Darker London

Every day felt long, unreasonably so. There was no need for the day to have so many hours in it when Helena was just counting them down until she could go back to bed. She thought other people might have read it as depression, but she wasn't really sad or numb so much as she was constantly hungering and anxious. About everything. Living in London, living with the people she did: it made for a stressful life when you were always wondering the next thing to hit.

But maybe she just assumed her life was more stressful. Sure, other people didn't face demons and church monsters, but they had to deal with all the other things that troubled Helena. She wasn't special. She was dying at exactly the same speed as all the other dumb humans around her.

( And I don't think on why I'm here or where it hurts )

Helena wasn't doing well.

This wasn't a new experience. Helena hadn't been doing well for the last six months, as much as she tried to keep the extent of it under wraps. She knew the main trigger for her slow downward spiraling was the police putting her rape case on 'inactive'. She couldn't find anyone else who would testify in a court or even talk to the police, so the whole thing had become pointless. Her solicitor had made it very clear that it would be near impossible to get a conviction without anyone else coming forward. All the guards had really good reputations, and Helena still could be 100% sure which ones had been her attackers in the first place. Sure, she'd gotten a name from one of the girls who had agreed to talk to her before pulling out, but without her going on a stand it was worthless.

( Babe, there's something broken about this )

This last year felt like the longest year of his life. Each month stretched to burst, packed full of more things than felt possible. Even the long gaping weeks of emptiness felt huge, the days of the Bermuda Triangle autopilot - but huge like a chasm was huge, huge like a desert was huge. How could so much emptiness fit into such a relatively short span of time?

The terrified-glorious-manic road trip summer, the drawn out shell-shocked autumn, the winter of discontent, and now spring was starting, again, and it was April, again. Some days Joss wanted to grab time by the neck and make it stop; he wasn't ready, everything was moving too quickly, he couldn't keep up, he couldn't keep up. Some days it was the strongest thing he felt - this feeling that he was being dragged behind a horse bound by his wrists and running to keep himself upright but the horse was faster and he couldn't keep going at this speed, he'd trip soon and smash himself against the ground. Some days he'd be sitting on the bus and the feeling that he wasn't moving fast enough crushed his chest in a panic, and he couldn't make it stop, couldn't appease it, because the feeling didn't want anything he could give it. It just wanted to remind him that time was passing and he was stuck, stuck stuck stuck like he'd died, he was a ghost, he was in limbo while the world rushed on and he struggled to keep up.

( ... )

Jinx didn't own a suit, never had. What he did own was a pair of neat black trousers and a black button up shirt to go with it. It was an outfit that he didn't wear often, but it was still more than he wanted to. Sometimes he thought about getting rid of it, a sort of 'don't encourage the worst' mentality, but then he always needed it again.

( He didn't know where he was walking to )