A/N: Thanks for the reviews, keep them coming! Sorry this
update is a little short but the last two chapters have give me
nightsmares, so I have to be doing something right. Hope you all
continue to enjoy the story.
Chapter 10: When the thread breaks
Carter and Susan stood there looking at Abby, right now both wishing that they had some Haldol or another sedative on hand. Their glances went from each other back to Abby. Waiting to see what she was going to do next, neither one of them wanting to get to close to her. She was scaring them both, neither of them trained to handle a break like this, while they might have been doctors they dealt with emergency medicine and left the psychiatric problems up to psyche to handle.
Abby was nothing more than a crying ball on the floor, her hands and legs bleeding from the tangle with the broken lamp. Her hair was plastered down against her face, drenched from the sweat that had started to poor off her body during her ordeal. It took everything emotionally and physically that she had and left her drained and emptied. All she wanted to do was cry unable to escape the torment that her mind was putting her body through. All of this was leaving her nothing more than a broken woman, an empty shell that did not contain the life that it once had. She was starting to gain awareness once again of where she was and that what she had seen wasn't really what she had done for she could see Carter standing in the kitchen now next to Susan.
She lifted her head up now and looked at Carter blinking her eyes as she adjusted them to the light in the room. Carter caught her glancing at him wondering now if it was safe to go over to her. She was a mess bleeding from the cuts that she had gotten from the lamp and you could see the blood stains where she had touched her head and her clothes with her hands.
Abby looked at the both now, more in control again of where she was almost unaware that she had been moving while in the dream like trance. "I hurt my hands." She said as her eyes feel upon them now. The pain that was there almost seemed surreal to her, she remembered in her dream holding the glass but that was just a dream wasn't it? Surely she knew what was real and what was in her mind. Abby didn't want to admit that she was slowly losing grip on the reality that surrounded her that her mind was taking on a life of it's own and there was nothing that she could do to stop what she was feeling, to get the nightmares under control to keep her fears under wraps and tightly controlled.
Carter cautiously approached her and took the glass from her hands so that he could get a better look at them. "Yeah you did baby." He said keeping his voice soft, as he looked over her injuries. She had sliced her hands up pretty badly with the glass, but it didn't look like any of them were deep enough that they would need stitches she just needed to have them cleaned up and bandaged, "it's okay I'll clean them up," he kissed her forehead softly before taking her hands into his and helping her up off the floor.
He led her over into the kitchen ever so slowly was each move; deliberate in attempts not to trigger another flashback for her. The last thing he wanted was for her to snap while he was this close to her. He just kept talking to her in a soft soothing voice telling her that everything was going to be okay that he was there and he would take care of her just like he knew he was supposed to. While Carter had been getting Abby out of the glass and away from the broken pieces, Susan had gone to the bathroom and raided Abby's first aid supplies keeping a careful watch over Abby now as Carter helped to clean up her cuts.
Susan was worried about her now, clearly Abby was not handling the stress of everything as well as they had all thought and she was suffering from PTSD in combination with something else right now. Her friend had been stabbed in the back and then that same man had come creeping back into the place where she worked, a place where you should be able to feel safe and tried to kill her a second time. No one should have to live through that and all of that was wearing her down. Susan knew that she needed to get Carter to get Abby to get some help, she was hanging on by a mere thread that seemed to have stretched to the point of snapping if that wasn't what had just happened in that apartment.
Once he was finished, Abby looked exhausted. He picked her up carefully so that she would know that it was him that had her and no one else and took her back to the bedroom. He laid her gently on the bed covering her up and making sure that she had something familiar there with her. A stuffed bear sitting on the nightstand which he wrapped in one of his shirts and tucked in firmly beside her. He stood there watching as she closed her eyes and drifted back into a sleeping state. He took a few steps back away from the bed and looked down at his hands.
Part of Paul's words echoed now in his head, that it would be her blood on his hands. And there it was part of what he was saying had come true, Carter had her blood on his hands. He didn't want to believe that this was all a part of Paul's plan that this man had somehow set out knowing that he wouldn't be able to kill her but that his plan was to slowly drive Abby mad so that Carter would know what it was like to lose someone he loved.
