Aster and Honeysuckle
Nicole Clevenger (February 2015)
Notes: I don't write this kind of thing these days, but I think we can all agree that – regardless of character development, or lack thereof – Emily Reid got cheated out of a proper farewell. Not that I do her any favors here. There are no bright spots in the following, and warnings for descriptions of mental illness and suicide. I didn't want to do it. But if they won't give us details, I guess we have to fill them in ourselves.
I make no money, because they don't belong to me. And I'm sorry.
Some days she knows him. Most days she does not.
The drugs designed to keep her calm and quiet often stretch further, laying her out near catatonic. He reads to her when she's like this, tells her a watered down tale of his week. Fills the room with the sound of his voice, meaningless words that pile upon one another to replace all the oxygen. He sits beside the bed until they stifle him. Until he can no longer breathe.
Reid holds Emily's hand in his, running his thumb over the healing scratches. They'd cut her beautiful nails down to the skin after she'd clawed herself to bleeding; he had come to visit the day after, to find her restrained by wrists strapped tightly to the bed. A persistent hysteria, the doctors had said. Not uncommon. A few setbacks were only to be expected.
So they tell him. It is far from his field.
Emily stares vacantly at the ceiling, barely blinking. Reid finds it's easier to look at the pillow by her ear than the blankness on her face. Her dark braids stand out starkly against the white of the bed, the nightgown she wears. Against the pallor of her skin. They make her appear younger, conspiring with the artificial peace that smoothes the pinched lines that of late had taken up residence around her mouth and eyes. If he doesn't look directly at her face, he can almost pretend that she's still the girl he once courted. That any moment she'll turn to him again with that once upon a time smile.
His fingers move on their own to push back the escaped hair curling loose at her temple; they brush against her cold skin. Cold as a corpse, comes a whisper. Reid jerks away from it. Turns his attention to the steady rise and fall of her chest as reassurance.
She still lives. She has not yet left him completely.
"Do you recall the flower girl," he asks, "the one set up shop at the end of your father's street?" He isn't sure why he thinks of this now, nor where it is headed. It hardly matters. He has no illusions that she will enter the conversation. He doubts she is even listening. "After a time, she began to prepare a bouquet for you before I had even arrived. I suspect it was solely my coin that kept her in business."
Money he hadn't truly been able to spare back then, surviving on a Detective Sergeant's salary. But he had been so in love, his only desire to please her. The occasional hunger pains a fair trade in his mind for the joy those flowers always brought to her face. Reid swallows against the lump that has lodged itself in his throat. So many years between there and here. So many years since he's been witness to that joy.
He forces himself not to reach for his pocket watch, pretending even to himself that these visits are not often remotely akin to timed sentences that must be endured. They used to have such inspired dialogues in the beginning, her wit and opinionated intelligence something beyond captivating. He remembers sitting in her father's parlor, sometimes unable to get a word in edgewise when they would touch on a subject about which she was passionate. He had not minded. Content to let her emotions wash over him, he would sit silently smiling. Tracking her animated movements about the room. Dreaming of the day she would be his.
She's so still now, always so still. Except when she transforms into a raging stranger. He has done this to her, altered her from that girl. He would give anything he has to change her back.
"Aster…" Emily murmurs. Reid's eyes fly to her face.
"And honeysuckle," he says softy. Trying to draw her out.
Her gaze remains glassy and unfocused; her eyes roll listlessly under their drooping lids. He waits. Eventually they shift sideways to find him. "Edmund…"
An exhale with the power to instantly drag him into memory. Lazy mornings drifting with her naked in his arms, the warmth of her against him and the taste of her skin. It's like a fantasy now. As if he looks at the life of someone else.
Stop, his brain hisses. At war with itself.
A muscle in his cheek twitches; he fights to shape his mouth into a smile. Her eyes jump about his features, but it's unclear what she really sees. Reid realizes he's holding his breath, that he squeezes her hand too hard. He makes himself relax his grip.
"Edmund… you are here..."
It is unbearably uncertain, and he cannot help but compare this Emily again with that headstrong young woman gone missing years ago. He wants to scoop her up into his arms, to protect her from this. He hasn't held her since he failed her that day at The Bear.
"Yes," he says, gently flattening that same errant hair. Emily tilts her head to press her face against the back of his hand. Her eyes close.
"I want to go home..."
It stabs with a force that greatly exceeds its almost inaudible volume; Reid's head snaps back as if she'd slapped him. "Soon, my darling." He takes care to form the words, to compose his expression around them. She has not yet opened her eyes. He leans in brush his lips over her forehead, inhaling the scent of her hair.
He thinks it smells differently than it used to. Or perhaps it's simply that he's forgotten.
"Take me home, please." The repetition this time sounds more like a sob. "They hurt me, Edmund…"
Reid sits up quickly, enough to be able to properly look at her. "What? Who hurt you?"
"Cruel, so cruel." She's becoming agitated; it rises bubbling in him as well. "It hurts…"
"Emily." He captures her chin in his hand, tries to claim her focus. "Tell me."
Her eyes are liquid as she blinks up at him, and he feels an answering sting in his own. So far from that night he'd proposed, swearing to keep her safe and loved forever. The future had had such a lovely glow to it then.
"I am their prisoner," she whispers urgently. "Shackles. Drugs that steal my thoughts."
"No, Emily, no," he coos. A bit of the tension begins to seep from his shoulders as he understands the danger to be residing only in her muddled mind. "They seek to treat you. To help."
She looks betrayed. When she tries to wrench her head away, he releases her without a fight. Emily turns her face to the wall. Reid watches a tear slide along the line of her slender nose.
"… should be you…"
He's reaching forward to wipe the moisture from her skin; her whisper freezes his hand. Emily's head comes back around fast. The tip of her nose almost hits his still outstretched fingers. "You should be their prisoner, Edmund. Not me." A feral hiss now. To match the fire burning in her eyes.
He cannot truly identify this woman, though in these last years he has glimpsed her more than once. A wild creature who lurks behind a mask made to look like his wife. He wonders if this thing has always been in there. Hiding. Or if it was he who had caused it to be born.
"It's your fault." She pushes herself up and away from him, her back against the wall. Reid's hand hovers impotently in the space between them. He lets it fall to his lap. Swallows. Somewhere down the corridor, a woman is screaming.
"You should be punished." Emily is weeping now, and a part of his mind struggles to understand how this all went so badly so quickly. "You. You, Edmund, not me…"
The screaming continues, sharp and high-pitched. It sounds almost a recording in its repetition. He wants to get up. To slam the door hard enough to make the room rattle. He cannot look away from her. His hands twist themselves together, fingers bending until they hurt.
"Yes." His teeth feel about to crack in his jaw.
"You." The word pelts him again and again, hurled between frantic gulps of air. She pulls at her hair as if she intends to yank it out.
There's the same gut punch of helplessness he'd felt when their daughter went overboard, instantly familiar even after so many years. He doesn't know what to do. That bloody screaming scraping raw the inside of his head. Reid shifts onto the bed. Wraps his arms around Emily and holds on as tightly as he can. She squirms against him, violently trying to battle away; her fists replace her words. They beat against his chest and shoulders, and he's surprised by their strength. An old pain flares, inconsequential in the face of this new.
"My fault," he murmurs in her ear. Her head knocks against his in her failing; he does not pull away even as it happens again. "You are right, my darling. My fault…"
He knows not how long they sit there when a hand lands on his shoulder. His head spins around; something twinges in his neck. The doctor.
"Inspector. Allow me."
Reid's eyes follow the gesture, to Emily in his arms. His brain drags slow and stupid. She no longer fights him, other than an occasional twitch. Still the sobbing goes on. Exhausted now, but unceasing.
"Emily." Nothing, not even the rage. "The doctor has come."
There is no resistance as he lays her back down onto the pillows; the tears are almost silent now, but they shake her thin frame. Reid moves out of the way so the doctor can get to her. He stands uselessly by the bed, watches the man help his wife drink from the glass bottle. Emily relaxes almost immediately. Something he'd found it impossible to get her to do.
The doctor glances up at him, and Reid averts his eyes. He reclaims his hat from the side table. The other man comes to join him near the door.
The screaming has stopped, he realizes, as they step out into the hall. Unfortunate that he can still hear it scratching at the inside of his skull. The hand not holding his hat comes up to rub at the back of his head. Through the throbbing there he gradually registers that the doctor before him seems nervous, uncomfortable. Hesitant to say something, and Reid finds himself just as hesitant to hear it.
"Inspector," the man begins, a stalling, drawn-out version of his title. Reid feels the scowl as it darkens his face, but he makes no attempt to smooth it.
"Speak, man." He has no patience left for this.
The doctor summons his authority in response to Reid's tone, visibly standing straighter as he lifts up his chin. It may have been comical, in circumstances other than these. "This occurs more and more frequently with your visits, sir." The doctor now right to the point. "Perhaps it would be wise for you not to come to see her so often."
He had not expected this, though he cannot fault the reasoning. Reid works to keep his reactions invisible, out of his expression; the scowl lingers, and he lets it. He refuses to calculate how many of the past weeks could be categorized good versus bad.
"I know it a difficult subject," the doctor continues, more gently now. Reid wonders vaguely which of his emotions it was that escaped. The hallway has a fuzziness to its edges that he is certain shouldn't be there, and he suddenly can't recall when it was that he might have last slept.
"Whatever you think best, Doctor," he says, having little option but to defer. "You will keep me informed?"
The corridor is too warm, the sentence forced out. An overwhelming wish to be gone from here surges through him like an electric shock. He sucks in a breath, tries to measure its exhale. But he has nothing else to say.
"Of course. We will look after her."
There's a definite urge to take the polite smile off of the other man's face, a brewing frustration that seeks a place to land. This will not do; he needs to leave before it has spiraled itself out of his control. Reid shoves his hat down onto his head, his fists deep into his pockets. He mutters a goodbye as he pushes past the doctor, not bothering to stop for an apology as his shoulder accidentally clips the other man's as he goes by.
He doesn't glance into Emily's room on the way.
"Um, Detective Inspector? Sir?"
Reid looks up from the papers, toward the tentative shadow advancing from the archive doorway. Grace again, although thankfully this time not bearing a tray. Reid sighs. He does not know how he is expected to get anything accomplished, if this boy persists in disturbing him every…
Five hours? Reid blinks at his pocket watch, but the evidence remains unaltered. Five hours passed, it seems, since the constable last had come down.
Regardless. He has no need of a nursemaid. Reid takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes. "Your consideration is appreciated, Grace," he says, hoping to head off a discussion. "But I am still not hungry."
"No, sir. It's… it's word from the hospital, sir."
The quiver in the boy's voice may be imagined. May be simply a generalized anxiety. But it strikes at a nerve in Reid. The paper covering his desk rustles under the crash of his hand. "Emily? Has something – ?"
Grace shakes his head. "They only bid you come, Inspector."
He will not remember giving Artherton instruction, will not remember who summoned the hansom he rides. Later he will only recall the length of the journey. The hours alone, fighting his dread of the worst.
She had been on his mind this morning, lingering with the threads of a dream, and an unpleasant recollection had seized its advantage to hit him hard outside The Bear on the way in to the shop. It had taken a long time before he had been able to come this direction without seeing the memory of her writhing on the cobblestones, Jackson trying to shield her from herself. Today it had surprised him. Sneaking up fresh as it so often used to.
Emily. Jackson. Drake. Left one by one. The time he spends in his archive helps keep him from dwelling too much on their absence.
When the hansom stops in front of the hospital, he finds he cannot immediately get out. Reid stares at the massive front door until the driver pointedly clears his throat from his perch up top. Time skips sideways; now he's walking up the steps. There are no shouts behind him, and he can only assume that he paid the man his due.
Reid wills himself to focus, to recognize that he dredges up imagined bad news without cause. It is likely that this meeting is about nothing more than a treatment change, as was the previous time he and the doctor had spoken. Electroshock therapy, carrying with it the promise of temporary peace. By all accounts a success, though he has not seen the results for himself.
He visits once a month now, rather than once a week. More often than not she is sleeping. He talks to the empty shell of her. To the girl he courted. Loved.
The doctor meets him in the reception room, his eyes sympathetic and downcast. Most of all, it will be this moment Reid remembers later. The space between when the other man looks up and when he opens his mouth. The moment when he still clings so foolishly to a fracturing aegis of optimism.
It will mock him forever, this moment of hope.
"There has been an incident…"
"Let me see her," Reid says, stumbling over the doctor's careful start. There has to be something he can do; his mind circles this thought before any details can be made known. Whatever has happened, they will deal with it. He only needs be allowed to see her. He glances down the hallway over the doctor's head, impatient and fidgeting.
Why is this man obstructing him? Can they not speak on the way? Reid takes a step as if to get by him. The doctor rests a hand lightly on his arm.
"I am very sorry, Inspector. You don't understand. I'm afraid that your wife is dead."
And everything stops.
Gone the restless urge to move, gone the pounding of his thoughts. Gone too the sounds of the people moving around them, the smells of the hospital. The information sinks through the center of him. His entire world narrowed to the weight pressing along its cold trail.
"Dead…" he repeats thickly. His lips, like the rest of him, are numb.
"She was discovered this morning," the explanation floats over him. "There was some difficulty last night, but we'd thought her sedated."
There are more details; Reid does not hear them. There will be plenty of nights in the future to wade through them, to pick each one out of the muck and hold it up to the individual scrutiny that comes from the magnifying light at the bottom of a bottle. He will eventually get his hands on the coroner's report, too. Delving deeper than just an image of bloody bedsprings. Directly to the professional estimation of exactly how long it took her to die.
It will not help then. It does not help now.
All there is to do is to keep himself standing until the doctor has finished, a meaningless triumph over the unnatural tilt of the floor. His hand grips the edge of the reception desk that props him up. He does not know when he found this necessary support. Reid wants to order the man to stop speaking, to tell him his words make no sense.
Indecipherable. Wasted. A buzzing has begun in his ears.
He won't recall leaving, nor the arrangements that he had to have made. Subsequent self interrogation will never bring him a proper recounting of where he goes from the hospital, of most of the rest of the week. It is lost time. Survived by a lost man.
He will tell those he must that the problem was her heart. Because in the end, that's what it was.
end.