and the best part about it is I'm the only who can do somethin' about it

[bye_felicia]

It hits her out of nowhere. One minute, she's berating a waitress for serving someone else before her, the next she's sitting there, staring open-mouthed at a girl near tears, the words still buzzing around in her head, sitting on her tongue, with surprise the only thing keeping them at bay.

The girl doesn't deserve this, she realizes suddenly. This is just the way that things are.

They're not home anymore. She can't treat people like this.

The girl runs away, escapes, and Victra doesn't see her again until she delivers her plate of food, so hot and fresh it's ready to burn her tongue.

But Victra can't pay any attention to her now. She has more important people in her life that she needs to apologize to. Her phone's already out and she's sending a mass text message with her location to everyone in her neatly cultivated contacts list.

I'm back to normal. Sorry.

And to Lincoln, an added:

Please forgive me.

Comments

[nocost]

It's not the same, but it's the closest he can think of, even if it doesn't quite fit, so he nods and squeezes her hand in return.

"I know," he says. "I thought telling you the private things you'd shared with me would help, but I didn't even realize those memories were gone, too. I thought you'd just forgotten me. This city."

But he'd brought up her sister and Victra simply hadn't known that. He almost would have felt guilty, except for the fact that her surety in herself had been so strong that she didn't seem all that bothered by the things he'd said. Just annoyed by his presence.

[bye_felicia]

"Even when they had me captured, even when they were torturing me, I never let them take my mind like that," she says, her voice a rough, hushed sound as she leans in to Lincoln. Taking comfort from his proximity and keeping some semblance of privacy between them.

"The city or whatever can do what it likes with my body. But my mind, my thoughts and my feelings... It turns my stomach to think about it again."

[nocost]

"I'm sorry," he says. It doesn't seem fair, that a place can violate someone in this way, especially someone he cares for as much as he does Victra. It seems so wrong, one of the many things about Darrow he can't fix for anyone, no matter how badly he might want to. All he can do is be here in the aftermath, be the man he's supposed to be.

He doesn't know how to prevent it from happening again. It seems like once should be enough, more than enough, she shouldn't have to experience it even that single time, but now he's worried it might happen to her again. Or to someone else.

"I wish there was some way to protect ourselves against these things," he says.