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It’s halfway through the afternoon, and Georgie is supposed to pick her girlfriend up for therapy today. Georgie’s getting ready to leave, to take her gray-brown car down to the pretentious Institute that looks like its biochemical composition is at least half dust. Melanie hates it and she’s tried to explain how she couldn’t leave if she wanted to – and what the hell, she really fucking wants to, and Georgie is going to help. As much as she can, at least. She quickly types out a text to Melanie, a ‘call when you’re outside, i’m OMW’, before putting a flannel on over her T-shirt.
Georgie kisses The Admiral on the forehead and makes a stop at a cafe so that she and Melanie can have coffee as they commute. Well actually, coffee and green tea. Georgie picks the drink she used to have all the time when she was just out of college. She pays, takes her drinks back to the car, and starts to drive to the Magnus Institute.
The weather’s…alright – she notes this as she cracks the window. It’s cooling down, though it’s still about a month ‘til autumn starts. She hopes things get better by then – for Melanie, mostly, but for herself too. Everything all feels kind of like it’s wrong, but not the kind of wrong that’s going to right itself, like how a stomach doesn’t hurt anymore once you throw up, though you might be shaky. She wishes that it wouldn’t hurt anymore either, that the things that haunt her could stay dead, though dead isn’t ever much better. She just wishes the Institute would go away, that Jon would either come home and be safe to be around for himself and others or be alright with her pulling away. They’re all making progress slowly, though everything Georgie has learned says it shouldn’t be possible until you’ve withdrawn yourself from the nidus of the harm. Mostly, she hopes Melanie will be–
Her phone chimes, charging next to the driver’s seat. She’s about a block away and she smiles – perfect timing, ‘til she turns her phone over and the call isn’t from Melanie. It’s the hospital. The last time that sterile-smelling place with death like raw pitted wounds as opposed to freshly dug graves called, it was to say that Jon was okay. When she came to visit, he looked like a pale cadaver but spoke like a man. She can’t contemplate that for too long, the buzzing has turned into ringing and she’s Melanie’s emergency contact which must mean that this is a goddamn emergency, right?
She nearly misses her light as she focuses her sight onto putting them on speaker. Maybe it isn’t about Melanie, maybe she’s okay, maybe she just has to pick up some medication or something. The hospital introduces themselves – “This is Georgina Barker, right?” “Right.”
“I’m calling you about Melanie King.” Well, then. “She has received lacerations to each eye, and her condition is being evaluated in the emergency room.” Georgie’s heart rate increases, and her fists clench. She parks outside of the Institute just ‘til she can get off the phone, then she’s driving straight down to the hospital – her first time in three months, her first time since Jon.
“Do you know what caused the…?” She doesn’t finish. The injury. The trauma. Who hurt her and why and Melanie didn’t do anything to warrant it, she’s getting better.
“I – we wanted to tell you in person, but since you asked I’ll tell you. When we removed Ms. King from the location where she was initially injured, she was holding an awl in her hand – my colleague only noticed because it almost poked them when they were trying to get her onto the stretcher. I’m sorry, Ms. Barker.”
“I’ll be there,” she says and hangs up so that she can get a word into open air without reality tempting anger or concern deeper than the already bone-deep feeling within her. An awl. Georgie heard about the scalpel when she got drinks with Basira a couple of months ago, but she doesn’t think Melanie got into a fight. She’s above that now, the night that made Georgie wish she still smoked, so one type of numbness can override the other. That was the night when Melanie appeared at her door at like two in the morning covered in blood that wasn’t hers and Georgie wordlessly turned on the shower, though every logical part of her told her that Melanie was in danger. Even if Melanie went back to her explosive anger – which is ok, progress isn’t linear, that’s what Dr. LaVerne probably says anyways – there’s one thing that confuses Georgie too much to feel concerned.
Melanie wouldn’t let herself get hurt.
Georgie starts on her way to the hospital when her phone buzzes again. This time it’s from Jon. She told him to only call if it’s important, which must mean this is a goddamn emergency, as stated by multiple sources. She picks up, and he asks her “Is Melanie alright?”
“I don’t know, Jon, I’m on the way to the hospital now.” She has barely any time to focus on relations and the road and the fact that Melanie is hurt and she still can’t find a clean-cut answer as to how.
"She told me, before she– she told me that she’d made some arrangements of how she’d be supported and I sort of, well, I knew that meant you were going to help her.” Georgie chews on her lip, Jon’s stress added onto hers is like pushing a snowball down a hill, and the scriptwriter in her would say that’s an alright metaphor except for the fact that it’s August, but she can barely pay attention to that.
“What did she arrange? She told me that she’d be staying over for a while, sure, but the hospital barely told me – she spoke to you before she got hurt?” Saying got hurt sounds wrong, sort of pathetic, like she scraped her knee or got punched or something, not like she might have to go into surgery.
“She – she – Melanie didn’t tell you?” Jon sounds agast at this. What is there to tell, what was Melanie anticipating when she came in for work today, and why did it sound like Georgie would be the last one to know.
Oh. Oh.
She didn’t just let herself get hurt, the blood on the awl was hers. Which was weird in another way entirely – saying that she’d stay over after something she was still waiting on meant that Melanie knew she was going to survive this.
“Jon, I…I didn’t know. I don’t know. She told you that she was going to drive an awl into each eye, and you told her to go ahead with it, or-”
“Georgie, I can explain – I found a tape, it explained how to quit working for the Magnus Institute, and-”
“That’s enough, Jon. I understand. I’m at the hospital now, I’m going to check on her.” Georgie hangs up and considers the information she has pooled completely without choice. She’s going to ask the doctors for more details, though Melanie is the only one that can tell her why. She doesn’t think Jon would lie about that, though, the way to quit the Insititute after exhausting every strategy from making the beating heart bleed to trying to skip out until she’s sick. She figured it out.
Isn’t that what Melanie wanted; not to be hurt, or to have any aspect of her life changed irreversably, but those, along with symptoms such as passing out from shock and having your girlfriend worry as much as she is able to, are an exchange. And if it works – Jon wouldn’t have let her if it didn’t, but does Georgie really know he wouldn’t anymore? – Melanie will have gotten what she really fucking wanted out of it.
She’ll be free.
If she’s free, then why does it hurt so goddamn much? Whatever the answer is, Georgie’s going to help. As much as she can, at least.