pessimism

who: eris
where: her loft
when: late

Eris sat in the center of her bed, files spread out around her. She'd gone over each of them at least once, thoroughly reading every piece of information in each, and now she was going through and trying to draw the lines between them. This would be a task much better suited to a woman who wasn't brain damaged, however. Really, while she could actually draw some parallels, match things up, that didn't mean she didn't think she was missing things. And she probably was, and she wouldn't even really notice.

The files could not be complete of course. In fact, she would be intensely surprised if they were. At the moment, she flat out did not trust Jakob, and he hadn't been doing anything to remedy that. If anything he'd made it worse with his behavior. Her main problem was she didn't know what to do about it. Sure, she could probably kill the bastard, but that wouldn't much help matters. And part of her wondered if Jackson wouldn't try some insane way of connecting her to it. Sure, he'd have no reason to, but she wondered if Jackson was going to be adhering to the law to the letter so much since his friend was 'at stake'.

She could see it. She'd seen people like him before, desperate, and willfully blind. If Brett couldn't talk him down, then he was going to be trouble for her. The kind of trouble she thought might wind up bringing her down in the end. The kind of trouble that might be through him justifying his actions by 'saving' his friend. People could justify just about anything in the end, if it was important enough to them.

The world's biggest threat were true believers. It was something she'd believed before, and she still did. Rubbing at her tired eyes, she exhaled, sitting back a little as she did so. She made a few little notes in her notebook, along with a lot of others that probably wouldn't make sense to her later anyways. But she was doing it anyhow.

Her mind started drifting again, towards Brett, and the other night, and she tried shoving it aside, but that didn't work out for her very well. It was there, preying on it, lurking just beneath the surface of her thoughts. She knew she needed to make decisions, and she'd already made them, more or less. She just didn't like them. And with her emotional fragility since her attempted murder, she wasn't at all positive she could even pull it off.

One thing was certain, though. Somewhere in her, she'd thought things might change. She wasn't sure where that idea had come from, and didn't even know when it had happened, but the other night, being there when things were so very wrong, and him...not asking, not caring, just rolling over and going to sleep, it hurt. Eris really didn't want it to hurt, and she realized that she should have been more prepared for things to not change. That it should be ideal, or something. But it wasn't. Not for her, anyways. For him? Maybe. He got to get laid occasionally, and she...would try to remember what it was like when that would have been perfect for her.

Eris kept telling herself that he'd been very clear. That she was being stupid here, that he'd made absolutely no secret what it was he wanted. He'd told her. Flat out, told her. It just didn't help. She'd still imagined something else there. It left her feeling hollow and stupid for even recognizing that, that she'd made that up in her head. Some stupid little fantasy that didn't exist. And her fantasy wasn't even what other women's would be. It was just that the guy gave a damn. That she might matter on a personal level.

The more she replayed everything in her head, the more she recognized that it wasn't the case. And any significance she did have to him, it was symbolic. She represented some part of him that he'd believed dead. Some decent part of himself. An object, like most men in her life had always seen her, just a different breed of it. And while sure, it was a slightly better kind of objectification than usual, it was still objectification.

It was someplace she didn't want to be anymore. So, she'd made decisions. This little side trip into insanity that was Julia, the woman who'd woken up after the lights went out, she was getting put into a box. She was vulnerable, and was only going to make things harder, so, in Eris fashion, she was getting cut out. She was going to stop looking at things from her new perspectives, she was going to continually ask herself what she would have done before, and go that route. Eris finished what she started, so she was finishing this deal with Brett. Both the one she'd made to herself and the one she'd struck up with him. She'd give him what he wanted when he wanted it, and...hopefully no one died. Until Jackson took her down, anyways.

Looking out the window at the gray day, she sighed, curling up on her side. The city was meant to suck the life out of people. It felt remarkably backwards that it seemed to have breathed life back into her, only to slowly suffocate her a little at a time.