༉˚*ೃ ᵒ⁷. 𝐍𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐄𝐄𝐍 𝐀𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐋!

( tw. mentions of trauma and injury, sensory overload )

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐆𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐃 cool and clean within the bath—scrubbed free of all the blood that had left Tea's wounds during the night earlier. Steam rose into the air and fogged up the mirror as heat ran off the tub. Tea was submerged up to her chest, knees drawn up to point at the ceiling. The water hurt her feet a little, but it wasn't so bad anymore. As long as she made sure not to get an infection. Her fingers stung too as she lowered them below the surface. A hiss left her bitten lips.

         Tea grabbed a freshly unwrapped bar of lavender soap and started scrubbing herself with it. That was one thing about Dorotea, when she felt dirty, she felt disgusting. Sometimes it took her hours to get clean just the way she wanted. She started with her legs first because they were still littered in tiny wounds that bled on the occasion, gently washing soap over the injuries and the tatters of her knees. It stung, but what was new? Tea tried her best to flex her foot up out of the water, but it burned so much that she was forced to let it stay. 

         Dorotea ran her lathered fingers up and over each of her arms, her shoulders, making sure every inch was scrubbed just to perfection. She scrubbed so hard that her skin turned pink and tender. The mirror was fogged up with steam, but Tea tried her very best not to look at it—she didn't want to get another scare like the one she'd had a few days ago. The bathwater was scalding, but she'd always preferred it that way. Something about the cold made her feel sick and afraid, it made her think of nightmares or wastelands, and gave her shivers all over. It seemed to remind her of something, but Tea couldn't think of quite what. Her skin stung a little where she harshly scrubbed it clean. Burned, burned.

         The soap scrubbed over her wrists harshly, rough and unrelenting. It jolted something sharp within her—pulled something out of the depths of her minds, out of the very corners of her thoughts.

         A knife—God, a knife—deep and sharp and quick opening the gentle layers of her skin like fire and ice. It sliced away at the flesh of her wrist. White-hot. It sent every nerve alight with deep pain. The hand controlling it was not her own—but neither could she tear it away. Tea must have been screaming, because the pain was uncompared. There was a bright light, but mostly it was just the pain. The blinding pain. And there were voices too, and flashing light and flashing images. What remained was the excrutiation. The scalpel cut deep.

         She felt the agony sharp and white-hot slicing into her left wrist, slow and precise and blindingly painful; felt the phantom grips on her skin, bruising, violent, the iron fingers holding her down at her arms and her throat and her shoulders, leaving purple and red marks behind. She felt the brush of fingers that weren't really there, and still the pain cut away at her so sharply.

          As it touched her skin, she felt its cruel sharpness, she felt the blade deep in her flesh. Sliced down and across and deep, deep. It hurt so much. God, it hurt. 

         The pain was so numbingly sharp, so blindingly painful, Tea could have screamed out. She stumbled out of the bath, water sloshing up over the side of the tub and onto the pristine tile floor, and Tea collapsed onto her knees on the fluffy bathmat. Her fingers clung onto the fur with panicked desperation. She was shaking all over—trembling violently—as water droplets freckled her bare skin. It felt as if she was being torn apart inside. Panic was gripping at her. Pain, too. Her knees burned, there was more blood on the bathmat.

          Hands on her neck. There were hands on her neck. Then her hair. They yanked and tugged so painfully. They must have been tearing them from the roots, it hurt so very much. Oh, so much. Shouting—so much shouting, Tea could nearly hear it—and, oh, it all burned.

         She felt the pain, felt every inch of it, the stabbing deep in her left wrist. She clutched at it, fingers digging into the scarred skin to try to stop the pain. It made her want to cry out. Static was alive in her body like a heartbeat. Her mind was scrambled, reeling. A sense of hopelessness was overcoming her—overwhelming her—it was all too, too, too much. Just too much.

         The fresh air on her sensitive skin seemed so clean that it burned, tingling up and over her young, pale flesh. It hurts, God, it hurts. It touched her face and all of her limbs, the jut of her young collarbones, her bare feet. It was too much, it was too fresh, it stung. She'd never felt anything like it in all of her life.

          Tea relented, drawing up her knees and forcing her body into a ball as small as it would go. "I was fine before, I was fine before, I was fine before, I was fine before," Tea chanted to herself as she grasped at her hair with her fingers and ducked her head against the bone of her knee. "I was fine before, I was fine before." She spoke it over and over, as if it would become true. But everything everyone had said about her was circling in her heads.

         Strange, strange, strange, strange, freak, freak, freak, freak, that weird girl, the girl who loves the woods, the girl who doesn't speak, the strange girl, the freak girl, strange, strange, strange.

         "It was fine, it was fine," but it never had been fine. She'd never been alright, or been normal. She'd never really been fine at all. Her entire life there'd been this gap, and the only thing that existed had been After. And After was alright, and perfect, but it also wasn't, because she'd never really cared about Before. And she'd always been alone. She'd never trusted; she'd never made friends; she'd never liked big crowds, or wide open spaces or small ones; she'd never felt safe in a doctor's office or a classroom; her parents were her parents and she loved them, but she was always different in a way that she couldn't understand; and her entire life she'd had everything wrong about her. She was the girl who'd gone through the woods and run away. She was the girl with the kind heart but the damaged mind. The girl who jumped at every loud car or every flashing light or abrupt noise—and she never knew why. She'd never been fine at all.

         Tea's fingers gripped at her hair, like how she remembered. Her body curled in on itself—desperate to be protected—knees jutting into her forehead, feet curled beneath her, spine arched and poking out beneath her skin, fingers against her scalp. It all hurt. Her skin was so sensitive, it felt like it burned, and every moment Tea just tried to pull herself closer, to make it go away. She'd never been so frightened and frustrated and distressed in her life—like all of the weight and everything had come crashing down on her; like she was living it.

         The knife over the top of her skin was a blinding, hot kiss, scraping away her skin and muscle, slicing, slicing away at her, slivering at the skin, removing black ink, flesh, in so much pain that it burst in every part of her nerves. God, it hurt so much. It stung and burned and bled. There were hands on her. She was sure there were hands on her. And the knife bit, and bit, and bit. Bit so sharp into her that it made her scream and cry. It hurt. It hurt so much. Blood welled up over the sliced-away skin.

         Tea screamed out in anger and frustration and pain and desperation—a wild, horror of a scream—long and distressed and so loud. Her fingers pulled at her hair so tightly it stung.

          The light above her shattered, raining glass onto her figure and into her hair. They slashed tiny cuts in her fingers and her shoulders, over the back of her slender neck. The lightbulb went out. Tea did not flinch nearly as much as she should have, even when they fell onto the bathroom floor and tub and sink in little plink, plink sounds, and shattered even more. Not even as they scattered around her.

          There were footsteps outside the bathroom door, but Tea's scream was dying in her throat and she'd squeezed her eyes closed so tightly that it hurt. The pain did not recede. Not even a little. The door opened, and when Tea's eyes flickered up to glance through tear-filled lashes, Nancy stood in the doorway.

         Nancy Wheeler was possibly the most beautiful person Dorotea had ever met. Her eyes were like the oceans and storms all at once, pretty and frightening but so, so gentle where they looked at Tea. She had those pretty lips that models would kill for, and the prettiest nose Tea had ever seen—sharp and curved and pointed just right. Angular cheekbones too, and a jawline so sharp that it made Tea's heart beat faster. She was hard to gaze at through such thick tears, but Tea tried her very best. Tea's mouth was quivering and her entire body was trembling violently—more of an anxiety mechanism than anything else—barely raising her head enough to see the girl standing in the doorway.

         Nancy glanced around at all the shattered glass, the trembling girl on the floor, the broken light. "What happened?" she asked softly, approaching Tea gently and crouching down to her height. Nancy's face was so open and gentle, it made Tea want to sob.

         "There's something wrong with me," was all Tea cried. "So wrong. I don't understand. I don't understand." Tea didn't notice that her fingernails were dug sharply into her cheeks until Nancy gently pried them away. She carefully draped a towel around Tea and pulled the girl into her arms. Tea succumbed to the gesture quickly, practically collapsing against Nancy's front. Her arms protectively cradled Dorotea.

         Nancy said nothing for a very long time. She just held onto Tea like her life depended on it, and let Tea hold her like perhaps her life depended on it too. And Tea was grateful, because it felt nice for the world to be silent for once. Nancy's arms stayed looped around Tea, making sure that the other girl was close and safe. 

         Perhaps she knew, a little, how this felt. Maybe, just maybe. Because her cheek was pressed against Tea's hair and she was letting Dorotea cradle into the sharp curve of her body, and some of her thin fingers were carding through Tea's brunette hair like they'd known each other forever. There were small words leaving her oh-so-pretty lips, that Tea could barely hear through her sobs. "It's okay," she might have been saying, "shhh, you're okay," but it was hard to tell. Dorotea's figure was shaking so badly that she felt out of control of her body.

         The pain was still there—somewhere, under her skin; a poisonous serpent—but it was something that had never been. Never been at all. It was infused within her, deep within her blood, something that had never existed yet did somehow beneath it all. It felt as if it was killing her. The sharp stinging in her left wrist, the phantom touches on her oversensitive skin that hurt in themselves, the whispers that still seemed to live in her head that didn't belong to the mouth of Nancy Wheeler. She did not understand what any of it meant, only that something within her did. She sobbed as water droplets slid down her forehead and marked cheeks, dropped onto her bare knees and over the wounds littered across her fragile body. Her body flinched as she remembered more wounds like that—wounds she'd had before, of course, there had been blood and split skin and metal in her tongue, and her ear had been sliced so violently and her arm too—and Tea kept flinching like small reactions to something that had never happened. Never, never did it happen. But maybe it did. 

          They sat amongst the shattered glass, empty electricity flickering above them through the broken lightbulb. Tea felt it inside her—in her skin and heart and mind—like an old friend, the static in her. She knew that it would never leave her now. And yet, it weighed down on her so heavily, all of it, all of the static. It exhausted her. She cried into Nancy's neck and collarbone, body wracked with violent, pained sobs. Nancy just held her. 

༉*ೃ༄

a bit of a short chapter but i thought it needed to be in order to maximise the emotions of this one djsdhksdkj

babies <3

i've returned to this story bc i miss tea and nancy, and i've had this chapter in my drafts for MONTHS. plus, caylee won't stop bugging me about it 🙄🙄 (/lh). i love this story so much, but it won't be updated super regularly! i figure that this, and my other stories (apart from TWL and LMT, which have consistent schedules) will be updated just whenever i get the chance to finish a chapter. caytopia come get ur food

word count: 2,285

03.03.2021.