Who: Em/Death -> Iris What: Reality comes crashing back in Where: Gotham -> Passages When: After her discussion with Eddie. Warnings/Rating: SADS. TIMES A BILLION.
If she was honest with herself, Em had known that something was off. She didn't feel quite right, Selina was complaining of a cold - or a flu - when she so rarely was sick, even Stephanie mentioned something feeling strange. The party had been the start of it, feeling like she'd somehow known Eddie before he even introduced himself, even though they'd never met before. Not that she could remember, at least. But things were so familiar. Things made her stumble. Things made her question.
When she'd seen the news about him attacking the Commissioner, her first impulse was to check on Stephanie. Who, while they'd met because of tutoring sessions to make sure Steph didn't fail her history courses, had turned into something more like friendship than Em had with most people (other than her sister, of course). And maybe the strange familiarity with Stephanie's boyfriend could have been played off as knowing him through listening to Steph talk about him, but it had seemed like something more than that. It had been uncomfortable and laced through with a stomach-turning sort of deja vu until he'd left her at the edge of the ballroom. She hadn't lied when she'd told him that talking to him, thinking about him, made her somehow both sad and angry at the same time. It had been the truth when she'd said that something made her not want to talk to him at all. She hadn't told him that he made her feel like something was missing.
And she hadn't told him that, with those last few lines they'd written, something had changed. Her apartment had grown dimmer around her, the lights not quite reaching the corners, and she chose to not study it too closely. No, it was her hands that had caught her attention. She knew how they were supposed to look - like anyone else's hands. She'd always been pale, but there was at least an underlying hint of pink to her skin, her fingers slim but strong enough to handle everything she needed to do. But the more she stared at her hands, the stranger they looked. No longer the way they should. Her skin went grey and dry, the bones of her hands easily mapped from knuckles to wrist, those wrists looking delicate enough to snap with one wrong movement. She clenched her fingers into fists, and her hands ached with the sort of chill that felt as if it would never be chased away. When she tipped her head forward, the hair that fell forward wasn't silky and brushed through, but tangled into ropes as thick as her thumb, limp and colorless.
Her heart raced in her chest for long, frantic minutes until with another breath she realized that she had no heartbeat at all, didn't need that breath she'd just taken. She wanted it to stop - all the realizations of everything that was wrong. Though she couldn't quite tell if it was the bad things that were wrong, or the good. Her whole body shook as she wished hard for her big sister to come and tell her that everything was going to be alright, and shook even more when she remembered that she didn't have a big sister. And as if that one realization had opened the floodgates, everything came rushing back in.
She felt crazy as she tried to sort through what was fact and what was fiction, made harder by wanting to cling to those fictions as they slipped away. Selina wasn't her sister, Stephanie was not her friend. She shouldn't have been talking to Eddie, not at all. Gotham was not the place it seemed, and she held no true place in it other than someone - something - that people wanted gone. Gone and unmade. She wanted to cry, but nothing came, so she simply wrapped weak arms around herself and shook until she was afraid she would shake herself apart. She couldn't feel people like she once had (and the knowledge of what she had once been only made things worse), but she could feel the suicides in Gotham like needles in her skin - the hopeless souls who had given up in the face of what was real. And for a sharp, painful moment, she wished she could join them. Instead, the hotel pulled her back through the door.
Iris stumbled as her feet hit carpet, and her legs gave out almost instantly. She staggered just far enough to touch the wall opposite the door, and then slumped down to the floor in a mirror of the curled position that Death had been curled into. Her own arms were too thin as she wrapped them around herself, her own hair limp where it slipped out from the messy braid at the back of her head. She wore the sort of clothing that she'd taken to wearing in her apartment - oversized, layered shirts and pants that had no right to be seen outside of home or a gym. She remembered not being concerned by what she was wearing when she left the apartment. She remembered not being concerned by much of anything. She remembered talking to Sam even though she'd promised not to, talking to other members of her family, to Neil. She remembered an invitation to a party that she'd said she'd try to go to, and being so glad that people were talking to her, but no. Everything was wrong. They hadn't spoken to her because they wanted to. They'd done it because she'd broken a promise and had once again become a problem for them.
The crushing hopelessness and sadness washed over her in a way that had been absent for that short, blissful time. It was (if possible) worse in its return. She knew she should get up, move away from the door, make her way back to the apartment. But she just couldn't bring herself to do it. So she simply remained, curled in on herself in misery, on the hotel floor.