Urgh so this is literally just pure trauma and angst, no porn even this time I'm sorry - set just before the trip to America, just after Enola, but with flashbacks. So many trigger warnings – madhouse awfulness, rape, abuse, depression, social anxiety, animal slaughter and a briefly referenced dead baby towards the end – just getting a heap of Lucille's madhouse years feels out of my system so I can move on to cheerier things later! It really is just a pile of grief, feel free to skip, normal service really will resume next instalment. :-)

4.

"So" she says, brightly "What more have you gathered about our Miss McMichael?"

"Well" he smiles, with a misguided attempt at levity – "She's not very pretty, is she?"

He had meant it as a sort of joke, something to cheer Lucille up, but the look she gives him is so withering he deflates at once, knowing how forced her brightness is, wondering why she bothered when he knows how tense and strained she is, how much she hates these social gatherings.

"What more have you gathered that's useful?" she amends, tersely, as though talking to a child. She always does this. Sometimes it irks him, but never that much, he probably deserves it and he finds himself, at this moment, as so often, in tune enough with her mood not to react to it. She sits down wearily on the side of his bed, rubbing her forehead very slightly in a jerky two fingered gesture he often notices when she has had to deal with the world. He wanders about the hotel room, hanging their coats up, fixing things here and there.

"Well she's rich" he nods, this was after all, the main pre-requisite "From somewhere quite new in America, a little place in New York state. New money of course, but they all are over there. She has an older brother – but it seems like she'll still inherit the family fortune, he seems to have made his own, he's a doctor, she said."

He catches the scowl that no sooner flickers on Lucille's face but she suppresses it;

"I don't like doctors" she shrugs just a little, pushing it off quickly, but not before he has noticed and felt that little stab of pain for her he feels so often. There is that sudden distance in her eyes as though she could at any moment fall away from him, back into the past.

She fought them all the way to Lancaster. By the time they reached the asylum gates they had already branded her "difficult". It took four of them to get her through the front door and from there straight into solitary in restraints. It should have been enough but they beat her when she was down just to make sure. Later on that first evening the doctors paid her their first visit.

"I know" he stops pacing and sits down beside her. For once he has picked the best thing he could say; it pulls her back and she turns to him with a faint smile.

"It's not important. It's not as though we'll have to get to know them for long."

"There is just one problem" he decides he may as well come out with it now. She looks at him silently – go on.

"They go back to America in a week. I don't think it's enough time."

She stands up angrily, giving a disgusted little breathe out.

"It's not."

They put her to work in the gardens with a huge great monster of a man who pushes her down in the flowerbed one day and rapes her. He is stupid and clumsy and brutal, but he knows how to do this one thing, cramming his cock into her leering and grinning while she lies there dead, sinking into the soil, her body no more than fuel for the broken flowers. She had thought she could have liked working out here.

She's here, but she's elsewhere. It troubles him when he knows the other place hurts her, has been there through her nightmares and the tears she does not know she lets slip in her sleep. She will so rarely talk to him about it later. All he can do is stop her, bring her back when he can.

"What do you want us to do?"

It's the right move, he knows, putting it in her hands like this right now, because she nods, her clenched fists soften and she stands still, quiet, thinking for a moment. A not quite happy smile twitches ruefully at the corners of her lips and then she turns to him –

"Thomas, didn't you always want to see the New World?"

They punish her for the broken flowers later, punish her for her filthy behaviour. He cannot help it of course, but she should have known better. They beat her for being a slut, telling her she must love it as they rape her again. She supposes she must like it, after all she never cries any more. They make her work with him until the job is done and until it is he rapes her every day, knowing that he can, and she lies still and absent, dying with every thrust, smelling the wet leaves and the soil, turning her head into the earth, imagining sinking down, down beneath the compost, flowers and grass growing over her, turning her face away into the damp and earth and choking on it, wishing she could go all the way away. She imagines crawling back up out of the grave, hands and mouth full of this earth and she thinks dear god, when I die, let me not come back, let me not come back. Then, every night the doctors do it again, they hardly need an excuse anymore, how many young, highborn girls do they have after all?

"Well I – spoke of it – but you – I mean – you wouldn't –"

She smiles, sits back down on the bed, beside him now, takes his hands in hers and draws his head down to her chest. Even though he is not the one who needs comforting right now, he knows that this helps her more than if he had tried to make it the other way around.

"I used to see the sea" she murmurs – "On a clear day you could see all the way across the bay, when they let me out – I used to think of being lost on it, a tiny thing in a vast space. Frightening – but – it felt like being free, just to imagine it. Wind in the sails, drifting but with purpose – like we always sing –" It is only ever her who sings, but he does not correct her. She does not stand correction well these days. He thinks it is far too soon to be travelling again. She has been so sad since Enola – well it was not Enola making her sad; there is a tiny coffin in the back of his mind that he cannot bring himself to think about. He tried to tell her to give it more time, that they could live off Enola's fortune for longer and they could have done but she struggles to stay still these days, even though she hates to be out of the house at the same time.

"There is nothing I would not do for you" she says and he knows how true it is, he supposes he must be ungrateful to feel guilt over the things she does, he should be gratified to be one of surely few people in the world to know for sure that their love would kill for them. She sounds almost proud of it

After that they put her on a stint in the slaughterhouse, she could only assume as some kind of added punishment. The idea that this might faze her has her laughing all the way there, like the mad woman they so clearly want her to be. It is a punishment, has to be, she is the only woman in the place, but for once it is not a problem; quite the reverse in fact – they only put the safer inmates down here of course, and besides nobody makes an unwelcome move on a girl with a cleaver in her hand; and when they see the look in her eye that accompanies it, they stay doubly away. It is here that she learns to enjoy the killing. She looks the animals in the eye and does it hard and fast. It is a kindness, she thinks, a strength that nobody around her has – none of them would look her in the eye when they were hurting her. She comes to enjoy the swing and thud and crunch of the cleaver and close her ears to the animal cries of pain. How could she not enjoy it? It is making her untouchable, something she has not been seen as since she arrived. Even outside of the slaughterhouse, she begins to see people looking at her with a wary kind of respect. Or maybe it is not respect, just a kind of fear – she could not entirely care. Even the doctors and the staff begin to change towards her, seeing her proficiency in this task as some sort of proof that her "treatment" is working. It seems that murder, first seen as her madness, was now being regarded as her rehabilitation. She realises, as she had not fully before, how insane that makes them, how woefully inadequate they are. All her old insecurities and self-loathing begin to run side by side with a sense of superiority far crazier than anything she had entered the place with.

"I know" he says and would say more but she says again –

"Everything I do is for you, you know that don't you?" He moves against her, curling into her, holding her as she holds him. He does know of course, she has told him so many times. He wants to tell her the same, but fears she would look at him like he did not mean it and he can just imagine how inadequate it would sound, instead he just replies –

"I know. I love you Lucille."

She smiles properly for the first time that night because, in all the lies that twist up her heart and that she feels tugging at his every promise, this at least is true. It has always been true and always will be. And of all her own utterances she can only quite trust herself to make this one.

"Yes. I love you too."

Because they fall together, falling in place, his hand against her chest and his eyes raising to hers. When he kisses her it brings her all the way back, beyond recent tragedy and awful long ago memory. It is the one thing that can hold her in the present, that can bring her back to life. It is, she thinks, like a fairy tale, the very core of how those stories work. When he kisses her she can be the heroine for once and not the villain, she can be the girl he sees her as; she can almost, if she closes her eyes, be beautiful. In amongst every other aspect of her this one thing will always be good, and beautiful. Perfection.

_x_

Okay yeah I literally said last chapter that the next would be less horrible but I lied. On the plus I have two chapters started, neither of which are of the distressing kind so when I say next time we'll be back with some merrily scheduled porn I DO mean it!

I should quickly explain that I have my own definitive head canon that the institution Lucille ended up in was Lancaster's Old Moor Hospital, the first and largest psychiatric asylum in the north west of England. Nowadays patients from the Cumbria (Cumberland) area still get sent to the replacement facility built in its old grounds so it's not a huge stretch to think that Cumbria people might have gone there 100 years ago. Also I used to be able to see the place from where I lived for years in Lancs so it's something I can work with. :-)

. (should anyone be interested)