Who: Iris What: Narrative Where: Her current in-patient residential facility When: Directly following her conversation with Toby Warnings/Rating: Bit angsty
Iris set the phone so carefully back onto its base, disconnecting the call with barely a sound. Something between her chest and her throat began to ache sharply, and she sat in the small room, staring at the phone, while she tried to swallow the feeling down. She'd been telling the truth - she knew what it was like to suddenly get a new doctor. The previous one often deciding that her care was simply too much for them to handle. It seemed as if a trained doctor should be able to handle a single patient, but she'd found that wasn't the case where she was involved. So she wasn't surprised by that.
She was surprised by the way it ached.
Dr. Fischer had been different than the doctors she'd had in the past - perhaps because he'd had to usher her back from her failed suicide attempt, perhaps because she'd begun their interactions by hating him for keeping her alive. Perhaps, even, it was because he knew what it was like to have someone else residing in your mind, and he helped with that as well when Death needed to go through the door to handle her own problems. Whatever the reason, when she'd demanded he take her somewhere other than the facility, the night news of Ian's death hit the journals, she'd felt safe when they ended up at his own home. She had been able to sleep soundly without the draining aid of medication for the first (and only) time in months. She hadn't had another night of rest that good since then.
She was fond. She had connected in her own mind. Foolishly, perhaps, all things considered. And now the breaking of the one-sided connection was something that bled with pain. Just like the still-painful scar of being removed from her family. She tried to surround all of it in her mind with a soft barrier of numbness, hard to do without aid of extra medication, but she did her best. It allowed her to open the door to the small room, return to the common area with her journal, and sit quietly until she could put words onto the page.
She had run out of people that she knew in the city. Dr. Roman would need to be contacted of course, but after that, she was lost, staring at the book. She felt, with the change in doctors, that she also wanted to leave the facility - what good would it do her, after all? She still ended up doing terrible things within the walls, as much as without. If she'd been given to someone that would return her to a strong regimen of medication, one that would leave her still and quiet enough to simply exist in the space where she was put, maybe she could have stayed. But without that, she no longer could remain in this place. But it raised the question of where to go.
There was really only one answer to the question, though it was one she remained wary of. It was too close to things she'd done wrong in the past, too easy for her to ruin even more. But she didn't know what else to do - the rest of her bridges seemingly thoroughly burned.