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[angelhunter]

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[temporicide]

[ Typing... and then silence. Typing... and then stillness. Her face feels hot all over. ]

OK
But most doctors never do. You must know this. They tell people they're going to fix their spirit and then they don't.

But that doesn't matter. Everything comes at a price
What did you lose instead?

[angelhunter]

[ It's a peculiar phrasing, "fix your spirit." She's not wrong: Mistreatment of patients is common, mistreatment of female patients all the more. But her case doesn't sound mundane, not when she puts it like that.

He'll circle back to it. Nobody but Leon understood that the work required sacrifice from him, too; and Leon was largely unsympathetic, nonetheless. Hap did his best not to mind. He learned a lot from the man and his own study benefited immeasurably from his colleague's early collaboration. ]

Connection. Innocence. [ Love. ] A real life.

[temporicide]

[ What else did she lose? goes unsaid. He is not the right person to ask. Roza shouldn't be asking any of these questions, in fact; she should directly end the conversation, as instructed. But she wants very much to believe that he has at least hurt himself, too, and that the knife was on both sides sharpened. ]

I know what it's like to lose those things
Some of them are easier to get back than others.

Would you do it again? I'm not in a position to change anything for you and you don't have to tell these things to a stranger. Obviously. But
I just wanted to understand.

[ Why, why, why. A bell ringing in her head, over and over. ]

[angelhunter]

[ Hap can't imagine anything worse than where he's going. His future is medieval. It's incomparable to what he put Prairie through. It's unconscionable.

That's what she lost. ]

I would do it differently. So much could have been avoided spared if I'd known she was out there. If I saw her for what she was, really was, when I met her.

We would have been partners.

[temporicide]

[ That's not what she hoped for, either, but like she told Danny, she makes herself forget what people are really like. This sounds like a desirable thing a person made powerless may latch onto: the want to be special enough to be seen as real. Proving oneself as qualifying for better treatment.

But all of it is projection, from floor to ceiling. Roza knows it. This isn't her doctor, not any of them. This is somebody else's story. ]

Maybe in some other universe that's the version you both got.

You've got a real bad week ahead of you
I should leave you to yourself. So you can get ready.

[angelhunter]

Don't

[ Hap sends it in a flash of a fugue state, his entire body engulfed in panic. Bright, blinding. Immediately, it fades; colors weigh him down, humiliation bleeding in. Hap crushes his eyes shut and yanks his glasses off, folding in on himself. Phone dark and vised in hand. ]

[temporicide]

[ She can only guess at what occurs on the other line; Roza is loath to attribute her own reactivity to other people, whom she broadly assumes to be better-composed than she is, a girl feeling as though every moment she is on the verge of total decompensation or ascension. Below is the chasm, above her beloved sky.

But it pings like fear. And like something base and awful and mean is growing all along her spine, irradiating her brain. ]

Your head has doorways in it you can go into and disappear, you know. It's the only way to survive jail.

I go visit every day. I'll bring you a book.
Or you can message me what you want, whichever.

[ Someone in a white coat told her once to be grateful for what she had.

There's no tonal difference here from her usual good nature, especially via text. But detached from her better self, past the heavy rain of her initial distress and well into the eerie eye of the storm, Roza wonders if he'd be grateful. ]

[angelhunter]

[ The buzz in his hand nearly stops his heart. Hap slips his glasses black on, smudge at the frames. He reads her message with a shaky breath, reads it again less unsteadily. He can't ask her to try and free him. It's too much. But maybe the sight of someone treating him like a man will remind everyone else that he is one. ]

A book.
Something dense. Layered. [ He can contemplate it while he's immobilized in the stocks. ]