Some things, they're solid, they're built to last. Some things, they fall apart, they break like glass.
There is a hint of confusion regarding Meredith in Catlin's eyes, but other than that fear painted with betrayal is suffocating her chest and the pain is only seen on the surface.
I have a mostly emotionless expression while it lingers on them, swinging Leah slightly in the idea of calming her down as I stare there.
Nobody is answering Meredith's question as I simply turn away from them, walking at the other end of the room as I look out of the window.
New York was never the type of city I would see myself living in, too loud even in the late hours, too alive for this darkness. Cars are hypnotizing down between these blinding lights. I keep my arms around Leah.
"Ta dig samman." I say, speaking explicibally to my sister. "Vill du att de ska döda oss?"
When I turn back to look at her, she is nodding while the others are now in sync with furrowed brows and questions with no space for answers.
"What was that?"
Swedish.
Me, Caitlin and Michael have learned it as kids in hope to communicate with each other without our parents knowing when we wanted to sneak out, lie to get away with stupid teenage shit or just play smart in front of others around us.
The one and only time it didn't work out of ru us was on a summer camp where we listed all the hilariously weird clothing the directed wore, until he wickedly smiled at us and started reading out our conduct codex and punished us for not being able to leave the cabins after eight for two whole weeks.
"Do you wish for something?" I ask them.
"Yes." Lilah speaks right away. "Wish to know what the hell was that?"
The tone of her voice tells me she isn't speaking of our language, but the smirk on my face is menacing. "Never heard people talking in another language?"
She tilts her head to the side in silent rage. "That's not-"
"How lovely." Meredith interrupts her. "I don't remember seeing your ability to speak another language anywhere in files about you two."
How obsessed could these people be?
"So what?" my voice thick with annoyance.
"So, how did you learn..." she stops for a moment to think, then clicks her tongue. "Danish."
Caitlin scoffs at that, muttering. "Din sorgliga, patetiska slyna."
The devil's horns pick up on that, not even understanding any of it as she grits her teeth like a goat and shoots her a glare.
"The fuck did you say, you whore of a surgen?" She begins taking steps toward her as she flicks the knife between her jewerely filled fingers. As my instincts say to rush forward and protect my sister, the logic tells me of a child in my arms that could be in much larger danger than an adult with a long tongue.
I have no need to double over an answer for a long time, because either way Meredith is stopped and pulled back.
She blinks once as Lilah pushes her away. "What are you doing?"
She rips her hand as if it burns both of them, clenching her jaw and letting freaky smiles rest on her. "Having fun with our pets. What does it fucking look like?"
"Landon said-"
"Oh, Landon said." She mocks with an obnoxiously loud voice, making a disgustingly strange expression. "Landon our lord and savior speaks and we must bend down when the words kneel leave his mouth. Oh, Landon, what would we do without him? Rot and die."
"He said not to touch them." Lilah gets out through gritted teeth, stepping closer. "So you don't touch he- them."
She is biting her lip and tongue, even trying to swallow down on those words but it echoes the room as I tighten my grip around Leah when I look back at Caitlin.
Her eyes are puffy when she hugs herself, looking on the floor. It could be a good thing she doesn't know them as much as I do, but this way she can't foresee the possible bloodshed which could occur very quickly.
Where the hell is Landon?
"Oh." Metedith says once, the erupts into a machine of different types of giggles, chuckles and laughs. All of them are full of irony, same as the rest of her life is.
"Of course." She wipes the fake tears off her cheeks. "I see why you are one of his favorites. He must see so much of himself in you."
"Shut it-" the rage in Lilah rises as eben more as soon as she is cut off.
"I mean, who else would make the same fucking mistake other than the slut whose parents didn't love her enough." she shouts at the same second Lilah swings.
The first one comes off as a surprise for most people, but Meredith is prepared as she catches her wrist. Her knife is falling on the ground as Lilah kicks it and Meredith goes to twisting her arm. While she takes a split second of her time doing that, Lilah is following motion, only enough so that she could pull them like magnets and smash their heads.
On the first sight, the smart move, in Lilah's hands was only Meredith's advantage when she mutters full sentences of curses as snatches a knife from Lilah then pulls it through the air.
"No!" my sister screams when Lilah cries in pain from a loud slash of through air. A second later the line over the side where her chest and shoulder meet is bleeding and Meredith can't stop smiling.
Until she does.
She is grasping her head, stumbling back as my eyes open wide at my sister, catching Lilah before she slips on the ground. Her eyes are immediately searching for the wound, you can see the dots from medical field connecting in her mind just as fast, as if she isn't holding her ex girlfriend which turned out to be spy for serial killer, who is her brother's ex, and as if she hasn't thrown a glass bowl at, it seems everyone's shared, enemy.
Someone should write a book about this.
"Bitch." She is hissing, hands grabbing a previously fallen knife, not even bothering to get closer this time as she flicks it between her fingere, going to stand up.
My reflexes work this time, dropping confused Leah to her feet as mine carry me just right in time to destroy the balance of her arm when she throws the knife.
Caitlin lets out a shriek when it hits the wall right next to her head.
I don't let Meredith even look at her throw successfully as I take my elbow, punching her straight in the side of the head, adding more damage to the head in hope of throwing her off guard further.
When it works, my hands are wrapped around her throat and I quickly push us both toward the door. She is scratching my hands, only stuttering once when her back hits the thin wall right next to the open door.
Her face is rising into a red color as I use all my strength to press my thumb in the right spot to stop her breathing. I remember the teacher in our training telling us the benefits and flaws of blood and air choke, describing how dangerous air choke is and not to use it unless we want to kill a person.
She said the last part as a joke.
We laughed.
Meredith isn't laughing.
But I am. I am smiling from ear to ear as I slowly feel her feet and arms loosening down and the fight leaving her body.
She is so close to death.
So close.
But close is never enough.
"Enough." is the word I hear when arms detach mine from hers and push them to the side into another stronghold as I flick my eyes towards the person.
Meredith's body is falling on the floor the same second I lock my eyes with rageful blue ones. He is keeping one of my arms in a strong grip while other is covering both of my hands previously uses in attempt of murder.
I wasn't sure if my breathing was rigid from the previous action or the proximity, but neither of those things was helping the situation.
Landon's are searching the room, pausing on Lilah and my sister when I turn back to look at Leah. She has her arms around herself, trembling on the ground as the tears wet her cheeks.
I try to get to her, but Landon tightens his grip on me, pulling my body to be right in front of him as he looks down. His lethal glare tells me all I need to know to not move.
"Lilah." he finally speaks as I see Meredith slowly regaining her breathing back. "Show our lovely surgeon guest, the room where she can help you treat that."
"I am fine." she mumbles.
"You are not." I hear Caitlin muttering to herself at the same time as Landon when he looks back at Meredith and adds. "Move and I will kill you."
Meredith doesn't move. The two of them do. Caitlin is refusing to look anywhere at Lilah as she throws an arm around her shoulder and keeps the ripped part of clothing over the dripping blood.
The floor is leaving stains of redness all over it. It sotrads until they exit the room and Landon speaks once more.
"Send Rafael up here."
Once they leave, his eyes return to me. His mouth doesn't speak, the look in his eyes asks me all I need to respond to.
Yet I ignore it. "Let me go."
"First tell me what have I just walked into."
I can hear Leah crying. "Let me calm my child, Landon." I tell him with a calm voice. No, I ask him, but he doesn't seem to care.
"She won't melt, now," he clenches his hands harsly around mine as he lowers his voice. "what happened?"
As the quick summary leaves my lips and the other two parties have the exact opposite reactions, one loudly crying while the other stays silently when, who I suppose is Rafael enters.
When I finish he just stares at me for quite a long moment.
Then says. "Rafael, escourt Meredith out of the building and put this child in bed, too late for her either way."
I close my eyes, trembling with fear returning as I whisper. "Landon, please."
It doesn't work, Meredith is leaving the room without muchba a fight other than default glares as Rafael walks across the room. Leah cries, turns into scream and even louder yells when he picks her up.
I couldn't imagine what a child even feels now, as an almost two meters long and wide man with a scarily long beard picks her up, bringing her out of the room and away from her father when all of this has happened not even five minutes before.
"Dad. Dad." she is crying out for me when he carries her away and I break my calm tone of a face for a moment and try to escape from his grip.
It fails miserably as I barely manage to let my hands free before he has his arms wrapped around me and keeping me in a steel grip at the same place.
"Leah go to sleep." I shout after her. "Just listen to him and sleep, Leah."
Please just listen, Leah.
The doors are shut and my body is flipped and back glued to the door with his elbow keeping me in the place. My eyes are shot closed as I hit my head on the hardwood.
His legs are wider than mine, keeping me in place with no way out to fight even if I wanted to.
"I told you already, what I say goes and not the other way around." a pause between each word would make a grown man clatter his teeth.
My breathing is moving my chest rapidly when I try to look for an answer. But the room is spinning, his breath is too close for oxygen as his hands are too warm on my waist to think rationally.
The nightlight shadows over casts his pale features mixed with disappointment larger than my morning attitude. He watches me, the let down feeling in his eyes isn't quite reaching my actions, more his own.
He awaited my answer, as there was nothing to answer after his harsh words.
"Which time," he starts. "on the scale of limits is this attack on Meredith because I can guarantee you, the line has been crossed."
The laughs escape from my lips. "I don't know how your insane mind works, Landon, but in the normal world, being mad at my sister doesn't equal being fine with her getting killed."
He walks over my comment about him. "Well maybe she should have thought before pushing on Meredith's buttons."
Meredith's buttons which are lighter than the features on the thick hair which slips through the heavy pillow.
Meredith's buttons that feel less existing than honesty into politicians' mouths.
Meredith's buttons which are not even there.
I took notice ever since we reunited, he never sees me coming with an actual physical attack. He never breaks his facade for yelling or screaming, but the incapable and clueless man is still all he sees when he looks at me.
He still sees Miles in me.
I think he always will.
Well if he is so keen on him, the next punch in the gut, which was enough to move him from me as I push his shoulders away enough to not be pushed into the wall.
If there was any actual pain from it, it wasn't shown on his face beside a very annoyed look.
"Meredith's buttons?" I ask, before turning my calm behavior into being in the same line of yelling as a preschool child throwing tantrums. "She doesn't have buttons, Landon. She is just completely, clinically insane."
His thumb goes over his jaw, clenching it into endless irritation, but refusing to let any real emotion swim out.
I waited until he tried to speak so I could cut down his words.
"But you won't see it." I am shaking my head in on one hand raw and honest disbelief. "You've seen all she has ever done and everything that she keeps doing, but you just refuse to see how dangerous she is."
"I need dangerous people." he manages to slip between my shouts.
"No. No, you need people you can control." I swallow the spit down my already sore throat.
He steps forward. "And you think I can't control her?" I take step to the side but he follows as I slowly lift my hand in between as to try and somehow create more distance. "She has been in love with me longer than you knew wield a gun, Winter. Trust me, I know how to use that to my advantage."
I wonder if everyone has a situation where they don't know whether they should laugh, cry or scream.
"In love?" I decide to quietly chuckle into a deadly forgotten room. "She doesn't love you, Landon."
He raises his brow, not in confusion of the situation, but simply out of my choice of words. "You keep forgetting I catch and analyze people like you, Lilah and her for living. It is so obvious that she is a pure sadistic psychopath. They can't love other people."
He even has the nerve to roll his eyes at my words when I add. "They can only be obsessed."
"It does not make much difference to me as long as I can use her." the voice is too sweet for such bitter meaning.
"But you can't." I raise my voice even more, it's echoing back to my ear. "You are not listening to me, Landon. She is obsessed with you. That's dangerous, more than you can think. If you think that the expression 'if I can have you, no one can' is just a silly sentence from a book then you are wrong. People like her go to the extent of killing a person they claim to love so much, just to assure they either never leave or never love anyone else."
He sighs. "You are overstating."
"You are understating."
His eyes are still the same. He doesn't trust it.
Doesn't trust me.
Not even my painfully truthful yells could get through him. The walls around him are too high and thick, not even a strong Japanese earthquake could tear them down.
It's pointless to speak at this point.
"It's like talking to a brick wall." I say, my hands going over my face as I look into far oblivion.
"Why is it surprising to you?" He tilts his head to the left when he looks down at me after taking another step closer. "You can't expect me to trust anything that comes out of your mouth."
A pang of pain goes through my chest when I scoff.
He is right. Almost. Almost. Almost.
"No," I say it barely over a whisper. "You can't believe anything I say, but I suppose I thought you were smart enough to see the facts and piece them together, but I see it now."
I feel like a whole hill is falling down on my shoulder and the past becomes an unknown space through the fog. Nothing feels real.
"See what?"
First thing I had to do was present my case in front of the board back home. Give them the description of my relationships, where abouts, actions, choices, then people around me.
The way they think, how they work, what they do, just how unstable they were.
When I stood dressed up on a wooden chair next to the judge and avoided eye contact with Landon I talked about it again.
By my perception and analysis about the situation and endless conversation with doctor Reeves, a highly educated psychiatrist who joined a unit for behavior analysis, we described him as a possibly disturbed and traumatized individual from his younger years. After being forced to inherit the family business he developed sociopathic tendencies.
I'm afraid we were wrong.
"I was wrong in court."
Now that is something that perks up the tension in his body. "Yes you were, about many things."
Yet not the same ones we are thinking of at the moment. But I have no time to explain or argue any longer, just to let this out because I feel like I could drown on it.
"You are the same. That's why you can't see anything wrong with her. Because you and her are exactly the same. Both are incapable of feeling empathy, sympathy or love."
It seems as if the world isn't holding back at either one of us.
"You think Meredith loves you because you thought what you felt for me is love." I finish with a quivering sigh. "It was not."
The look in his eyes is the same. The same look he had when I broke what I thought was his heart ages ago. Same eyes full of betrayal in that motel room when our life came crumbling apart.
Lips sealed as his eyes talk more than any mouth could describe this. For a moment I even think, maybe I was wrong.
I wish he would speak, but the lack of care just shows how right I was.
As quiet as his leave of the room was, equals the opposite sound of doors being shut down as he leaves the room.
I think I should sleep.