Mouse
Mouse lay on Taylor's bed, staring at the ceiling. It was like half of her had been ripped away. She hurt so much...
Fafnir licked her hand comfortingly where it hung over the edge of the bed, the other hand resting on her swollen stomach.
We'll get him back.
"Will we? I don't know this time..."
Mouse could have howled for the sense of helplessness that filled her. She should have been able to help. She shouldn't have had to wait far out of the range of fire, hoping and praying. She wasn't someone who took inaction well.
She fingered the grisgris around her neck that Mama had given her back in New Orleans. Feathers and sacred stones in a leather bag with herbs on a leather thong, decorated with beads and shells and the fangs of a cottonmouth snake. Supposed to avert the eyes of evil. Pity it couldn't make the bad guys not see them either, but it only realy worked on spirits.
The crystal necklace Taylor had given her never left her neck, except for when she absolutely had to take it off.
The fuzzles were depressed as well, expecially Flavian and Meena. And she couldn't do anything about that. She was fighting her own crushing sense of depression.
It would be so easy to just reach for that knife...
But she had the babies to think of. She couldn't hurt them. While they needed her, her life wasn't her own. It was theirs.
They crooned to her anxiously, trying to reassure her. She rubbed her hand over her stomach softly as she kept staring at the ceiling.
She didn't want to talk to anyone. Otherwise she was afraid she'd start screaming and be unable to stop.