A Damp, Drizzly November in My Soul, for obsessivemuch (Dollhouse, PG)
Title: A Damp, Drizzly November in My Soul
Author: penmage
Recipient: obsessivemuch
Fandom: Dollhouse
Rating: PG (implied PG-13)
Pairing: Paul Ballard/Mellie
Spoilers: Through 1x09 A Spy in the House of Love. Goes a little AU after that, what with the apocalypse and all.
Request: Request 2 - fandom: Dollhouse
Details: Ballard/Mellie (November) - post-apocalyptic story of how Ballard comes to know the girl across the hall - whether or not she remembers is up to you, but it would be interesting to see how a composite of Mellie/November would act
Summary: When the ice caps start melting, Paul and Mellie are trapped in the building together.
A Damp, Drizzly November in My Soul
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”--from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
When the ice caps first started melting, Paul barely noticed. Global warming had been an issue for the talking heads pretty much for as long as he could remember, and while he was sad that his hypothetical grandkids would never get to see a polar bear, he figured it didn’t affect him. Much.
Besides, in those days Paul’s mind was a little preoccupied with something else, something that felt a lot closer to home considering it involved a sleeper agent planted across the hall.
He was operating in stealth mode in those days, and sometimes he even surprised himself with the lengths he was going to keep Mellie-and the Dollhouse-deceived. Falsifying his charts, deliberately circling dead ends like they meant something to him. Telling Mellie about a “promising” new lead that had been dead for weeks over forkfuls of her homemade lasagna.
He knew the rules. Mellie, or whatever her name really was, had told them to him herself, with her own mouth. He had to keep Mellie-and through her, the Dollhouse-thinking that he was still in the dark. And the only way to do that convincingly was to keep them convinced that he was still researching the Dollhouse, and still sharing that research with the girl across the hall.
It still creeped him out when he thought about it actively, so he tried not to, as often as possible. He knew in the back of his brain that she was a lie, a tool for the bad guys, but he just couldn’t constantly function that way. So he still laughed with her over a cheesy pun, still crushed her at Scrabble and lorded it over her like she couldn’t kill him with a flick of a switch.
She was Mellie, the sweet, irrepressible, insecure bundle of bravery he had fallen for, but she was also November, the paper girl spying on him for his enemies. Sometimes, no matter how hard he reminded himself of that, it got harder and harder for him to remember which one she really was.
And then the ice caps started melting, and he had bigger worries than taking down a cabal of evil mindwiping pimps.
When he pulled his head out of his obsessive detecting activities long enough to realize what was happening, it was almost too late. Mellie stopped him in the hall, her eyes so harrowed and dead that for a moment he thought he was seeing November again.
“I stocked up on advil and bottled water,” she said.
It was so Mellie. Instead of reminding him, like she must have done a hundred times to his blank wall of a distracted back, that there was a run on the drugstores and asking him to come with her and stock up on supplies, she just got straight to the point. She had stocked up. Stocking up meant something was very wrong.
“Come on, don’t you think you’re overreacting just a little?” If he was being honest, he didn’t really think she was, but he was a little staggered that things had gotten so bad without him noticing. It was almost laughable. He was so wrapped up in the Dollhouse that he had barely noticed that the world was ending around him.
“Paul,” she said, just his name and nothing else, and then took his hand and led him into her apartment and sat him in front of the TV. He watched-paying attention, this time-as the talking heads looked increasingly frantic as they suggested people get to higher ground as soon as possible, and recommended stocking up on canned food and bottled water.
Things became crystal clear to him then. The world was ending. Literally ending. The ice caps were melting, the oceans were rising, the sun was baking the planet, and life as he knew it was changing forever. There were more important things in the world that conspiracies, and one of them was staying alive, and maybe actually living his life for once.
He could walk away. Leave LA, leave the hunt for a mythic bunker. Leave the search that had devoured his every waking moment for months now. He glanced at the girl sitting next to him on the couch, and had another thought: he could leave her behind, too. Finally finally, he could be rid of his constant surveillance, of having to constantly play the game. He could leave Mellie behind and stop living a double life. He could finally be free.
“Call your mother,” he said. His voice was harsher than he had expected, husky with sudden excitement. He stood up, itching to do something, to start moving, to get out.
“What?” Mellie gazed up at him, and gave him one of those wounded looks she was so good at.
“You need to call your mother.” He felt like a prize jerk when he said it. He knew full well that she didn’t have a mother in Iowa, but maybe that number led to the people pulling her strings. They would take care of her, and he could finally be free-of her, of them, of all of this. “Iowa is inland. You’ll be safer there.”
“Paul-” Mellie’s voice broke on his name, and his heart caught despite himself. God, she was so damn good at pressing his buttons. “Paul, I thought of that. I thought maybe both of us could go, but I can’t get through to her. Maybe the phones are down in Iowa.” She stood and caught his hands. They looked so small in his large rough fingers, and despite himself his instinct to play the white knight, to protect the damsel in distress, fought for control.
“Paul, I’m afraid. My mother-I don’t want to go there on my own just to find out that she’s dead.” She looked up at him, met his eyes. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’m not going anywhere. Not without you, anyway.”
It was a declaration of love, and if she had been a normal girl he would have taken it that way, but in that moment, against the backdrop of the end of the world, all he could think of was damn. He wouldn’t be free of her after all.
“Paul?”
He wanted to hit her, all of a sudden. The instinct rose up in him like bile. He wanted to slap her down, shove her away from him, break free of the invisible chains binding them together. He forced himself to take a deep breath. There’s a person in there, he reminded himself, as he tried to when he was on the verge of losing it. A real person, beneath Mellie and November. There’s a lost girl in there, and for her sake I have to keep Mellie safe.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. We’ll stick together. Tomorrow we’ll make another grocery run and see if we can stock up on canned food. How does that sound?”
She smiled, and it should have warmed his heart, but instead he felt nothing inside, felt only cold where moments before he had been so irrationally elated.
“Good. That sounds good, Paul.”
In the bedroom that night, her arm resting carelessly across his chest, he listened to her even breathing and thought of the real girl he had never met. She might not have a mother in Iowa, but she had a family somewhere. Somewhere in the world, there was someone who knew her real name, someone who loved her.
And if Paul was being honest with himself, he knew he couldn’t walk away, couldn’t leave her to survive or die on her own. It wasn’t her fault that her puppetmasters had abandoned her, and he couldn’t live with himself if he left her, too. It was his fault she was here, and the white knight in him wouldn’t let him walk.
And so in the morning, they made a grocery run.
*************
They had blocked off their two apartments when things started getting really bad. Paul had commandeered some building supplies and blocked off the end of the hall. The elevators were broken, and the narrow length of the staircases made it more and more dangerous to risk being attacked on the journey up and down. The safest way in and out of their little compound was through the fire escape, and besides, there wasn’t much reason to leave, anyway.
They’ve fallen into something of a routine, these days. Paul goes through his workout routine first thing in the morning while Mellie putters around her place. He thinks she’s writing or crocheting or something, but to be honest he couldn’t be bothered. The hobbies of a paper girl just don’t seem that significant to him.
He only thinks of her as a paper girl approximately half the time these days.
It’s getting harder and harder for him to remember that Mellie is a lie. Living in such close quarters with her, seeing her and only her all day every day-when she’s the only other person in his world, how can she not be a real person at all? It hurts his head to think about it. He’s too honest with himself not to think about it at all.
Mellie comes over in the afternoon to make lunch. They’ve divided their food into daily rations. It’s less than they’d like to eat-gone are the days of Mellie’s manicotti, or too many little boxes of Chinese takeout. But even though it feels like they’ve got enough canned peas and corn to feed an army, they both know there isn’t any more coming after their supply runs out.
Paul doesn’t like to think about what happens after their supply runs out. He figures that things can only be bad for so long, and eventually they have to get better, but it’s getting hard for him to keep thinking positive-he’s always been the eternal pessimist, after all.
They haven’t heard anything from the talking heads in over a month. Nothing on TV. Nothing on the radio. They spend a few minutes every day after lunch and dinner fiddling with the dial, hoping that someone out there somewhere is broadcasting something, but nothing ever turns up, and they don’t want to waste the batteries.
They fall asleep together every night, a jumble of limbs under a sheet. It’s too hot for a blanket-too hot to be touching, even, but human contact helps Paul fall asleep. Even so, he finds himself lying awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, listening to Mellie’s even breathing. His mind likes to travel in circles, trying to find a way out, a way to save them, a way to fix things, even though he knows that there is absolutely nothing he could even begin to do. He usually falls asleep in despair somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth hopeless plan.
It’s only been a month and a half since the waters started rising, since he began to feel like Noah during the flood, since his world was pulled out from under him, but already Paul is beginning to feel like his old life was just a dream he had once. Real life is this, humidity and feeling caged in by the four walls of his apartment, and always feeling hungry, and Mellie.
Mellie. He hates to admit it, but he would have jumped off the roof into the vile still water ages ago if it weren’t for her. He wouldn’t have been the first. Too many people, driven mad by terror and claustrophobia and hopelessness had taken the plunge. They bobbed at the top of the water, swollen and purple and reeking. He has almost gotten used to the smell.
But Mellie is bright and cheerful, unrelentingly there when he just wants to be left to give up. Mellie always has a plan, even if it’s as simple as having crushed pineapple for lunch instead of another can of green beans. He’s just surviving, but Mellie, she’s planning. She’s already sketched out her plans for a roof garden to supplement their cans and extend their food supply.
At the beginning, he told himself that he was keeping her afloat, that she was a paper girl and would be lost without him, but if he forces himself to confront the truth, he would be broken without her to keep him sane.
Sometimes, he comes across her sitting, just staring into space, and when he calls her name or waves a hand across her eyes, it’s almost like her eyes are glass and she can’t see. Once, he put a hand on her shoulder, trying to draw her out of the trance, and she nearly broke his wrist, reacting with a speed and strength he would never have guessed she could possess. It had been one of the few times these days that he was forced to remember that she wasn’t only paper, but razor sharp, too. He had nearly forgotten. Sometimes he thought wanted to forget all the way.
She always snaps out of her trance eventually, as long as he leaves her alone, and so he never mentions it. When he lets himself think about it, he’s a little afraid that her imprint is wearing off, that she’s gone too long without it being reinforced, and that sooner or later, she’ll revert to being a paper girl for real.
He doesn’t think he could bear that. Mellie has become his reason for staying alive. He doesn’t like to think too far along those lines, though. It makes him feel too much like he’s become a paper boy himself. Is there really so much of a difference between them, here at the end of the world? Neither of them are what they really were anymore, anyway. Maybe the whole world is made of paper, and it’ll all wash away in the rising flood until there’s nothing left but mulch.
He doesn’t like to think much about the Dollhouse anymore, but if he did he would be forced to admit that he is using Mellie has much as any other Dollhouse client. And so he says nothing, pretends nothing has happened, even when she blinks aware, and looks up at him with her big doe eyes, and asks “Did I fall asleep?”
He can never bear to say anything. Not then, and not when she murmurs in her sleep about flowers in a vase. He just closes his eyes and pretends she’s a real girl, pretends as hard as he can.
The days get hotter, their rations run shorter, and Mellie’s trance spells get longer. When she snaps out of them, it takes her longer and longer to come back to herself. And Paul begins to wonder how much longer she has. How much longer they both have.
It’s been six months now, since the waters started rising, since they were trapped in their building, since the last time he’d heard another human voice. When she’s in her own apartment, doing whatever it is she does (if he really loved her, if he really thought of her as a person, he would know, he would care, he tells himself guiltily, but he still can’t bring himself to ask) he gets on the two-way radio and calls out, desperately, to her makers. He begs the Dollhouse to come get her, to come get them both. He promises them anything he can think of, if only they’ll fix Mellie, make her right again. They just need a little more time. He hates himself for doing it, but he can’t stop himself. He doesn’t actually believe they can hear him. He doesn’t think help is coming.
Too many days now, he goes up to the roof and stares down at the stinking ocean that extends as far as the eye can see. It tempts him, calling out with a siren song that whispers against the unavoidable predictability that has become his life. It’s all he can do not to hurl himself over the ledge for once and for all.
One day soon, he tells himself. One day soon, she’ll go away inside her head for good, and his Mellie will be gone forever, along with his reason for staying away from the edge. He stares down at the bodies bobbing in the water, and for one brief moment, he thinks he sees his own face.
Author: penmage
Recipient: obsessivemuch
Fandom: Dollhouse
Rating: PG (implied PG-13)
Pairing: Paul Ballard/Mellie
Spoilers: Through 1x09 A Spy in the House of Love. Goes a little AU after that, what with the apocalypse and all.
Request: Request 2 - fandom: Dollhouse
Details: Ballard/Mellie (November) - post-apocalyptic story of how Ballard comes to know the girl across the hall - whether or not she remembers is up to you, but it would be interesting to see how a composite of Mellie/November would act
Summary: When the ice caps start melting, Paul and Mellie are trapped in the building together.
A Damp, Drizzly November in My Soul
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”--from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
When the ice caps first started melting, Paul barely noticed. Global warming had been an issue for the talking heads pretty much for as long as he could remember, and while he was sad that his hypothetical grandkids would never get to see a polar bear, he figured it didn’t affect him. Much.
Besides, in those days Paul’s mind was a little preoccupied with something else, something that felt a lot closer to home considering it involved a sleeper agent planted across the hall.
He was operating in stealth mode in those days, and sometimes he even surprised himself with the lengths he was going to keep Mellie-and the Dollhouse-deceived. Falsifying his charts, deliberately circling dead ends like they meant something to him. Telling Mellie about a “promising” new lead that had been dead for weeks over forkfuls of her homemade lasagna.
He knew the rules. Mellie, or whatever her name really was, had told them to him herself, with her own mouth. He had to keep Mellie-and through her, the Dollhouse-thinking that he was still in the dark. And the only way to do that convincingly was to keep them convinced that he was still researching the Dollhouse, and still sharing that research with the girl across the hall.
It still creeped him out when he thought about it actively, so he tried not to, as often as possible. He knew in the back of his brain that she was a lie, a tool for the bad guys, but he just couldn’t constantly function that way. So he still laughed with her over a cheesy pun, still crushed her at Scrabble and lorded it over her like she couldn’t kill him with a flick of a switch.
She was Mellie, the sweet, irrepressible, insecure bundle of bravery he had fallen for, but she was also November, the paper girl spying on him for his enemies. Sometimes, no matter how hard he reminded himself of that, it got harder and harder for him to remember which one she really was.
And then the ice caps started melting, and he had bigger worries than taking down a cabal of evil mindwiping pimps.
When he pulled his head out of his obsessive detecting activities long enough to realize what was happening, it was almost too late. Mellie stopped him in the hall, her eyes so harrowed and dead that for a moment he thought he was seeing November again.
“I stocked up on advil and bottled water,” she said.
It was so Mellie. Instead of reminding him, like she must have done a hundred times to his blank wall of a distracted back, that there was a run on the drugstores and asking him to come with her and stock up on supplies, she just got straight to the point. She had stocked up. Stocking up meant something was very wrong.
“Come on, don’t you think you’re overreacting just a little?” If he was being honest, he didn’t really think she was, but he was a little staggered that things had gotten so bad without him noticing. It was almost laughable. He was so wrapped up in the Dollhouse that he had barely noticed that the world was ending around him.
“Paul,” she said, just his name and nothing else, and then took his hand and led him into her apartment and sat him in front of the TV. He watched-paying attention, this time-as the talking heads looked increasingly frantic as they suggested people get to higher ground as soon as possible, and recommended stocking up on canned food and bottled water.
Things became crystal clear to him then. The world was ending. Literally ending. The ice caps were melting, the oceans were rising, the sun was baking the planet, and life as he knew it was changing forever. There were more important things in the world that conspiracies, and one of them was staying alive, and maybe actually living his life for once.
He could walk away. Leave LA, leave the hunt for a mythic bunker. Leave the search that had devoured his every waking moment for months now. He glanced at the girl sitting next to him on the couch, and had another thought: he could leave her behind, too. Finally finally, he could be rid of his constant surveillance, of having to constantly play the game. He could leave Mellie behind and stop living a double life. He could finally be free.
“Call your mother,” he said. His voice was harsher than he had expected, husky with sudden excitement. He stood up, itching to do something, to start moving, to get out.
“What?” Mellie gazed up at him, and gave him one of those wounded looks she was so good at.
“You need to call your mother.” He felt like a prize jerk when he said it. He knew full well that she didn’t have a mother in Iowa, but maybe that number led to the people pulling her strings. They would take care of her, and he could finally be free-of her, of them, of all of this. “Iowa is inland. You’ll be safer there.”
“Paul-” Mellie’s voice broke on his name, and his heart caught despite himself. God, she was so damn good at pressing his buttons. “Paul, I thought of that. I thought maybe both of us could go, but I can’t get through to her. Maybe the phones are down in Iowa.” She stood and caught his hands. They looked so small in his large rough fingers, and despite himself his instinct to play the white knight, to protect the damsel in distress, fought for control.
“Paul, I’m afraid. My mother-I don’t want to go there on my own just to find out that she’s dead.” She looked up at him, met his eyes. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’m not going anywhere. Not without you, anyway.”
It was a declaration of love, and if she had been a normal girl he would have taken it that way, but in that moment, against the backdrop of the end of the world, all he could think of was damn. He wouldn’t be free of her after all.
“Paul?”
He wanted to hit her, all of a sudden. The instinct rose up in him like bile. He wanted to slap her down, shove her away from him, break free of the invisible chains binding them together. He forced himself to take a deep breath. There’s a person in there, he reminded himself, as he tried to when he was on the verge of losing it. A real person, beneath Mellie and November. There’s a lost girl in there, and for her sake I have to keep Mellie safe.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. We’ll stick together. Tomorrow we’ll make another grocery run and see if we can stock up on canned food. How does that sound?”
She smiled, and it should have warmed his heart, but instead he felt nothing inside, felt only cold where moments before he had been so irrationally elated.
“Good. That sounds good, Paul.”
In the bedroom that night, her arm resting carelessly across his chest, he listened to her even breathing and thought of the real girl he had never met. She might not have a mother in Iowa, but she had a family somewhere. Somewhere in the world, there was someone who knew her real name, someone who loved her.
And if Paul was being honest with himself, he knew he couldn’t walk away, couldn’t leave her to survive or die on her own. It wasn’t her fault that her puppetmasters had abandoned her, and he couldn’t live with himself if he left her, too. It was his fault she was here, and the white knight in him wouldn’t let him walk.
And so in the morning, they made a grocery run.
*************
They had blocked off their two apartments when things started getting really bad. Paul had commandeered some building supplies and blocked off the end of the hall. The elevators were broken, and the narrow length of the staircases made it more and more dangerous to risk being attacked on the journey up and down. The safest way in and out of their little compound was through the fire escape, and besides, there wasn’t much reason to leave, anyway.
They’ve fallen into something of a routine, these days. Paul goes through his workout routine first thing in the morning while Mellie putters around her place. He thinks she’s writing or crocheting or something, but to be honest he couldn’t be bothered. The hobbies of a paper girl just don’t seem that significant to him.
He only thinks of her as a paper girl approximately half the time these days.
It’s getting harder and harder for him to remember that Mellie is a lie. Living in such close quarters with her, seeing her and only her all day every day-when she’s the only other person in his world, how can she not be a real person at all? It hurts his head to think about it. He’s too honest with himself not to think about it at all.
Mellie comes over in the afternoon to make lunch. They’ve divided their food into daily rations. It’s less than they’d like to eat-gone are the days of Mellie’s manicotti, or too many little boxes of Chinese takeout. But even though it feels like they’ve got enough canned peas and corn to feed an army, they both know there isn’t any more coming after their supply runs out.
Paul doesn’t like to think about what happens after their supply runs out. He figures that things can only be bad for so long, and eventually they have to get better, but it’s getting hard for him to keep thinking positive-he’s always been the eternal pessimist, after all.
They haven’t heard anything from the talking heads in over a month. Nothing on TV. Nothing on the radio. They spend a few minutes every day after lunch and dinner fiddling with the dial, hoping that someone out there somewhere is broadcasting something, but nothing ever turns up, and they don’t want to waste the batteries.
They fall asleep together every night, a jumble of limbs under a sheet. It’s too hot for a blanket-too hot to be touching, even, but human contact helps Paul fall asleep. Even so, he finds himself lying awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, listening to Mellie’s even breathing. His mind likes to travel in circles, trying to find a way out, a way to save them, a way to fix things, even though he knows that there is absolutely nothing he could even begin to do. He usually falls asleep in despair somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth hopeless plan.
It’s only been a month and a half since the waters started rising, since he began to feel like Noah during the flood, since his world was pulled out from under him, but already Paul is beginning to feel like his old life was just a dream he had once. Real life is this, humidity and feeling caged in by the four walls of his apartment, and always feeling hungry, and Mellie.
Mellie. He hates to admit it, but he would have jumped off the roof into the vile still water ages ago if it weren’t for her. He wouldn’t have been the first. Too many people, driven mad by terror and claustrophobia and hopelessness had taken the plunge. They bobbed at the top of the water, swollen and purple and reeking. He has almost gotten used to the smell.
But Mellie is bright and cheerful, unrelentingly there when he just wants to be left to give up. Mellie always has a plan, even if it’s as simple as having crushed pineapple for lunch instead of another can of green beans. He’s just surviving, but Mellie, she’s planning. She’s already sketched out her plans for a roof garden to supplement their cans and extend their food supply.
At the beginning, he told himself that he was keeping her afloat, that she was a paper girl and would be lost without him, but if he forces himself to confront the truth, he would be broken without her to keep him sane.
Sometimes, he comes across her sitting, just staring into space, and when he calls her name or waves a hand across her eyes, it’s almost like her eyes are glass and she can’t see. Once, he put a hand on her shoulder, trying to draw her out of the trance, and she nearly broke his wrist, reacting with a speed and strength he would never have guessed she could possess. It had been one of the few times these days that he was forced to remember that she wasn’t only paper, but razor sharp, too. He had nearly forgotten. Sometimes he thought wanted to forget all the way.
She always snaps out of her trance eventually, as long as he leaves her alone, and so he never mentions it. When he lets himself think about it, he’s a little afraid that her imprint is wearing off, that she’s gone too long without it being reinforced, and that sooner or later, she’ll revert to being a paper girl for real.
He doesn’t think he could bear that. Mellie has become his reason for staying alive. He doesn’t like to think too far along those lines, though. It makes him feel too much like he’s become a paper boy himself. Is there really so much of a difference between them, here at the end of the world? Neither of them are what they really were anymore, anyway. Maybe the whole world is made of paper, and it’ll all wash away in the rising flood until there’s nothing left but mulch.
He doesn’t like to think much about the Dollhouse anymore, but if he did he would be forced to admit that he is using Mellie has much as any other Dollhouse client. And so he says nothing, pretends nothing has happened, even when she blinks aware, and looks up at him with her big doe eyes, and asks “Did I fall asleep?”
He can never bear to say anything. Not then, and not when she murmurs in her sleep about flowers in a vase. He just closes his eyes and pretends she’s a real girl, pretends as hard as he can.
The days get hotter, their rations run shorter, and Mellie’s trance spells get longer. When she snaps out of them, it takes her longer and longer to come back to herself. And Paul begins to wonder how much longer she has. How much longer they both have.
It’s been six months now, since the waters started rising, since they were trapped in their building, since the last time he’d heard another human voice. When she’s in her own apartment, doing whatever it is she does (if he really loved her, if he really thought of her as a person, he would know, he would care, he tells himself guiltily, but he still can’t bring himself to ask) he gets on the two-way radio and calls out, desperately, to her makers. He begs the Dollhouse to come get her, to come get them both. He promises them anything he can think of, if only they’ll fix Mellie, make her right again. They just need a little more time. He hates himself for doing it, but he can’t stop himself. He doesn’t actually believe they can hear him. He doesn’t think help is coming.
Too many days now, he goes up to the roof and stares down at the stinking ocean that extends as far as the eye can see. It tempts him, calling out with a siren song that whispers against the unavoidable predictability that has become his life. It’s all he can do not to hurl himself over the ledge for once and for all.
One day soon, he tells himself. One day soon, she’ll go away inside her head for good, and his Mellie will be gone forever, along with his reason for staying away from the edge. He stares down at the bodies bobbing in the water, and for one brief moment, he thinks he sees his own face.