Woah! Hey! [ The words are out of Jo's mouth, and she's darting to help the guy who just took a nose dive at a wall before her mind can even process how fast and suddenly that snap went. But it's not hard to know how. Why. It's the same thing she flees that forces her back out.
How many of her days, how many people, had made her trigger sensitive to whether she needed to tell someone after one (or four beers) over where they should have stopped that they got to take a nap in the driver's seat first? Or tried to say they were OK after getting triaged in the bar, only to nearly take a header two steps from standing up? How far into her teens had she been by the time she learned how to help catch a body half her size without crumpling?
It's deeper than breathing or thinking. She's already got a hand on the guy's shoulder before it really works out in her head how-what-why, and she's already in the middle of more words even as it's clicking, and she's kicking herself or the whole fucking world. Some acidic shame in the game of preferring distraction, throwing herself into the ice cold punch of reality, digging her hands hard down on thorns or flames, smothering it again for a second, busy with the brusqueness of the too well-known, over clarity there even to circle her ankles. ] You—
[ —okay? dies in her mouth because the guy couldn't be okay regardless of how light or obvious or trite or normal the question is. He's one of the returnees. Not from their group. But he's so broken over and through—she's not even sure how he made it this far, to the wall, from wherever he'd been before—and she has to reform the rest of that sentence on a too-obvious pause there. There's some guilt in that, too.
(She should be with Cas. Even if. Because he too. She should be grateful this didn't happen to her. To more of theirs. She can't feel it.) ]
—going somewhere?
You don't much look like you should be out of bed.
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How many of her days, how many people, had made her trigger sensitive to whether she needed to tell someone after one (or four beers) over where they should have stopped that they got to take a nap in the driver's seat first? Or tried to say they were OK after getting triaged in the bar, only to nearly take a header two steps from standing up? How far into her teens had she been by the time she learned how to help catch a body half her size without crumpling?
It's deeper than breathing or thinking. She's already got a hand on the guy's shoulder before it really works out in her head how-what-why, and she's already in the middle of more words even as it's clicking, and she's kicking herself or the whole fucking world. Some acidic shame in the game of preferring distraction, throwing herself into the ice cold punch of reality, digging her hands hard down on thorns or flames, smothering it again for a second, busy with the brusqueness of the too well-known, over clarity there even to circle her ankles. ] You—
[ —okay? dies in her mouth because the guy couldn't be okay regardless of how light or obvious or trite or normal the question is. He's one of the returnees. Not from their group. But he's so broken over and through—she's not even sure how he made it this far, to the wall, from wherever he'd been before—and she has to reform the rest of that sentence on a too-obvious pause there. There's some guilt in that, too.
(She should be with Cas. Even if. Because he too.
She should be grateful this didn't happen to her.
To more of theirs. She can't feel it.) ]
—going somewhere?
You don't much look like you should be out of bed.