Liam Roberts is an (author) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-04-21 12:38:00 |
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Entry tags: | fandral, poison ivy |
Who: Liam & Cerise
What: The lost convene
Where: Cerise's hotel room
When: Shortly after this
Warnings/Rating: Descriptions of drug use.
Cerise had time to reflect after she'd invited Liam over. It had been a moment of weakness, and she regretted it immediately. She'd never been a particularly social creature. Initially because of necessity, but now it was due to dysfunction. When so many of the developmental years were spent screaming into floorboards, things just never really went back to normal when it came to interacting with others. She recognized that she was different and broken, but that didn't make changing any easier. To be honest, she wasn't entirely sure that she wanted to change. As much as she hated it, she understood what Jack meant when he said he was tired of pretending. After a while, there didn't seem to be much of a point in pretending that she was anything different than this. Used up and battle scarred. When one could make all the depressing realities just go away, why wouldn't they? Maybe that was the problem. What was the point in wiping away the only bearable aspect of her life? She didn't have friends, or family, or a job, no real reason to change what had worked for nearly twenty years.
She was still lamenting with a thumbnail between her teeth when the knock came. She peeled back the curtains from one window with caution. Cerise seemed pale and wane on her side of the glass. The smile she offered was brief, and not quite convincing, but she opened the door for him anyway. "Hey," she said softly while stepping back.
The motel room was clean and extremely impersonal. Aside from a couple of wet wrung tee shirts drying on the back of a chair, there didn't seem to be any personal items in the room. "You got any money?" The question was hopeful.
There was a line he had crossed, some invisible line in the sand that he had stepped over, and ever since then, Liam had known that going back to who he was before, what he was before, was impossible. It wasn’t just the drugs, or the mistakes, or all the things in between, but there had been a fundamental change in him since his world had tipped over on its side, and no matter how hard he scrabbled up the hill and away from what had happened, he kept sliding back, drifting back to that broken thing he had been after Trystan. And frankly, he just didn’t care enough to try to make it better. It was like Jack had said; he needed to want to fix himself, and unless he got to that point, nothing would ever improve.
It was dark when he arrived at her hotel room, a hand coming up to knock on the door before he stepped back, catching a glimpse of her pale face on the other side of the glass. A moment later, when the door finally opened, he greeted her with a small smile of his own, but it didn’t reach those shadow-lined eyes. Very little attention was given to her room, to the personal effects contained within, instead giving her his attention as he nodded his head in the affirmative. One hand pulled out of his pocket, a wad of twenties folded up together, thick and green between his fingers. “I’m new, but I’m learning how this works,” he said softly, sliding the money back home in his pocket for safekeeping.
Her eyes made her look younger, awfully big and green with enough loneliness to drown in. She studied his eyes, and the darkness that whispered ghost stories in his sockets. He didn't look as if he'd gotten decent sleep in some time, but she knew what that was like.
When Liam said that he was new to this, she glanced away from him and onto the closed door. Part of her wished that he wouldn't have said that, reminded her of the fact that she was willing to turn him on to something bad. The darker, more prominent part of her brain knew that it didn't matter. If somebody was inclined to use painkillers, it was a small step to the poppy. Besides, she didn't have any of the necessary cash to score tonight. Robbing tourists was more of an option than turning tricks, but none of that was going to be critical tonight. That's why she invited Liam over, he'd bring the money. She could focus on making money for breakfast or motel room rent tomorrow when she wasn't sick. Cerise was already beginning to feel the ache and the itch of want with the knowledge of relief being so close. "Alright," she sniffed while glancing back to him. She seemed anxious, but her eyes were honest when she watched him from above the back of her hand, which she ran beneath her nose as the sickness worsened. "Give me sixty and I'll get it, that'll be enough." She could have asked for more or robbed him blind, but she didn't.
There was still enough of Liam’s naivety left that he didn’t suspect Cerise of anything but what she spoke of, even taking into account their disastrous first meeting which had left him unconscious in the hallway outside the Marvel door. Liam was not one to hold grudges, even with how everything had changed, and perhaps that was part of the reason he had ended up in this situation to begin with. A smarter man would have walked away from Tristan the first disastrous meeting, but he had gone back. And repeatedly gone back. Perhaps he deserved the world he had fallen into.
So when Cerise asked for sixty, he gave a short nod of his head, pulling out the wad of bills, and it wasn’t three twenties that he peeled off but four, a little extra, thanks, generosity in the face of everything else that they were doing. It was a misguided gesture, but it was a sliver of the Southern boy peeking through who had been raised with his mama’s manners. “You want me to wait here or?” he asked, sliding his hands back in his pockets once she had taken the bills, shoulders hunched up towards his ears, narrow things with the shirt hanging off of them awkwardly.
She took the money and counted it out with a spitslick thumb. It was more than she'd asked for, which was a little good and a little bad. It meant that they could get more, which was always a dangerous thing with drugs like these. She wasn't beyond stealing from somebody.. quite the opposite these days, really. But she did believe in a certain code of ethics as far as drugs and money went. Liam had come all of the way here with the money, she wasn't going to turn on him. Not in her own motel room, especially. Cerise shook her head, dark curls fanning across her face and dope-skinny shoulders as she shoved the wad of cash in her back pocket. "You don't want to meet people like this," she offered with a genuine, albeit brief smile.
"I'll be back in ten minutes," she promised. Stepping into some running shoes, she moved to the dresser and pulled a handgun from the top drawer. Tucking it into the waistband of her shorts at the small of her back, she gave Liam another reassuring glance while making her way out the door. In this line of bartering and copping, Cerise had been robbed enough times that the gun was a necessity for little visits like these. Although that was only one of about ten dozen reasons that she had a gun in the first place. "I'll be right back," she made that second promise before tugging the door shut behind her, securing him in the creepy solitude of her motel room.
True to her word, the door opened some fifteen minutes later, and Cerise reappeared. She slid the handgun back onto the dresser and pulled the drugs from her pocket for a toss onto the bed's scratchy coverlet. A couple capped insulin needles and six wax paper sachets with red dragons stamped on the front. She made her way to the bathroom sink, filling up a glass with some tap water before calling over her shoulder. "You should snort your's," she offered with matronly suggestion. Cerise was fairly positive that Liam didn't know what he was doing when it came to things like this. Nice people never did.
The combination of her words and the reassuring glance did nothing to quell the nausea that swelled up at that brief sight of the gun, immediately bringing back Seven, the gun leveled at his face, and as soon as Cerise had tugged the door shut behind her, Liam sunk down to sit heavily on the bed, head held in his hands. Fingers threaded back through his hair, and time slid by unnoticed until the door opened once again and Cerise came through. He looked up in a startled fashion, blue eyes wide with surprise, though he relaxed moment later as she tossed the wax paper sachets onto the mattress. He didn’t like that feeling that erupted deep inside him at the sight, the pull, the desire, and it took more than he cared for to look away and back towards where she had disappeared to. "Yeah, of course,” Liam said quietly, pushing a hand back through his hair as he got up to his feet, pacing the room for a moment before settling against one wall, his arms folded over his chest.
He seemed nervous. It actually made her smile a little, the first thing in a long line of events that had made her cry instead. Not that she seemed like a woman who cried. Maybe the shitty motel room was something to be sympathetic toward, but a girl with that many scars was never one for sympathy. That kind of shit did nothing but make her uncomfortable. All kindness did. Normally she would have felt anxious about using his money to procure dope, but she knew that he didn't dance the seedy underbelly rainbow connection like she did. It could be labeled a convenience fee if she ever got to feeling especially moral about it. Although honestly, morality didn't fit into most of Cerise's life. If she wanted to just halfway guilty for all of the bad things she'd done in her life, she might as well jump off a fucking bridge. Still, Cerise did believe in karma to a certain extent. It was potentially the only reason she hadn't lapsed back into the good ol' hoodlum days.
"You nervous?" She finally said what she'd been thinking, and it was mostly a tease, although a little bit serious. The glass of metallic tasting city water was set gently on the nightstand as she took a seat on the edge of the bed. She tried to spend as little time as possible in front of that bathroom mirror, and she never used in front of it. Initially, she'd been fascinated by drugs and the way that responsibility and shame could melt away with her pupils until there was nothing but warm, fuzzy, fearless relief. That kind of shiny newness wore off eventually, and these days it took a lot for her to face herself. Especially when she was at her worst. This was the worst, wasn't it? She had nobody. Except for the rarity of tonight, her life resembled a sentence of solitary confinement at the bottom of a damp, hopeless well.
"Here, you can go first." She dumped a couple of sachets onto the back of the holy bible, and passed over for him to cut up and inhale.
Nervous. That was one way to put it, but it hardly summarized his feelings neatly. Instead, he pressed his back against the wall, eyeing the bible that she had passed over towards him, and then with a small nod of his head, an answer to both of her questions, perhaps, Liam stepped forward and took the book, the wax paper sachets, and he sunk down to the questionable carpet of the hotel floor to sit. He was quiet as he worked, hands gripped with the tiniest of tremors. “Sorry,” Liam murmured after a moment, still bent over the book on the floor. “I’ve never- Well. Not since the first time. In front of someone.” His brow furrowed down in confusion that this was what had him concerned, using in front of someone else.
She gave him a look. It could have been transcribed into an amused Really? She didn't argue with him however, and she didn't make fun. Cerise's skinny shoulders moved with a faint shrug before she turned and collected the glass of water from the nightstand. Gulping it down in a few sips, she rose from the edge of the bed and made her way toward the bathroom in order to collect some more and give him the privacy that he must have desired. The water cut on and it would be enough to disguise what he was doing, even if they both knew. Cerise wondered about how shiny and new he was. She couldn't ever remember being shy, not about this anyway. Of course, when she'd started using it had been a necessity just to keep moving or to keep from absorbing the despair of that hell she'd crawled into like a rabid dog deadset on dying. She hated thinking about those days, but her mind always went back there. It was so long ago, but it wasn't ever going to go away. Her demons were immortal. Sniffing the thought away, Cerise watched herself while she refilled the glass. It was a game sometimes, to stare into her own eyes and wait for a sign of the person she'd once been. It never came though.
She cut the water off and made her way back to the bed with the fresh glass, taking a small sip this time. "You okay?" She asked softly while quirking a brow and trying to discern if he'd done some or not.
Somehow, it was easier without her watching, hovering somewhere close by, and even though Liam was aware of her presence only feet away, some of the tension drained from his shoulders. There was more than a little shame in what he was doing, a taint that spread over him and what he did, but the hunger, the need that he wanted to deny, it was more than he could deal with. So he suffered through the shame instead as he leaned over the book, the neat and tidy white lines waiting. There was no thought as he did two of them, quickly, in a row. First one nostril, then the next, and then he was sitting back and rubbing at his nose, letting the powder do it’s magic.
When Cerise returned from the bathroom, Liam glanced up, sniffing once before he gave a nod of his head, leaning back with his hands braced upon the dirty carpeting. “Yeah, I’m good,” he assured her, a faint smile coming to his lips. It didn’t come with a rush that left him reeling, but it snuck up on him bit by bit, easing everything away, and that was what he sought. Those handful of moments where he felt good, truly good, even if it came on the heels of something that wasn’t so good. “Sorry for...” And he waved a hand in the air at his behavior, shoulders shrugging. “Thanks for understanding. I appreciate it. A lot.”
"You don't have to thank me." She said the words with a crooked, half-squint look of speculation that said she wasn't entirely sure of what he was thanking her for, or maybe that she just wasn't used to being thanked for things like that. To be fair, it had been a long time since she'd sat in a room with somebody who wasn't an arsonist, a criminal, or a junkie. Cerise found herself blissfully low on conversation, but she had better things to do than talk anyway.
Years and years of practice made for a brief administering of the drugs. Everything was mixed up, drawn up, and shot up in a couple of minutes. She dropped the needle onto the nightstand with a sleepy fumbling of fingers. It was difficult to connect the furthest part of her extremities with her brain, and all she really wanted to do was lie back with her eyes closed. Not because she was sleepy, but rather because focusing on anything more than the way her body felt warm and wonderful was overwhelming. Cerise slumped back against the comforter, and when she lifted her hand the action was so slow that it seemed like she was pulling loose from an invisible tar pit. She ran some fingers across her eyes, trying to focus on some degree of consciousness.
"Why did you start using, Liam?" Her voice was thick like syrup. A pleasure that went beyond sex -- it was honey on toast, Christmas Eve in front of fireplaces, and a hug that one could just sink into.
As Cerise did her thing, the sound of the needle dropping on the nightstand echoing for a long while in his ears, he watched as the drugs took effect, the slump of her shoulders, and he could recognize those feelings, even if they weren’t as strong in him. He wondered, he thought, but he didn’t have the courage to do that. “Escape,” Liam answered quietly in response, shifting slightly so that he was sitting with his back against the bed, head tilted back so he could catch some slight of her. “Depression. Anger. I thought it could help. And it did.” Was he proud of what he was doing, would he recommend it to anyone else? No. But the moments were thought disappeared and nothing mattered, it was what he lived for anymore.
Her dark, grimey curls plummeted off the suicide edge of the mattress, and with her head tossed back like that, she could see him. Maybe not clearly, since her eyes kept slipping closed with the beauty that came from peace, that rich and welcoming feeling of at last. When it went away, she'd be sad and angry at herself. But right now everything was good. She liked the sound of his voice, or maybe she just liked not being alone. She'd been alone for a long time now. Even when around other people, inside of her head it was a quiet cell that never got any visitors. Honestly, she usually preferred things that way. Abused dogs know how to bite, and she wasn't good at much else. She wasn't educated, and Cerise might have lamented that fact while in discussions with an author if she were in her right mind. But she wasn't. So she just smiled a little with her eyes closed. Her face was pale, but there was a warm blush navigating its way through the freckles. "It does for a bit yeah.. but it also becomes one more thing to be depressed and angry about." The topic was somber, but Cerise smiled dreamily as she rolled onto her side, trying desperately to keep her eyes open so that she could focus. She wanted to be concerned over the fact that she'd let a perfect stranger into her sanctuary, but she just didn't have the energy for that kind of thinking right now.
"You'll stop eventually, though.. I can see it.." She waggled her fingers toward the ceiling, signifying the future. He wasn't destined for this. It was probably a pleasant vacation, though.
“At least this is something I can control,” he said softly, and as she looked towards him, their gazes meeting for a brief moment, he reached back towards her, fingers skimming over that pool of dark curls that spilled over the edge of the bed. “I don’t have control over anything else,” Liam murmured. “Get depressed. Get angry. I just find some more, and it all bleeds away again.” His voice had grown thick with the fog that had settled over him, a peace that he had been seeking for so very long. And in her presence, calm and quiet in its own way, it was easy to get lost, to ignore the details and focus on the fog that clouded everything over into something he could live with. Fingers twined in one curl, winding it around two of his fingers, and he let out a soft sigh, blue eyes falling closed with the exhaled air. “Maybe you’ll stop too. Maybe I’ll stop. Or maybe I’ll just fade away someday and no one will notice.” Because that’s how it felt at times. Seven, Sam, everyone else he knew. They’d go on, with or without him, and maybe they’d be better off without him and his insecurities.
She should have froze, or maybe she should have reacted with the frightened, static-jerk that was her trademark when a man reached for her. He didn't want to hurt her, though. He was only reaching for her hair, and not even in an affectionate way, but in a manner that seemed to her like he'd only just realized she had curls at all. Kind of like how her own thoughts had to catch up to the situation, and by the time she was done analyzing what he was doing, he was already doing it. There was a disconnected intimacy in it. Not sexually charged, but rather like finding a mirror after a stint in solitary confinement. She was curious, and she wanted to know what his hair felt like too. In the manner of a child that didn't think to stop itself, her arm draped across the bed, and her wrist flopped over the edge where he sat. Cerise's fingers bent back, twisting a lock of his dark hair around her knuckle as she mirrored him. Her green eyes lacked focus, but she was fascinated. Human contact felt a bit like discovering one of the wonders of the world these days.
"You're sad," she whispered. His voice didn't relay it, the drugs made it thick and sleepy. She was able to see past the sound, though, and into the words.
Hearing it phrased like that, stated so simply but in a way that summed up so much of what he was feeling, it would have been jarring had it not been for the gloss the drugs painted over the world. “Yeah, I’m sad,” Liam murmured in response, closing his eyes halfway at the feeling of her fingers in his hair, mirror images of one another. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been happy,” Liam admitted, tipping his head back further, more of the tension leaking out of him. “You?” He was usually good at picking up at such things, but it had been a long time since he had been anything close to ‘usual’ for him. The world had turned into a tainted, grey thing, and there had been moments of clarity, of something resembling happiness, but he couldn’t remember the last time that had lasted more than a moment, more than just a heartbeat of relief. The fog was easier, jelly-filled thoughts that didn’t grab onto the sadness.
Her fingers flexed against his scalp, mentally cataloging the strange pleasure that came with moving her fingers so slow. It felt like being underwater. Cerise trapped some of his hair between her fingers, opening her hand a moment later to watch the dark strands spill off her palm as she lifted it slowly away from him. Blinking, she only seemed to realize what he'd asked her a full minute after he'd asked it. "People make me sad, but I make myself angry.. I guess that's why I don't like to feel anything. There's no in between anymore, and to be honest, I'm not sure how to fix it." She thoughtfully traced a fingertip down the curve of his cheek. "I'm not sure I want to. Everyone I've ever cared about is either dead or wants nothing to do with me, and its not the kind of thing that getting clean can fix."
Liam found himself turning in towards the finger against his cheek, a breath released as it trailed down, her words falling in behind it, slow and easy. He might not have been able to empathize with her situation, her feelings, but he felt as though he could understand where she was coming from. “I think that’s when you have to weigh the advantages of getting clean and staying the way you are. Which is better?” Because there were days when he couldn’t decide which would be better. Reality hurt, reality made him want to crawl beneath a bed and hide, but the escape had its price as well. Which was easier to pay?
Shifting slightly, Liam reached up to touch her hand, fingers ghosting over hers, feather light and barely felt, exploring the feel of skin beneath his own. Life had turned into a solitary thing, alone in his room, in his bed, and companionship had regained something novel to it.
"I think," she whispered, and the rest of the sentence slipped into a vast sea of wordless quiet for some time. Cerise became rather distracted with his fingers, in the same way that someone who'd never seen another human being might. It did feel strangely new and also strangely familiar. She didn't analyze why. Taking a deep breath, she sighed while remembering what she'd intended to say. "I think, as backwards as it is.. that I'm a better person when I'm like this. Less emotional, less volatile.. I don't hurt people when I'm hurting myself.. you know?"
She pressed her palm against his cheek, and spread her fingers to map his temple. His skin felt so warm under her hand, although she imagined that her fingers felt unusually warm too. Opiates did that. Rolling a bit onto her side, Cerise pressed the side of her face into the flesh of her arm while watching him. "Do you think you can stand up?" He had to be less high than her, and her tone of voice said that she wasn't entirely sure standing was an option for her right now. Still, she had an idea.
“No, I get what you mean,” Liam murmured in response, because he did get it. All that anger, all the things that boiled up and bubbled inside, when they were directed at yourself, other people didn’t suffer for it, not directly, at least, and sometimes, that was easier. But then his thoughts derailed as her palm pressed against his cheek, and he found himself turning into it, warmth against warmth, and it was enough to push the rest of the world away once more, if only for a short time. When her voice came again, quiet, drifting towards him, blue eyes slitted open slightly, focusing on her lips, then the question that had been uttered. “Yeah, I can,” he murmured, and it only took a slight amount of effort, though the regret at leaving that warm touch behind was harder to bear. Onto his knees, and then his feet, he was steady where he stood beside the bed, long limbs gangly with the short sleeves of his t-shirt, the baggy cargo pants he wore.
She smiled when he stood, although the expression wasn't entirely there. It was a smile in a dream, but her green eyes were open and she watched him while dropping her head back so that he was upside down. The new perspective was curious and not at all disorienting. With some effort, she lifted a hand and gestured to the door he'd come through originally. "Get the lights?"
Then, twisting onto her stomach, Cerise pulled herself slightly off the edge of the bed in order to punch her thumb against the vintage television. The volume was muted with another button a moment later. Cartoons were on, and the colors were a bluegreen ocean that glowed like Atlantis when he cut the lights off. Hooking her fingers into the edge of the bedspread, Cerise lowered herself to the floor eventually while bringing the blanket along with her. She tried to organize it as a pallet beneath herself, but the effort was more than she bargained for and it ended up as a kind of flattened pile instead. Making room beside herself for Liam, Cerise stretched her arms out over her head. "Come lay down." The glow from the television was cast across the stucco ceiling like colorful shadow puppets.
When he stood, he wasn’t entirely sure what it was she had planned, but there was little room in him to offer up arguments just then, so he got the lights, the world cast into darkness for a brief moment until she turned the television on. And then, Liam simply watched. Watched as she slipped to the floor, the blanket pulled along with her, and as the cartoons flickered across the screen, Liam couldn’t help the smile that pulled at his lips. Everything else considered, the offer was nothing he could refuse, so he kicked his shoes off and padded over to where she had arranged the blankets, sinking down on top of them beside her, the world a soft and fuzzy thing with rounded edges.
All of the little dots on the ceiling could nearly be mistaken as stars if one squinted just right, and the water stains could have been galaxies. When Cerise was alone, she tended to count her sins on those make believe stars, but right now it was possibly just to appreciate them for the sight alone. "You can almost make constellations," she whispered with no awareness of the fact that she hadn't had a conversation outloud just now about how the ceiling looked like a universe. She sighed, content and warm for the first time in a long time. She pressed her cheek against his shoulder and closed her eyes for a moment, enjoying the way her body seemed to melt into the comforter beneath them.
"You don't have to stay," she offered after some silence. Although the statement was a little sad, like she didn't mean it.
Even if her thoughts hadn’t been aloud, it was easy to follow where she was going. The mention of the word constellations brought up thoughts of stars, and as he looked up towards the ceiling, the glow from the television, the patterns in the ceiling, he saw where she was coming from. Liam gave a nod of assent, and as she pressed her cheek against his shoulder, Liam reached down to thread his fingers with her own, a point of contact, warmth against warmth against the world. “I know I don’t have to stay,” he whispered, not wanting to break the silence that had fell into their world, “but I want to.” And truly, he did. This was peace, the things he was looking for. Why would he abandon that now?
When he said that, she smiled and her mouth moved against his narrow shoulder for a momentary peck of affection. He was pretty much a stranger, and while the world was full of those, there was a weird sense of kinship that came with destroying yourself in the same manner. A camaraderie in their self abuse. It was a brief union built of necessity and sadness, but in this moment, she didn't feel quite so alone. Liam filled in the gaps for everybody that she missed, he felt like a second chance at something less horrible. Right now he could be the boy from her youth that she used with, the one that eventually left her -- twice. When he got better, which she knew he would -- not everyone was a lifer like she was -- she could force him into the missing puzzle piece that Jack's absence had left behind. Because she had faith that Jack was going to get better too. Nothing that bad could stay, not for somebody that she cared about so much. With her green eyes closed tight against his shoulder, she could even imagine distant people that she hadn't thought of in years. People she missed desperately and wanted so very badly to be close to again, but had no way of doing so. Whether they were dead or just vanished in the dustbowl smoke that rose after years of separation.. she could imagine them now. That was the beautiful thing about drugs like this, the waking dreams. The reason so many artists and authors resorted to its siren call. Cerise kept her eyes screwed shut tight, and her breath came out in a shaky little exhale when she started to cry.
Waves. The world was full of waves, moments of glorious beauty when you crested above everything else, but every high had its lows, and he felt hers as she sank down into it, sliding down towards the darkness that was just as powerful as the good that came as well. When the tears came, the breath that trembled, Liam didn’t say anything as he turned in towards her, gathering her into his arms, because that was what Liam did. He was a man who comforted, who was the rock others could rely on, and here, he could be that again. Those arms were thin and narrow, but there was strength in them still. One hand threaded through her hair, and as close as they were, there was nothing other than comfort in his touch. “I know,” he murmured, and it felt as though he did know. The world was full of things that hurt, that seared through to leave their imprint without permission, and he was all too knowledgeable about how those wounds could continue to hurt weeks and months later.
He didn’t murmur sweet nothings to her, false assurances that everything would be okay, that in the morning, things would be better, because those kind of things were lies. It was nothing he could guarantee, nothing he could assure her of, so he offered the one thing that he could give without doubt. His presence.
The sadness eased as quickly as it overwhelmed, and the waves metaphor wasn't that far off. The emotion was a tide, and she could feel it drifting out of her after it'd flooded completely. Drop by drop and tear by tear until she was dry again and the vast forever of her loneliness didn't seem so daunting anymore. She didn't say anything after the brief sniffling stopped, but rather sank into the warm line of his body with her cheek still pinned to his shoulder. The minutes went by with the television still glowing in candy blue colors, and consciousness was a seesaw. Not quite awake, but never quite asleep. A limited and static awareness of her surroundings paired with snippets of dreams. Dreams, never nightmares. The drugs were the only way she could sleep anymore, even if she never quite got that deep into it. It was impossible to, but everything these days was a lose/lose situation.