Vanessa - Daytime Ruminations

Vanessa's legs ache. Exhaustion is slow to come to an athlete supernaturally empowered with beyond-human stamina, who already suffers insomnia as a matter of habit. But eventually, it does come. She tires of her endless walk. She finds a tree to roost in and watches the sun rise from its boughs as she falls asleep.

At last, she is simply too tired to be sad. She can't walk the emotions out of her body, but she can walk until she overrides them with something worse.

Maybe it's not jumping off a bridge as she's joked about (and considered) before. But it's self-destructive all the same. She recognizes it, but does anyone else, she wonders. Do they know that when she says she exerts herself to the point of fainting to soothe her bad moods, it's in some small way a cry for help?

She can't bring herself to say "help". She makes jokes and meme edits, and hopes people can read between the lines. And she also hopes they don't. Maybe she doesn't want them to know how pathetic she is. She doesn't know what they want. She doesn't know what they think.

Waking comes with a renewed determination to be what she thinks they want of her. She'll be more agreeable. She'll do what she thinks the scripts tell her. She won't cry in front of anyone anymore.

Maybe if she just kept walking...

No, she'll go back. This time, she still has enough tethers to hold her down.

But that weird, sick feeling of dread is working its way up again from down in her gut. The preemptive exhaustion at imagining how she has to pretend how everything is fine, to everyone else. Going about her normal day. And waiting - waiting -

It's fine. She's fine.

She sometimes looks at her life like cloth, and counts the threads that tie her home, and wonders how many it takes to fray away until she'll just go back. Not to New York, not home, but to home-home, to where she ran from years ago.

She doesn't know if she ever actually left, not really.

It was fine. She was fine.

She sits in the tree breathing slowly as she wonders, not nearly for the first or last time, how long it is before she gives up and goes back to Salem. And not for the first or last time, she rehearses in her head the groveling apologies she'd lay at Charles's feet for her ungrateful absence. He did not love her, but he showed love to her. He didn't care about her, but he took care of her.

Vanessa hops down from the tree. She keeps walking. She finds a town. She eats in a diner alone. She considers. She keeps considering.

It'll be fine. She'll be fine.

She tells herself to just behave this time, and there'll be no more trouble. She goes back. This time, to New York. This time.