Seventeen years, ten months, two weeks, three days...
Each moment is agony.
Every second of every day, George Beaumont is reminded of his young wife's untimely death. With every glimpse of that painting up on that mantle, with every glimpse of his...
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Edited
Autumn of 1870
Anne spends the next several hours alone, door locked and bolted. The autumn chill spreads across her body, but she remains in one corner, hugging her knees to her chest. Even if it isn't so close to winter, she is sure that she had never felt so cold.
Madness. That is what her mother calls it. She had heard her arguing about sending her to an asylum with Eleanor. Anne looks at her nails, no blood staining them, but there might as well have been. Her mother is right. She does not even know what to do anymore. Everything is just darkness. Nothing she can ever climb out of. The worst part is that she does not even feel any guilt towards hurting Raymond, or screaming at George and Eleanor. As a matter of fact, she does not even feel anything. She feels empty, yet she wants to claw out of her own skin. Aren't those the kinds of people that are committed to madhouses?
It could just be the sleeping draught that addles her mind, but Anne finds that she can barely even remember her own name. It scares her. Scares her just like those dreams of claws and blood do. Especially with all that laudanum. She has just woken up from a nightmare about bloodstained claws and fangs tearing her apart piece by piece until there was nothing left. In that dream, she knew death. And she is glad that she survived her wounds.
Raymond. He was in the nightmare too. She remembers his cold eyes, foreign and cruel, as she calls out to him. He left her defenseless. He was the one that left her to be torn apart by those demons in the first place. There is nothing to console her. Her memories are so fragmented that she cannot remember what he did to make her smile when she was sad. In that moment, he is just a monster conjured up by her mind to leave her to die.
Hot tears cloud her vision, not that there is anything much to see aside from shadows.
Then she hears a rapping at her window. It is the complex knock that only Raymond knew. Three, three, two, one, three. The beat is familiar. As the window is always unlocked, he slides in, years of experience behind him. That dark, insane part of her mind cries out. It tells her so shove him out the window, to try and carve his eyes out. She doesn't. He might have been a monster in her dream, but his stormy eyes look nothing like a demon's in the faint candlelight.
"Anne? You're not... You're not feeling better, are you?" His voice sounds defeated, though his smile remains. She can see it in the faint moonlight. Anne wants to throw her arms around him, but she is scared of those horrible feelings of hate and terror coming back. She is scared of hurting him.
She shakes her head, not moving even as he walks towards her. What is the right thing to do after she had tried to tear him to shreds? Why is he even there? Her tears have stopped, but there is still nothing but emptiness inside her. Not even agony. Not even the agony she deserved.
He settles in front of her, setting down the leather satchel he only ever brought around when he went up through her window.
Smoothing her matted hair back with his fingers, he sighs.
