Michael knelt down to Christine, but she pushed him away with more strength than he thought she possessed as she tried to sit up, her eyes streaming with her heightened emotions and the pain of her bleeding arm. He'd imagined that the fall would have weakened her and helped bring her back to her senses, but if anything, she seemed angrier than she was before, shouting at him with a flurry of slurred words as she realised that all the vodka was in pools on the kitchen floor. He tried to take her hand, but again, she pushed him away, curling up in the middle of the cold, tiled floor, clasping her legs as tightly as she could in her drunken state, mumbling something to herself as she tended to do when she was drunk - and God knew, Michael had seen her drunk enough times to know that.

"Look what you've done!" she cried, lifting her head for a moment and looking at him piercingly, her bloodshot eyes growing weaker as she spoke. He took the chance to pin her now wildly flailing arms to her sides, using all of his strength just to keep her still as she resisted, trying to push him away as she cried, her breath coming in gulps and gasps as she sobbed, kicking and screaming at him with very little or no coordination, much like a child having a tantrum.

Suddenly, all her resistance seemed to leave her, and she let him pull her shaking body up to standing, her arms around his neck as he took her over to the kitchen table, sitting her down gently on one of the chairs. He didn't know if she even had any idea who he was - she hadn't mentioned his name, and he assumed that her intoxicated mind was unable to process his face - he'd thought that she'd have started screaming at him for leaving by now if she recognised him, but instead, she just sat crying silently at the table, her eyes blank, but the salinity of the tears having made her irises like tiny kaleidoscope patterns; green and amber. He heard her murmur something, and strained to hear what she was mumbling as she covered her face with her shaking hands like she was trying to shield herself from something.

"Don't hurt me," she slurred, her eyes suddenly meeting his, the pleading and the desperation back in them, "Please don't hurt me."

He was confused for a moment, before it hit him just what she was talking about. Her ex-father-in-law; the farmhouse... the rape. She started crying again, silently, hot tears flowing wildly down her face. She didn't seem to have noticed her arm, but Michael glanced momentarily at it and saw the part of the glass bottle still sticking out of her right forearm, blood seeping from around it and dripping down onto the gleaming tiles as her hand was dropped at her side.

"Christine, you need to stay still, okay?" he began, getting a pair of tweezers from her makeup bag in her black handbag on the table, finding the first aid box to the side of the oven as if he'd not been gone from this house for longer than a day or so. Placing the box on the large, wooden table, he sat down and got a bandage and some antiseptic cream, before gently taking her right hand and resting it on the table in front of him, picking up the tweezers.

"That's what he said," she mumbled, looking at the floor, eyes still producing tears which she didn't seem to notice, "He told me to stay still." Michael felt more than a little uncomfortable listening to her recount this, but he knew that it was the only way to keep her still, by getting her to speak. He noticed, as he began to remove the shard of glass, that her arms had light freckles on them - it was amazing, he thought, the details that he'd never noticed of her. She didn't seem to feel anything as he placed the piece of glass on the table and opened the antiseptic cream, and he supposed that it was because of the alcohol's effect. He felt her arm tense as he applied the cream to the cut, and he looked up to see her gaze harden as she seemed to finally recognise him.

"Michael," she said, her eyes filling with something indistinguishable, and he prepared himself for what she'd say;

"I'm so sorry."

Well, he wasn't expecting that. He'd expected her to drunkenly hit him, to shout at him, to scream in his face - maybe he'd even wanted her to do that, because it might have given him a sense of how much he'd destroyed and hurt her. But she didn't - she just sat there, looking at him with her deep, warm eyes full of tears. He thought, for a moment, that she looked as if she was crying alcohol to purge it from her system. She stood up, staring at the floor like she was a student having been sent to his office, and she looked so vulnerable that he instinctively wrapped his arms around her quaking figure.

She smelt of a mixture of her perfume and the alcohol she'd consumed, which was an oddly beautiful combination because it reminded him exactly how much she needed someone - anyone - right now. She held onto him as if her life was dependent on it, and he stroked her smooth, blonde locks as she cried into his chest, her tears soaking through his white shirt from her eyes, and blood from the wound on her arm, and he knew that would leave stains from her mascara and blood, but he didn't mind, for now.

He knew that she wouldn't be doing this if she was sober - in fact, she'd probably have thrown him out by now if she was sober - but for now, she was blind drunk, scared and vulnerable, and he just needed to hold her until she could speak to him without sobbing.

"What are you sorry for?"

"I failed." she mumbled, and he felt her gulp for air after that. Christine had always been ashamed of her alcoholism, and she'd become an expert at hiding when she was drunk or drinking. It must have been three months, he thought, since she'd last been like this, and it genuinely upset him to see her in this state, barely able to control her own body.

"You didn't fail, darling." He told her quietly, slowly stroking her hair as she clutched his shirt. He didn't think he'd ever called her darling, even when they were together, but it seemed oddly appropriate at that particular moment in time, and it seemed to comfort her slightly. He kissed the top of her head, inhaling the familiar scent of her, and felt her sobs finally begin to subside, her breathing becoming less laboured and her body less tense, until it felt almost like he was just holding her last month, before he'd gone and blown his chance at happiness with her.

She was sat on the sofa now, clutching her red cardigan to her body and shivering. The cut on her arm had finally stopped bleeding after he'd bandaged it for the third time and made her stay still before making her two slices of toast in an attempt to dilute the alcohol in her stomach slightly (He hadn't made coffee, because he knew how useless he was at it, and didn't want to make her feel any more sick). He didn't know how long she'd been drinking, but she seemed to be starting to sober up slightly, if only a little - her limbs had stopped shaking as violently, and she wasn't behaving as erratically as she had been. Michael was sat on a kitchen chair opposite the sofa, watching her and waiting for her to speak first, just as he had when she'd admitted everything that had happened almost eighteen years ago at the farmhouse.

"Why does everyone leave me?" she wondered aloud, staring blankly out of the window to her right, overlooking the grey sea, as if she was talking to herself, "Joe, you, Connor, Imogen... Evanna." She glanced at Michael during her sentence as if to affirm the fact that he was still sat opposite her, listening to her every word.

"Evanna?" Michael questioned, presuming that her intoxicated mind was just confusing people's names, and that she probably meant somebody else - he didn't know anyone called Evanna, and Christine had never mentioned anyone by that name before.

"She's only sixteen, but she just needs someone. She's an addict - a junkie - but she's got nothing... nobody - she ran away from care when she was younger. She turned up here on Tuesday evening, she stayed... but she got desperate. She left me on my own." Christine was still looking out of the window, speaking almost as if she was alone and recounting who the girl was.

He realised in that moment just how caring and empathetic Christine was - he'd always known it, but the way she was in some situations, such as with Dynasty, and seemingly the girl called Evanna, just went to show her nature; another of the things that had made him love her. He had to tell her that when she sobered up - he had to explain why he left; had to tell her that he still very much adored her, despite what he'd said.

"She looks like she could break... a little china doll - long, wavy, white-blonde hair, eyes so deep and blue you could jump in and swim around in them. She's tiny; so skinny her legs don't look like they could support anything, never mind a person," she carried on, describing the girl in incredible depth, as if she was writing a book or a poem, "It was like looking at myself aged sixteen, you know?" Her eyes finally met Michael's, and a lone tear rolled down her cheek, taking what had remained of her mascara with it and leaving a greyish black trail down her skin.

"I don't want her to go through what I did." She finally said, after a pause in which a pin could have been heard dropping in her living room, holding her gaze on Michael, her beautiful almond shaped eyes steady and wide, almost childlike in a disturbing sense.

She stood up, swaying slightly as she began to walk over to the window - the alcohol wasn't quite out of her system yet - and he followed her, standing a couple of feet behind when she stopped, resting her hands on the white wooden windowsill and sighing. The light made her look pale and vulnerable, which he supposed she was, but he just didn't want to see it, because he knew he had only himself to blame. At that moment, looking at her, all he wanted to do was put his arms around her, lie her down and hold her until she slept, just like he used to whenever she was upset. He couldn't do that now, because he worried that she'd wake up, sober again, and be absolutely furious with him for it, innocent as his intentions were.

So instead, he stood beside her and let her come to him, let her place her head on his shoulder and hold onto him once more. It was four hours, now, since she'd had a drink, and he knew that she'd be almost entirely sober by now - because she'd drank so much in the past, her body was used to the effects of the toxin, and she wasn't affected as harshly as some people were by it. She was still vulnerable, though, still desperate for someone to hold her until she sobered up - she'd told him before that she actually couldn't stand being drunk, but she felt that it was the only logical solution to all of her problems.

He just hoped that, when she finally was sober, he'd be able to explain, to tell her why he left, and to tell her that he still loved her so much that he could hardly breathe when he thought of her. He hoped that she'd understand. She, of all people, should be able to understand forgiveness.

She'd never told him much, if anything, about her life when she was younger. He knew that she'd never got on with her parents, but she'd never said why, exactly. He also remembered her saying various offhand remarks about certain things - tiny, tiny clues as to what had happened to her during her youth - "The family without a skeleton in the closet must have buried it.", "We don't ever know anyone, really, do we? Maybe we don't even know ourselves.", and the one that had got to him the most, "Stuff like that happens, though - children are abused, taken into care, and whatever. It's just the so-called lucky ones that make it out alive.". He wondered if Christine had been in care when she was a child. He couldn't bring himself to think of the possibility of her having been abused, though.

Perhaps that was where her sense of empathy came from - the understanding of other people's problems, however awful they were. The way she spoke about that girl, Evanna, was like she was talking about her own daughter, not someone who was a near stranger to her; it was almost like Michael himself knew her, because her description had been so detailed.

Wavy, bleach blonde hair. Deep blue eyes. Skinny. Junkie.

The girl at the off-licence. That was Evanna.

I'm sorry if this uploads strangely - I can't afford to buy Microsoft Word, so I'm using a free alternative which is just text, no features such as lines when there's a scene change or anything. I've done my best to edit it, but I'm not sure it's worked!

And as a sort of P.S; I'd just like to have a quick complaint about how unjust it is that the killer of Trayvon Martin was found not guilty - George Zimmerman shot Trayvon, a 17 year old African American, dead in February last year, claiming self defence despite neighbours and other witnesses saying that Trayvon did nothing to provoke the attack - in fact, his father's fiancée (whom Trayvon was visiting) lived in the community in which he was killed. It's a sad day for mankind when a murderer can get off scot-free, and people are still allowed to carry guns when events like this occur.