Breaking Point [Pre-midterm] The world kept turning. Days were passing, the baby was growing, and Isis was sinking. She could feel her life flying by her, a dizzying blur she could barely even observe. She could focus just enough to function professionally - to autopilot her way through her classes and through Head of House responsibilities - and somehow got through the days. The world just kept turning. It turned and it turned and it turned and it turned and it turned and-....
Nathan had to notice. That was her greatest fear, but how could he miss it? She was different now. She tried so very hard to hide it, but there was a blankness to her, and anxious skittishness that, while she had never been a particularly stable person, she had never exhibited. And she was so tired. Isis had never watched so many hours tick by from bed or from the couch as she did now. But tick, tock, there they went.
She needed Nathan not to see, needed him to not know how royally she was screwing up this second chance at motherhood that he had given her, so mostly, she indulged her sadnesses while his classes were going. Sometimes she lied, which was the worst part of it: she would tell him of the things she did during the days she wasn’t needed to substitute, but honestly, many of them she was in bed. The baby was tended by the prairie elves, and she tried to hold her breath and plug her ears and pretend she was not real. Or maybe she pretended she was real. It was hard to make solid logic with her head hung over her clutched knees.
But this time, there were no elves, and the baby was crying and crying and crying and crying, like a metronome of her failures. Without even processing that she was in motion, her body rose slowly, laboriously, from the couch and moved to the baby’s room, where she watched her hands scoop and lift, then watched her feet shuffle. Then she was in the hallway outside their quarters. And then she was back in their quarters. And she was alone.
It took some time - thirty minutes maybe - before her brain caught up. She lept to her feet in an instantaneous sweat and threw the door open to check what she had done. Isis knew now that she had left the baby on the ground in the hallway, but there was no baby there now. In plain view of anyone who could have been passing by, she exploded into sobs, the greatest release of emotion she had known for some time. And it hurt. Physically, it hurt. Her chest burned and convulsed, and briefly, she thought she might be dying. Slowly, she slid to the floor, collapsing under the weight that was all just too much.
***
Not more than a minute after Isis had left Theodora in the hallway, a prairie elf had come by and scooped her up. After a few moments of baby babble, he had taken her to Selina. There had never been any danger. Not for the baby, anyway.
It was Selina, with Theodora in tow, who found Isis in her state of utter disarray. Now Isis sat impatiently in the hospital wing. She ruminated in silence and thought how everything was over now: how she would lose her job and her husband, who was definitely going to be more than a little upset with her for abandoning their child. She refused to let him come to her in the hospital wing, not wanting to be seen like this. She had only just barely composed herself, and the incident had already been several hours ago. Nathan deserved so much better. Just like she had always tried to tell him.
The medic entered with an expression Isis could not quite read, but a part of her wished for a terrible diagnosis, some sort of brain malfunction that would both explain her abnormalities and end them soon enough. But the medic had no such easy way out. No, it was immediately clear that things were going to get harder before they got any easier.