Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 15

DUSKWOOD TWP

EXIT RIGHT > 10 MILES

She stared up at the blue highway sign as it approached at speed, watching mutely as the coral and orange light of the late afternoon sun bounced sharply off of the reflective coating on the letters and scattered across Lilly's dashboard.

The car was quiet, as it had been for the last half hour or so; the conversation between the two women inside had organically begun to dwindle as the sun began to approach the horizon. It was a meditative silence that was only punctuated by the rhythmic, muted humming of the engine and the tires as they worked in tireless synchronicity.

The deep and warm light of the day's end flooded the car's interior as they drove, creating a dreamlike haze that was only heightened by the stillness of the woods that towered over both sides of the highway, silent, watchful, and dark. They were both feeling the fatigue of the road now, but Lilly had rejected her frequent offers to take over the driving, saying that it helped to keep her mind occupied, so she had eventually stopped asking.

As they passed under the highway sign, she saw Lilly glance over at her briefly, but the other woman did not say anything to mark the occasion, something for which she was grateful. During their conversation at the start of their journey, she had hesitantly confessed her intense - and growing - apprehension at finally being able to set foot in Duskwood, getting to meet everyone in the group that had become so integral to her daily life, and getting to meet Hannah especially.

She had asked Lilly as they had set off if Hannah had explained how she had found or even why she had sent her number to Thomas, but Lilly had not had an answer for her. She had explained that Hannah had been taken to the hospital almost immediately after the explosion in the mine, and that she had been on some heavy medication when they had gone to see her there. By the time that she had gotten back to their parents' house after the twenty-four hour monitoring period that the doctors wanted to keep her for, she had been withdrawn and silent to any of their gentle attempts at questions, retiring to her bedroom immediately upon entering the house and had not emerged since.

She was intensely nervous to meet Hannah; had no knowledge of if the other woman even wanted to meet her at all. But if she did - what does one say to someone who had experienced what Hannah had? How do you begin to strike up a conversation with someone who had been through so much trauma, someone who only came into your life as a direct result of the abuse that had been done to her? How do you look into the eyes of someone that had been so brutally victimized, knowing that you had to victimize her further by prying open her private life with a crowbar and putting it, in all of its ugliness and guilt, on display for her closest friends and family to see? How do you even begin to apologize for doing something like that?

But that wasn't even the worst of her fears, of course.

Because inasmuch as she was desperately yearning to finally meet Jake, she was utterly terrified at the thought of actually doing so. How exactly was she supposed to navigate the meeting of the man that had, in the span of a few short weeks, completely shattered everything that she thought that she knew about herself, about relationships, and about what it meant to truly be vulnerable? And if she thought having to confront the horror of the past month in Hannah's eyes was bad, how would she even begin to be able to witness what it looked like in Jake's?

Jake hadn't been the one who had been abducted and tied up in a derelict house at the hands of a childhood friend, this was true, but he had spent literally every waking moment trying to find his sister with every single resource that he could claw into the search. He had to confront daily - and hourly, it seemed - the darkness that had twisted Richy's heart, and he'd had to engage in that confrontation with a steady and unwavering gaze that did not - could not - look away from the punishing cruelty of it lest he miss the opportunity to find the routes that would bring Hannah home.