PEARL

TWENTY-SIX

TRACK 26
SHE'S DEAD
BEACH GOONS

more like he's dead hahahahaha. ha ha.
long chapter that i surprisingly Love to make up for the update wait !!!

🚬

NATE's eyes were so wide that Ida thought they'd fall out of his head if they got any wider.

"Oh God," he murmured, blinking said wide and wired (Weak alliteration, but okay) blue eyes at the unmoving man on the claret-colored mess of a bed (Alright, alright. Don't push your luck.) and sighing shakily, shifting his already-bloodied shoes with a soft semi-groan. "That's...a lot of blood."

"Yeah, Nate," Rowan replied quietly, standing beside him as stiff as a board or second blood-soaked corpse (Ha ha. How tasteful.) from head to cleaner-sneakered toe. "Stabbed bodies tend to do that."

"I know, Ro," Nate sniffed, shifting again, although he wasn't crying. Ida figured that sniffing gave himself something to do other than stare – it was silicon action, like a hand placed awkwardly on a shoulder or forearm, dug out to fill the seashell-gaping void of not knowing what else to do. Sort of like smoking. Or sex. "I meant that it's a lot for someone to have to see in the space of two days."

Rowan didn't respond to that. He adjusted his tightly-crossed arms instead, sniffing himself as he returned his eyes to what a writer with no taste whatsoever would call the elephant in the bedroom that he, Ida, Nicole and Nate (Ah, that sweet sweet name order) were blinking at from the doorway.

It could have just been the hallway's now-boring coldness, Ida supposed. Making them silicon-sniff.

"He didn't, um..." Nate tried and failed to stop trailing off again, tugging at his sweatshirt's more-than-spacious collar before his next attempt. Now that was a silicon action if Ida had ever seen one, beating sniffing to the podium of Most Plastic. "He didn't...do anything to you, Nicky...did he?"

Through threadbare breaths, Nicole shook her dripping head.

"No," she replied, ridding Nate of the need to voice the Ida-obvious. (Is that meant to be flattering?) The word was as cool and singular as a stone. "He didn't."

Ida and her patched-up perception had assumed as much.

From what little Nate and his un-silver-blue skill in knowing how best to deal with people (even when he was so stunned that his eyes had, as already excessively established, taken on the shape of saucers) had managed to coax out of Nicole in Lily's sterile-smelling room over the steady beep of her monitors and Nicole's bout of hyperventilation, both Ida and her ability to read people (which lacked a share of Nate's aforementioned talent) had pieced together that Nurse Winterson had touched (pun pathetically intended, without a craved shadow of a doubt) a nerve inside Nicole, most likely by trying to do what he had to Lily, and had earned himself a pair of nail scissors to the neck by sparking a trauma-motivated moment of mania.

Character having been set in stone (Go on, then. No? Really?) that was destined for dismantling via friendship and falling freckle-friezed head over muddy-soled heels for Nathan Gold or not, Ida's absence of empathy at that point in time would've horrified any audience member – in fact, barely batting a bluestone eye (There you go.) at Nicole's past abuse, regardless of its present vagueness, had certainly got Futility sharpening its talons for Ida, just as it had unnerved her after her previous post-scarlet shock had finally shed its skin to realise, while looking at the sleeping Lily's no-longer-lilting mouth, that she'd kissed that mouth – by the lakeside, higher than the hospital gates, when everything was perfect enough to make the movie makers and their cameras orgasm on the spot.