Late Sunday, early Monday morning, the stairwell

[notajar]

It's cool enough by the time the pigeon returns, hours into the morning, that Door wishes she'd not left her coat in her room. She's fallen asleep once, just a brief nod that had been jerked into wakefulness by the flutter of passing wings. She's wide awake now, though. In place of the scraggly bit of hair-ribbon around the pigeon's leg, there's a

Comments

[grenfelzer]

Carmela can't sleep, and though she'd briefly pondered heading to the common room to talk to the television, or something, what she ended up doing was wandering the dorms. Not one to ignore someone who seems like they might be in trouble, she stops when she sees the other girl sitting in the stairwell.

"Hey," she says quietly, sitting down next to her. "What's wrong?"

[notajar]

Door looks up, and before she can think to wipe her eyes or pretend to be all right, gives the same answer she had when they'd found her and asked her what hurt. "Everything?" Then she comes to herself and looks down. "Sorry, it's okay. I'm fine."

[grenfelzer]

Carmela snorts at that. "It's ridiculous o'clock in the morning, and you're sitting here instead of tucked in bed?" she points out. "Also, you were crying. People don't generally do that when they're fine."

[notajar]

Door wipes her eyes on the back of the hand not holding the picture, and laughs a little raggedly. "Well, it's not been the best of weeks, no."

[grenfelzer]

"You want to talk about it?" Carmela asks. "Sometimes that helps."

[notajar]

"It can't help them," Door says, flattening out the paper that's become crumpled in her hands.

[grenfelzer]

"No, but it might help *you*," Carmela says.

[notajar]

Door taks a wet breath and smooths the photograph out again, placing it on her knee. "That's my family. My mother and father, and my sister and brother."

[grenfelzer]

Carmela can occassionally put two and two together and come up with four. "Oh," she says quietly. "I'm sorry," she offers, though she does know how stupid that sounds to say, sometimes.

[notajar]

"I went out exploring by myself; I do that sometimes," Door says, rolling the photograph up again to give her fingers something to do. "I came home and...found them."

[grenfelzer]

Carmela tries to imagine how she'd feel if she'd come home to find *her* family... "Did they catch the people who did it?" she asks, jumping to the conclusion from the way she'd phrased things that it hadn't been an accident or something like that.

[notajar]

"You don't catch Croup and Vandemar; you run from them." Door slides the photo back into the tube, then wipes at her face again, though it's mostly dry now. "That's what I've been doing for the last four days or so, before I ended up here."

[grenfelzer]

"Ah," Carmela nods. "I've known people like that, yeah. Wait, you were on the run for four *days*?" she asks, her eyes wide.

[notajar]

"Running or hiding, yes. There's a lot of places to hide where I live." Door gives a short, sharp laugh. "Unfortunately they're rather good at finding them."

[grenfelzer]

"Do you think they'll find you here?" Carmela asks. The impression she has of the place so far seems to point to no, but then, she's only been here for a week, so she can't be entirely sure of Fandom's relative safety.

[notajar]

"Principal Washburn says if they did, I'd be protected," Door answers, though it's clear in her tone that she's not entirely convinced of that.