Re: Coffeeshop: Hannah/Si
He didn't believe his eyes. His eyes had lied to him. All of his senses had. Over and over and over. Hallucinations, phantom scents, tastes, touch. And every time Si let himself trust one of the falsities, he was plunged deeper, deeper into uncertainty, deeper into a place without order and choked with fear. It was like being trapped in that dumbwaiter, alone, barred in, in the dark, with nowhere to go and something dead coming for him, tearing at him.—But, when you couldn't trust the world as it offered itself to you, you couldn't trust anything, and you definitely couldn't trust yourself. Si didn't. He never had. He didn't now. He didn't trust that Amy was Amy, but he didn't trust that she wasn't. She could be. What if she was? What if she was, but she was still dead? What if she wasn't? What if this woman had killed Amy? The more Si tried to push his thoughts away, as usual, the harder they came back. The mental image of a snapping neck was there. He tried to count to seven.
Hugging Amy, he was counting, but she pulled back when he was at a four, and he didn't open his eyes until he got to where he needed to be. This was a lot. This whole situation was a lot. That was what Rita would say. It was normal—it had to be fucking normal—to freak out. This was an abnormal situation. Amy, who was dead, wasn't dead, but she wasn't Amy, but she obviously was. She was as much as she wasn't, and Si was sobbing on her while people in the line for coffee kept looking back at them. He wanted to cover his face and go somewhere else. He rubbed his eye, he wiped a hand under his nose, and he might've gotten a handle on himself for a second, if she hadn't touched his cheek. "Remember—" It was hard to understand him through the tears, but he couldn't help it. "I told you not to go. Ever again. And you promised." Spit, snot, tears. She remembered his fucking coffee order, and he just kept thinking of her dead in a box.