Samantha Winchester does not eat murdered animals (tofubacon) wrote in wariscoming,
She knew Jacob was talking, trying to reassure her, saying something about seeing how bad it was, but all Samantha could process was that he was moving away. Her hands curled in tighter around the fabric of his shirt and her teeth worked their way into her bottom lip until she drew blood, trying to stay close, trying to keep using the security of being held to block out everything from the light (bright, too bright after so many hours in the pitch-dark warehouse) to the fear. Even as gentle as he was being, however, Jacob was stronger than her, and her muscles felt like they had atrophied, like they’d gone through one burst of adrenaline too many and simply cut off ties to her brain. Her struggle was more a plea than a fight, and when she realized it was useless she simply gave up, let her fingers go boneless and her head loll back, dead weight, as Jacob placed her gently on the couch.
The couch was one they still had in her time, and she’d curled up at one end of it before school on the morning of the day they’d been snatched back in time. She remembered tucking her knees up almost to her chin and determinedly focusing on the last few pages of the chapter she was reading in her book as her father yelled for her from the front yard - ”Sammy, come on, let’s go, you don’t have to stop reading, just take a break. I’m taking you to the place where the books live kid.” The upholstery against her skin was as familiar as home, and Jacob hadn’t let go of her entirely, he was still steadying her, but it didn’t matter. She felt exposed in a way that had nothing to do with the fact that they’d cut off her shirt, vulnerable in a way that wasn’t in response to a specific threat, to an attack, but to the way the world suddenly seemed so much bigger, so much more sinister and watchful.
She wanted nothing more than to contract everything again, to press her face against her friend’s shirt or turn and bury herself as much as she could in the corner of the couch, but she couldn’t make herself protest any more, and so she tried to go blank instead, to retreat mentally even if she couldn’t physically. Her eyes focused somewhere just past Jacob’s left shoulder and then slid vaguely out of focus again so that everything was softened slightly, blurred. She tried not to feel the air like panting breaths on her stomach, crossed and crossed again by cuts as long as her torso or as short as tiny nicks, or on her throat where bruises purpled her skin in the shape of fingers exaggerated by the spread of the bruise so that it looked like a giant had choked her, fingers as big as sausages. Her whole body was tensed just slightly, looking more she’d resigned herself to being hit than looked over for injuries.
He has to see, managed to move through what felt like layers of cement to the forefront of her mind, he has to. Still, it was hard to care when all she wanted to do was hide.