a_littlefaith | (no subject)

(no subject)

When it comes to her own music, Beth is of two very different minds.

There's a part of herself that knows she's talented. She can write thoughtful lyrics, she can set them to interesting, intelligent melodies, and she can play nearly any instrument. Her voice is both sweet and powerful, something she can hear when she listens to herself after she's been recorded. But at the same time, she has terrible insecurities about it all, convinced she's only fooling herself, and all of this will never amount of anything resembling a career.

But here she is. This is an album, it's her album, fully finished, and it sounds good. Not only that, but people are buying it. They want to spend money on this.

Beth plays a short set, not wanting to overwhelm herself, then mostly just talks to people at the release party. It's still crazy to think they're here for her, but everyone is really friendly and happy and supportive. It relaxes Beth and by the time she realizes someone is staring at her, it's nearing the end of the party. A lot of people have left already, the bar has emptied out a bit, and she's standing alone near the stage door, off to the side and out of the way, so she can put her guitar away.

Her corners her there.

She's been watching ever since she realized he was looking at her, but only out of the corner of her eye, thinking there really wouldn't be anything to it. Guys are weird sometimes, she's used to that. It's the memory of Gorman that she's not used to, not yet, even less used to it than she is the memory of her own death. There are things she's dealt with and things she's ignored, and as he corners her in that tiny hall just beside the stage, a shiver runs up her spine and she tastes green apple candy.

Turning, Beth flashes a quick smile and tries to get past him. "Sorry, I just gotta-"

"You were really good up there," he says, stepping closer to block her way. "You've got a great voice. Great look, too."

"Thanks," she says, trying to stay bright. Her mouth is flooded with the taste of that candy Gorman had pushed between her lips and she tries not to taste it. It isn't real, she's only imagining it, but it's sweet and sticky and she licks her lips, trying to force the taste away.

"Yeah," he says, putting his arm against the wall so there's nowhere for her to go. She doesn't even have her knife. Just the guitar behind her, barely a weapon at all, especially in a space as small as this. "You're really pretty, you know. Would it kill you to look at me?"

Beth glances up, sees Gorman, no matter how impossible it is, and glances away.

"I really have to get goin'," she says, her voice coming from far away. "But thanks."

"Hey," he says, pressing closer to her. She can feel his breath on her cheek, on her neck. He's so close and she can see Gorman's face and taste the candy and she wants to scream. "C'mon, stay awhile."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He'd meant only to be going back to say hi to Beth, to wish her well. The bar is quieter now, a lot of the people who'd been there gone, and it feels easier to approach her like this rather than trying to push his way through various other friends and fans. If this were anyone else's album release, he probably wouldn't be here — he's never paid all that much attention to music — but with Beth, he at least likes to show his support. She's good at what she does, and he likes her music. It just still feels a little like it's part of a world he doesn't belong in.

As he gets closer, though, he just barely manages to make out the conversation, inasmuch as it is one, and then he can barely think straight. The sight of that asshole pinning her against the wall and leaning in close doesn't help on that front. Without meaning to, he thinks for a moment of his Uncle Scott and that woman, a memory that makes his skin crawl and his stomach turn to have to carry. His hand closes on the back of the man's shirt to drag him off Beth, the other pulling back to punch him hard in the jaw. "Can you fucking hear? She said no."

The memories are overlapping with this moment and as the man is suddenly yanked away, Beth hears glass shattering, the jar shattering over Gorman's head. She can smell death in the bar, mingling with beer, hear Joan on the floor beside her, moaning in reanimation, as real as the sound of Chuck's voice.

She's angry suddenly. No longer just scared, but furious, and Chuck hits the guy, but then Beth pushes herself off the wall where she'd been pinned and flies at them both. Her hand lashes out, curled into a fist. It smashes hard into the guy's face, not a good punch necessarily, but her knuckles drive satisfyingly hard into his cheekbone.

"If you come anywhere near me again, I'll kill you," she says breathlessly.

"Fucking crazy bitch," the guy says, clutching his face. "It's a compliment."

"Yeah, it's really fucking not," Chuck says through clenched teeth, so angry he can barely see straight. That isn't enough for him to let down his guard, though, even if Beth seems, fortunately, to have been spurred into action. He wouldn't have blamed her at all for staying frozen in the face of something like this, but this asshole deserves all the ire she can throw at him and far more bruises than the ones he's already likely to wind up sporting. Chuck wants to take care of that himself — to do serious damage, leave cuts and broken bones in his wake, find some way of making obvious what could have happened here so no one else wants anything to do with someone who'd refuse to take no for an answer like that. As long as Beth isn't huddled against the wall, though, it's her fight. He'll back her up, but he can keep himself in check, too, no matter how utterly goddamn furious he might be.

"You're lucky you're able to stand right now to walk away. Which I suggest you do while you still can."

At first Beth isn't sure he's going to do it. He hesitates, wavers for a moment, and she thinks she's going to need to go for the knife in her bag. She's no longer afraid and whether it's due to Chuck's presence beside her or her own sudden return to the present she's not entirely sure.

Having Chuck here with her makes a big difference, though, and she stands by his side, her arm pressed against his, and stares at the man looking back at them. Waiting for his second attempt at an attack.

But then his shoulders deflate and he steps back, still glaring at the two of them. "This is bullshit," he mutters as he walks away, but Beth doesn't bother answering. The energy seems to go out of her all at once and she sags a little, leaning against Chuck.

It isn't good enough. Chuck is used to anger, feels it often enough that he barely notices it half the time, but rage like this is something different, something personal. A part of him still wants to trail after the man and make sure he doesn't try anything like this again with anyone else, teach him a real fucking lesson that would be impossible to ignore. Only Beth's presence at his side keeps him from doing so. Instead, he closes his eyes for just a moment, forces himself to take a slow, deep breath, and when he opens them again, he wraps an arm around her shoulders, moving cautiously and holding her gently so she can move away without any effort if she needs. He doesn't want to touch her if she isn't ready for that yet, and he wouldn't blame her if she wasn't.

"Are you alright?" he asks, a quiet concern in his voice that he would give to few others. He doesn't think Beth is physically hurt, at least, but he doesn't really know what happened before he stumbled upon the scene, and he doesn't want to just assume.

A part of Beth wonders if she shouldn't be uncomfortable with Chuck's arm around her, but the truth is, it's comforting and steadying and more than anything, she wants to turn into his chest and climb inside the protective circle of his arms and close her eyes. The physical part of their friendship is long over, she knows that's something they'll never go back to, but she still loves Chuck, loves him like all the other friends who have become her adopted family over the years, and she knows he would keep her safe.

But she needs to keep herself safe, too. So she nods, lets herself be comforted by his arm around her, then pulls herself together and stands straight once again.

"I'm okay," she says finally. "Nothin' really happened, he didn't... it just reminded me of stuff. From before. Stuff I haven't really, um... stuff I don't think about much. Ever."

Chuck nods slowly, not needing to press for anything more than that. He remembers her mentioning something vaguely once, when he was worried about not wanting to push Laura, but even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't be his business to ask her to tell him more about it. Whatever she does want to share, though, he's here for. He's not the best conversationalist, especially when it comes to sensitive matters, but he can at least try. Anyway, he sort of gets it, albeit in ways he doesn't like to talk about. It's hard to explain having knowledge of things he hasn't done and some of the memories rattling around in his head. He might not think about them much either, but they're there still.

"You shouldn't've had to now," he says, frowning. "You wanna get out of here? Or at least go sit down?"

Maybe refusing to think about it is part of the problem, she thinks. Part of why she can't do anything but freeze when something like this happens. Beth is stronger than that, she's not the girl who cut her wrist all those years ago, and she should be able to stand up for herself.

"I wanna get out of here," she says with a nod. "He... I could taste green apple. A candy. The police officer from before, he took one out of this glass jar on the doctor's desk and forced me-"

She cuts herself off suddenly. She hadn't meant to say any of that, but the words have just come out.

Immediately, instinctively, Chuck feels a white-hot rage course through his veins again. It's over now, and better for Beth just to get out of here, but a part of him still wants to go after the man who cornered her tonight and take all this frustration out on him. He wasn't that police officer, but he was still fucking sick in his own right. She shouldn't have had to deal with that now or the onslaught of memory from her past.

Staying with her seems more important than his desire to hit something, though, so he takes a breath, willing himself to try to calm down. "Let's get out of here, then," he says, starting towards the door. "Wherever you wanna go. And we can get you something that doesn't taste like green apple, if you think that'll help."

Beth laughs, the sound bubbling up a little unexpectedly, and then she almost starts to cry, but forces it back. It's such a simple solution, just to get something that doesn't taste like green apple, and yet it's exactly what she wants. In her current state, she doubts she would have thought of it, but it's perfect.

"Coffee," she decides. "Full of caffeine and sugar so I can stay up all night."

Judith is with a sitter right now, but Beth has to go home eventually. Probably sooner rather than later. If she can just sit in the living room all night and watch old movies and bad TV, she thinks she can deal with all this.

"Perfect," Chuck says. It's strangely comforting to have something he can do, some concrete way of helping her that isn't just offering nebulous support. The instinct alone isn't one he's all that used to, but while he knows, on some level, that it may be enough for her just not to be on her own, it feels oddly inadequate. Coffee is such a small thing, but it's still a plan, still something that she seems sure will help. It makes sense, too. If he were her, he'd probably want to find some way of staying awake, too. "Sleep's overrated anyway."

It isn't, but they're probably both accustomed enough to going without it. "And, you know, if you want company while you stay awake or anything, I don't have anywhere to be."

Edited 2019-01-18 09:27 (UTC)

"Did Laura come here with you?" she asks and it's the first time she's felt a little bit more outside of her own head and her own experiences since the moment that man approached her. It feels better, thinking about someone else. Something else.

She doesn't want to take Chuck away from Laura if she's going to be waiting for him. Even if he finds Laura first, they can all leave together if they have to.

Then again, Laura strikes her as being pretty independent most of the time. Beth doesn't know her well, though, and she doesn't want to make assumptions. Asking about someone else centres her like not much else has.

"Yeah, but she ran into a friend," Chuck says, shrugging. She's been acting weird anyway, and he doesn't think it has anything to do with Beth being his ex. Hell, he's barely even talked about that. It was such a long time ago, and so short-lived, and they're friends now. No, whatever is going on, he has a feeling it's more because of what happened at the end of October with that awful fucking movie, what he saw that night and what he said. He should've kept his goddamn mouth shut.

He doesn't want to dwell on that now, though. It won't do any good. "It's fine, I can text her, let her know where I am."

"Okay," she says softly. "If you're sure."

It's so much easier to think about that. Beth doesn't think she would ruin their relationship just by asking Chuck to help her right now, but she also doesn't want to screw things up even a little. She doesn't want to give Laura any reason to be mad at Chuck or her.

"I always thought you'd be the who kept everything all bottled up," she says with a wet sounding laugh. "I just wanted to forget all this stuff that happened at the hospital. It seemed so much easier."

"The problem with keeping everything all bottled up is it still never really goes anywhere," Chuck says, as significant an admission as he could make. He still prefers to do it, finding it far easier than dealing with messy, unpleasant emotions, but it doesn't actually fix anything. Especially in a case like this, though, God knows he can't blame Beth for trying. Of course she would want to forget about something like that. He has things he wishes he could forget, too, fragments of other people's memories buried in his head that he'll never fully be able to erase no matter how hard he tries.

"It is easier, at least for a while, until it's not anymore."

She can't help it, even as flustered and uncomfortable as she feels right now, she has to laugh at what Chuck has just said. In all the time they've known each other, which is significant at this point, she never imagined their positions might be reversed like this. Beth is lucky to have him as a friend, despite what she's sure he would say about himself, and she wishes he would give himself more credit in general.

But even still, with how much she believes in him, she couldn't have expected this.

"Yeah," she says on an exhale. "Yeah, I know. You're right. I just... I didn't want to confront this. Somehow bein' dead felt easier. Is that messed up?"

It takes more effort than it should for Chuck not to let out a laugh at that, though there's nothing particularly humorous about the subject at hand. He shakes his head, though, shooting Beth a wry sort of expression. "No," he says, then reconsiders that. "Well, probably. But that's how I felt about a lot of things when I got here." For a long time, he'd wished he stayed dead, finding it easier to die for a cause than to have to live without one. He knows that for Beth, things happened in an odd order, that she'd been here for a long time before she remembered having died, but he thinks he gets it even so.

"When things end, they just end. You know what happened, you go from there. But something like that..." Not sure how much he can or should speak to that, he pauses for a moment. "Seems harder to carry around. Harder to shake."

At a distance, Laura watched.

Not for too long, but long enough that she felt a tug of guilt, distance but unmistakable. She'd seen this before, so many times it was almost boring. The guy? Boring. Beth's reaction? In a selfish, mean-spirited way, Laura found that boring, too. If only because it reminded her of herself, cowering from her father, from BOB, from Leo, from men who got too familiar with her, when she wasn't feeling like Laura Palmer, Twin Peak's untouchable fucking Homecoming Queen.

Laura Palmer, who was up for anything, if only because she was tired of losing every single time she decided to fight.

Knocking back the last of her drink, Laura made her way over, a wide smile affixed to her face. Already, she could smell the booze on him, the nervous sweat.

That, too, was boring.

"There you are," she said warmly, seeming to ignore the man completely as she turned her attention solely to Beth. "I've been looking all over for you."

Beth doesn't really know Laura. She knows of her more than anything, because even though Chuck isn't always that expressive, Beth has gotten pretty good at reading him and she knows how important Laura really is to him.

Maybe it's because she doesn't really know her that Laura's voice jars her out of the memories that keep washing over her. Suddenly her hand shoots out and he's lucky she doesn't have her knife, because she's moving on instinct now, fingers jabbing hard into the delicate skin of his throat. He's sputtering, coughing, stumbling back from Beth as she turns toward Laura.

She still looks a little haunted, a little shaken, and the smile she musters isn't her usual sunny smile. Not many people still left in Darrow have seen the smile she's wearing now. She hasn't had reason to force herself into hardness for a long time now.

"Hi," she says, a little breathlessly. Behind her, the man spits out an angry curse.

That wasn't boring.

With a shrill burst of laughter, Laura took Beth by the wrist, saying, "Okay, we're getting the fuck out of here."

The guy was red-faced and furious, and Laura knew how dangerous a humiliated man could be. So many of them were giant babies, in need of coddling, who lashed out like the toddlers they were whenever they didn't get their way.

"Grab your shit and let's go."

Beth laughs, too, the sound startled out of her, but she reaches out with her free hand and grabs her bag. Her guitar is still there, but off to the side, and she can see a stagehand coming out now, his expression concerned. He'll take care of it for her, her guitar, the situation, all of it, so she doesn't feel guilty leaving with Laura.

She doesn't feel guilty about any of it. In fact, she wants to do something more, kick out the asshole's knee, smash him over the head with something. Leave him for dead the way she had with Gorman.

"Where're we goin'?" she asks, but honestly, she doesn't really care. Her heart is still thumping wildly and she feels that odd, freeing sense of not caring about anything.

"I have no idea," Laura admitted, laughing as she pulled Beth towards the door. Out on the street, the night air was chilly, but she'd had enough to drink that she hardly cared.

As a taxi approached the curb, she said to Beth, "Come on, we'll go to my place. You can have a drink without getting groped by creepy guys."

"Okay," she says. After that moment, that sickening taste of green apple and pulse pounding rage and fear, she feels oddly liberated. Her heart is still beating too quick, thumping away heavily behind her ribs, but the fear is gone. The anger is, too. At least for the moment.

She's relieved it's Laura she's climbing into the cab with, too. A man might have been too much right now, even someone she cares for as much as Jason, and someone who knows her well might not have given her this freedom she suddenly feels. Certain responses would have been expected of her, but Laura doesn't know her. Doesn't know to expect anything out of her.

"What an asshole," she says, loose limbed in her seat.

"Men think they can do whatever they want, just because a girl gets their dick hard. It's nothing new," she said flippantly, slouching in her seat at Beth's side, close enough that her hair brushed against Beth's arm.

"Sometimes I think all men should be castrated," she admitted, a giggle bubbling up in the back of her throat. "Not always, but times like this? Snip snip." She pantomimed the opening and closing of scissors.

That makes Beth laugh, a mean little laugh she wouldn't normally do, but she doesn't feel bad about it. After tonight, she thinks she's allowed to be a little bit mean about men like that. Men like Gorman.

"I hate that I froze up," she admits. "And I wish I'd been holdin' my bag at the time."

Knowing the cab driver is probably going to see, Beth still takes her hunting knife out of her bag. It's sheathed, it's safe, but it's still really obvious what it is.

"Wow," Laura said, her eyes wide. "I could've used that a few times."

Laura knew, deep down, that she wouldn't have. She'd let men hurt her. She'd even come back for more on multiple occasions. She'd always wondered if that made her weak, or if the impulse came from someplace else entirely.

She liked the violence. She was made for it.

"You're interesting, Beth Greene," Laura decided, leaning back in her seat and leveling Beth with an appraising look. "Definitely not what I expected."

Beth smiles then, just a little one, but it feels good to be able to do so. Ever since Chuck began to talk to her -- slowly and more than a little stilted -- about Laura, she'd wondered if they would get along. She had wanted them to, because whatever she and Chuck used to be to each other, he's now one of her best friends, and she not only wants him to be happy, but wants to be able to spend time with whoever it is that makes him happy.

This isn't necessarily how she would have wanted it to happen, but she's still glad Laura found her.

"Y'know how we've all come from different places?" she asks as she tucks her knife away again. "My world had this virus in it and it... it brought people back to life after they died. Everything kinda fell apart, so we all had to learn how to be a little bit... harder." She doesn't want to say stronger, she doesn't like that word much after the hospital.

That maybe wasn't the strangest thing she'd ever heard, but it still sounded outlandish enough that she gave Beth a look, waiting briefly for the punchline. "You're serious? A virus that brought people back to life?"

She laughed, without considering that it might've been unkind.

"I mean, I guess it's not that crazy. According to my ex, I died almost thirty years ago."

Beth nods and says, "Completely serious."

She doesn't want to tell Laura about all the awful ways in which it's come to Darrow over the years. Her father's head. Those visions they'd seen. Curtis like he was never supposed to be.

"Thirty," she breathes, looking a little surprised by that. Not that Laura is dead, not really, but that it had happened so long ago. Laura is younger than she is, pretty and vibrant and full of life, and thirty years is a lifetime ago.

She smiles a little and says, "I'm dead, too."

Beth's set is amazing -- as usual, Blue thinks with nothing but a very fond envy for that level of innate talent. Her own little works of fabric and thread don't really slot themselves into the same category in her head. But it's not something she minds, really, it's just fantastic. Even if she and Beth weren't friends, she'd find herself feeling a little nostalgic and a little newly captured by the acoustic-rock sounds Beth puts together.

She's been hanging out around the bar, sipping a ginger ale that looks like it could be something harder and staying generally out of Beth's way while she mingles. Blue has half an idea about catching her when it clears out a bit, maybe hanging out a bit one on one in some sort of celebratory, less overwhelming fashion if she isn't hanging out with Jason.

Then it does clear out some, and Beth isn't back, so Blue starts wandering vaguely. That's when she sees him, the man in the hallway. At first he's just a blot against the lights backstage, but she sees a flash of Beth's hair, a slightly forced smile, from behind him.

Blue can feel her blood pressure already spiking. At 4'11", no one sees her as imposing if they see her at all, but if she's ever once watched a man harass someone without feeling like she's about to turn into She-Hulk, she can't remember it.

She crosses the room without even really thinking about it, striding, and catches the guy by the back of his jacket, tugging. She does have her switchblade, and one hand's ready to go for it if she needs to. "She has to get going," she snarls, and her face is every single that bitch Blue Sargent she's ever been called.

Edited 2018-12-24 03:48 (UTC)

Gorman is suddenly jerked away from her -- not Gorman, she has to remind herself -- and it snaps Beth out of the trance she's in enough for her to shove one hand forward. Her palm connects with the man's sternum, not hard for it to really do any damage, but paired with Blue's hand tugging at the back of his jacket, it's enough to send him reeling into another wall.

"Come on," she says, reaching for Blue. He's not Gorman, he doesn't have any power over her, he can't decide whether she gets out of the hospital or not, because she's not in the hospital anymore, but she's still afraid and angry.

"You bitch," the man spits out, but Beth is already moving, trying to get away.

Blue grabs for Beth's outstretched hand, linking their fingers so if he recovers quickly he's unlikely to separate them. It's not a thing they should have to think about, whether a refusal should result in violence, whether pushing someone away when they don't take no for an answer could be the last thing you do.

She's still very aware of her knife in her pocket, and her cell phone.

On instinct, she grabs the phone and snaps a cluster of pictures of him. It's terrible; they're in movement, but his surprised, angry face is there.

"Fuck yeah we're bitches," Blue snaps as they both stride away, booking it to a better view of security and the door, "now crawl back to wherever it is you go when you're not being a creep."

As the distance grows between the man and them, she shifts her arm to around Beth's shoulders, still walking fast. "You want to get some air?"

Beth doesn't mean to and she doesn't want to, but she feels Blue's arm around her shoulders and stiffens anyway. After remembering Gorman, she'd put it all aside, forced it into a place where she didn't have to think about it because she hadn't wanted to acknowledge all the other things that had happened to her beyond her death. That part had been the worst, so she'd chosen to focus on that.

But she should have known better. The rest isn't going to just be ignored because she wants it to.

"I'm sorry," she says, knowing Blue will have felt the way her shoulders tightened up. "I'm sorry, it's not you, it's- air, yeah. Air sounds like a real good idea right now."

Blue does feel Beth tense, and she drops her arm almost immediately, a little annoyed at herself for not having thought that touch could be a bad idea. And even more annoyed that this is a thing they have to think about, that they all have to be conscious of all the time.

"Don't be sorry," she assures her, "it's okay, whatever you need is okay." She keeps them walking toward the exit: she must still look a little murderous because the remaining crowd kind of parts to let them through.

Outside the air is chilly and quieter, and she steers them both toward the edge of the building. "What an asshole, jesus. Has he ever come by before?"

That's a good question and Beth searches her memory for his face, but every time she tries, she only sees Gorman. Eventually she has to shake her head, not because she knows for certain, but because she can't see anything besides Gorman. She can't taste anything beyond that awful green apple candy.

"I don't know," she says. "I'm really not sure, I just keep... I keep seein' this... this other guy. From before. From-"

She can't find the words, but she wants to say them. She wants to tell Blue what happened to her in those weeks before her death, but she has no idea where to even start.

"I just need a sec," she says, exhaling slowly.

Blue's indignant rage expands in her chest from a focused anger to a more hypothetical salt-the-earth encompassing whoever this other guy from before is. It's worse, in a way, because she can't lay hands on whoever it was that hurt Beth, then, that made all of this worse. But it's also not her fight, and she takes a long breath, slowing her heartbeat, and keeps her mouth shut for once because she's not helping anything that way.

"I'm sorry," she says, quietly, and maybe she means for asking too many questions, and maybe she means for what happened, or both. "Take your time, okay? We can stay here as long as you need."

Beth nods slowly, taking a few more deep breaths as she leans back against the wall behind her. As she does, she realizes it's been so long that she's not even sure what Blue knows about her life before and what Beth's never thought to mention. Georgia is as far away from her now as it can get and although she misses her family and the people she'd left behind all the time, the life itself seems like it happened to someone else much of the time.

"The world ended," she says after a second. "Where I'm from. I told you that stuff, right?"

Now that she's had a second to calm down, she thinks she had. She'd met Blue in that awful other version of Darrow, after all, where she'd had to be hard again, had to fight.

Blue nods, slowly. "Not everything, but some of it. Zombies, right, sort of?" The first time they'd run into each other, it had been Beth herself as a zombie (or something like it) that had been after her, dead and feral and wrists-slit, horrible. She hadn't known her well, but you didn't have to know someone well to help them get away from something like that. She'd been watching everyone she loved die over and over at the time. That place had been awful, though it had brought some of her favorite people into her life.

It feels like ages ago, and not long at all. A different era, definitely. It's sometimes hard for her to remember not everyone has experienced those weeks of terror and dark as part of arriving here. Most of what Darrow's thrown at her since then hasn't beat that, except the parts that were straight from Henrietta.

"A different kind than Ellie's, but the same end of the world."

Beth nods and takes another breath before she says, "People are... they take advantage of stuff like that, y'know. Even with the end of the world and all the walkers around us, they still hurt each other. There were these people livin' at a hospital and they'd go around and hit people with their vehicles. They'd do it on purpose so they could take people to the hospital and basically use 'em as slaves."

She shrugs and says, "I didn't realize at first that they'd been the ones to hit me. My wrist was broken and they'd put it in a cast and I thought they'd helped me, but they... there were cops livin' there, too. I feel like I'm not makin' any sense, but these cops, they were keepin' the peace, only they were also- they were raping the women there. Not me. Never... never me. I stopped it before it even really started."

Blue nods as Beth starts, pressing her lips together. She's met so many good people here, but she knows too how terrible people are. How many people had been killed just in the pursuit of power in Henrietta? And that didn't even come down to plain, sexist violence.

As Beth goes on, though, Blue's eyes widen and her brows furrow. "Jesus."

She is rambling in her anxiety a little, but not so much that Blue can't follow. Keeping the peace, only also raping the women there. Sounds like cops. Maybe it comes with her general territory as one of the only black, Latina girls in a small southern town, but she doesn't trust police. Power again: it's always about power. That particular flare of anger passes as she focuses in on what Beth's saying, though.

Even really started doesn't sound good, but Blue's not going to push on that right now. That's not what matters.

"I'm really fucking glad you did," she says, but adds, "God. I can't imagine living in a place like that, having to worry about that, too, with everything else. That's -- Beth, I'm sorry."

"One of the girls there killed herself," she says. "She couldn't take it anymore."

And as someone with scars on her wrist, Beth can't blame Joan for that. She'll never blame her for that. They hadn't known each other very well or for very long, but Beth had gotten the sense that Joan had been stuck at Grady for some time and with someone like Gorman on the staff, she can only imagine the horrors she had been put through. She'd needed to escape and so she had.

"But no one had found her," she continues. "She was just lyin' on the floor in one of the offices and I went in there to clean up and she was there, but then Gorman came in and he... I hit him with a jar. Hard. I left him there with Joan as she was startin' to reanimate. I hope it hurt when she ate him."

Blue feels like she's been punched in the gut, somehow, even though this isn't her memory, it's nothing she could imagine having experienced. It doesn't feel like she deserves to feel clawed into. But that can't override empathy -- something that, after being the normal one living with psychics, with someone who could literally access memories via touch, she always finds herself a little surprised to realize she has a lot of. Usually by being overwhelmed.

She lets out a little huffed breath, and her eyes go wide as she realizes where the story is going.

"I do too," Blue nods, voice icy, then slows down. "Gorman -- one of the cops, I guess?"

Beth nods and says, "The only one I ever really interacted with at all besides D- besides their leader. He was worse than she was, though, even if she was pretty awful, too."

She should have scars from the things Dawn did to her, the beatings she'd put Beth through. She remembers these things, the broken wrist, the stitches under her eye and high up on her forehead. The way Dawn had reopened those wounds when she'd struck Beth repeatedly. There should be scars, but she has only the memories, not the physical evidence.

"She was lettin' them do it, though," she says. "When I confronted her, she denied it, but she knew. She just didn't wanna think about it."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only