A/N: Honestly, this just happened. It's short, and feels incomplete, and I'll probably delete it in like an hour. The bold is memories, the italics are Frank's words, and the rest is just Gail.
Your breathing is slowly becoming shallow, and your two hands are clasped together so tightly that a light purple is starting to tinge your pale skin.
You're trying not to draw attention to yourself, and are trying to suppress your reaction to the whole ordeal to the point that it ceases to exist. Practice has always made perfect, and considering you've had a significant amount of practice suppressing your emotions, your feelings, your identity, it shouldn't prove to be difficult. But it is. It is.
His words are still chiming in your ears, as his mouth continues to move, but you don't hear the words that leave. They are most likely details, or an explanation of their rationale, or even a hypothetical situation to really drive the point home. Because you need fuel to start the journey, right? But you don't hear them, because his previous words are still playing in your head in a continuous loop that reminds you of the old vintage tape recorder that Dov brought into your shared apartment last week. You push a tape in, it gets to a certain point and then sticks. The same words playing again and again, until you take the tape out, and even then the tape clings to the wall of the recorder, and takes hours of careful, calculated movements to remove.
His words are stuck in your head, playing again and again. And each time you hope, you wish, you pray, that you heard wrong, and that this isn't happening. But it is. It is.
"As many of you may know, recently a fellow officer in fourteenth division was fired and apprehended in due to a sexual harassment complaint being filed against him by a colleague. This incident—"
You stop his words, you clasp your hands tighter, then you take a deep breath in, before you continue.
"—along with many non-officer related incidents, solidifies that sexually related crimes are currently a rising statistic and should be made a top priority. In response, management has ordered—"
Stop. Clasp. Breathe. Breathe. Play.
"—a mandatory, division wide, retraining on the subject. It will serve as a general reestablishment of how to deal with cases including, but not limited to, sexual harassment—"
Stop. Clasp. Breathe. Breathe. Play.
"—sexual abuse—"
Stop. Clasp. Breathe. Breathe. Play.
"—rape—"
Stop. Clasp. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Play.
"—solicitation of minors through the internet and—"
Stop. Clench. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Play.
"—child molestation."
Stick. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
At this point you could usually just shove the tape recorder into a drawer, or the closet, and leave for a few hours before dedicating the time and effort that it takes to remove the tape. The tape would then take a maximum of two hours to remove, and you could easily just forget that it ever existed; it would be washed away by new, more significant experiences. Ones like Nick breaking up with you, or still struggling to feel comfortable in a place that is supposed to feel like home.
But this isn't a tape recorder. You can't just remove the recurring words from the surrounding atmosphere with nothing more than a steady hand, and a concentrated state. This is life, and reality, and karma, and all of explanations that you have told yourself over the years to explain why it happened. Why it happened to you. You shoved the tape recorder into your closet, the farthest corner of the closet, seventeen years ago, but it still managed to steal its way into your room on some of your darkest days, and sleep peacefully right beside you, falling asleep to the soothing sounds of your muffled sobs, and your violent thrashing, as you tried to shake yourself into oblivion, as you tried to make yourself forget.
You never did forget, and you know you never will, but suppression still became your own personal art, as did delusion, as did pretending, and somehow you managed to stay alive. You even managed to build a career.
Delusion, pretending and suppression never fixed anything, according to the shrinks your mother assigned you they never would. But they did offer a sense of false security, the idea that if you ignored your problems a little longer, they would all vanish, and you could actually sleep at night, and not flinch every time you hear the sound of a lock snapping in place. (Whether it be a car, or a room, you would always have to adverse the action. You would always tell your colleagues, in a patronizing tone, that the prospect of being stuck in a room with them was too frightening, when they asked. It wasn't the truth. But they never cared enough to question, or even notice, the slight tremor lying beneath the ice.)
In the beginning a lot of things could break down your wall (the sound of a Spice Girls CD, the sight of black loafers taking slow deliberate steps on carpet, the touch of another person's hand anywhere on your body, etc.) but the more time that passed, the thicker your skin became, and the more durable your wall was. Fewer things could break through. Fewer things could break you.
Those two words always could.
"Gail this is my brother, and your uncle, Dmitri."
"— child molestation."
Your mother's sudden appearance accompanied by her unfamiliar words were enough to cause you to look away from where you had set up a passing circle composed of all of your favourite stuffed animals and yourself. You had been passing around a plastic blow up ball, that had been a gift from your best friend, Kari. It was painted the color of hot pink, with small yellow daisies imprinted continuously over every clear surface. Out of all the gift's you had received that day, it was easily your favourite, closely followed by the bicycle that your Uncle Phil gave you.
The ball however, was nowhere close to as exciting as meeting your uncle. After all, Uncle Phil, your dad's brother, was really awesome, and sometimes even let you ride in the back of his police car (which you would readily agree smelled far better than your mother's, and even your father's old one, before he was promoted).
You had blinked up owlishly at him, when your eyes flew past your mom's and landed on the foreign man, the nails of your fingers digging down into the ball that was still tightly nestled in your fragile small hands.
Something in the pit of your stomach churned as his green eyes connected with yours and even after you severed eye contact the feeling still remained.
"—child molestation."
He grinned at you, baring his pearl white teeth to the world. His eyes were crinkled in the way that you had only ever seen on the seventy year old man down the street that would always sneak you a tootsie roll on Halloween when your mother wasn't looking. But they didn't hold the same friendliness, or warmth.
A sudden sharp pop drew your eyes away from him, and you paused long enough to realize that your hands were no longer digging into your ball, but instead hanging onto a deflated piece of synthetic material.
Kari's dad's voice chimed instantly in your ears, your mind finding an apparent correlation with the words he had told you only hours before. "You have to be careful though. All it takes is one tiny whole to ruin that ball, no matter how strong and stable it appears. One tiny incident, can cause the ball to be unfixable."
You never realized until you were eighteen, and were forcefully pushing the gentle tender hands of the first man who truly loved you off of you, why those words truly resonated inside your head that day.
"—child molestation."
"I think you and I are going to get along wonderfully, dear."
Suddenly you feel a finger poke you harshly in the side, the long unkempt finger nail piercing your skin no deeper than an inch, but it has what you imagine to be the desired effect. You snap back into reality and swiftly try to regain face that you may have lost.
Andy is looking at you, her dark brown eyes surveying you with a concoction of interest and suspicion. Her two eyebrows are knitted together and her nose is slightly scrunched up, and you see the way her gaze is levelled with yours. She knows something is wrong. She just doesn't know what.
You instantly direct your attention back up to the front where Frank is still standing, now in front of the smartboard, and he's pointing to a picture of a battered girl holding a speech bubble that contains: "No means no." He's speaking, and you honestly try to listen to the words he says and to make them register in your brain. But they don't. Because you can still feel the scrutiny of Andy's examination, and the memories are forcing their way to the surface (after eighteen years of burying them), and you can't focus on the words that Frank is saying, or the pictures plastered on the screen showing various forms of weakness.
All of your energy is going towards not letting your emotions consume you, not letting your past experiences define who you are, not letting your mask fall. If the mask falls, then you fall. If it breaks, you will break. For eighteen years the mask is the only thing that has kept you intact, and if it disappears you will shatter.
Five minutes pass, but it feels like longer (so much longer). You're no longer even trying to put up the façade that you are listening to what is being said, and your eyes are avoiding the board desperately. Instead your eyes are trained on the clock, silently pleading with the hands.
Frank notices your disinterest and lack of attention at the exact moment Andy decides to pipe up. "Gail? Are you okay?"
"Peck!"
Your eyes automatically snap up to meet Frank's, and the decision to respect an authority figure is the worst you make that day.
The slide is changed to a picture of a little blonde haired girl staring at the camera wearing ripped clothes and bruises covering her face, as a tall man looms over her. A little speech bubble protrudes from her mouth that says: "This is not my fault."
Your skin turns deathly pale that second, and before you can help it, you're leaning over a waste basket emptying out the contents of your stomach.
Lies could've paved your way out of the mess, like they never failed to do from the start, if it wasn't for the sobs pouring out from your lips.
"You trust me don't you sweetie?" he asked, gently placing his right hand on top of your right thigh.
The placement felt a bit odd, because no one had ever touched you that high on your thigh before and it evokes a knotted feeling low in your stomach. But you reminded yourself with vigour that he was your uncle, and that just because nobody had before didn't mean that they shouldn't. You looked up at him through your eyelashes and let out a wide bright smile. "Yes I do."
"I'm just not feeling well."
"Then why are you crying?"
You just choke on another sob, the vocal sound scratching against the back of your throat, as you force your long blonde hair to the back of your head with a trembling hand. Another wave of nausea courses through your veins, and before you can even react it's forcing its way up the same path, and out of your mouth into the basket.
The same question is lingering in your mind, the poignant why? The mask, the one that you are convinced must be carved out of your own bone using your tears as its cohesive unit, has fallen before. Not many times, but it has. The day of your graduation from the academy, a courtesy letter arrived at your parent's house, the one sealed with a glob of black ink, with nearly unrecognizable scrawl, that informed you that he's still being contained. They arrived every six months, and while they do succeed in calming the erratic nature of your heart (the constant pounding, that hardly ever ceases), they also force you to remember. Something that you always try to avoid. You missed graduation that day.
But it was never in public, never where anybody could see you.
"I-I-It just h-h-hurts," you manage to stutter out, in between greedy gulps of air and breathtaking sobs.
It's not a lie, not like it was intended to be. What you meant to mean was that your stomach was causing you pain that was so intense that it elicited tears. What you ended up meaning, was that the constant pain in your chest makes it difficult to breathe.
A/N: And there it is. It's barely over 2000 words, and it's choppy, most likely filled with grammar mistakes, and based around an idea that to most probably doesn't seem plausible. I wasn't going to end it there, I had more to say, but alas I did end it there. But in the end I suppose it doesn't really matter, because I am almost entirely certain that I'll delete in a few hours.