cassidy moran ; the beast (miroirs) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-09-27 22:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | beast, roxanne |
Who: Wren and Cass
What: Possibly the most depressing thread of all time where no one is actually killed! Hooray for us!
Where: Aubade #501
When: After this.
Warnings: You may need prozac when it's over? Also descriptions of panic attacks.
Panic attack.
The first time Cass had heard the phrase in reference to himself, he’d been laying in a hospital bed. He’d just fought his way through the cotton of anesthesia to something like wakefulness. It had been three days since the St. Anthony went down, and his limbs felt impossibly heavy and he thought for a long, agonizing moment that he was drowning.
The nurse called in the doctor, who verified her assumption that he was having a panic attack - gasping for air, fist clenched, toes curled, and screaming. The disorientation of waking up mingled with the memories his mind kept replaying combined to make for panic and fear like nothing he’d ever experienced, and his eyes were wild with it until they sedated him.
He hated that. He hated the embarrassment of waking up and looking at everyone’s concerned, pitying faces, and he hated being knocked out because he’d panicked, like an overreacting child who needed to be soothed. He couldn’t stop them from doing it, and it happened several more times that way - he panicked, tried to calm himself down, it didn’t work, and they knocked him out.
They had him speak to the hospital psychiatrist every week. She explained that the panic attacks were typical of post-traumatic stress, and that working through what had happened to him could make them go away, along with the nightmares and the flashbacks. He resisted her every step of the way, and when he finally went back home to finish his convalescence he rejected the idea of medication out of hand. The idea of relying on drugs to keep himself on an even keel hit him in his already shredded pride, and he decided that if he was going to keep panicking, he was going to deal with it in private and on his own.
In the ensuing years, it happened less and less. Once every few months, give or take, but those were months without stimulation or interaction with other people. Really, it was a wonder that this was the first one he was having since he crossed over.
He’d spent the entire night trying to keep himself level under mounting fear, and talking to Wren sent it all crashing down on him. He got as far from the computer as the side of his bed, where he curled up, head down and hands on the back of his head. Not the most dignified position in the world, trying to catch his breath, to stop the hammering of his heart in his chest, the feeling like the walls were falling down around him, the circle of thought around the fact that Wren could have died in that place he had sent her off to. Pathetic, shameful, but he was alone.
Somewhere in the midst of this he thought about how much safer she would be if he could only keep her close. If she would just take his fucking money and stay with him he could be sure she didn’t leave, didn’t go get herself hurt or try to fight criminals like that would accomplish something. He could protect her from her own deathwish, and from the people who would happily kill her for what she was doing.
And something in him reached out, and grabbed her, and pulled. It was like being tugged, being grabbed around the middle and yanked through space, sudden as a drop on a rollercoaster and about as pleasant for the stomach. There was about two seconds of nothing at all, and then solid ground, all at once, into the apartment.
Wren had been curled on the couch, and she’d been worrying about a million things. The fact that Eve was acting like a petulant child, the fact that Nobody was going to get both herself and Robin killed, the fact that she didn’t understand what had made Hal so angry, the fact that letting Charlie know he was her uncle might make Hal go away entirely, the fact that Cassidy refused to understand what was happening around him, and the fact that people were dying.
She had curled her legs beneath her, the sundress she wore baring the self-administered bandages on her shoulder, and she’d tried to sleep. Tried, but failed, because just as she’d closed her eyes, she’d tumbled onto the familiar carpet.
She didn’t yell, and she didn’t scream; she just didn’t have it in her to do either, and she sat up and looked around.
Cassidy’s apartment?
Then she saw him, looking terrible and so surprised. “Cassidy?” she asked, rolling onto her feet. “I’m not asleep,” she reminded herself, because she really did need to. “What just happened?”
He heard the sound of her rolling onto the carpet and looked up, eyes going wide. “Wren?” he echoed, because that made no sense at all. He waited for her to disappear, to prove to be nothing more than an illusion, further proof that he was simply going insane. But no, she was solid, and she was asking him questions that he had no answer to. “I don’t - I don’t know. How did you get here?” God, now she was here, seeing him panic. That only made it worse and sent him into a fresh loop while he did his level best not to look like he was panicking, which didn’t really work. He tried to be angry about the fact that she was there, and couldn’t. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, grabbing the edge of the bed and trying to stand despite the fact that he was shaking.
She watched the panic wash over him, watched that deep and thick fear in those blue eyes of his. She, herself, looked confused. She had started to fall asleep. and she had a felt a telltale tug, and then she’d been here, on his floor. She walked to the bed, closed her fingers around one of the bedposts, and she looked down at him. “I didn’t come here on my own, Cassidy,” she said with soft calm. “I can’t do that,” she added in Italian. She looked around, even as she held onto the post, and then she looked back at him. “Did you do it?” she asked, even though it seemed unlikely in his current state.
He ended up seated on the edge of the bed, since he really wasn’t going to get much further than that, trying to steady his breathing. “I don’t know,” he said, speaking to the floor, trying to think. “I didn’t - I don’t know what I can do.” Nothing had happened so far, and he had assumed that he couldn’t do anything - that maybe the common wisdom was wrong, and everyone didn’t have some grand ability. He grasped for the Italian, and it took him a long moment, but it forced him to think about something else, so he didn’t speak until he could find the words. “You’re alright?” he asked, trying to keep his voice as level as possible, eyes darting up to her. “I was worried about you.” He said it like it ought to have nothing to do with the state she’d found him in, but it occurred to him that it might have something to do with her showing up. Great. Was this going to happen every time he panicked?
She edged around the bed, and she slipped up onto the blankets, until she was sitting at his feet, a picture of serene confusion in a yellow sundress. “I’m fine,” she reiterated. She’d been saying that a lot lately, she realized. For someone who had spent a lifetime with no one worrying about her, this influx of concern was a strange and foreign thing. “I’m not careless, Cassidy,” she told him, and she believed it. She was careful, even in her vigilante work. If her ability didn’t work on someone, she serviced them and didn’t engage them in anything aggressive, after all. “Going to the meeting was a bad idea, but sometimes you have to do things to keep people you care about safe,” she said candidly. “Do you understand?”
She smoothed down the blankets with her fingertips. “You’ve never done this before?”
Having her present and close, where he could see that she looked tired but otherwise fine, did help. His heart began to slow a little. The reassurance that she was fine was backed up by something he could see. “You could have been killed,” he reiterated, but it wasn’t so much scolding as a naked admission of fear, and he shuddered. “Jesus.”
He did understand, and that made it unfortunately difficult to come back against it. “Who was it?” he asked, and looked over at her. It wasn’t much comfort - still out risking her life, but only going to the really risky events if protecting someone else called for it. “Why are you doing this?”
He watched her hands slide over the comforter. “No,” he said. He tried replaying the last few minutes in his mind. There had been something strange, to be sure, but pinning down exactly what it was or how it had worked wasn’t so easily managed. His shoulders sank. Clearly there was little use pretending she wasn’t here, or that this wasn’t happening, so he waved a hand, vaguely. “I haven’t - this hasn’t happened, not since I got here.” His chin lifted a little without him noticing - he wanted to be angry, wanted to come at this situation from a position where he felt safe, but that wasn’t going to happen.
She considered not talking to him about it, reminded herself of what she had told Eve. It held true, at least to a certain extent. He wasn’t Eve, who knew her past in bloody gore and detail, and he wasn’t Hal, who she respected and considered a confidant (even if he didn’t realize it), and he wasn’t Robin, who understood on some fundamental level what she did and why. He was clean and clear of all those things, and she realized she wanted that for him; he had enough broken in his soul, and he didn’t need this burden. She considered not talking to him about it, and she did just that, in the end. “Why did you want me here, Cassidy? What do you want from me?” she asked, direct and quiet, her fingers still passing over the blanket in a slow, graceful dance.
He noticed that his question went unanswered. That didn’t mean he was going to let it lie. “That’s not an answer,” he said, watching her. He needed to know. If she was going to keep risking herself, he needed to know what it was that made that make sense. What made her care.
“I-” he stopped. “I wanted to make sure you were safe,” he said carefully, watching her hands move, glancing back to his own. The shaking was stopping, thank god. “I was wishing you were here, where I could make sure you weren’t going to get yourself hurt, and that no one else was going to kill you because you decided to chase a cause.”
What he wanted from her was a much more complicated question, one he wasn’t really sure how to answer. He considered saying nothing at all, but that hadn’t gotten him anywhere so far, had it? “I just - I like you. When you’re around, things don’t seem...” he trailed off without finishing the thought. “I keep royally fucking things up. I’m tired of that. Really, I am. I want to get to know you better than I do, and I want you here.” He pulled that thought up short. He’d offered to pay her to be here, and that hadn’t suited, so he continued on quickly, “Around.” He sighed. “There’s something about you that I don’t really know how to explain properly. You’re something special, and I don’t want to see you get broken or hurt.” His hand wasn’t shaking quite so much when he slid it over hers. “I know you don’t feel the same way, but you...you matter to me, girl.”
She wanted to tell him that she thought he was too late, about the broken part, but she didn’t. She looked down at his hand on hers. The blanket under her fingertips was unbelievably soft, and the 500 dollars she’d left for Hal that morning was the last bit of money she had stashed away (her inheritance from her mother). She could work a handful of jobs to make rent in three days, but her shoulder was bandaged from a gunshot wound, and it reminded her too much of being 16 and walking the streets in a daze after her mother had died. Somewhere, since she’d started marking rapists, things had changed. Wren couldn’t exactly explain how, but they had. This man across from her, he didn’t want her in the way her clients normally wanted her, and he didn’t need her in the way they needed her. He didn’t understand her they way her own kind did, and he’d never understand what she did when she left his apartment. But the thought of the kind of quiet comfort that could come from a job like this made her shoulders sag in a kind of tired relief, and she swallowed her pride. “Three nights a week,” she said, voice quiet. “No other paid exclusives, rent and power, plus a hundred a week for spending money.” It was a low price, but she wasn’t offering him all seven days; she couldn’t do that, not with her side work.
Just at that moment, he probably would have taken anything she offered. It wasn’t as much as he wanted to be sure that she was safe, but it would make sure she got her rent paid, and it would keep her around three nights a week, even if she didn’t want to see him.
Apparently he was willing to sink that low, when there were mitigating factors involved.
She’d be able to pay for her own food, and she wouldn’t have to work to take care of her rent - that was going to need to be enough. “Alright,” he said. His heart had slowed almost back to normal, and there was nothing he could do to hide his expression, a complex combination of relief and something else, something like disappointment. So he was that man, apparently, the kind who had to go so far as to pay for company. Still. She’d keep doing the foolish things she was doing, but it would at least minimize the risk some, at least in her work. He made that his consolation, and he was going to have to be content with it.
What exactly he was going to do on those nights was completely beyond him. “What nights?”
The disappointment that shone through his expression made her sigh, made her slide her feet to the plush carpet. “I am what I am, Cassidy,” she told him softly. “This is me. I like expensive things, and I like waltzes and antique books, and I like feeling like I’m being paid because I’m wanted, not because someone pities me or is scared for me. That isn’t what I do. I don’t want a savior, and I don’t want a husband or a boyfriend. I would like a lover, but one that doesn’t want me to change. Life is hard, and life is tough, and it’s short - I don’t want to waste it feeling caged or unloved.” She leaned her cheek against the bed post, and she looked at him, knowing full well he couldn’t understand anything she was saying. He didn’t live like that, didn’t think like that, didn’t love like that. “If I take your money, then it’s a job. Do you understand?”
She was asking him to make a decision, to decide whether or not he could handle the idea that if he paid her in an effort to keep her safe and be sure she was taken care of, it was going to be a job to her and nothing more, because he couldn't be happy with her the way he was. He didn't know how to explain it in a way she could understand - he wanted her to change so she would be happier, safer, the way he was sure that she would be. He wanted her to be treated the way she deserved to be treated, not like an object. But if he paid her, that was exactly what he was doing. There was no way out of it.
He didn't want her to feel caged. He wanted her to feel loved, to be cared about, but apparently he was never going to fit that bill. At that point, what did it matter? If she was never going to love him, he might as well pay her to be around, and make sure she was taken care of. "I understand." He didn't get angry, he didn't shout, and maybe that was what was worst about it. The situation had defeated him. He had nothing in him to rail with against it.
She stood there quietly for a moment, just looking at him, and she was so tired in that moment. She just nodded, just once, and she gave him a soft smile that was pure grace, trained and bought in an etiquette class so she could land a job just like this one, and yet nothing like this one. “We can start on Wednesday,” she told him, shrugging her bad shoulder just a little. “So this can have a day to heal.”
His gaze lingered on her shoulder for a moment, and that seemed to strengthen his resolve. He still looked like a drowning man, but it made him more sure that this was the right thing to do. "Alright," he said, getting up from the bed. "I'm sorry I -" He pressed his lips together, and shook his head. "It won't happen again."
She actually smiled a little at that. “You might as well try it and see if it happens again. 6 pm? I’ll be waiting for the tug.”
He watched her a moment, and then smiled faintly. "Alright, I'll try it."
He walked over to the door of the bedroom, pretending for all the world that she hadn't seen him hunched into a ball on the floor ten minutes before, walking her out into the hall.
She kissed his cheek, her lips cool and soft, and she padded downstairs and to the door. She was familiar with the apartment in a way she was familiar with few others in the area, and she caressed the wood at the door as she tugged it open. “Go back to sleep, Cassidy,” she said, her finger sliding down to the cool, cool metal of the doorknob.
He was standing halfway up the steps, watching her go to the door, and he smiled slightly at the order before going back upstairs.