Disclaimer: The characters in this story are the property of CBS and are only used for fan related purposes.
Haunted
Dr. Burns was an idiot.
Well, no, that wasn't really nice—but Abby Mills was done with being nice. What had nice ever really gotten her but years of pain and confusion and a life that was nothing but an elaborate lie? Okay, maybe her therapist was kind in an absent-minded, dry, educational sort of way, but he was nothing if not stubborn and by the book. Which, she decided, made him a complete idiot for her purposes.
He refused to believe Abby when she told him the truth, insisting that, instead, they explore her feelings, her emotions after the devastating events that happened last September. How did she feel, he wondered, how was she coping? Did the sleeping pills help with the nightmares? Had the insomnia let up at all?
Had those, ahem, hallucinations stopped?
After awhile, Abby stopped being honest. He didn't believe her when she was telling the truth, but Dr. Burns was more than willing to believe her when she started to lie. When she said she was actually sleeping through the night, when she said the thoughts of her perished friends and family didn't occupy her mind all the time, when she said Henry stopped popping up to say hello (and sometimes more)… he was more than willing to swallow those lies and give her another refill on her pills before reminding her to come back in a few days and shipping her out the door.
During her appointments the doctor often mentioned wish fulfillment. To all the world, Henry Dunn was just another victim of John Wakefield's malice and hate. Abby never told anyone that part of the truth, she begged Jimmy not to tell for reasons she never could quite explain, so the doctor thought these… whatever they were (she disliked hallucinations and refused to think of it like he was really there… even if he was) were simply her dreams manifesting themselves. Henry Dunn wasn't a murderer; he was her best friend. Abby was having a hard time coming to terms with his murder—which, at least, was true—so rather than let him rest, she imagined him alive and well.
He just couldn't believe it when she tried to explain that she never wanted to see Henry again.
Why would she? She refused to mark him as an accomplice rather than a victim, but she knew better. She knew the tragedy was all his fault, that her father, her friends—everyone—died on Harper's Island because of him, because of her and because of a silly wish that was nothing but a child's summer dream.
Ha, she laughed ruefully. Talk about wish fulfillment…
But Henry was there. She couldn't deny it, and she couldn't figure out a way to explain to Doctor Burns that her dead (ex) best friend had arrived in her apartment in LA a few days after his quick burial, acting like nothing was wrong, pretending everything was the way it always was, it always used to be (even if it wasn't).
They both pointedly ignored the blood stains on his shirt and the gaping hole she knew lay underneath.
She tried, though. Dr. Burns was part of her past: he was the therapist her grandmother insisted she see seven years ago when John Wakefield first attacked and she lost her mother. Now, all these years later, she searched Dr. Burns out again, now that Wakefield had also returned from the dead, bringing her father with him this time before going back to rot. She thought she could tell him (almost) everything, and when Henry first appeared, she tried.
Abby thought, if she talked it out, Henry would disappear—but it didn't work. Dr. Burns just didn't understand that she was haunted, and Henry didn't understand that he wasn't welcome anymore.
In the end, Abby cancelled all of her appointments. Either she really was crazy or Henry was horrifyingly real (and then Abby was crazier than she thought), and neither of those options were particularly appealing. Because, no matter how many sessions she attended, Henry was always waiting for her back at the apartment when they were done. When he started taking the drive downtown with her, she knew it was time to give it up.
Jimmy was gone. She had to admit, he stayed as long as he could—and longer than she expected. Abby was too damaged, he was too scarred, and they both knew it would never work out. Oh, they tried. After the tragedy he moved into her apartment, he met her cat, they faced the trauma together. They faced the pain together. They even faced the damn media together. Madison was too young, Shea too devastated, and that left two of the four survivors to speak up about the Harper's Island Tragedy. That's what they called it: The Harper's Island Tragedy. And it wasn't enough.
The two of them faced everything they could—but they couldn't face Henry together.
Jimmy had his own demons, his own ghosts, and in the end they won out. Shane's calls and Nikki's pleas, Charlie's gruff demands, they lured Jimmy back to Harper's Island. With a sad puppy-dog smile, he wanted her to go, but he understood when she couldn't. Not wouldn't. Couldn't. So he took the little he'd accumulated, stuffed it in a secondhand backpack, and slipped out one afternoon when she was with her therapist.
Henry laughed boyishly when he told her that Jimmy had left.
It hadn't taken him long to find her. One week, that was all. One week to the day Abby ran Henry through with the boarding knife—she had to, he wasn't Henry anymore, he would've killed Jimmy!—she was sitting in her apartment, at her desk in her room, her eyes wide open and staring at the blood on her hands. To get a feel for the neighborhood, Jimmy took to taking walks around the block; it was an excuse, an excuse to give Abby some time to mourn on her own, and she recognized it and was grateful. Except, in the wake of everything that happened, she just couldn't feel—
—until, all at once, she experienced fear, surprise, happiness and revulsion.
Fear because she heard him before she saw him.
Surprise because she Henry Dunn's voice was the last she thought she'd ever hear.
Happiness because, well, maybe it could've all been a dream. Maybe she'd fallen and slipped and was in a coma where her mother's murder manifested itself in a terrible nightmare where John Wakefield was alive, Henry was her half-brother and all of her friends and family were dead.
Finally revulsion because, as soon as she realized that she was deluding herself, she was horrified to find that just the soft sound of Henry's hello was enough to make her happy.
And then she felt her heart catch in her throat and her stomach heaved, and the only reason she didn't throw up all over herself was because her appetite was still back on Harper's Island with her emotions, her family, her life.
She was like a ghost, except for the fact that she was one of the only ones who escaped the damn island alive.
When Abby finally worked up the nerve to leave her bedroom in search of that voice, the familiar sound of that laughter, she made sure to reach under her bed first. Living in Los Angeles was nothing like living on Harper's Island (at least, not the Harper's Island of her childhood, before sociopathic murderers and explosions at the Marina and bodies in the trees) and a girl learned to be prepared. There was a bat under her bed, an honest-to-goodness Louisville Slugger and she gripped it with trembling fingers as she hesitantly but bravely (because life and experience had made Abby recklessly brave) left her room.
Henry Dunn was crouched down beside her couch, his back to her but since when did Abby need to see his face to recognize him? Just the way he stayed down low like that, the way his head was tilted, the hole in his shirt from where the boarding knife ran him through…
He was bent down, his fingers outstretched towards a bristled bundle of gray fur huddled at the end of the couch. She recognized her cat and was taken aback to see the way he was reacting to Henry's touch. His fur, fluffy and light as it was, was standing on edge, making her twenty-pounder seem even bigger than he already was. His ears were pulled back, his eyes terrified and too large, his lips pulled back into a warning sneer, revealing canine teeth sharper than Abby thought he had.
What was wrong with Shakespeare? He knew Henry, he used to purr and jump and beg for treats whenever Henry had cause to visit—
—and then, with a jolt, she remembered. Henry was dead. He shouldn't be there—he was buried in a hastily dug grave back on Harper's Island (Abby insisted and Jimmy, careful not to lose her again, had agreed). He was dead, he shouldn't be in LA, he shouldn't be in her apartment, he shouldn't be petting Shakespeare.
Her voice betrayed her first. "H-Henry?"
He turned to look over his shoulder, to look at her, and the same, wide winning smile she'd seen cross his face a thousand times was suddenly there. It was the same smile he'd worn when she'd arrived at the Tarapunga nearly two weeks ago and if she'd known then what that smile meant, she never would've boarded the boat. Hell, she probably would've jumped into Seattle Harbor first.
"Abby?" His voice was just the way she remembered it, that hint of earnestness that just was Henry to her, and it made her tightened stomach drop to her shoes to hear it now. "Hey, Ab! I just let myself in, I hope that's okay."
It wasn't okay. It would never be okay.
The bat fell from limp fingers, crashing against the floor with a loud thud that spooked the cat even more. Shakespeare's ears flattened against his head, his green eyes almost black with fear, and he hissed, striking out at a specter that couldn't feel its sharp claws. When his paw went straight through Henry's hand, he let out a shrill howl and took off, running past Abby until he installed himself in her room, under her bed, where he stayed for the next few days straight without even coming out for the litter box.
Henry watched the cat go with his easy-going smile and a shrug that told her he didn't quite understand what was going on but that there was nowhere else he'd rather be. Without Shakespeare to take up the end of the couch, he sat down and looked over at Abby with something akin to concern written on his face—that, and an undeniable lust hidden in his bright eyes.
How had she never seen that before?
"Are you alright?" He patted the seat next to him. "You look a little shaken up, Abby. Why don't you sit down?"
He spoke easily, as if this was normal, just one of the many visits they shared when they were still simply best friends (before he dropped the bombshell he could never take back and she could never forget). There was an air of companionship around him, none of the menace that surrounded him those last few terrible days, and she found her knees folded of their own accord as she all but fell onto the couch.
She never asked him what he was doing there or how he had gotten there. Somehow, she couldn't bring herself to hear the answer.
She'd liked to think she was crazy, but that would've been too easy.
He didn't leave. Oh, there were moments when Abby would close her eyes and open them and, suddenly, he would be gone like he'd never been. But he always came back. He spent most of his time in the kitchen, asking Abby what she would like to eat, scolding her that she was becoming far too thin. It was unhealthy, he told her, and he offered her breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, anything.
Abby refused to take anything he offered her, and not just because her appetite was even scarcer than it had been. She was weak and tired and her boss had allowed her (or commanded her to, it was all so blurry) to take another couple of weeks off due to her stress and upset. She wanted to go back to work, if only because the alternative was spending the whole day alone with Henry's ghost, but the one time she tried, she broke down at her computer when she saw that her screensaver was a picture of her, Henry and Trish from when she visited Seattle two summers ago.
After that she decided that maybe a few more days at home would be good. She still had Jimmy then, but then he was replaced by Henry (and she had to wonder if Jimmy's leaving was because of her or if Henry had something to do with it) and she spent most of her days locked in her room, petting a skittish Shakespeare and hoping that, the next time she ventured out of her room, Henry would be gone again.
He wouldn't leave.
Henry moved back into the living room the afternoon Jimmy left. He stayed on the couch, always looking down the hall and in the direction of her bedroom door. She always felt his eyes on her, no matter where she was, but if there was one room he wouldn't go, it was hers. Even as a ghost, even as an obsessive spirit of a man she never knew loved her that way, Henry wouldn't intrude on her when she was in the one sanctuary she had left. Before long he moved himself out to the hallway, leaning against the door, sitting against the wall, trying to be as close to her as he could without crossing the threshold into the room.
So she wouldn't leave there. Abby stayed in bed for as long as she dared (because he called to her if she ignored him too long and she was afraid her neighbors would hear if his calls went unanswered for too long), thinking and remembering and trying her best to forget. She didn't see Dr. Burns anymore but she didn't need the doctor. She knew what was wrong without some fancy diagnosis (or admitting that she was crazy).
She just had to admit it: she was haunted. And not only that.
Abby Mills was hunted.
He was everywhere. She saw him in the local grocery store, meeting him down the cereal aisle as he asked if they were out of Honey Nut Cheerios. After a long night with a bottle of Jack, he'd appear in the bathroom while her forehead was pressed against the cool porcelain side, eager to hold her hair back while she puked. He was on the train, in her car, outside on the balcony of her apartment… he was everywhere and there was not a damn thing Abby could do about it.
At first she didn't think he could leave the apartment and that, if she did, she could escape him—but it didn't work that way. The apartment wasn't haunted, she was. Wherever she went, Henry followed until Abby stopped trying to leave. She gave up on work, hiding herself in her room, under her covers, hoping against hope that Henry would remember he was dead and leave her the hell alone.
But, see, he was dead, which meant that he had all the time in the world to spend with her.
"Just me and you, Abby," he would murmur from his place in the hallway; she closed her door, locked it out of habit and, still, she could hear his voice as clearly as if he was lying in bed beside her. "It's not Harper's Island, but we can be alone, just me and you." And then he would pause, chuckle in that innocent way that was forever tainted, and add, "The cat can stay."
It seemed that Henry—or was it Abby?—got his wish after all.
- stress, 09.26.10