE THIS ICON HAHA
Where: Cerise's motel room.
When: After Jack talked to Max and Luke.
Warnings/Rating: Blood, beatings, and violence.



Max felt like she wanted to explode. She'd been operating under this pretense of barely contained rage, anger that simmered just beneath the surface, threatening to explode and fuck everyone up within a five mile radius. She knew she hadn't dealt with her fear, or with the feelings that came with believe Corvus dead for all those days. All that was still there, mixed in with the anger she felt that anyone would dare risk her daughter's life. The poor maid, whose face she could still see in her mind's eye, just added to the dull ache that pulsed behind her eyes. There was no one way this was going unavenged, and that was just that.

Originally, Max intended to kill both of them. The arsonist and Cerise. Then, as she hunted for the other woman, the kill count went down to just Cerise. But there was Corvus, who was fucking nuts. Corvus, who loved this Cerise woman. And Max could turn it around in her head. If some woman told her that she'd killed Jack, Max would have gone and killed her herself. So could she really hold Cerise responsible for doing the same thing she would have done? No, but she could blame the bitch for hiring a shitty arsonist, and for almost getting Amanda killed. She could blame her for the life of that college girl, the maid. This couldn't go unavenged.

Max left her gun at home, because it would be too easy to shoot it. She'd been in the military since she was eighteen, and the General had taught her to be lethal at the age of five. She remembered Cerise as a skinny junkie, and she knew Cerise had no chance against a bullet. Max was an active agent, an assassin in so many ways, and Cerise didn't have a chance in a hand-to-hand fight either, but Max wasn't looking for one of those, so it didn't matter. No, she just wanted to break the other woman's face into a million pieces, and then maybe she could move on. It wasn't much to ask, given her original intention to just kill Cerise execution style.

Finding Cerise was a piece of cake for an agent in Las Vegas, and Max was at the roadside motel before the sun set on her visit with Corvus and Luke. The place was shit, a hole where hookers came by the hour and where druggies slept on old, stained coverlets. Max didn't even stop to think about what that meant before flashing her badge at the high-school dropout behind the counter in the room/lobby. Master key in hand, she went to find Cerise's room.

Unconsciousness came and went, a blur of narcotic sunsets and sunrises. They blended into one hazy-eyed glimpse of green eyes through drawn blinds. She'd lost track of the days since Jack had died.. no not dead. Not anymore. It was a philosophical inkblot that she deciphered in between so many hours of nodding out. The television was on, and its programming mutated from one sitcom to the next every time she got her eyes open enough to register the source of droning noise. There was a newscast at some point, and she could feel herself mouthing some of the words in a sedated half dream where she'd never come to Vegas at all, never left Mexico. It was visionless memories, or just an alternate life brought on by the soundtrack of some atypical happy story coming from the newscast.

When Cerise finally arose from the opiate coma, it was with a drowsy ache. An undefined sadness that pervaded the back of her mind and made her clench her olive green eyes in ignorance. Thankfully, the dream was like the wind. Within moments all of that warmth and safety and depressing lack of reality was whisked away by the realization that she was still in the same motel room. The same grunge scratch sheets, the same pill powder dusting the nightstand beside her. Rolling away from the ironic discomfort of her motel-issued comforter, she reached for the electronic device beside the remaining pills littering the nightstand like some satanic constellation. It wasn't heroin, it wasn't enough. Even if it had been years since she'd touched such hardcore narcotics, her tolerance seemed to have barely waned and this just wasn't doing the trick. Whether the intended trick was overdose or just nonstop ignorance, she didn't analyze it. Shit like that would get her nowhere, because right now she didn't need self-realization or peace of mind... she needed mind numbing emptiness.

How long had she been in this room? Cerise picked up the phone to check the date and noticed the blinking forum signal of Jack's message. Through rheumy eyes, she took in the text and within the course of seconds, she was out of the tangled sheets and pulling back on a pair of tattered bluejeans. "Son of a bitch!" The shriek was directed at nobody but herself because being exposed was not an option, it never had been. If her make believe father of sadism and snakecharming had taught her anything, it was that. Stuffing some clothes into a backpack, the tv flickered onto a new program, while the window for escape unknowingly dwindled.

Max didn't knock. She slipped the key in the lock, and she pushed open the door with her foot, the force of the shove sending the wood against the cheap plaster of the wall behind it with a warning thud that no one in any of the adjacent rooms would heed. She looked around the room, brown eyes scanning for the presence of the woman she wanted to tear to fucking pieces. She didn't care if Corvus warned her. She didn't care if Corvus showed up here with a gun in his hand. She didn't care about the stale air in the room. She didn't stop to question the possible state of the woman inside. She just looked for movement, because she was going to close her hands around Cerise's scrawny neck once she saw her. Not kill her, she reminded herself. She wasn't going to fucking kill her.

"Going somewhere?" Max asked, once her gaze caught the figure of the woman shoving her clothes into her backpack. She slammed the door shut behind her, and she approached the bed. "Without waiting for me?" Oh, she knew Corvus had warned her now, and it just pissed her off more. She understood why, but it still pissed her off, and it still felt like choosing sides. Cerise's rheumy gaze let her know that the other woman was on something, but she didn't care about that either. One lunge, quick and precise, and she had a handful of Cerise's brown hair in her unforgiving grip.

Even with the waning fuzziness of painkillers, the sound of the key in the lock was as noticeable and loud as a fire alarm. Women that slept with knives under their pillows didn't have a tendency to miss the signals of war. Going still in the dusky light of the room, Cerise only lifted her eyes when the door went flying open. She didn't have a gun, hadn't had one in years. There was the briefest, laughing flicker of self realization in that moment. Jack had saved her from that, from hurting people and herself.. it had been a pipedream. Cerise realized with a self deprecating and crippling kind of disgust that trying to be normal had made her soft. She should have known better. There was no turning back, not for people like her.

She wasn't surprised to see Max, that much was obvious. There was just a cloudy blink, a sad twitch of a chapped smile. Rattlesnake still, she stood beside the bed with her hands paused and poised on whatever scrap of a tee shirt she'd been in the process of packing. Her eyes stayed on Max, although she did not retreat from the bed even when the other woman sent the motel room door banging shut. The questions brought about a partial huff of an exhale that barely registered emotion, they were rhetorical inquiries anyway.

Cerise never moved, not until her head jerked back at an angle that would have been painful if not for the current level of opiates surfing through her body. Even if she was barely high, her attention was pinpoint spot on, glazed and green, watching. "Heya, Max.." Dehydration turned her voice into a throaty smoker-like murmur.

Max had one second where she knew that Cerise was fucked, and where she could stop, rethink, replan. It was, literally, second - she didn't take it.

Max yanked Cerise's head back harder, more unforgiving. "Do you know why I'm here?" she demanded, and her voice was agent cold, steel and nothing like empathy or giving a damn. "I'm here because you got a college student killed, you bitch." she moved forward, pure, trained strength in the sleek muscles of her arms. "I'm here because you almost killed an old woman, you bitch." Forward still, and Max's body was as much a weapon as any knife or gun she carried. She did this for a living, fought and killed, and she did it like someone else might turn a key in a car ignition, thoughtless.

Max stopped in front of the nightstand. "I'm here because you almost killed my daughter, you fucking asshole."

Slam. Max slammed Cerise's face against the nightstand, over and over and over, nose and chin and cheeks against the cheap excuse for wood. Slam. Slam. "And you did it all because I did something Corvus asked me to do," she hissed, and she shoved the other woman away with enough force to send her into the wall.

The severity of that second yank to Cerise's hair whisked through the fading numbness like unpleasant needles and a tired bone popped due to fuck knows how many days of bed bound misuse. Max's voice was cold with demand, and while it had been a long, long time since anybody had interrogated Cee, this was different. This was not the warm danger of her late employer or any of the mad dogs that roamed the warehouse where she'd grown up. Even if pain was nothing new, there was a fresh heat every time. Funny how things lie that never really went away. It wasn't like drugs, tolerance came reluctantly. Grimacing, there was bared teeth as her neck craned, and Cerise and she caught her tongue between her teeth in another of those sad smiles. It might have had something to do with the pain, but there was so much more to it than that. "I could guess," she suggested with exhaustion, resolution, and just a splinter of that self deprecating smirk. Cerise had overreacted to false information, Kellan had fucked up, and there was no shrinking back from it now. Typical, really. "Yeah," she admitted

Her steps migrated backward with the instigation and advance of Max's body. Slightly sober or not, her balance was panther sleek and there was not a single stagger. She just watched Max with knowing eyes and a set mouth. She knew rage, she knew its cool terror and scalding beatings, brandings, rapings. She didn't relive it, there were too many years to account for in a single blink.. and it must have been there in her solemn, steady eyes. Cerise wasn't afraid. Not of Max, the woman had already taken away the person that mattered most to her. Even if some through the door bullshit negated that, the anguish was still there just beneath the surface. She refused to let it rise, and that was pretty easy when the initial slam against the plywood dresser's unforgiving surface came. Those that followed left her tasting blood, smelling it as a fresh gush poured from freckled nostrils. A moment later she was against the wall, catching her balance with a hand and choking down the strangled sound of discomfort in her throat. One cheekbone definitely felt fractured. She knew the feeling, it was a recurring one from her youth. Cerise tried licking the blood away, and when that failed she just turned her head to smear its ugly, toxic red against the fabric of her shirt's cotton. It wasn't the violence that incited the dangerous burn in her eyes, but the mention of Jack. "He wasn't in his right mind, you fucking knew that Max.." For the first time, she could feel Ivy lurking in her head like a seething briar. Thorns of hate for the woman before her. Cerise didn't understand the hatred or the worry of repercussions over some echoing mystery referred to only as the Pit.

In Seattle, she and Max could have been a damn close to even match. Killing machines with different programming.. but that was a long time ago. Even so, and even with the grogginess that came with waking from her self-induced coma, Cerise wasn't going to get killed in this shitty motel room unless it was by her own hand, her own pills, her own aching losses. Sniffing away some of the blood, it drained down her tonsils and Cerise spit it on the floor in a goreslick arc of displease. Those eyes were still all for Max, and she carefully pushed herself away from the wall with no apparent worries over round two. It had been a long time since she'd taken a beating, and if this was what Max's visit intended, it didn't hold up against all of those late nights in candlit basements of torture. "You could have helped him!" Emotion flooded the accusation and Cerise swallowed it back because it didn't belong here. Not now. Advancing toward the agent of righteous fury, Cerise took a wide berth of caution. She wondered briefly about if Max had a gun, but ultimately decided that it didn't matter. Cerise's only weapon at hand was the butterfly switchblade in her back pocket, but she didn't reach for it even when she spit more blood out with a hateful, burning stare.

"We discussed it before," Max bit out, that same cold anger that didn't rise or heat. "When he moved in with me, because he trusted me to handle it. You weren't there. He didn't go to you. You weren't part of it. He left Seattle with you, and you're probably fucking, but this had nothing to do with you," she explained, each word icy and direct. He didn't trust you, the words said, without actually saying it at all. And she knew Jack would stop her from doing this if he was there, but she was letting Cerise live for him, and that was more than enough.

Max wasn't scared of this drugged out thing on the floor, this trash husk. Whatever Cerise brought, Max could handle. She was sober, clean and at the top of her game. She'd taken down seven men overseas last week, all without coming away with a nick on her. This pathetic excuse for a woman was nothing. And maybe Cerise reminded her of herself just then. Not the drugs, because Max had never used, but she'd spent plenty of time pathetically drunk five years earlier, beatdown and with no self-esteem. Cerise reminded her of that, because Cerise hadn't changed. She was the same woman Max had met in the elevator of an apartment complex all those years ago, and Max just wanted to put space between them, to put space between herself and that time in her life.

Part of her wanted Cerise to try something, to give her the excuse to lash out harder. To that end, Max moved closer and shoved her boot into Cerise's abdomen. It wasn't a kick. It was a shove against the dirty wallpaper of the shithole hotel room. It pinned Cerise there, and there would be a bootmark on Cerise's abdomen, one to go along with the broken bones in Cerise's face.

"The only reason you aren't dead, is because of him. If it was up to me, I would have blown your brains out the moment I came through the door," she said, and oh, there was anger, hot and overflowing, and Max pulled her foot away just in time to grab a handful of Cerise's hair and slam Cerise's head against the wall. "I could kill him twenty times over, and he still wouldn't want me dead," she hissed, one last slam of skull against the wall, and then she stepped back and forced herself to regain that calm.

The truth hurt more than any bootheel. Jack didn't trust her, the words were unspoken but radiating. Thankfully her stomach was empty because the dig of that sole against her abdomen and organs was far from mild, otherwise she might have wretched rather than just bared her teeth against the deep, stabbing ache that pervaded her thorax. She might not have been as strong or toned as the old days required, but some things never went away. At the house in Texas she'd been quick to learn that one never folded under torture. Not that Max was prying her for information, but if the woman was seeking out tears, begging, or even a fringe of fear in her glowing eyes.. it wasn't going to be found. Not with a beating, broken bones, or any boot heel. The training in Texas had been unfathomable, more than just guns and knives, ropes and red hot iron that they branded into her. So much more.

Cerise's silence was long, reading the woman's hate with dead eyes while she remained pinned against the wallpaper. She could have explained that the only reason Max was still alive in her book was because Jack was. Cerise could have warned the woman that if Max so much as fucking approached Jack again, she'd see the woman dead, even if it meant going down in the process. The prospect of death didn't frighten her the way it should have, probably because she knew that there were worse things than dying. Or because she was toying with death anyway in the form of those pills. But Cerise had never been a woman of threats, it kind of went against stealth protocol. She found actions to speak much louder.

A bit of distance came then with Max's retreat, and Cerise stumbled forward with momentary weakness against the dresser. Although she did actually have to blink the stars out of her eyes from that final blow. Cerise gasped and watched while blood dripped continuously from her face onto the woodgrain surface below. Spine bowing, she seemed close to collapsing right up until the moment that she spun around. The drugs kept her from feeling the kind of pain that should have slowed most people. Ripping the small decorative lamp from the dresser's surface, the cord tore from the wall when Cerise flung it without warning at Max's face. It was nothing more than a distraction really, because the true threat came a quick lunge later when she took a tackle at Max, counting on the lamp to be disorienting or distracting enough so that she could crash the pair of them against the mattress' edge before tumbling to the floor. The butterfly knife was already out and unfolded between Cerise's fingers, as familiar and memorable as anything she'd ever known. She plunged forward, low in aim for the woman's gut even in the midst of their tumble.

Her aim was without deadly intention, and years of practice recalled where to avoid the more crucial organs. Warnings at knife point wouldn't do, not with a woman as skilled as Max. Even if Cerise hated her, hated the venom that poured from the woman's mouth, hated that Jack actually trusted her, loved and pined after her for years. HER, a woman willing to kill him over and over by fucking admission. Maybe Cerise should have taken the beating, but those words were a horror that spun so much fire in her head that there was no turning back now. "That's the difference between us, you don't care at all, and I'd die to protect him!" This time, the words were a tortured scream.

The knife caught skin, but nothing more. If that knife managed to do any real damage, then Max needed to give up the job. It stung, and blood seeped through the tear in her shirt, but it wasn't enough to dissuade her. The lamp, which managed to catch just on her temple pissed her off more than the blade did. Droplets of blood pooled there, and Max smeared them away from her face before deciding this shit was over. Cerise's words just shoved at her further, pushing sore spots and eating at her own guilt from when she'd thought Corvus dead. She didn't care what this woman had to say, though, she reminded herself. Corvus could have his careless killer. Because that's what pissed her off. If Cerise had come after her with a gun, Max wouldn't have taken issue with the vengeance. It was the sloppy, pisspoor way the other woman had gone about it that she took issue with.

Max reached for the lamp, and she slammed the remains on the nightstand, until she could get at the cord, which she looped over Cerise's head after shoving the woman to the ground with a side kick and a swing of the hair she still held in her hand. She tightened the cord, twisting it cruelly and leaving Cerise just enough breath to barely stay alive. "You listen to me. I don't give a shit what you have going with Corvus. You stay away from me. You stay away from my family," she explained, that deadly calm back now that she was turning a corded tourniquet, now that it felt like work again. "You can have Corvus, and you can have his problems, but if you so much as breathe on anyone I care about, I'm finishing this. And next time? Next time you won't so much as hear me coming," she promised. Because this? All this warning and all this fight. It was so intentional. If she wanted Cerise dead, Cerise would be dead. It was as simple as that.

The cord tightened, and Max applied just enough pressure to make Cerise's world shutter.

Cerise was too fucked up, too out of practice, and part of her was just too unwilling to fight. How ironic that she was the survivor. One of the lone wolves that escaped the cage of Texas and yet all she really did for the past ten years was work on a slow death. The adrenaline wasn't even there, not in this moment. There was no fight, because there was realization had been long in coming that everybody she cared about left her, sold her, betrayed her. Even Jack. Jack, who she'd trusted beyond anyone because Jack was truth where Sid had only been unholy need.

The floor was there then, scratchy carpet against her back where the shirt fabric ruched on a disappearing,malnourished waist. She never even reached for the knife again, never tried to hold true and go for death. It didn't really matter, maybe she was tired of hurting people, maybe she was tired of hurting. Her eyes closed when the electrical cord strung a tight noose around her throat. Cerise winced momentarily, but this was not a woman that feared pain or even death. When the cord tightened enough to put black spots in her vision, maybe her lashes fluttered and her freckled face went heartbreakingly pale, but she never even reached for Max's wrist to alleviate the ever tightening strangulation. Her green eyes were once cloudy, but now flushed of oxygen seemed translucent as green tea. She watched Max, she saw her and the truth. The woman willing to kill a man who couldn't help himself due to some fucking infection he'd probably derived trying to help others. Because that's who Jack was to Cerise, the savior. The one that had gotten her clean and safe and unafraid. So while this woman above her had taken that momentarily away from her, the horrible knowledge remained.. Jack had given her up to Max, he had to have.

Glazed eyes opened at the end of Max's speech, and Cerise twitch while her lips were beginning to darken to something almost blue. Her hands fumbled against the carpet instinctively, unable to resist the urge to inhale deeper. "You don't care about him," came the hoarse whisper. "And he loves you," befuddled, she would have laughed if she could, but the air just wasn't there. "One day you're going to lose everything and everyone.. the way he did, the way I d--" Stop. She struggled to swallow as her vision went black. Words gasped in a strange, fluttering formation as she barely held consciousness. "Evil.. you.. that's.. what.. you.. no.. ." Cerise's eyes fell closed, and for the first time in a long time, she didn't care. Let the asphyxiation take her away.

Too late. Too late was the history of Jack's life, and here he was again, outside the hotel, much, much too late again. He'd warned Cerise as quickly as he could managed, but, of course, not quick enough. If he'd known exactly where she was staying, he could have gone straight there without waiting. That was just how things were, though. Ifs and wishes forever.

He didn't know how to feel. Nothing inside him was where it should be, a foreign landscape that he still hadn't been given the time to learn how to navigate. Sifting through his feelings was a nightmare. For Max, for Amanda, for the dead woman, for Cerise. Everything was tossed together in a jumble where no decisions were the right ones, and choices that once seemed simple now had shades upon shades of gray. He knew he didn't want Cerise to die, that she'd been the only person in his world for years, when living seemed like the bleakest prospect he could think of and the future stretched out long and empty. But thinking about her called up the hovering guilt of the dead woman, ready to sting him, and her unwillingness to tell him about the arsonist. He didn't want Max to kill her, but he thought of Amanda and knew why she wanted to.

He pulled around the back of the motel, where he'd promised to meet Cerise, but no one was there. His stomach turned, but he didn't stop moving, pulling the bike around to the front instead. He hit the front door with so much momentum it was like he’d never climbed off the engine, and a quick interrogation of the guy behind the front desk sent him after the 'other woman' who'd just come through, with a badge. Jack ran.

The door was still slightly ajar, and he slammed through it with his shoulder into the dim room. All he saw was a silhouette with a cord around the neck of a limp figure. Too late. "Drop her," he said.

He was angry, angry at everything in this situation, and he couldn't even keep track of why, anymore. He didn't scream, but his voice hit a brand new pitch at the bottom of the scale, even as he continued moving heavily, swiftly, toward them, hands outstretched to rip the cord from Max's hands if need be, to stand between them, to save them both.

Max was already letting Cerise fall into a heap on the floor when the door flew inward, when Jack's voice filled the room. She let the other woman fall as Jack approached, and then she stepped back from the unconscious pile on the floor. Three steps, and she turned to face Corvus.

Max was largely uninjured, clearly the winner in this battle, and she just walked past Jack, shoulder brushing against his as she went. "She's not dead. She's got you to thank for that," she said, because that was fucking true, and he might as well know it. She would have killed Cerise otherwise, and she didn't care who knew it. It made her feel impotent not to have killed her, and it pissed her off to no end, which carried in the short, terse sentences. And, when it was all said and done, Corvus had just made a choice, hadn't he? Back at that hotel with Luke, he'd made a choice. "You warned her, didn't you? She was packing." A pause, but only a brief one. "Tell her to stay the fuck away from me, away from anyone I give a shit about, and I'll stay away from you."

That said, Max moved on, toward the door. "She's fucked up, and she'll have one hell of a fucking headache in the morning," she added, sounded proud of that, at least.

Jack looked to Cerise on the floor. She was breathing, and Max was true to her word. Fear and helpless rage warred independently, but he forced them down. He had to. They had no place here.

Of course he'd warned Cerise. He had to warn her. Yes, he thought she should be punished somehow for what she'd done, but he could also understand intimately why she'd done it. Death wasn't the answer when so many mistakes had been involved in the middle. He was the cause of all of this, in the end.

Before Max could simply walk out, he grabbed her by the wrist, to command her attention for just a moment more, before she left and he began the work of finding medical attention for Cerise. "Thank you," he said, ragged. He felt sick, and didn't know whose side he was on, or what he ought to be feeling. But Max could have killed Cerise, and she didn't, and Jack didn’t think he could take any more dead people he cared about to be responsible for. He wouldn’t be forgetting her restraint any time soon.

The thank you, combined with the fact that Corvus didn't protest her staying away, just cemented whatever the fuck Max was feeling (she wasn't even sure what she was feeling just then), and she yanked her hand away and stormed out the door, not looking back.

Unconsciousness was a vacation from the anguish of her own mind, and even if death was a permanent one, it didn't seem like such a bad thing. Maybe it was the drugs, she was toying with her own mortality for days now. The slowing heartbeat, the staggered breaths. She'd always been a survivor, she'd always done what needed to be done, regardless of the cost. Yet in this instance with Max, she'd hardly made an effort to fight back. If it was guilt, she didn't recognize it. There had been a numb kind of acceptance to the woman's arrival. After all, if Cerise had really been that concerned about repercussions, she'd have gotten out of town. But she'd stayed, buried herself in stale sheets, and medicated the dreams away.

Blood splattered the front of her rumpled tank top, the gash in her cheek most definitely required stitches, and her lips were slightly blue when she coughed her way back to consciousness at last. Dreamy, trembling fingers slid the cord away from her neck, revealing a deep, red groove that would bruise black with time. Rolling onto her stomach against the smashed bits of broken lamp glass, Cerise dug her fingers into the carpet in a search for strength. The pentagram branded into her shoulderblade was an easy reminder that she'd been through worse. Her lashes fluttered, one dilated eye showing signals of a concussion when she finally glanced up at Jack through a fall of dark tangles. It was Seattle all over again, pale, too skinny, too much blood. She closed her eyes, grimacing away from Jack. Not sure if he'd saved her and if so, why. Reaching up, her fingers snagged on the bed's coverlet to find a grip in an attempt to pull herself to standing.

Cerise was a mess, and a sweeping glance of the motel room spotted the pills and at least one empty needle. He felt the sick drop of disappointment, more guilt, more lack of surety. First things first, though - she needed a doctor.

He dropped down beside her. They still had a lot of talking to do, and there was still a long way to go before he figured out where they were now, whether he could forgive the things she'd done on his behalf. Now, though, wasn't the time. "Hey," he said, and took her by the arm. "Stop, don't move." He couldn't take her to the hospital, not if she'd been shooting up again. His thoughts went to the journals. Someone on there might be able to clean her up and stitch her up. His knowledge of first aid was rough. When he'd been hurt too badly to fix things himself back in Seattle, he'd always been able to find a back alley doctor who would take care of things. This was Las Vegas. Finding one couldn't be all that difficult.

He needed to move quickly, though. He dashed off a quick message on the journals about needing medical help, and then began clearing the broken glass away from where Cerise was on the floor. The concussion was what worried him most. If no one responded quickly, he might have to risk taking her to the hospital, risk seeing her end up in rehab somewhere. It was better than dead.

"I'm fine," she croaked. It would have been a snap of her voice was anything more than a hoarse, noose-choke whisper. Get up, she just had to get up. That was the rule, and her mind slipped back and forth between the past and present. Things she'd spent so long forgetting, then numbing herself to, then finally accepting. They came back now. Get up, it only got worse if one couldn't. Her knees dug fiercely into the stained carpet, and ever the fighter, her twitching knuckles clung to the coverlet as she hauled herself up against the bed's edge. Collapsing there with momentary relief, she rolled onto her back. There was a heavy exhale, and it hurt like speaking did when she finally focused on Jack again. "Just go, Jack." She could handle a little blood. A couple butterfly stitches and good as new. That was without counting the concussion, which she was yet unaware of. She just felt tired. Exhausted really, suddenly. He'd want to take her to the hospital he knew, and that meant filing vague assault reports and other nightmares that she associated with the doctors. "I'm going to the hotel," she whispered through grit teeth as her eyes began to fall closed for a rest. For the first time, something in her muddled brain said that was a safe place.

"You're not going anywhere," he said. "You've got a concussion, and you're a mess. You're going to stay right here, and I'm going to bring someone in to help you."

He believed that. He had to believe that. She was right, of course - they did have one other option, if help didn't seem to be coming soon, but it would be hard to get her from here to the hotel on his bike, and a taxi driver would ask questions. Only if there was no other option. Only if no one offered to help. He knelt next to her with the TV still flickering behind him, and kept the journal flipped open on his knee, brushing her hair from her face before picking up the pen again.