Like Real People Do

34. NFWMB

TW: Self-Harm, Eating Disorder 

If I was a blackthorn tree I'd wanna be felled by you, held by you, fuel the pyre of your enemies -Hozier

Saturday, September 4th

Sleep did not find Shane that night. He laid beside Rhiannon in bed watching her erratic breathing slow to a rhythmic rise and fall before closing his eyes and lying awake. Dawn had just barely begun to break with its usual soft pink light cast over the bedroom. It illuminated Rhiannon, curled up on her side and hugging a pillow tightly against her torso. Mornings like this were supposed to be a reprieve, the eye of a hurricane that they both slept in comfortably. Today, however, just felt like the eerily silent aftermath of a destructive storm.

She insisted that he go home over and over again, but after everything that happened, he couldn't have left. He wouldn't have left. It was not often that Rhiannon allowed herself to be taken care of, but he suspected that she didn't have much of a say in the matter the night before. It was already a difficult day for her, and it somehow managed to make itself worse.

Shane thought Rhiannon a lot of things in the time that they'd known one another. She was fiery, never willing to back down to injustice, yet still moved with such kindness. He never met someone so stubbornly compassionate, who cared as loudly as she did. Rhiannon was the most beautiful thing that the light touched every morning, and the most comfortable presence beside him at nightfall. She was his guardian, best friend, and love of his life all wrapped up into one person.

Breakable, however, was never something that he attributed to her.

The first time they ever spoke at length, he noted similar injuries on her hand. There were fresh wounds on her knuckles, accessorized with a face red and puffy from crying. She chalked it up to a "bad-night" and dismissed him when he asked, but that explanation never satisfied his curiosity. They knew more about one another than anyone else, but she was still guarded and cryptic when it came to her emotional outbursts. He hit things in anger before- there was nothing odd about that- but it was the way she turned around to face him with her knuckles bruised and bloody that shook him. If she had been enraged or devastated, it would have been fine, but there was a look on her face that Shane couldn't even put into words. Rhiannon's eyes were usually full of vibrancy and life, but the ones she looked at him with that night were completely and entirely vacant.

She never told him the specifics, but whatever Agnes's mother said to her during that short phone call broke her, and what came next was chilling. Rhiannon wasn't Rhiannon at that moment. Someone stood in her place that Shane had never seen before. She moved like a ghost through a memory, and her mind was miles away.

"She said it was my fault," he watched her mumble, slumped over on her couch with that distant look in her eyes. It took every ounce of self control he had not to react in anger, but that sentence alone had him seeing red. If not for him entering crisis mode, Shane might have punched the wall, too

Now, watching her sleep restlessly with bruises and small wounds all over her right hand, he still bristled at the thought of it. How dare she speak to that? How dare anyone speak to her like that? She never needed him to protect her, but nothing would stop him from trying. One thing was for damn sure- if that fucking woman ever called again, she'd be answering to him, and he wouldn't be half as patient as Rhiannon was.

He heard the way she spoke of her late best friend, always with distant stares and troubled frowns. She read him the book of Agnes before, and the ending still aged her every time she said it. Shane could do nothing but listen respectfully, but his opinion of the Cooper women was not very high. Agnes included. If Rhiannon cared for her even half as much as she cared for him, then the only thing she was guilty of was putting up with too much. She had never been anything but selfless, yet somehow still carried the responsibility of Agnes's passing because she put her foot down when enough had been more than enough.