disclaimer: I own nothing
Author's Note: God, this is getting a lot longer than I intended. I personally like stories with chapters this long, especially with Sanctuary stories. Thanks to everyone who has read this so far. This chapter has had no beta activity, so anything wrong with it is my fault. This was a fourteen page document and I wrote ten pages on the day of posting, so...not sure if that's quality or not.
This is for the two people who actually read chapter two (at the time of the posting). Enjoy Magnus's possibly descent into madness.
Two days later, Helen felt that she was doing a good job in the 'she was sane' department. She was still having dreams. And flashes. But she was shoving them down, squashing them and refusing to look at them. Admittedly, it was mostly due to the fact that she had pretty much stayed alone in the house all day.
Today, however, she was going to the courthouse. Today was the last day of a trial that John had been working on before the Ripper case. It had truly been a horrible one and it had been very hard on John. Helen had attended each court day because she had wanted to give her husband support. She wasn't going to stop at the last minute, even though a part of her wanted to. Very much so.
Helen examined her reflection in the mirror. There was a certain way the wife of a high profile district attorney had to appear when she was at the courthouse. Especially when the public knew that she was John's wife. Her clothing was much more conservative that she would prefered.
A neat skirt that went to her knees, a blouse that buttoned to her collarbones, and a light blazer-like jacket over that. Black heels. Light make up.
Helen frowned at her reflection. This didn't feel like her. But as she stared at the reflection, she started to feel like this version of her was more familiar than it should have been. She turned away before anything could flash across her vision, hurrying down the stairs. She made certain that Henry was inside and got into her car.
She turned on the radio as she drove, focusing on the road. If she had one of those strange flashes while she was driving, it wold be a disaster. She needed to stay firmly in reality. Especially today of all days.
Helen had a hard time finding a parking space and was almost late as she ran up the steps of the courthouse. There were a lot of people outside of it, waiting for the verdict of this case. She went through security and found the proper court room. There was a spot behind John for Helen to sit. She slid into it, pausing behind her husband.
"Good luck." she whispered, though he hadn't turned around.
His body language said that he had heard her and she imagined John hiding a smile. It was normal. Helen would have smiled herself, if this case hadn't been so serious. The conviction was expected today. She was hoping that John would win the case. The evidence, as far as she had seen, was sound, and the crimes themselves had been horrendous.
The room was packed and there was a lot of tension. Helen was drumming her fingers against her knee. She wondered what would happen if John lost. If the person who had done this went free. She didn't want to think like that, but she knew that it was a possibility. A possibility that she didn't want to entertain. But she knew how John was when he lost a case that he needed to win. When he felt he hadn't fought hard enough.
There was a review of what had been done. And then the jury was asked to read their decision.
The first charge resulted with non-guilty. Helen closed her eyes, watching as John's shoulders went tense. She wished that she could sit beside him and offer him support.
Some of the minor charges stuck. Some didn't. Then came the big ones.
The first one was another not-guilty.
But the biggest one was guilty.
Helen released a breath that she hadn't realized that she had been holding. People around her broke into conversation, some even going so far as cheering. The judge had to order silence. Things didn't last much longer after that. Helen stayed in her seat as others emptied out. She watched as John spoke to the families of the victims. One woman -a victim's mother, if Helen remembered correctly- threw her arms around John.
Helen had the sudden flash of a woman's body in front of her, badly mutilated. She shied away from it. It was probably just a flash of one of the victims. Sitting through the entire trial, she had seen all the pictures.
She stood when John was finally leaving. He faltered for a moment, as if he didn't know what to say to her. Helen gave him a small smile.
"Well done."
He nodded. He looked as if a great amount of tension and weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Helen understood why. He had done his job. And he had done it properly.
She walked out with John. The steps of the courthouse were packed with reporters and others. The noise, the flashing, and the sheer pack of people, overwhelmed Helen for a moment. She took a deep breath and managed to steady herself. She stood two steps above John, patiently waiting as he spoke to the reporters. She spotted Declan MacRae among them. He gave her a friendly wave when he saw her looking at him, then went back to scribbling things down in a notebook that he was holding.
It was quite some time before John managed to separate himself from everyone. Helen walked down the stairs with him.
"You didn't have to come, darling."
"I wanted to. Most people don't realize the prosecuters need someone there for them as well. Not just the people that they're for." she said.
Helen slid her hand into John's, squeezing it gently. He returned the pressure, which made her smile faintly. Maybe they would be okay. If they could still do little things like this, then it couldn't be all that bad.
"I was thinking that perhaps we could go out to dinner tonight." John said abruptly.
Helen arched an eyebrow at him.
"Oh? Why? To celebrate?"
John's mouth thinned at this. She shouldn't have said that. He didn't like 'celebrating' when he won a case. He found it in poor taste, though he was happy to let the media have their fun with such a thing.
"No. It occurred to me that I've rather been neglecting you because of my cases."
"And I haven't?" Helen asked quietly.
"You came to court when you had no need to. Simply to support me during the verdict."
That was a point, Helen supposed.
"All right. Where?"
"Alfredo's?"
A semi-fancy resteraunt, where they'd used to go when they had first moved to America. They hadn't been there in quite some time. It was touching on John's part to think of such a thing.
"We'd need a reservation."
"And we so happen to have one."
So John had been planning this since before the end of the case. That showed he had put more thought and effort into things than she had been lately. Helen knew that she had no good excuse. She had never thought that John would be the one to try more than she did. That unsettled her for some reason.
They said goodbye at her car because John had to get back to his office and Helene supposed that she needed to paint. She wasn't certain that she felt like it, because her mind was far, far away right now. And she was afraid that she would start seeing strange things in her paintings again. She wasn't comfortable with the idea, but she knew that she would have to see what happened. She was meeting with her agent this weekend, after all. She had to finish the work that she had lined up.
At home, Helen changed, didn't bother taking her make up off because she would have to have reapply it, and turned her music on. Henry was sprawled across the stool and she ignored him, starting to paint. As she did, Helen felt more at ease than she had in a while. This was what she did. Of course this was what she did. Why would she think about anything else? Why would she let the dreams and images get to her so much she felt like she was going insane?
She painted for a while, losing herself in all of it. It was nice. It was what she wanted. It was something that she enjoyed. It was why she had decided to devote herself to this, after all.
The spell was broken when she had to stop and dress for dinner. Helen had never liked formal clothing very much, but she knew that she needed to make an effort. She donned a dress that suited where they were going, but her prefered style, of course. Though a part of Helen wished to just wrap herself in her sweater, because it made her feel secure.
John picked her up and they talked a little on the drive to the restaurant. Helen was trying to be normal, but her head was starting to ache and she could practically feel things building up against the barriers in her mind. When John asked her if something was wrong, she just smiled and said that everything was fine. If she said it enough, perhaps it would be true.
Sitting at the table with John, talking and eating, something was nagging Helen. Because even this wasn't right. This setting wasn't right. John wasn't right. She wasn't right. An image was nudging at her mind. Knocking on the wall she had erected and it wouldn't leave her alone.
"Are you all right?" John asked her.
"Of course I am."
Helen knocked back some of her wine, hoping it would help. A fuzzy mind would be much better than an insane one. It didn't help. If anything, the alcohol gave the image permission to come in.
Just a brief flash, of herself sitting with a young man at a table in a room she was certain she had never seen, smiling at each other.
Helen gasped slightly at the force of it. John became more alert, looked at her with an arched eyebrow. She gave him a smile and excused herself to the bathroom. More images were crowding at the crack in the barrier. The bathroom was empty and Helen fumbled with her purse. She had put her medication in here, just in case. She fumbled with the bottle, stared at it. She could feel anxiety mounting, brought on by the images. After a moment of debating, she took one, swallowing it dry.
She rejoined John. Talked with him. Knocked back the rest of her drink. By the time they left, she was starting to feel a little unsteady, but managed to hide it. She didn't want John to know that she had been mixing medication with wine. He didn't seem to notice as they drove home. Her mind was feeling fuzzy as they walked up to the front door of the house.
Helen went upstairs to bed, scrubbing off her make up and dropping her clothing on the floor before crawling under the bloody quilt that was supposed to mean so much. John actually joined her. But she was too far gone to appreciate it.
Her nightmares returned that night. John woke her up and for a moment, Helen couldn't make sense of what she was seeing. She yelped and jerked back at the sight of him bending over her, tumbling out of the bed.
"Darling, are you all right?" John asked her.
"Fine. Fine, just a nightmare."
Helen got to her feet, feeling shaky as she looked at him. For a moment, when she had seen his face it had been wrong. Not the John she knew. There had been blood and a frightening look.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" John asked.
"You're not right."
Helen stuttered on the words, realized that she had said them outloud. John stared at her, clearly having no idea how to respond to that.
"I assure you that I am."
"No. No...your scar."
Helen blinked, staring at John's face. On the right side, where there should have been a long groove of a scar, there was nothing. Chills shot over her body.
"What scar?" John seemed genuinely confused, sliding out of the bed to join her on the floor.
"Your scar. It's gone." Helen reached out and touched where it should have been.
"My love, I never had a scar." he said softly.
Helen shook her head. That wasn't right. Everything in her mind told her that John should have a scar there. She couldn't remember how or why, but it should have been there. An image of John with the scar floated across her vision. She closed her eyes tightly. John touched her arm. She trembled.
"You're just confused, Helen. You had a bad dream."
"Leave me alone." she whispered.
Something inside of her suddenly didn't want John touching her. She managed not to say it, because she knew that he would take offense. John hovered for another moment, then departed the room. Helen cracked open her eyes. It was later than she had thought. She took a shower, simply to avoid John a little longer.
Images were swirling through her mind. Images that she couldn't make sense of. But she was suddenly positive that John should have a scar. She didn't know why and she didn't know where it had gone. But John had a scar.
By the time she went downstairs, John was dressed and making breakfast. A cup of coffee was sitting on the island waiting for her. Helen frowned at it.
"Coffee?"
"Of course. Your favorite."
Was it? Helen distinctly remembered having tea instead a few days earlier. She looked at her scalded hand. Realized that John hadn't even noticed the injury. He might have been making an effort, but he wasn't doing a very good job in that department, was he?
"Thank you."
She sat the island and noticed that this morning's newspaper was sitting beside the cup. She unfolded it and saw that John had made the front page with his success on the case. She touched her fingertips to the picture. John had no scar there either. She was standing just behind him in the picture, her face composed. She looked like a much saner woman than she felt right now. She also didn't look like herself. She looked like her nightmare self.
Helen dropped the paper as if it had burned her and sipped her coffee. Yes. Coffee. She liked it, didn't she? She suddenly wasn't sure.
"What are you doing here?" she asked John.
"I happen to live here."
"No. I...you shouldn't be here. You should be getting to work. You should be at work. I shouldn't see you until tonight."
"As I said -I've been rather neglecting you. I need to change that. I -what happened to your hand?"
John reached across the counter and picked up her injured hand and wrist gingerly, as if he thought that he would injure her further.
"I scalded myself. Three days ago. Kind of you to notice."
"Helen." John looked wounded at the tone in her voice.
Helen yanked her hand back, cuffed her sweater sleeve over it. She wanted to ask him why he was suddenly being concerned. Why he was suddenly doing the things that she thought he should be doing? It made no sense. But it did. John loved her and she loved him. Didn't she?
"Perhaps you should talk to someone."
"What does that mean?"
"Sessions with a professional."
"Because I snapped at you?"
"Because you are not yourself lately, Helen. You've been having nightmares. Been speaking of strange things. Perhaps you need to talk to someone."
"I talked to James."
It wasn't until she said that Helen realized talking to John's best friend instead of him might be another point against her on the husband and wife score sheet.
"And?"
"He didn't say much. I'm fine, John. Just...overworked and overtired and having bloody disturbing nightmares."
Lie, lie, lie. She was good at that, wasn't she? But Helen was lying to John not to be mean or truly hide anything. She was lying because she wanted to believe it.
"Do you think that perhaps you are not dealing with things properly? That all of this may caused by that?"
"Caused by what?"
"I'm not certain, Helen. I am not the professional. The miscarriages, perhaps? You mentioned children the other day."
John always said what he shouldn't. Helen had no idea if it was a talent he alone possessed or he was simply being a man.
"Do not go there." Helen whispered, closing her eyes. "I am not...this isn't because of that."
"You never truly dealt with it, Helen."
"How do you want me to deal with it?!" Her voice rose. "My children were ripped out of my body and-"
Helen broke off, more images flashing through her mind. Pain and blood, gushing beyond her control. Rushing to the hospital even though it was already too late. Her looking at James, a hand pressed to her flat belly. More blood, a different time, another failure. James, laying out surgical tools, placing a rag over her mouth and nose. Yet more blood, staining the sheets. An embryo in a cryogenic container, a strange looking one, as she touched an incision mark on her abdomen. More blood, everywhere, in the hospital. James again, holding a syringe and tubing, the cryogenic container behind him, empty now. Her sobbing in John's arms only once.
Helen whimpered, burying her face in her hands.
"Helen?"
The images continued to swirl around her mind, overlapping each other other, bleeding into one another and not making sense. One thing they all had in common was that her child had been taken from her body. It made no sense. None at all.
"Helen, are you all right?'
"Frozen embryo." she whispered, closing her tightly against the image. "Alone in the cold and the dark for nearly a century. Until it was safe. But it was never safe."
"We never froze any embryos."
Helen looked at John. She had no idea what she was saying. What these visions she was seeing made any sense.
"I...know."
Did she? It suddenly seemed real. And that bloody scar was still not on his face where it should have been.
"Helen-"
"This isn't right!"
Helen jumped up, knocking her coffee on to the newspaper. It saturated the paper.
"Helen."
"None of this feels right, John. I don't know what-" The only thing that made Helen break off was realizing just how insane she was sounding. She had told herself that she wouldn't show this to her husband. That she would keep it to herself because she couldn't show that she was doing worse than he had thought.
He was staring at her how she didn't want him to stare at her. Like she was broken. Like she needed more than she had been told she did. Like everything was wrong. She didn't need someone to look at her like that because she already felt that way. She needed someone to tell her what was wrong with her. Or to assure that she wasn't going insane. John wasn't giving it to her and she suddenly hated him for that. She needed him to be the man she had married and he wasn't. Things were shifting and the cracks were appearing. Deepening rapidly.
"I'm fine." she whispered.
It was a lie. To him. To her. But she needed it to be true.
"Are you?"
"Yes!"
Helen looked at the saturated newspaper instead of John. She suddenly wanted to tear it in half. Obliterate the image of them that was supposed to be correct but suddenly didn't feel right.
"Then how about some breakfast?"
He was giving her an out, Helen realized. John shouldn't have been doing that. He should have been expressing more concern for her. A normal husband was supposed to be concerned when his wife's mental health -already unbalanced- was clearly spiraling down the drain rapidly. He was supposed to be reassuring and questioning and trying different things than this. But he didn't. He gave her an out because he didn't want to deal with it. Because their marriage wasn't as good as it really should have been.
Helen grabbed on to the out and nodded. She mopped up the coffee and put the newspaper aside. John put plates on the counter. They sat together and ate. They pretended that it was normal. They were pretending when it came to a lot of things. It worked for now. But it was never going to work in the long term. Something was going to give. At this rate, it was going to be Helen.
When John left for work, she tried to work herself. She was stuck on the miscarriages now that he had brought it up. The images that hadn't made sense. She was tempted to call James again simply because he had been in them, but that was a door that she was not going to open. She couldn't. Not if she wanted to hang on to her sanity. Or so Helen told herself. Her first reaction when going through something hard was to pull away from everyone. Including John. Most people reached out to their oldest friends. She pulled way.
"Most people go back to their oldest contacts for solace, Helen. You defy that convention, but then, you always have."
That was James's voice, but he had never said that to her. Never. Helen rubbed her forehead, feeling frustration well up. What was wrong with her?
She thought about curling up on the sofa with Henry -whoops, she had forgotten to feed him- and thinking about things, but she was afraid to. She thought about calling James or Nigel or Nikola, but they would all be busy. She was the only one that worked from home and had such a flexible schedule.
John would probably be telling James about this before the day was through. And then the others. She'd probably receive a call from the other three soon enough. James with his serious concern, Nigel with the concern coupled with trying to cheer her up, Nikola telling her to get her head on straight. She might need those things, Helen, realized, but she wasn't certain that she wanted them.
She wanted to be sane. She wanted to go back to England, she realized. It was more than that. She wanted to go back in time. She wanted to be home with her friends around her, before this had all started happening. Before she felt insane. Before she had anxiety. Before her marriage started cracking. Before the miscarriages. What she wanted, Helen realized, was her youth. When things had been simple and full of hope and possibilities. She suddenly felt very, very old.
Tiredly, Helen fed Henry and tried to paint. It wasn't any good. Her thoughts were all over the place and she was feeling anxious, afraid that some strange vision would come out of no where and hit her, making everything feel wrong and upside down.
It wasn't even noon when she broke down and took a pill. She painted while she could. Eventually the drug took priority over the rest of what she needed to do and she curled up on the sofa with Henry and a handstitched blanket, closing her eyes.
She had no nightmares. Helen felt a thrill of something close to happiness at this realization when she woke. The only reason she woke up was because Henry batted at her face. She was still fuzzy, but she felt better. That was much better than this morning. Helen had no idea how long she had been asleep, but she didn't care. She hadn't had nightmares or visions and her mind felt almost light from the brief break.
She painted. She was fuzzy and her balance was off. She dropped her paintbrushes several times on to the hardwood floor, leaving spots that she would clean up later. She received no phone calls. She could ignore the strange images from earlier, though she was left with the echoing heartbreak of the images of her tiny, dead children clean of blood and forever parted from her. But that was old pain. Pain Helen knew how to handle. How dare John say that she wasn't handling it, especially after all this time.
Helen turned up the music. Did what she needed to do. She was off balance, nearly knocking the painting over, dropping a brush in the kitchen when she went to clean them. She stepped on Henry's tail, earning an earsplitting screech from the cat, as if she had dropped him into a vat of hot oil instead of applying pressure to a mere inch of bony, fur covered flesh.
"Darling, I'm sorry." she told him, picking him up and giving him a cuddle. Helen nuzzled the top of his head, right near the faint gray patches, taking comfort in him. "I'm not crazy."
Reassuring your feline that you were not crazy may have been, in fact, a sign of craziness. Helen had a feeling that she was already well on her way to being a cat lady. She didn't want to tack the word crazy in front of it.
By the time that John got home that night -well past ten o'clock- the effects of the pill had worn off and Helen was trying to ignore that by painting more. She didn't hear John come in and he scared her when he came up behind her, touching her shoulder. Helen yelped and jerked, spinning around. She went a little weak when she saw that it was only John.
"I apologize." he said.
"You're home late."
"There was a lot to do."
Neither of them kissed each other in greeting or showed any sign of affection. Helen saw that John was scanning her, clearly trying to determine if she as better than earlier or something like that. She arched an eyebrow at him when he reached her face. John cleared his throat, seeming a little awkward.
"How are you?"
"Better." she said shortly. "I...apologize for this morning."
Something inside of Helen deeply loathed apologizing to John suddenly. She had no idea why. She wasn't going to examine it.
"As do I."
That was all that they said about it. All they were going to say about it. That suited Helen just fine. She didn't want to talk about it. She certainly wasn't going to tell John that taking the medication had made everything seem better. They'd had so many arguments about the medication, where he had been for it and she had been against it. She wasn't going to admit that she was going to give into it now. Helen did not want John to think that more medication might help her even more. She may not have known what was going on with her, what was happening to her mind, but she knew that she did want to be told more drugs were the solution. She was determined to be the kind of person that didn't need medication to be normal, even if she needed medication for anxiety.
Helen continued painting long after John had gone to bed. She had drank several cups of coffee -still uncertain whether or not she liked the stuff- and was feeling jittery and couldn't sleep. So she worked, listening to music. Finishing everything that needed to be done for the weekend, she found another blank canvas. She didn't paint a landscape and she didn't paint an abstract painting either. Instead, she painted damp cobblestones reflecting lamp light, red with blood. The blood streaked over it, pooling, running between the stones.
When she finally stopped, Helen stared at it, surprised. She hadn't really payed all that much attention to what she had been painting. She had just done it. She stared at it. You couldn't see the source of the blood, but it was rather sinister to see it this way. Chills ran down her back as she stared at it. Why would she paint something like this? She had no clue and the fact that she didn't scared Helen. She had never been dark in her paintings before. Not like this.
She gave up on painting for the night after that. Washing her brushes, Helen braced her hands against the sink, closing her eyes. Images very similar to the one that was on the canvas were running through her mind. But they made no sense. No sense at all. She had never seen anything like that. But she could practically smell it. A wet London night and the sharp copper tang of blood in the air. A body, curly blonde hair the only image that she could focus on.
Helen snapped open her eyes, finding that she had raised one braced hand to her hair. Once upon a time, she'd had long curly blonde hair. That had been a long time ago. But the correlation between the two made her shudder. It was an image from her nightmares, certainly. Had she been having some strange nightmare about her own death? Helen had no idea. She turned away from the sink, turning off the lights. Turning off the music. Too weary to handle the prospect of going upstairs, Helen simply curled up on the sofa with the same blanket as earlier.
Her nightmares returned that night. Bad enough that she woke up in a cold sweat in the morning, bolting upright and sending Henry flying. The cat meowed indignantly at her, but Helen didn't care. Her heart was pounding and it took her a few moments to realize where she was. And a few moments longer to realize that it was right.
"Nightmares?"
A twist of her head showed Helen that John was in the kitchen. It was still early enough for him to be home and he did not seem pleased for whatever reason.
"Yes."
He grunted and said nothing else. Helen had a feeling that he was not pleased with her for some reason. She stood up, brushing cat hair off of her chest and walked towards the kitchen. It didn't look like John was making breakfast. Just tea. She stared at him. His body was tense. He was barely looking at her. He had fed Henry, she noted, but that was probably because she had been a little lax in doing so the day before.
"Are you all right?"
Another grunt. That sent a flare of annoyance through Helen.
"I am your wife, John. You can give me one syllable instead of a noise that would be more appropriate for lesser primates."
"I was under the impression you didn't want to speak to me."
That surprised Helen.
"Why?"
"A man assumes he did something wrong when his wife chooses the sofa over the bed."
Dear God, this was what this was about? Helen was having a hard time wrapping her head around the fact that she was in the present, standing here with him, instead of the strange nightmare world her mind had given her. There were too many images and feelings and things like that crowding her mind for her to want to deal with John and whatever petty reason he had found to be unhappy with her this time.
"I was tired when I finished painting. I walked a few feet and went to sleep." Helen said, though she suddenly wasn't certain that was all it was.
She had been so out of sorts when she had woken up with John over her. She hadn't wanted to feel that way again, even though she still felt more than half way convinced that he should have a scar on his cheek. She wasn't going to bring that up again. The best thing that she could try to do right now was keep what she could inside. Some things kept slipping out beyond her control and she hated that.
"New painting." John commented, ignoring what she had said all together.
Helen glanced over her shoulder at it. She had forgotten about it. She stared. She could still smell it, which made no sense. She felt that the painting was connected to her and John, though it was absurd.
"Do you want me to make you something before I go?"
"Don't go out of your way to be kind to me."
She wasn't helping by being snappish and unkind, but Helen didn't care. her mind was too crowded and John was adding to it when she wasn't certain she could handle it. Looking from the painting to John again, the images decided to cooperate and show her some things. It made Helen confused and slip into it.
"You're not right." she whispered. "This isn't right. We're not right."
"Helen."
She looked at him. Helen wasn't even sure that she was seeing him. The scar seemed to be hovering, ghost-like, over John's face.
"You broke my heart." she said to John, more images banging on her mind, trying to get in, but at the same time unable to do so. "With blade and blood and bullet."
John's expression was what snapped her out of it. Helen's legs felt weak and wobbly. She started to go down. She reached for the edge of the counter. John caught her. She leaned her head against him, screwing her eyes closed against the images. She wasn't certain how long it was before she managed to steady herself. She pulled away from John and stared at him, shaking hard. John looked shaky as well.
"You are not fine." John said.
Helen jerked away from him, shaking her head. Shaking harder and cuffing her sweater over her hands, wrapping her arms around herself.
"No. No, I'm fine. I'm fine."
It wasn't true. They both knew that. They both had seen it. She didn't know what to say. What to do. This was worse than what had happened with the Zimmermans. This was her husband. This was worse than before.
"You're not."
Helen shoved John hard when he came towards her. It was reflexive reaction, but she didn't care. Her mind was going wrong. And John had seen it. Letting someone else see something like this was terrifying. She swallowed hard, tears welling in her eyes.
"I'm not crazy, John. I am not."
"I am not saying you are. But you are not fine either. Perhaps a doctor-"
"No!" Helen took a step forward as she said this, nearly slapping John across the face. She had no idea why that was her reaction.
But some part of her suddenly wanted to hurt John and for more than this. She had no idea why and it scared her. It was like there were two versions of her. The one that was standing here in the kitchen and the one that was pounding on her brain, demanding entry. She held up a hand towards John, saw that it was shaking badly.
"I am fine. I just...the nightmares..."
"This is more than nightmares."
Helen didn't know what to do. She just stared at John. He stared back. He must have realized that she wasn't going to back off from this. He inclined his head towards her and left the house.
Helen watched as he got into his car and drove away into the rapidly lightening morning. Once he was gone, she took a breath. She found her medication bottle. She took one of the pills and returned to the sofa, hoping that it would make everything better.
Author's Note: This might need warnings about prescription drug use, I'm not sure.
If anyone is out there and reading this, please review and let me know what you think!