Gabriel Reed (matchesmade) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-08-31 21:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | jane foster |
Who: Gabriel Reed (and Eloise Murphy)
What: Sending her away
When: Recently.
Warnings: Sads.
Gabriel always drove the way he had been taught. Hands at ten and two and the slick glide of one gear into the next, the smooth uninterruption of the engine a soft and complacent purr. He did not drive like a model student that morning, he drove with the grinding protest and the speed of early morning clear roads. He drove like damp-soaked fear, like palms sweating hard against the wheel and the whisp of a voice down a telephone line. The woman who was becoming (each time he saw her, the memory of her sharp and brilliantine like gin poured into crystal) fragile as moth’s wings, inching closer to something Gabriel could not know, could not prepare for as he prepared for those other things that caused sweat-drenched nightmares, that were death waiting in the corner for its dance.
There was a truck-stop. Pin-pointed on an electronic map he should not have had and had anyway, Eloise a heap of elbows and knees, too sharp points in thinly insubstantial frock beneath it, and if Gabriel looked at her with the outward calm of jobs, of gathering the pieces of something fractured back into themselves for long enough to triage, it was shuttered. Early morning light and heavy desert dust and he had thought long enough about the way he would hold his wife again when he had the chance to. It had never been like this. Tear-thick sobs and shocking fragility and the bruised-raw flesh of her feet. Her terror, her mind, blister-broken in Vegas heat and sunshine.
Gabriel always prepared for assignments as thoroughly as a model student might prepare for a lesson. All eventualities considered, carefully set aside. He did not prepare as he had for assignment, his voice low on the telephone, the rug rucked beneath his feet as he paced and Eloise loosely undone limbs in an armchair, sat like a drowsy child with drugs in her veins from a doctor called with panic in his voice. He called the right people, he drew up a prospectus as coolly inviting as stately homes and the place he had visited at Christmases with his wife, green grass and white stone and a hush to the name of the address - but warm in a way that place had never been, with nurses who had expensive training and kind hands.
He called her parents the once, he told them she would be nearby and he told them a lot very quickly of what he thought of the doctors they had let treat her, who had allowed her to walk away, to shatter like thin china. He had knelt beside the chair as the doctor leaned competently over her arm with a needle, and he had listened to the fear rise in her voice like water, a tragedy in one act - to talk of butterflies who could not be chased away, to letters from brothers like malevolency waiting in corners and under beds like a child’s night terrors, to wishes that the sun would finally set and the shadows fall low.
When Gabriel drove back from the airport with his car empty of the blanket she’d huddled in, empty of the nurse who had sat with stiff back and pressed uniform but her hand curled comfortingly around those of his wife, empty of the echo of the woman herself, he drove like a model student with his hands at careful ten and two on the wheel and his mind a shuttered blank.