Re: the lighthouse, inside.
"Wait, wait, wait." Creak and croak, and the lightkeeper's voice complained like the light above did as it turned its face outward. "Telling me that stuff that happened will always happen again? That if stuff hasn't happened yet, then it won't happen at all? That's shit." There was something that wasn't precisely vexation in her voice, because the logic welled up water in her lungs and made her fear she'd drown again, just because she'd drowned once. Maybe she already believed that a little, and the woman weighed down by a sopping straightjacket of a dress, she didn't want to drown again. "So don't try. You say don't bother? You say there's no point, because failure will just come again?" Her springtide voice, young, fluttered with impotence. "Just give up? Is that what Smokey would do?"
With the door heavy and cold at her back, she scoffed once more, but this time the sound was quieter. Less the braying of seagulls in ugly dialog, and more something small and trapped that was clinging to deteriorating bravado. "Why keep trying? The alternative is not trying. Not trying is bad. You don't get it, Smokey." She motioned above her to the corpse of bricks that was falling apart and crumbling inward, but that still kept her there, insufficient for even the presence of a smokey stranger. "I got to try. This isn't enough." It wasn't. The lighthouse flung its light outward, and that had been enough for a long time, but it wasn't anymore, and the lightkeeper knew that. She punctuated the thought with another slosh of cold water at his shins, because stomping made impotent young girls feel better, even when they were lightkeepers with rough voices and rough manners. "Less harm for who?" The addition was small, and it didn't bounce off the walls.
The nubilous yellow light ensconced upon the stone wall watched as he stepped back, and while her features were still in shadow, there was a flicker of illumination at the possibility that he'd give her the shirt. But the light faded again with each failed attempt on his part, and the shivers that visibly wracked her shoulders in that rheumy light became more pronounced. She reached out a hand in search of a smokey wrist to seize, if she could. "Okay. It's okay. Maybe you're right about trying." The lightkeeper, when it came to herself, surrendered easy and without any of the tenacity that defiantly kept the light turning on the world outside.