WHO: Antigone and Joan WHEN: Friday morning, after Antigone's no good very bad night. WHERE: Joan's place WHAT: The morning after WARNINGS: Probably no biggies.
Antigone woke up, and wished she hadn't.
Noo she thought, miserably, toward her waking brain. Stay asleep, say unconscious, stay stopped.
It didn't work. It never did. Antigone groaned, pulling her wrist closer to her chest. Her hand smelled of hospital. Her mind smelled like Ares. Her stomach tasted like Melpomene's words. All her feelings were cross-wired and wrong.
With a physical gag, Antigone opened her eyes and stared at Joan's ceiling, trying to banish last night into a much more distant past.She breathed a deep, shaken breath. She could wallow, stuck in these feelings, for hours, days. Maybe she should. Maybe she deserved to drown herself in this agony.
But through Joan's bedroom door, Antigone heard a chair push back across the floor, and light footsteps. Maybe she did deserve to drown, to agonise, to torment herself with the muse's words over and over and over, but it was unfair to force Joan to scrape Antigone off her floor, unfair to ask Joan for help and then make her suffer along with her.
Uuuuuuuugh, thought Antigone.
Resigned, grudgingly, not to be the most selfish version of herself, Antigone shifted out of the bed. In doing so, she discovered a bruise down her back in the shape of a skip that she'd forgotten about. Her knees hurt from falling on them. Her shoulder ached like a ghost and her elbow, too, was haunted. And that was just the background pain.
But, aside from Joan, nobody on earth knew where she was. There was something immensely comforting about that. Antigone pulled on a light hoodie over the singlet she'd worn to bed (it was a struggle, and involved a lot of groaning and a couple of well placed swears) and went out, stiffly, to find her friend.