Making a home (Alex, Danny, Deirdre, open)
Alex woke from a nightmare - not a screaming one, thank god - and sat up in bed in the dark, catching her breath, trying not to cry. In the dream her window had shattered and something had climbed in, and for too many long moments, sick with adrenaline as she tried to breathe quietly, she was too scared to look at the window and see.
Reality slowly filtered back in. She was in a room in a big house on Victoria Lane. It was, according to the people she lived with, 'Alex's room', but it did not feel yet like it belonged to her. The room was the biggest and the most expensive gift that she had ever been given and this was one of the roadblocks in her mind stopping her from thinking of it as her own thing.
Anyway - the window in the room that faced out into the night wasn't broken, and there was no glass on her floor, and nobody had tried to break in and get her. Eventually, Alex found the courage to turn on the light and prove it was true.
She swore, and pulled the covers further up her body, deciding what to do now. Not sleep, obviously. She would like a shower to wash the clammy, fear sweat off her, but it was the middle of the night and using the shower at this time might bother someone who had to work in the morning. Alex hadn't figured out anyone's schedules yet, only Danny's.
Alex didn't want to be the kind of flatmate that woke up in the middle of the night screaming and had two am showers, anyway. Danny had assured her that Deirdre and the others got it about nightmares and trauma but Alex didn't want to be that person here. She was okay with Cai and Danny and that knowing shit she'd been through and how much of a mess she was, but it seemed too weird to come out to people like Dylan's older sister, or her stoner brother, or the tall gamer boy whose real name couldn't possibly be Jinx, or the other flatmate Astrid who seemed to live next door more often than actually living here.
So she made sure her door was locked and the window bolted (whoever had lived in this room last had put serious bolts on the window, something that freaked her out and comforted her at the same time) and she sat in her bed and watched videos and drank till she felt too sick to stay awake any more.
She woke up again after sleeping through half the day and dragged herself out of bed, caring less about appearing a mess in front of her new housemates. Her head ached and she felt as sluggish and slow as the winter sun dragging its feet across the sky, and uncaring. It felt better, not to care.
She pushed a lamp off her bedside desk to show how little she cared about it, and the lamp didn't even have the decency to break, even when she kicked it afterwards.
Fine, whatever. "Fucking lamp," she muttered, turning her back on it and leaving her room so she didn't have to look at it.
There was laughter happening downstairs and the smell of baking. Alex was in two minds about it. She wanted a distraction from her own head, but, despite trying not to care, she still felt shitty for bringing the mood down. In the end the selfish desire for a distraction won out and she went downstairs to find Danny and Deirdre, hanging out in the kitchen, both of them looking a lot more awake, and cleaner, and healthier than she felt.