i-dont-wanna-remember:

Georgia settles in a chair across from him.  They are alone in the small corner of the rec room though their fellow walking dead gather in small groups around tables.  Some wander mumbling incoherently.

She rests her head against the wall.  Her hair is dirty.  Ratty even.  She doesn’t care.

How are you?  or How are you feeling today? are questions better reserved for staff members.  Will is a kindred spirit of sorts.  She’d rather talk about deeper issues.  She’d rather probe areas in him that may spark memories in her.  If anyone held a key to unraveling the mystery that is becoming her life it would be him.

Her medicine rattled mind wraps itself around a question.  

“Have you ever felt…afraid of me Will?”

Will doesn’t wander. In a hospital of the criminal and the insane and the handful of true multi-taskers in-between, he’s been deemed one of the special few. Considered more monster than all the other monsters. Will’s ankles are joined on a chain always narrower than his hips; his hands have enough freedom to turn the page of the book on the table, but hidden beneath that is the bolt where his restraints end. He’s not going anywhere before the bell rings for the orderlies to line them up, file them out. 

A frown isn’t the expression he wanted to greet her with, but it’s the only one he’s got, wrong-footed by the opening question. Will watches her sink against the wall, and a knot of unfortunate instinct rises up to lodge in his throat. Abigail’s empty place is something he knows better than to fill, or to pretend that he was ever the type of man who could (as true then as it was now). But he can’t help cataloging the tone of her skin (healthier than when he last saw her) and the tangle of her hair (muted and dull, and at odds with her eyes). 

Will didn’t know she was here, but Georgia had clearly known that he was. The question suggested time to internalize and reflect, settling him into the orbit of her thoughts. It leaves Will to catch up; to adjust himself mentally and without discussion to the new information. He’s taught psychology long enough to know that her question, by extension, is therefore important. He wants to under-cut the question, to ask her what happened at her trial; what happened to the shock therapy they promised would help her, but instead Will pulls his shoulders out of their slump and works his jaw, startling the muscles in his face to wake his mind without resorting to rubbing a hand over his eyes. 

The cuffs don’t reach that far.

“Once. Before I knew you were real.” His answer is gravelly with interrupted silence, but more welcoming than his initial confusion. “Before I understood why.”

Jul 21st   5 notes