Clarabelle returns to consciousness abruptly, painfully. She looks at her hands, sees test-tubes empty, and she removes recollection of the events surrounding them from her thinking mind, as she has every morning for so long. She doesn't want to deal with those.
"Do you know what these are?" rings out the question in Kenspeckle's voice so Clarabelle unfocuses and moves her eyes until she finds his form, and then she concentrates on seeing him and not screaming.
He is holding more glass containers, so she nods. "I washed those yesterday," she says simply. "They live in the cupboard under the sterilization sink."
"Do you know what they contain?" he asks, rolling his eyes.
"Looks like water," she says.
"They contain a deadly poison," he tells her. "One will be neutralized at sundown."
"Why?" she asks, involuntary response, shoulders sloping weak in the aftermath.
"Because that's how long it takes for the ingredients in it to finish reacting with each other," Kenspeckle says, the obviouslyunspoken.
"Why?" she repeats blindly, and cold is lining itself up against her nerves, shunting down her spine, and her head feels like so much hollow. "Why was that car there on that day and why am I alive now and why does my voice sound wrong and why are you trying to kill me and why am I alive now and why are my cousins dead and why is Lenka not here and why don't I remember anything anymore and why am I alive now?"
"What are you talking about?" Kenspeckle counters, his tone reasonable, even. "You're hysterical – only to be expected, I suppose, considering your karyotype. You're delusional."
"No, Kenspeckle," she breaths lightly. "I am not. There are some things that the world cannot take away from me, and God knows how it has tried—how you have tried—and Lenka is one of those things and I can still remember her like I remember where I left my limbs." She grins, tight and wide and distracting while her fingers scrabble out onto the table behind her. "I remember life with her like falling in love, like the world aligning itself for one blinding moment of perfection. I remember what it was like to live a life intact, and this is not it."
"You are unbalanced," Kenspeckle tells her, moving closer to her, and her eyes are fixed on the syringe he scoops up on his way. "You need help."
"And, what, you think you're the person to give it to me?" she asks, standing still now, hoping that just for once, things will go the right way. "You think that you're the one that needs to help me?"
"Clarabelle—" he begins, a warning in his voice, but it's too late for any kind of warning for him because she has been primed and ready to hurt for years now, buzzing with a need that she should have known sooner, or so she thinks, and so she cuts, lashes out with the scalpels until she has removed from him every trace of the man who had been her torment.
She listens to the dripping of his blood, after that, thinks about what she has done. The insanity she has ended. She thinks about all the people she saw, she met, distantly, through a cloud, when she was under his control. She thinks about how her cousins were dead then alive then dead once more and she thinks she might belong dead, but that doesn't matter because she feels more alive now than she has since Lenka.
She listens to the dripping of his blood, and she smiles.
A/N: The timelines in this story are kind of a horrible mess. I'll have to try and even that out at some point.
~Mademise Morte, December 29, 2012.