outside
She's kneeling in front of him in a matter of minutes. Almost half an hour later.
He looks up at her and then down at what she's wearing. Ripped jeans with the top button unmade. Her top half is adorned in a large sweater and her hair is a mess behind her head. He wonders how she looks with her hair loose. Penelope's hair looks nice when it's loose and when it's put up. Past, he has to remind himself. People think it's odd to speak of the dead in the present tense.
Rory's exposed knees scape against the wet cement and Harry should cringe at the fact that that must hurt, but he doesn't. Instead, he just continues looking at her. She looks worried. Maybe she's dealing with something like he is.
"Hi," he finally says when he notices that she's shivering. The wind picked up minutes before she arrived. His skin feels hot and cold at the same time.
"Are you okay? Can you tell me why you're out here?"
"I couldn't breathe in there," he answers quietly. She simply nods, mouth opening and ready to speak when the door behind them opens and the doorman emerges, hugging a jacket to his chest as he points at them both.
"You can't loiter here."
Harry stays quiet, still crouched in front of Rory. What kind of name is Rory for a girl?
"We were just about to go inside now, thank you," she speaks up. Her voice is soft and gentle and he isn't familiar with it. He doesn't know if it's trustworthy. "Do you want to go up? We can take a walk if you still feel like you can't breathe."
He shakes his head and stands to his feet, reaching down to pull her up by her wrists. They're clean. Her eyes aren't dark either. They don't remind him of shadows and skeletons. They don't make him feel guilty, but Penelope is always in his head so Rory doesn't have to have dark eyes or scarred wrists to make him feel guilty. Pen is doing that for him already. "I'll go inside," he says, pushing past the doorman and through the exit staircase door.
He hasn't been in an elevator since the day he met Penelope. He remembers her telling him to take the steps when they went home because she liked being alone in the elevator. She would walk into his apartment minutes later even though he was only on the third floor. "Great," Rory's voice pulls him from his thoughts.
When they get into the new apartment, he looks at the mess of boxes and the scatter of knives from when he knocked one over. Rory presses a hand to her lips as she looks at everything. He feels attacked, but he asked her to do this. He gave her permission to look at him and judge. He can see her connecting the dots right now.
She looks at the ceiling where the light should be, but there are no lightbulbs. She drags her eyes to the boxes, to the sloppy way he'd written the names. All of the room names are written in small letters except for the kitchen box that's written in sloppy, uppercase letters.
She's figuring him out and he's getting scared.
There's a bunch of post-it notes slipping from the kitchen box. Harry forgot to throw them out. They remind him that he used to leave notes to Penelope. Maybe Rory is connecting the dots. Maybe she knows why they're in the kitchen box. Maybe she knows Pen is in the kitchen box. She looks at him blankly before parting her lips. He half expects her to ask something like, 'How did it feel to get away with murder?' or, 'How did her blood feel when she coughed it up all over you?'
But she doesn't.
She just rubs her eyes slowly while waving a finger. "You just moved in?"
And he's safe. For now, at least. But she'll get it and when she gets it, he's done for. When she gets it, he won't have the chance to know why he did what he did. "Yes," he answers. He sounds guilty. Hopes she doesn't catch it, but she does.
Her eyebrows knit together and she tilts her head. The question is burned into the air before she even asks it. Taunting him and breaking him down. "Are you okay?"
"It's just packed in here. I'm used to big places. Not small apartments like this."
"Why don't you look for another one?"
He shakes his head. Knows the reason is that he knows he has to learn how to trust himself in small places before he moves on to the bigger ones. "I will. In a while."
She walks over to the small chair against the wall in front of the window and takes a seat. "Tell me what you were doing when you had the anxiety attack."
"What?" He's scared again. Scared of her. What she might think. Afraid that she won't help him if she finds out.
"What were you doing? Unpacking? Sitting down? Were you talking to someone?"
"I was trying to sleep," he answered vaguely.
"And what was keeping you from sleeping?"
He stepped back. "I don't know."
"You told me you were in danger. Over the phone. That something was happening in your head."
Harry hugs his arms over his chest. She looks down at the sudden action. Even he knows it's something alarming . He just doesn't know what it means. Surely, she does. And she's taking mental notes. "I have bad dreams sometimes and I think I'm-" he pauses. Looks down at her to see her already looking at him. "I think I'm scared to sleep."
"Do you remember most of your nightmares?"
He rubs the back of his neck with his right hand. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe his skin is burning because she's not suppose to be sitting in his living room and he's not suppose to be telling anyone about how he feels. "Not really," he lies, eyes meeting hers before hurriedly darting to the wall behind her.
"Okay." It sounds like she knows he's lying. "It's okay if you don't feel like talking about the specific details, but is there a common denominator? Do your parents always show up? Maybe a co worker or even a place?"
"My girlfriend." He's quick to answer. Hopefully it's not enough information to make her run out of the room. "She's always there, but she's different."
"Different how?"
"She's a nice person. She's got a really dark personality, but when you get her alone and spend some time with her, she can sometimes be hopeful. I've never been scared of her. She's the first person I've ever loved and," he shakes his head. "She never gave me a reason to be scared of her, I mean, I love her. But in my nightmares, her eyes are always dark and she's there, but she isn't. She's in the background watching me. Saying something I can't hear and it just scares me. I haven't had a good night's sleep in weeks."
Rory nods and he looks down at where her jeans are ripped. There's blood from when she slid onto the cement earlier, and every time her hand brushes it, she winces. Harry wants to offer her his first aid kit in the bathroom, but he doesn't. He doesn't know why, but he doesn't. Maybe he doesn't care enough to make sure she's all right. "Have you told your girlfriend?"
He laughs. It's short and raw, absent of amusement. Penelope would have liked the sound since she finds beauty in ugly, dark things. "No. No, I haven't told her. I can't."
"But if you could," she catches his eyes, holding them hostage. "Would you tell her?"
"No."
He wants to end the conversation now. It's gotten too personal and he's suffered enough for the night. It's time to talk about something different and then let her go so she can think about everything and tell him what she thinks later tomorrow. Something in her pocket catches his attention and he points at it in curiosity.
"What is that?"
She follows his gaze and pulls something out. It's white and blocked. It takes him a moment to realize that they're index cards. "It's to help me study."
And he's tired. So, so tired, but he doesn't know if he can live through another nightmare and wake up sane. So he takes them from her hand slowly and looks down at her neat handwriting. The first word reads Deindividualization. Harry doesn't like the name of it, but reads it out loud anyway, his voice echoing off of the walls and falling silent on the cardboard boxes.
"Deindividualization," she repeats, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth in thought. "That's loss of self awareness, no?"
He flips the card over and reads the given definition in his head. Loss of self-awareness and self-restraint, typically in a sense of anomie. "Right." He looks down at the words again. "What's anomie?"
"No order or social standards. Like, imagine if someone were to get slapped, and, as a response, they laugh. It's not normal."
He nods and pulls another card from the stack randomly. "Altruism?"
"Selflessness," she answers.
"Yeah."
It goes on like that for a while; Harry reading words and hearing her define them. Harry learning something new but knowing he'll forget it all by morning. She gets tired a while later and begins stuttering on words and finally getting some wrong.
It goes on like that for a while, and then there's her tired voice getting a definition wrong, and Harry correcting her nicely.
"No, you got it right the last time. They carry information from the sense receptors," and, "no, they block the neurotransmitters."
Then there's, "I'm tired," and she almost drops her head back in exhaustion. Harry half expects her to fall asleep on the chair, but she surprises him by standing to her feet and rubbing her eyes. "I should get going."
The window outside proves to him that it's past six in the morning and he's thankful because he didn't see his dead ex- girlfriend in his dreams. He didn't have a nightmare and he didn't even have to take adderall to stay up. He just needed a distraction.
And she's leaving now. He feels bad for not offering her a place to stay until she wakes up again, but he doesn't know her. Harry doesn't even know if he wants to know her. She walks half dazed to the front door, waving him off slowly and tiredly.
He doesn't want to admit aloud that she's pretty. Her eyes are prettier than her face, though. They remind him of sun burns and that pretty burnt orange that shoots across the skyline every morning. "Goodbye," he says quietly, mouth getting dry. She leaves his apartment and by the time he notices that her flash cards are in the palm of his hand, she's already out of the corridor and probably out of the building.
(A/n: There's no face claim for Rory, but she is a person of color so I'll be using pictures of people that could possibly be her. There may also be mistakes, please excuse them.)