DW: Cracked (PG-13)
Title: Cracked
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Aunt Sharon, Amelia Pond
Spoilers: Series Five (nothing for Series Six, unless you are already in on the joke.)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Implied endangerment of a child
Summary: Something is the matter with Amelia.
A/N: For
help_japan, and for
marginaliana, who a) just got married! and b) has been such a lovely friend for many years of fandom that it was a joy to write for her. I'm not sure I did her prompt justice, but I hope you like the fic anyway, dear.
(Note that I'm marking this a gen, but there is a F/F relationship that is 100% fanon, as is Sharon's last name; Amy's mum's name I got from the TARDIS Index Files wiki.)
Cracked
by Mad Maudlin
Something is the matter with Amelia.
Sharon can't quite put her finger on it, not in the midst of everything else-moving to Leadworth, getting her business cards changed and the second phone line installed (what good's a home office if she can't send a fax?) and listing all the many things that she simply can't get in this miserable postage stamp of a village. She's still got one leg in London, a lease she has to break and a client base she can no longer do lunch with, and it seems like she'll never have enough attention to do anything justice again; just one leg in Leadworth, and it's a good thing the house is only held in trust for Amelia because Sharon knows on sight that it's never going to feel like home.
In the midst of the mess she watches Amelia, waiting for...something. For tears or fits or acting out, for any of the signs of grief that Christine had warned her to look for in a child of that age. Amelia likes to draw, and read fairy tales, and is happy to make her own supper when Sharon just can't get herself together to cook something. Amelia likes to play by herself in the garden for hours on end. Sometimes Amelia talks about school, or something she watched on the telly, or the boy down the street who's a year older, Reggie or Rory or somebody, who plays with her.
"It's all right if you want to talk about it," Sharon tells her, when she does manage supper and Amelia obediently eats her peas.
"Talk about what?" Amelia asks.
"About your mum and dad," Sharon suggests.
Amelia takes a long swallow of milk, holding the glass in both hands. "Do you want to talk about them?"
Sharon thinks about Tabetha and her daft husband, about moving to the middle of nowhere and then dragging her after them, about Amelia's eerie calm, about the memorial she's supposed to be planning, about-about-
"Not if you don't," Sharon says, with a little shiver, and Amelia shoves half a potato into her mouth.
-\-\-\-\-
Something is the matter with Amelia, and Sharon doesn't think it has anything to do with her trip to see Christine over Easter weekend, or the cracking plaster in Amelia's room, or even the mysterious destruction of the shed and all its contents. "She's got abandonment issues," Christine tells her over the phone. "You ought to let me talk to her."
"She's fine," Sharon says, which is part of what's wrong-Amelia doesn't act like a grieving little girl, doesn't act resentful or clingy or distant. She giggles to herself but won't let Sharon in on the joke, she scurries off to the Williams' house down the road to talk to her little friend and vanishes until well after dark. It would be better if she had some kind of misplaced anger at Sharon; as it is, Sharon doesn't even seem to signify. "Honestly, sometimes I think she doesn't need me at all."
"Of course she needs you, Sharon, she's just lost both her parents. She's probably still processing."
"She's processing just fine all on her own, it looks like. It isn't natural."
She takes a break to come out of her office for a bit and make a cup of tea; the house is heavy and still, and creaks to itself from places she can't see. On a whim, Sharon climbs the stairs to Amelia's room; knocks, pokes her head inside. Amelia has nicked a thick stack of printer paper and has made a spray of drawings around the room, the colored pencils she got for Christmas already wearing down to nubs. "Everything all right, Amelia?"
"'M fine," Amelia says absently.
Sharon picks up a couple of the drawings: a person with a tie and a Bart Simpson-style spike of hair standing next to some kind of blue rectangle. "Is this your dad?" Sharon asks, hoping they might finally have that talk that she's been dreading.
Amelia giggles. "No."
Well, then. Sharon looks at another picture: for a minute she can't tell what it is, sort of a snake maybe, or a worm, but then she manages to interpret which of the jagged lines are scales and which are teeth, and it makes her shiver. "My god, Amelia, what are you drawing?"
"It's a secret," she says, and reaches for another sheet of paper.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Sharon leaves off complaining to Christine about Amelia, eventually; there's nothing new to say and she's got other things that need doing. She keeps studying the pictures, though, of teeth and tentacles and terrible smiles. She wants to say that it's something she got off a television program, or a film, or-or something. Because Amelia can't be making this up, she's seven. And if she didn't get it from a film--
(Sometimes Sharon thinks she hears sound in the night-just the house settling, of course, just the creaks and cracks of an aging building-that's what she told Amelia, anyway. Amelia complained about voices in her room, once. Amelia doesn't seem bothered by them now.)
Amelia's marks in school are dropping, and according to her teachers she spends more time sleeping or doodling than paying attention, except of course when she's arguing in history class. "She claims that she's met Winston Churchill," the teacher tells her, brows creased. "She told me he smelled funny and was in league with aliens. Miss Pond--"
"Walsh," Sharon corrects. "I'm Amelia's aunt."
"Miss Walsh," the history teacher says, wringing his hands, "I know Amelia suffered a loss earlier this year, but her behavior is getting quite out of hand. Perhaps she ought to see somebody?"
So Sharon takes her to a therapist--not Christine, that would be bizarre, but one that Christine recommends. Amy kicks her feet and stares out the window and smiles that unsettling smile. "Anything you want to tell me, Amelia?" Sharon asks, making the effort.
And it looks for a moment like Amelia might actually tell her, instead of drawing pictures and keeping secrets. Instead she just smiles. "Not really."
("She's got an imaginary friend," the therapist concludes, massaging his hand, "and an overbite.")
-\-\-\-\-\-
Sharon looks through old photo albums sometimes, but she's misplaced all the pictures she used to have of her and Tabetha as girls, and the years have made her memories foggy and strange. She curses Tabby for being so forgettable, for growing up and growing apart, for marrying a dreamer and then-then-well. She curses that she's been saddled with such a cuckoo's egg, sometimes, this house, this slice of someone else's life. She never curses Amelia, though, never hates her for a minute.
"I think I'm afraid of her," she confides to Christine one night, curled close in what London passes off as dark. "Not for her. Of her. It's terrible, isn't it?"
"You need to spend more time with her," Christine says, smoothing Sharon's hair back. "Maybe then she'll open up to you. I wouldn't mind getting to meet her in person, you know."
"But I'm booked solid through--"
"Sharon." Christine presses a finger to her lips. "This is your niece. This is Tabby's daughter. Are your clients really more important than that?"
-\-\-\-\-\-
Amelia doesn't seem to care when Sharon introduces Christine, as blithely unconcerned as if Leadworth was brimming with lesbians; Christine smiles reassuringly and buys Amelia a soda. They go to the National Museum, and Amelia looks curiously at the paintings and the statues and asks questions about Impressionists that neither Sharon or Christine know how to answer.
"Do you want to look at the Egyptian gallery?" Sharon asks.
Amelia shakes her head. "I want to look at the Romans. They were loads nicer."
Sharon tries to catch Christine's eye, because something about that sounds off, odd-but Christine is asking questions and Amelia isn't paying either of them any attention, and maybe she was overreacting to an odd turn of phrase.
On the drive back to Leadworth, Sharon asks, "Did you like the museum?"
Amelia nods. "I always like museums."
"Oh?" Sharon tries not to hold her breath.
"It's how we keep score," Amelia explains.
"How who keeps score, Amelia?"
She blinks, as if she's just noticed she's misspoken. "Nobody important."
Sharon bites her lip as hard as she can.
-\-\-\-\-\-
The next day Amy disappears from school: she asks her teacher if she can go to the toilet and never comes back. Leadworth is small and Leadworth is safe and nobody saw where Amelia went, not a teacher or a constable or a closed-circuit camera, if those even exist anywhere but London. Amelia left her bag and her coat in the classroom and might as well have walked off the face of the earth.
Sharon is in her office when the school calls; she cancels all her meetings for the day, and sits in the head teacher's office drinking tea while the staff search the school, and then the grounds, and find no trace of her niece "You'd best go home, Miss P-er-Walsh," Sergeant Hopkins tells her after explaining they were going to widen the search. "We'll call the moment we know anything."
So Sharon goes back to the cold, rambling house that was Tabetha's home, makes herself more tea that she doesn't drink and a sandwich she can't bring herself to eat, listens for something besides the groans and sighs of bricks and wood that threaten to fall in on themselves and bury her. She sits in her office, among the tidy files and labeled binders; she looks at the blank gray computer monitor but can't bring herself to switch it on. She didn't tell the police about Amy's imaginary friend, because that's just daft, but here in the dark with her tea getting cold she starts to wonder-children make things up, children don't understand, there are random creepers everywhere and the house is full of noises and Amelia's been keeping secrets-
There's a sound from upstairs, a grinding wheeze, and the creak of floorboards. Sharon freezes for a moment, trying to tell herself it's just the wind, just the entropic settling of this awful house. When she hears the footsteps she stands up so quickly that her tea tumbles to the floor.
Amelia's door is shut, of course. Amelia always shuts her door these days. Sharon can hear voices inside it, unmistakeable, Amy's voice and someone else, a grown man's. She thinks for a wild minute that she ought to run back down to the kitchen for the carving knife on the draining board. But then the grinding noise starts up again, and when she throws the door open she's smacked in the face by one of Amelia's drawings, the one of the talking pepperpot, and a burst of wind.
Then it's still again and Amelia is sitting on the bed, wearing a red sweater over her school uniform. There is no one else in the room, just paper scattered all around like dying leaves, the curtains rucked up around a window firmly shut. Amelia's eyes are red and wet, and she looks at Sharon with a trembling lip for a moment; Sharon just manages to blurt out "Amelia--?" and then she finds her arms full of trembling girl.
Amelia cries until she falls asleep, and Sharon holds her like that, and doesn't ask any of the questions that are floating in her head. Even though she thinks that just now, Amelia might answer them.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Sharon cancels all her appointments for two weeks; she'll worry about the bills when they come. She takes Amelia out for ice cream, and they sit by the pond in the village center in the springtime sun, when there are no dark corners or phantom sounds. The people of Leadworth filter by them, calling to one another and making small talk as they go about their business; some of them call to Amelia, or to Sharon, mostly teachers or police or volunteers who helped the search. Most of them don't actually know Sharon's name.
During a lull Sharon asks, "Where did you go, Amelia?"
"To a museum," she says, letting the ice cream drip down her hand.
"One in Gloucester, you mean?"
She shakes her head.
"I heard you talking, you know." Sharon dabs at the rivers of chocolate ripple staining Amelia's knuckles with a napkin, for all the good it does. "Was that your secret, the man in your room?"
Amelia's silence is admission.
Sharon sighs and looks at the ducks on the pond. "I just want to understand, Amelia. Why did you leave school? Where did you go?"
"He made me promise to keep it a secret," she says, and then shoves as much ice cream in her mouth as can fit at once. Sharon waits out the inevitable headache in silence.
"You know, Amelia, there are different kinds of secrets," Sharon tells her. "Sometimes keeping a secret can be dangerous."
"I'm not going to tell on him, he's my friend," Amelia says mulishly, "and next time's going to be good, he promised." And for a moment Sharon can see Tabetha at the same age, when they promised to tell each other everything. But Tabetha is-is gone, and Sharon isn't seven anymore.
"You don't have to tell me about it if you don't want to," she says, and it's the hardest thing she's ever had to say. "But you should tell somebody. Somebody older. Before any next time. They'll know if it's a good secret to keep or not."
Amelia nods solemnly.
Two days later, the Williams boy down the road disappears.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
Amelia moves around the house like a ghost, but when Sharon asks her what's the matter she says "Nothing" like the question makes no sense. The Williamses down the road are much the same, always looking past the people they're talking to as if scanning the horizon, but they still force a smile when Sharon asks how they're doing.
"And your little boy?" she asks. "What was his name?"
"Oh," they said. "Oh, no, we don't have any children, Miss Pond."
"Walsh," she corrects, again (and again and again...) "But my niece said-"
Mr. Williams laughs, but his eyes keep drifting over Sharon's shoulder. "Oh, Amelia, you know how she is, always making things up."
Amelia goes "walking" for an afternoon and when she comes home she paints pictures of sunflowers, dozens of them, broad finger-paint smears of color that she hangs on her walls. "Vincent Van Gogh painted sunflowers," she says with authority, and fills her room with them. "He said they were like people, always dying."
"People aren't always dying, Amelia," Sharon protests uneasily.
"I know," she says, but she sniffles as she bends over her paint.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
Sharon takes Amelia to another therapist; she throws such a tantrum that they're asked never to return. She takes Amelia out of school for a day on another museum trip, but Amelia doesn't talk, doesn't want to look at the statues and turns white as a sheet when Sharon points out a dinosaur exhibit. Sharon hears noises all the time now, from Amelia's bedroom, from the garden-she hears Amelia talking to an empty room, and watches as the smiles slide off her face when she thinks no one is looking.
She wants to run back to London, where the nights are never silent, but she can't leave Amelia in Leadworth and she's afraid of making things worse with another sudden change. Instead she stays in her office, as much as she dares, going to work in the small hours when she starts out of troubling dreams. She watches the village through the windows but doesn't go out; Leadworth feels like a corset, one drawn tight enough to smother.
In June the head teacher calls her in, suggests that Amy isn't prepared to take her final exams. Sharon seriously looks into moving to London, or sending Amy to a boarding school for troubled children. She looks into taking a long, long holiday somewhere far away, and sunny. "I don't know how to help her," she rambles into the phone, sitting in a cupboard where Amelia won't overhear. "I don't know if she knows what's real anymore. Maybe I don't know what's real."
"You know there aren't any strange men coming into the house at night," Christine assures her. "You installed that alarm system, right?"
Sharon installed a home security system, to the bemusement of the rest of the village. It shorts out at least once a week. "She's so scared and so quiet and I don't know what to do."
"Maybe a holiday would be good for both of you," Christine says. "And maybe family counseling."
"I'm not crazy, Christine--!"
"But you're stressed and you're worried and you're obviously having trouble communicating with her." Christine sighs into the phone. "Sharon, babe, you can't tackle this alone. Amelia's having a delayed reaction to losing her parents and that's more than you can handle. It's nothing to be ashamed of."
Something niggles in the back of Sharon's mind, and she finds herself blurting, "We didn't lose them."
"I'm sorry?"
"We didn't-it's not like Augustus and Tabby were just misplaced, Christine, we know where they are! They-they--"
"Sharon, talk to me."
But her throat is closing up around the impossibility of it all, around the words she can't say and the things she can't quite remember, on the tip of her tongue. "We didn't lose them," she said again. "They're just-gone. Like the boy. Like Amelia was."
There's a long silence on the other end of the line. "Sharon, I've got a few days off coming up. Why don't I come pay you a visit?"
"No," she says, "I mean, no, it's fine. I'm sorry to bother you."
She rings off and sits in her own bedroom, in the shadow of the sister she can't properly remember and the massive house of cracking plaster and crumbling bricks that seems ready to swallow her whole. Lost, misplaced, taken-and Amelia alone gets left behind--
You're being foolish, she tells herself, but it doesn't make her feel any better.
-\-\-\-\-\-
It's a Friday night in June, and Amelia goes out in the garden to play; she has been talking about something she saw on the telly and looking almost happy, almost calm. Sharon watches her from the windows, watches her wave around a magic marker and whistle as she points it at birds and trees; she puts up the leftovers and starts the washing up, wondering if she can get a bit of work done while Amelia is occupied-just a bit, with the window open and the door propped so that she'll hear if Amelia calls for her. She's miles behind on the few projects she hasn't outright canceled-or lost-and if she even wants the option of moving out of this damned village she needs the income. Surely she can take an evening to herself, surely just a few hours--
Faintly, she hears a grinding noise, somewhere out of sight.
"Amelia?"
No answer.
"...Amelia?"
This time Sharon takes the carving knife out into the overgrown garden as she searches for the source of the sound. It's faded by the time she circles around to where the shed had been-she never did get around to properly cleaning up the mess, did she? There's a square imprint in the muddy earth, a few feet on each side; the evening is still and silent again, silent and completely, deathly still.
"Amelia?" she calls, looked around. There is a green marker lying in the unkempt grass. "Amelia?"
-\-\-\-\-\-
Leadworth is small and Leadworth is safe and Leadworth has never been so terrifying. Sharon walks up and down the road, knocks on the Williams' door, walks all the way to the post office and back with the knife hidden in her purse, calling Amelia's name. People stare at her, or ask what's happened--"Are you all right, Miss Pond?"
Sharon can't correct them, can't even begin to explain-just says "He took Amelia," though she doesn't know who he is. People try to stop her-Mrs. Pogitt and Sergeant Hopkins and Mrs. Angelo whose grandson is in Amelia's class. Sharon walks away from them all. The night is dark and warm and something has gone horribly wrong, Amelia's gone again and what if she doesn't come back this time? What if she's gone the way of Augustus and Tabetha and the boy whose name Sharon never knew?
What if it's Sharon's turn?
"Miss Pond!" It's one of the old men who sit outside the pub at all hours playing dominoes; she's never bothered to learn their names. "Miss Pond, are you all right?"
"Of course not," she says raggedly. If they don't even know her name, will they notice she's gone? Or will they think that strange woman with the funny accent had gone back to wherever she came from? Who else will be drawn into that horrible house, to the disappearing girl and her secret friends, that man of air and darkness...?
The house. Amelia came back to the house last time. Sharon turns back and looked warily up the tree-lined road. If Amelia comes back...
When Amelia comes back, Sharon will be waiting for her.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
It's quiet in Leadworth at night, and so very dark: nothing but starlight and the insubstantial sounds of birds and insects, a precariously thin skin between her and something terrible. Sharon's too tired to run all the way back, but she walks fast and with a purpose, and when cars pass and slow she averts her eyes and ignores them, avoids the questions and suspicions. She makes her way back to the house of cracking plaster, but she's not a footstep inside the garden gate before something stops her cold:
There is a blue box standing in the front garden. A blue box labeled POLICE and softly lit inside, and all around it Sharon can see burnt-black patterns in the grass. She circles around it; tests the doors, and they are locked. It is wooden and sturdy and does not shift. This is a great impossible thing in a day of impossible things, half a year of nightmares, and she is not sure whether to laugh or weep.
"What are you doing?"
Sharon spins around; she's got the knife out now, raised between them, between herself and the box and the woman coming down the path with an arm full of Amelia's books and toys. "Where've you taken her?" she asks, because it only makes sense, because she's never seen this woman before and somehow something has to make sense around here.
The woman with the curling cloud of hair drops the books and puts one hand to her hip, where she's got something hanging that looks horribly like a gun. "You're Sharon Walsh," she says, firmly, and the name settles between them like a warning, like something infinitely more dangerous than a gun or box.
"Where's Amelia?" Sharon stammers; she wants to move away from the impossible box, wants to run and hide and cry and go back to London, but she's not going without her niece and she needs to understand. "Where've you taken her?"
"Amelia is in trouble," the woman says calmly. "She needs my help."
"She needs her family," Sharon says, daring to take a step closer. "You keep taking her, you and the man with the wind-where do you go?"
The other woman's mouth thins a bit. "Sharon, I really don't have time for this."
Sharon laughs, a little. It hurts. "You don't have time? You don't have time to tell me where Amelia is?"
"Amelia is long ago and far away," the woman says. "Time has gone wrong, your niece is in danger and you really need to get out of my way."
Sharon takes a step forward. "Tell me where you took--"
She doesn't even see the strange woman shoot from the hip.
"I'm sorry," is the last thing she hears before falling into endless black, "for what it's worth."
-\-\-\-\-\-
-\-\-\-\-\-
Something is the matter with Amelia, something Sharon can't put her finger on-not when she visits Tabby and Augustus in Leadworth for the first time, when Amelia is a little moon-faced girl with an imaginary friend, and not a decade and a half later, either.
"You miss your sister," Christine says when they get the wedding invitation. "You haven't seen your niece in years."
"I know," Sharon says. "I know." And she can't explain, can't put it into words why the village makes her uneasy, why Amelia's smiling face sometimes makes her shudder. They visit her in London, sometimes. Sharon sends cards and money for birthdays and Christmas, and lets Tabby vent over the phone about the latest psychiatrist, the latest school report. It's been okay.
They go to the wedding, and Christine drives; Sharon watches out the window as the A40 gives way to the M5. The house at the end of the lane is full of Ponds and fury, but Tabby drags Sharon into a hug and then sets them up with a quiet corner in a ground-floor room-"Augustus's 'study,'" she says, complete with air quotes, as if the dusty books and unfinished model planes don't give it away. "I've got the Li-Lo all ready for you, though-trust me, it's better than sharing a guest room with his Great-Aunt Gertie--"
Sharon looks around the room, and there is a moment of deja vu when she thinks that, just maybe, the next time she blinks the shelves will change, there will be binders and files and an old desktop computer-but then it's gone again, and Christine is asking about the rehearsal dinner. Sharon takes a deep breath, and stows their bags under the desk, out of the way.
Tabetha has to run to down Amelia, who gives a polite smile as if she barely knows her. Sharon barely recognizes Amy, all tall and coltish and about to get married to some village boy. "Still on about your imaginary friend?" Christine asks, and it's supposed to be a joke about the last time they saw her but something makes Amy go stiff and still and Sharon feels like all the air's gone from the room.
"What's wrong?" Christine asks, when they're back in the study and Sharon has calmed down a bit.
"I don't know," Sharon says, which is true.
They make it through the rehearsal and the wedding, meeting Amy's future in-laws (thin nervous people, with a thin nervous son, though he seems calmer when he's by Amy's side) and Sharon thinks she can do this, can get through the visit and back to work on Monday. They're on their way to the reception dinner when Sharon catches a glimpse of someone in black-who wears black to a wedding, honestly? It's a woman with curling blond hair, and for a moment Sharon thinks it must be another of Augustus' cousins, or perhaps someone from the groom's side, one of the great crowd of people she hasn't been able to keep track of.
Sharon looks at the woman, and the woman looks at her, and mouths the words, I'm sorry.
"What's the matter, Sharon?" Christine asks when Sharon's hand clamps down on her wrist.
"I don't," she stammers, "I don't know," because she doesn't, it doesn't make any sense, this bone-deep fear in the summer sun. There's never been a reason, not to fear Amelia, to fear imaginary men. "I can't. That woman--"
But the woman in black has gone. Christine didn't even see her.
"Sharon, you're shaking," Christine says. "Do you want to skip the reception?"
"No," Sharon says, "no. I'll just...I'll be fine. It's all a bit silly, isn't it? Jumping at shadows?"
Christine frowns at her, and again when Sharon tosses back a glass of wine like water. Sharon pretends she doesn't see.
And it's all going so well until Amy climbs on the table, shushing Augustus and Rory with wide, staring eyes. "When I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend," she says, and Sharon shuts her eyes, tries to shut it all out. "But he wasn't imaginary. He was real."
Tabby muttering about psychiatrists and people whispering and for some reason, Sharon thinks of ducks on a pond, of a younger Amelia saying he's my friend, and next time is going to be good: but that never happened, Sharon hasn't been to Leadworth since Amy was small and there's no such thing as monsters. She covers her eyes and breaths, because there is nothing here to fear.
"Raggedy man, I remember you!" Amy screams, and the whole room begins to shake, a bone-deep vibration and a grinding wheeze, and a great hard-edged form is taking shape in the middle of the dance floor, something tall and dark and impossible. Something that Sharon doesn't remember. Something she somehow knows. "And you are late for my wedding!"
There's an impossible thing forming in the middle of the room and Sharon wants no part of it. She flees.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Christine will find her, later, and take her back to Tabetha's house, just long enough to get their things; the others will find her later and they will all be so charmed, so pleasantly bewildered, that they won't understand why Sharon's mascara has run in thick black streaks down to her chin. Tabetha will find her and ask her what's wrong, Amelia will find her and make apologies, but first, the first person to find Sharon is the woman in black.
Sharon is gasping and breathing outside the reception hall, and the woman simply says, "I am sorry, you know. But I had to do it. So much more than you can imagine was at stake."
It seems insane, it is insane, but Sharon finds herself asking quite calmly, "Did you kill me?"
The woman shakes her head. "No. Just stunned. It was the universe that died."
"The stars," Sharon says, and just speaking out the memories in her head helps, a little, makes it all seem a little less mad. She doesn't even need to elaborate; the woman just nods.
"The timelines are back where they're meant to be now," she continues. "Amy and Rory are who they're meant to be. They're going to be all right."
What about me, Sharon wants to ask, but she can't quite find the words. "So that-that thing. The box. The man."
"Is not someone you'll have to worry about again," the woman assures her. Hesitates. "He meant well, for what it's worth. He was just trying to fix his mistakes."
"Is that what I was?" Sharon asks. The woman in black winces.
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Aunt Sharon, Amelia Pond
Spoilers: Series Five (nothing for Series Six, unless you are already in on the joke.)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Implied endangerment of a child
Summary: Something is the matter with Amelia.
A/N: For
help_japan, and for
marginaliana, who a) just got married! and b) has been such a lovely friend for many years of fandom that it was a joy to write for her. I'm not sure I did her prompt justice, but I hope you like the fic anyway, dear.
(Note that I'm marking this a gen, but there is a F/F relationship that is 100% fanon, as is Sharon's last name; Amy's mum's name I got from the TARDIS Index Files wiki.)
Cracked
by Mad Maudlin
Something is the matter with Amelia.
Sharon can't quite put her finger on it, not in the midst of everything else-moving to Leadworth, getting her business cards changed and the second phone line installed (what good's a home office if she can't send a fax?) and listing all the many things that she simply can't get in this miserable postage stamp of a village. She's still got one leg in London, a lease she has to break and a client base she can no longer do lunch with, and it seems like she'll never have enough attention to do anything justice again; just one leg in Leadworth, and it's a good thing the house is only held in trust for Amelia because Sharon knows on sight that it's never going to feel like home.
In the midst of the mess she watches Amelia, waiting for...something. For tears or fits or acting out, for any of the signs of grief that Christine had warned her to look for in a child of that age. Amelia likes to draw, and read fairy tales, and is happy to make her own supper when Sharon just can't get herself together to cook something. Amelia likes to play by herself in the garden for hours on end. Sometimes Amelia talks about school, or something she watched on the telly, or the boy down the street who's a year older, Reggie or Rory or somebody, who plays with her.
"It's all right if you want to talk about it," Sharon tells her, when she does manage supper and Amelia obediently eats her peas.
"Talk about what?" Amelia asks.
"About your mum and dad," Sharon suggests.
Amelia takes a long swallow of milk, holding the glass in both hands. "Do you want to talk about them?"
Sharon thinks about Tabetha and her daft husband, about moving to the middle of nowhere and then dragging her after them, about Amelia's eerie calm, about the memorial she's supposed to be planning, about-about-
"Not if you don't," Sharon says, with a little shiver, and Amelia shoves half a potato into her mouth.
-\-\-\-\-
Something is the matter with Amelia, and Sharon doesn't think it has anything to do with her trip to see Christine over Easter weekend, or the cracking plaster in Amelia's room, or even the mysterious destruction of the shed and all its contents. "She's got abandonment issues," Christine tells her over the phone. "You ought to let me talk to her."
"She's fine," Sharon says, which is part of what's wrong-Amelia doesn't act like a grieving little girl, doesn't act resentful or clingy or distant. She giggles to herself but won't let Sharon in on the joke, she scurries off to the Williams' house down the road to talk to her little friend and vanishes until well after dark. It would be better if she had some kind of misplaced anger at Sharon; as it is, Sharon doesn't even seem to signify. "Honestly, sometimes I think she doesn't need me at all."
"Of course she needs you, Sharon, she's just lost both her parents. She's probably still processing."
"She's processing just fine all on her own, it looks like. It isn't natural."
She takes a break to come out of her office for a bit and make a cup of tea; the house is heavy and still, and creaks to itself from places she can't see. On a whim, Sharon climbs the stairs to Amelia's room; knocks, pokes her head inside. Amelia has nicked a thick stack of printer paper and has made a spray of drawings around the room, the colored pencils she got for Christmas already wearing down to nubs. "Everything all right, Amelia?"
"'M fine," Amelia says absently.
Sharon picks up a couple of the drawings: a person with a tie and a Bart Simpson-style spike of hair standing next to some kind of blue rectangle. "Is this your dad?" Sharon asks, hoping they might finally have that talk that she's been dreading.
Amelia giggles. "No."
Well, then. Sharon looks at another picture: for a minute she can't tell what it is, sort of a snake maybe, or a worm, but then she manages to interpret which of the jagged lines are scales and which are teeth, and it makes her shiver. "My god, Amelia, what are you drawing?"
"It's a secret," she says, and reaches for another sheet of paper.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Sharon leaves off complaining to Christine about Amelia, eventually; there's nothing new to say and she's got other things that need doing. She keeps studying the pictures, though, of teeth and tentacles and terrible smiles. She wants to say that it's something she got off a television program, or a film, or-or something. Because Amelia can't be making this up, she's seven. And if she didn't get it from a film--
(Sometimes Sharon thinks she hears sound in the night-just the house settling, of course, just the creaks and cracks of an aging building-that's what she told Amelia, anyway. Amelia complained about voices in her room, once. Amelia doesn't seem bothered by them now.)
Amelia's marks in school are dropping, and according to her teachers she spends more time sleeping or doodling than paying attention, except of course when she's arguing in history class. "She claims that she's met Winston Churchill," the teacher tells her, brows creased. "She told me he smelled funny and was in league with aliens. Miss Pond--"
"Walsh," Sharon corrects. "I'm Amelia's aunt."
"Miss Walsh," the history teacher says, wringing his hands, "I know Amelia suffered a loss earlier this year, but her behavior is getting quite out of hand. Perhaps she ought to see somebody?"
So Sharon takes her to a therapist--not Christine, that would be bizarre, but one that Christine recommends. Amy kicks her feet and stares out the window and smiles that unsettling smile. "Anything you want to tell me, Amelia?" Sharon asks, making the effort.
And it looks for a moment like Amelia might actually tell her, instead of drawing pictures and keeping secrets. Instead she just smiles. "Not really."
("She's got an imaginary friend," the therapist concludes, massaging his hand, "and an overbite.")
-\-\-\-\-\-
Sharon looks through old photo albums sometimes, but she's misplaced all the pictures she used to have of her and Tabetha as girls, and the years have made her memories foggy and strange. She curses Tabby for being so forgettable, for growing up and growing apart, for marrying a dreamer and then-then-well. She curses that she's been saddled with such a cuckoo's egg, sometimes, this house, this slice of someone else's life. She never curses Amelia, though, never hates her for a minute.
"I think I'm afraid of her," she confides to Christine one night, curled close in what London passes off as dark. "Not for her. Of her. It's terrible, isn't it?"
"You need to spend more time with her," Christine says, smoothing Sharon's hair back. "Maybe then she'll open up to you. I wouldn't mind getting to meet her in person, you know."
"But I'm booked solid through--"
"Sharon." Christine presses a finger to her lips. "This is your niece. This is Tabby's daughter. Are your clients really more important than that?"
-\-\-\-\-\-
Amelia doesn't seem to care when Sharon introduces Christine, as blithely unconcerned as if Leadworth was brimming with lesbians; Christine smiles reassuringly and buys Amelia a soda. They go to the National Museum, and Amelia looks curiously at the paintings and the statues and asks questions about Impressionists that neither Sharon or Christine know how to answer.
"Do you want to look at the Egyptian gallery?" Sharon asks.
Amelia shakes her head. "I want to look at the Romans. They were loads nicer."
Sharon tries to catch Christine's eye, because something about that sounds off, odd-but Christine is asking questions and Amelia isn't paying either of them any attention, and maybe she was overreacting to an odd turn of phrase.
On the drive back to Leadworth, Sharon asks, "Did you like the museum?"
Amelia nods. "I always like museums."
"Oh?" Sharon tries not to hold her breath.
"It's how we keep score," Amelia explains.
"How who keeps score, Amelia?"
She blinks, as if she's just noticed she's misspoken. "Nobody important."
Sharon bites her lip as hard as she can.
-\-\-\-\-\-
The next day Amy disappears from school: she asks her teacher if she can go to the toilet and never comes back. Leadworth is small and Leadworth is safe and nobody saw where Amelia went, not a teacher or a constable or a closed-circuit camera, if those even exist anywhere but London. Amelia left her bag and her coat in the classroom and might as well have walked off the face of the earth.
Sharon is in her office when the school calls; she cancels all her meetings for the day, and sits in the head teacher's office drinking tea while the staff search the school, and then the grounds, and find no trace of her niece "You'd best go home, Miss P-er-Walsh," Sergeant Hopkins tells her after explaining they were going to widen the search. "We'll call the moment we know anything."
So Sharon goes back to the cold, rambling house that was Tabetha's home, makes herself more tea that she doesn't drink and a sandwich she can't bring herself to eat, listens for something besides the groans and sighs of bricks and wood that threaten to fall in on themselves and bury her. She sits in her office, among the tidy files and labeled binders; she looks at the blank gray computer monitor but can't bring herself to switch it on. She didn't tell the police about Amy's imaginary friend, because that's just daft, but here in the dark with her tea getting cold she starts to wonder-children make things up, children don't understand, there are random creepers everywhere and the house is full of noises and Amelia's been keeping secrets-
There's a sound from upstairs, a grinding wheeze, and the creak of floorboards. Sharon freezes for a moment, trying to tell herself it's just the wind, just the entropic settling of this awful house. When she hears the footsteps she stands up so quickly that her tea tumbles to the floor.
Amelia's door is shut, of course. Amelia always shuts her door these days. Sharon can hear voices inside it, unmistakeable, Amy's voice and someone else, a grown man's. She thinks for a wild minute that she ought to run back down to the kitchen for the carving knife on the draining board. But then the grinding noise starts up again, and when she throws the door open she's smacked in the face by one of Amelia's drawings, the one of the talking pepperpot, and a burst of wind.
Then it's still again and Amelia is sitting on the bed, wearing a red sweater over her school uniform. There is no one else in the room, just paper scattered all around like dying leaves, the curtains rucked up around a window firmly shut. Amelia's eyes are red and wet, and she looks at Sharon with a trembling lip for a moment; Sharon just manages to blurt out "Amelia--?" and then she finds her arms full of trembling girl.
Amelia cries until she falls asleep, and Sharon holds her like that, and doesn't ask any of the questions that are floating in her head. Even though she thinks that just now, Amelia might answer them.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Sharon cancels all her appointments for two weeks; she'll worry about the bills when they come. She takes Amelia out for ice cream, and they sit by the pond in the village center in the springtime sun, when there are no dark corners or phantom sounds. The people of Leadworth filter by them, calling to one another and making small talk as they go about their business; some of them call to Amelia, or to Sharon, mostly teachers or police or volunteers who helped the search. Most of them don't actually know Sharon's name.
During a lull Sharon asks, "Where did you go, Amelia?"
"To a museum," she says, letting the ice cream drip down her hand.
"One in Gloucester, you mean?"
She shakes her head.
"I heard you talking, you know." Sharon dabs at the rivers of chocolate ripple staining Amelia's knuckles with a napkin, for all the good it does. "Was that your secret, the man in your room?"
Amelia's silence is admission.
Sharon sighs and looks at the ducks on the pond. "I just want to understand, Amelia. Why did you leave school? Where did you go?"
"He made me promise to keep it a secret," she says, and then shoves as much ice cream in her mouth as can fit at once. Sharon waits out the inevitable headache in silence.
"You know, Amelia, there are different kinds of secrets," Sharon tells her. "Sometimes keeping a secret can be dangerous."
"I'm not going to tell on him, he's my friend," Amelia says mulishly, "and next time's going to be good, he promised." And for a moment Sharon can see Tabetha at the same age, when they promised to tell each other everything. But Tabetha is-is gone, and Sharon isn't seven anymore.
"You don't have to tell me about it if you don't want to," she says, and it's the hardest thing she's ever had to say. "But you should tell somebody. Somebody older. Before any next time. They'll know if it's a good secret to keep or not."
Amelia nods solemnly.
Two days later, the Williams boy down the road disappears.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
Amelia moves around the house like a ghost, but when Sharon asks her what's the matter she says "Nothing" like the question makes no sense. The Williamses down the road are much the same, always looking past the people they're talking to as if scanning the horizon, but they still force a smile when Sharon asks how they're doing.
"And your little boy?" she asks. "What was his name?"
"Oh," they said. "Oh, no, we don't have any children, Miss Pond."
"Walsh," she corrects, again (and again and again...) "But my niece said-"
Mr. Williams laughs, but his eyes keep drifting over Sharon's shoulder. "Oh, Amelia, you know how she is, always making things up."
Amelia goes "walking" for an afternoon and when she comes home she paints pictures of sunflowers, dozens of them, broad finger-paint smears of color that she hangs on her walls. "Vincent Van Gogh painted sunflowers," she says with authority, and fills her room with them. "He said they were like people, always dying."
"People aren't always dying, Amelia," Sharon protests uneasily.
"I know," she says, but she sniffles as she bends over her paint.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
Sharon takes Amelia to another therapist; she throws such a tantrum that they're asked never to return. She takes Amelia out of school for a day on another museum trip, but Amelia doesn't talk, doesn't want to look at the statues and turns white as a sheet when Sharon points out a dinosaur exhibit. Sharon hears noises all the time now, from Amelia's bedroom, from the garden-she hears Amelia talking to an empty room, and watches as the smiles slide off her face when she thinks no one is looking.
She wants to run back to London, where the nights are never silent, but she can't leave Amelia in Leadworth and she's afraid of making things worse with another sudden change. Instead she stays in her office, as much as she dares, going to work in the small hours when she starts out of troubling dreams. She watches the village through the windows but doesn't go out; Leadworth feels like a corset, one drawn tight enough to smother.
In June the head teacher calls her in, suggests that Amy isn't prepared to take her final exams. Sharon seriously looks into moving to London, or sending Amy to a boarding school for troubled children. She looks into taking a long, long holiday somewhere far away, and sunny. "I don't know how to help her," she rambles into the phone, sitting in a cupboard where Amelia won't overhear. "I don't know if she knows what's real anymore. Maybe I don't know what's real."
"You know there aren't any strange men coming into the house at night," Christine assures her. "You installed that alarm system, right?"
Sharon installed a home security system, to the bemusement of the rest of the village. It shorts out at least once a week. "She's so scared and so quiet and I don't know what to do."
"Maybe a holiday would be good for both of you," Christine says. "And maybe family counseling."
"I'm not crazy, Christine--!"
"But you're stressed and you're worried and you're obviously having trouble communicating with her." Christine sighs into the phone. "Sharon, babe, you can't tackle this alone. Amelia's having a delayed reaction to losing her parents and that's more than you can handle. It's nothing to be ashamed of."
Something niggles in the back of Sharon's mind, and she finds herself blurting, "We didn't lose them."
"I'm sorry?"
"We didn't-it's not like Augustus and Tabby were just misplaced, Christine, we know where they are! They-they--"
"Sharon, talk to me."
But her throat is closing up around the impossibility of it all, around the words she can't say and the things she can't quite remember, on the tip of her tongue. "We didn't lose them," she said again. "They're just-gone. Like the boy. Like Amelia was."
There's a long silence on the other end of the line. "Sharon, I've got a few days off coming up. Why don't I come pay you a visit?"
"No," she says, "I mean, no, it's fine. I'm sorry to bother you."
She rings off and sits in her own bedroom, in the shadow of the sister she can't properly remember and the massive house of cracking plaster and crumbling bricks that seems ready to swallow her whole. Lost, misplaced, taken-and Amelia alone gets left behind--
You're being foolish, she tells herself, but it doesn't make her feel any better.
-\-\-\-\-\-
It's a Friday night in June, and Amelia goes out in the garden to play; she has been talking about something she saw on the telly and looking almost happy, almost calm. Sharon watches her from the windows, watches her wave around a magic marker and whistle as she points it at birds and trees; she puts up the leftovers and starts the washing up, wondering if she can get a bit of work done while Amelia is occupied-just a bit, with the window open and the door propped so that she'll hear if Amelia calls for her. She's miles behind on the few projects she hasn't outright canceled-or lost-and if she even wants the option of moving out of this damned village she needs the income. Surely she can take an evening to herself, surely just a few hours--
Faintly, she hears a grinding noise, somewhere out of sight.
"Amelia?"
No answer.
"...Amelia?"
This time Sharon takes the carving knife out into the overgrown garden as she searches for the source of the sound. It's faded by the time she circles around to where the shed had been-she never did get around to properly cleaning up the mess, did she? There's a square imprint in the muddy earth, a few feet on each side; the evening is still and silent again, silent and completely, deathly still.
"Amelia?" she calls, looked around. There is a green marker lying in the unkempt grass. "Amelia?"
-\-\-\-\-\-
Leadworth is small and Leadworth is safe and Leadworth has never been so terrifying. Sharon walks up and down the road, knocks on the Williams' door, walks all the way to the post office and back with the knife hidden in her purse, calling Amelia's name. People stare at her, or ask what's happened--"Are you all right, Miss Pond?"
Sharon can't correct them, can't even begin to explain-just says "He took Amelia," though she doesn't know who he is. People try to stop her-Mrs. Pogitt and Sergeant Hopkins and Mrs. Angelo whose grandson is in Amelia's class. Sharon walks away from them all. The night is dark and warm and something has gone horribly wrong, Amelia's gone again and what if she doesn't come back this time? What if she's gone the way of Augustus and Tabetha and the boy whose name Sharon never knew?
What if it's Sharon's turn?
"Miss Pond!" It's one of the old men who sit outside the pub at all hours playing dominoes; she's never bothered to learn their names. "Miss Pond, are you all right?"
"Of course not," she says raggedly. If they don't even know her name, will they notice she's gone? Or will they think that strange woman with the funny accent had gone back to wherever she came from? Who else will be drawn into that horrible house, to the disappearing girl and her secret friends, that man of air and darkness...?
The house. Amelia came back to the house last time. Sharon turns back and looked warily up the tree-lined road. If Amelia comes back...
When Amelia comes back, Sharon will be waiting for her.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
It's quiet in Leadworth at night, and so very dark: nothing but starlight and the insubstantial sounds of birds and insects, a precariously thin skin between her and something terrible. Sharon's too tired to run all the way back, but she walks fast and with a purpose, and when cars pass and slow she averts her eyes and ignores them, avoids the questions and suspicions. She makes her way back to the house of cracking plaster, but she's not a footstep inside the garden gate before something stops her cold:
There is a blue box standing in the front garden. A blue box labeled POLICE and softly lit inside, and all around it Sharon can see burnt-black patterns in the grass. She circles around it; tests the doors, and they are locked. It is wooden and sturdy and does not shift. This is a great impossible thing in a day of impossible things, half a year of nightmares, and she is not sure whether to laugh or weep.
"What are you doing?"
Sharon spins around; she's got the knife out now, raised between them, between herself and the box and the woman coming down the path with an arm full of Amelia's books and toys. "Where've you taken her?" she asks, because it only makes sense, because she's never seen this woman before and somehow something has to make sense around here.
The woman with the curling cloud of hair drops the books and puts one hand to her hip, where she's got something hanging that looks horribly like a gun. "You're Sharon Walsh," she says, firmly, and the name settles between them like a warning, like something infinitely more dangerous than a gun or box.
"Where's Amelia?" Sharon stammers; she wants to move away from the impossible box, wants to run and hide and cry and go back to London, but she's not going without her niece and she needs to understand. "Where've you taken her?"
"Amelia is in trouble," the woman says calmly. "She needs my help."
"She needs her family," Sharon says, daring to take a step closer. "You keep taking her, you and the man with the wind-where do you go?"
The other woman's mouth thins a bit. "Sharon, I really don't have time for this."
Sharon laughs, a little. It hurts. "You don't have time? You don't have time to tell me where Amelia is?"
"Amelia is long ago and far away," the woman says. "Time has gone wrong, your niece is in danger and you really need to get out of my way."
Sharon takes a step forward. "Tell me where you took--"
She doesn't even see the strange woman shoot from the hip.
"I'm sorry," is the last thing she hears before falling into endless black, "for what it's worth."
-\-\-\-\-\-
-\-\-\-\-\-
Something is the matter with Amelia, something Sharon can't put her finger on-not when she visits Tabby and Augustus in Leadworth for the first time, when Amelia is a little moon-faced girl with an imaginary friend, and not a decade and a half later, either.
"You miss your sister," Christine says when they get the wedding invitation. "You haven't seen your niece in years."
"I know," Sharon says. "I know." And she can't explain, can't put it into words why the village makes her uneasy, why Amelia's smiling face sometimes makes her shudder. They visit her in London, sometimes. Sharon sends cards and money for birthdays and Christmas, and lets Tabby vent over the phone about the latest psychiatrist, the latest school report. It's been okay.
They go to the wedding, and Christine drives; Sharon watches out the window as the A40 gives way to the M5. The house at the end of the lane is full of Ponds and fury, but Tabby drags Sharon into a hug and then sets them up with a quiet corner in a ground-floor room-"Augustus's 'study,'" she says, complete with air quotes, as if the dusty books and unfinished model planes don't give it away. "I've got the Li-Lo all ready for you, though-trust me, it's better than sharing a guest room with his Great-Aunt Gertie--"
Sharon looks around the room, and there is a moment of deja vu when she thinks that, just maybe, the next time she blinks the shelves will change, there will be binders and files and an old desktop computer-but then it's gone again, and Christine is asking about the rehearsal dinner. Sharon takes a deep breath, and stows their bags under the desk, out of the way.
Tabetha has to run to down Amelia, who gives a polite smile as if she barely knows her. Sharon barely recognizes Amy, all tall and coltish and about to get married to some village boy. "Still on about your imaginary friend?" Christine asks, and it's supposed to be a joke about the last time they saw her but something makes Amy go stiff and still and Sharon feels like all the air's gone from the room.
"What's wrong?" Christine asks, when they're back in the study and Sharon has calmed down a bit.
"I don't know," Sharon says, which is true.
They make it through the rehearsal and the wedding, meeting Amy's future in-laws (thin nervous people, with a thin nervous son, though he seems calmer when he's by Amy's side) and Sharon thinks she can do this, can get through the visit and back to work on Monday. They're on their way to the reception dinner when Sharon catches a glimpse of someone in black-who wears black to a wedding, honestly? It's a woman with curling blond hair, and for a moment Sharon thinks it must be another of Augustus' cousins, or perhaps someone from the groom's side, one of the great crowd of people she hasn't been able to keep track of.
Sharon looks at the woman, and the woman looks at her, and mouths the words, I'm sorry.
"What's the matter, Sharon?" Christine asks when Sharon's hand clamps down on her wrist.
"I don't," she stammers, "I don't know," because she doesn't, it doesn't make any sense, this bone-deep fear in the summer sun. There's never been a reason, not to fear Amelia, to fear imaginary men. "I can't. That woman--"
But the woman in black has gone. Christine didn't even see her.
"Sharon, you're shaking," Christine says. "Do you want to skip the reception?"
"No," Sharon says, "no. I'll just...I'll be fine. It's all a bit silly, isn't it? Jumping at shadows?"
Christine frowns at her, and again when Sharon tosses back a glass of wine like water. Sharon pretends she doesn't see.
And it's all going so well until Amy climbs on the table, shushing Augustus and Rory with wide, staring eyes. "When I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend," she says, and Sharon shuts her eyes, tries to shut it all out. "But he wasn't imaginary. He was real."
Tabby muttering about psychiatrists and people whispering and for some reason, Sharon thinks of ducks on a pond, of a younger Amelia saying he's my friend, and next time is going to be good: but that never happened, Sharon hasn't been to Leadworth since Amy was small and there's no such thing as monsters. She covers her eyes and breaths, because there is nothing here to fear.
"Raggedy man, I remember you!" Amy screams, and the whole room begins to shake, a bone-deep vibration and a grinding wheeze, and a great hard-edged form is taking shape in the middle of the dance floor, something tall and dark and impossible. Something that Sharon doesn't remember. Something she somehow knows. "And you are late for my wedding!"
There's an impossible thing forming in the middle of the room and Sharon wants no part of it. She flees.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Christine will find her, later, and take her back to Tabetha's house, just long enough to get their things; the others will find her later and they will all be so charmed, so pleasantly bewildered, that they won't understand why Sharon's mascara has run in thick black streaks down to her chin. Tabetha will find her and ask her what's wrong, Amelia will find her and make apologies, but first, the first person to find Sharon is the woman in black.
Sharon is gasping and breathing outside the reception hall, and the woman simply says, "I am sorry, you know. But I had to do it. So much more than you can imagine was at stake."
It seems insane, it is insane, but Sharon finds herself asking quite calmly, "Did you kill me?"
The woman shakes her head. "No. Just stunned. It was the universe that died."
"The stars," Sharon says, and just speaking out the memories in her head helps, a little, makes it all seem a little less mad. She doesn't even need to elaborate; the woman just nods.
"The timelines are back where they're meant to be now," she continues. "Amy and Rory are who they're meant to be. They're going to be all right."
What about me, Sharon wants to ask, but she can't quite find the words. "So that-that thing. The box. The man."
"Is not someone you'll have to worry about again," the woman assures her. Hesitates. "He meant well, for what it's worth. He was just trying to fix his mistakes."
"Is that what I was?" Sharon asks. The woman in black winces.