Re: Marvel: Cris & Sam
He was fine on his feet. He wasn't concussed, he didn't think. His ears rang still from the shatter of Sam's scream, and he was dizzy, but he was okay on his feet. He was steady and it still didn't hurt. There was no ache, no pressure—it was a release, what he'd done. Messed up, and, yeah, he got that. He knew it looked scary too, but there hadn't been many outlets to choose from there on the sidewalk. He couldn't hurt Sam, he wasn't going to break his fist on the glass-bright concrete, but he'd had to do something. Moments like that, he had to do something, wound up and all that. His teeth grating each other. It was violent, but the head thing did the trick. It got him back to calm, to a person who could think and do what needed to be done, instead of sitting with his heart growing too big for the cavity of his chest, useless, dazed, staring, and painful, lungs empty and blueing.—This was better.
Sam didn't get that, but she was coming down from the ugly stars of her crack high and Cris didn't expect her to get why she'd freaked him out so much, toes dipping into the fatal current of traffic. Not now, anyway. He didn't expect her to get what she was doing, and it was that fact, bad as it was, bad as it was how she got there—shelters and strangers and sex—that at least gave him some hope. Sofia had been straight when she jumped. Maybe Sam only wanted to 'cause the crack stripped her of whatever buffer it was that kept her from making the plunge. Maybe.—Okay, that wasn't the most hopeful hope. She was still suicidal. But, suicide was the kinda thing you didn't come back from, as dumb as it sounds to have to say that. Being suicidal was better than committing suicide, whether that was differentiating between two shades of gray or not, to Cris, it made all the difference.
Because he thought they could work through it, once she was right in the head. They'd been close to it before all the Neil stuff.—Though what options did she have now? Cris could get her somewhere, after the precinct, somewhere they'd watch her, but he knew how that could feed that monster, all-black and consuming and exhausting, of hopelessness; being locked up, forcefed pills from paper cups, he got how that could make it worse. He could take her to his place, but she'd hate it too.
Cris wanted to help Sam help herself. He wanted to help her get a place she wanted to be, if she wouldn't stay with him, but to get a place through enough work of her own that she didn't feel like she owed anyone anything, least of all Neil.—Neil, who he was gonna have to have another word with, 'cause it sounded like he'd gone and told Sam exactly what it was about the whole thing that bothered him while she was already feeling more than a little guilty. Neil, who was selfish enough to do that to a girl who'd had to ask him for a place to live. Yeah, a word. A word or his Louisville slugger to the guy's kneecaps. He could pay for new ones anyway, right? Cabrón.
But maybe right now, the housing thing was a background thing. Yeah. They got to the precinct after a few minutes' walking, her being pulled along by a guy bleeding out the back of his head. But it was New York. No one looked all that long.