sunbaked_baker | OOM: I wish that I could just be brave

The night-quiet darkness of her bedroom swallowed her as Rae left the light and noise of the bar room. The sound of the door clicking closed behind her left her in numb stillness, staring around her for a long moment. It was certainly an adjustment. She hadn't seen her apartment in the year and half she was in Milliways, but everything was just as she had left it. Strewn pillows and rumpled sheets from her failed attempt at sleep, the smell of sweat and sick lingering, still fresh. Nothing had changed.

Had she?

She had been wracked with exhaustion-fueled panic when she'd stumbled into Milliways from her bathroom doorway. Now, she was... almost calm? The heavy pit in her stomach wouldn't let her says she was perfectly calm, but she felt numb, and her thoughts were strangely clear. She wondered if this was healthy, or normal. Rae had never gone in for the adrenaline-junkie kind of hobbies. Things like sky-diving or swimming with sharks weren't her idea of a good time - except that jiving with vampires probably counted, now that she thought about it. She would imagine this would be how it felt to have a terrible fear of heights, and then to find oneself already strapped with a parachute and feeling the airplane lift off the tarmac.

Frightened or not, this was going to happen.

(The lake's shoreline was more rock than marsh, and when they crossed a ragged little stream the cold splash of water against her torn feet was a shock: I'm alive, it said.)

Rae remembered this numbness; she hoped the remembered the way to find the center of herself in it, and not let the panic break through.

She had an hour until she expected her SOF to arrive. Her habits told her that to keep her hands from shaking, she must keep them busy, so she does. Rae stripped the sheets off her bed and bundled them into the laundry hamper, and cleaned her room (Rae held off on doing anything more than sweeping the floors - she was pretty sure Yolande wouldn't appreciate her vacuuming at three in the morning, whatever Rae's stress levels are like). She cleaned her bathroom until the smell of sick was eradicated. She scrubbed the few dishes in her sink until they gleamed, dried them and put them away.

Only when she heard the SOF car pull up outside did the numbness falter, the last glass nearly slipping from her suddenly nerveless hand. Rae put the glass down with more hurry and force than normal, just to get it out of danger of falling, and closed her eyes. Special Other Forces vehicles tended to be relatively quiet, when their sirens weren't on. She almost didn't hear it draw up alongside the driveway, except that she had been unconsciously listening for it.

They're early.

Pat, Jessie, and Theo wouldn't go so far as to come up to her door. Even SOF has manners, sometimes, and usual politeness dictated you didn't deliberately cross someone's outer ward line without invitation, and Rae's SOFs were strangers to Yolande's wards. They would wait in the car for her to come down and out from behind the wards' protection. For a while, at least. Until enough time had passed that they worried she would not come down on her own.

Rae looked around the quiet, dark, now freshly-clean apartment.

She was dressed nicely, her hair neat, her face and hands clean. What did she need? Her purse. It was a steadying weight against her shoulder and side. Rae's keys and pocketknife and wallet would normally live in her pockets, but more recently she had taken to wearing the small, unfashionable purse some aunt had given her years ago. The one alteration Rae had made to it was to insert one of the little listening and recording devices Jay had given her into the purse's lining.

Just in case, in the mess her life had become.

She took a breath. What else might she need if things went bad? What else did she have?

('Lend me some of your bravery?')

Nothing else. Just her.

She would have to be enough.

Having found herself with no excuses left, Sunshine went out her door to meet her SOFs.

(Continued here.)