It's been a long, shitty day. You're exhausted, and feeling that flattened, textureless kind of immiserated that would be numb if only it would stop feeling bad.
You go to hang your coat on the hook and fumble it instead, lean your head on the wall and squeeze your eyes closed to hold in the prickle of tears. Debate the effort of picking it up, versus the admission of defeat in leaving it there.
But it's not as if anyone will know or care, and if you bend close enough to the floor to grasp it, you think you'll just crumple there on top of it, and you don't know if you'll ever move again.
You lift your head enough to shuffle in the direction of the kitchen. Glass of water, lie down, pass out: the perfect evening.
Your demon looks up into your eyes as your round the doorway.
A second earlier, you didn't feel awake enough, alive enough, to contain the sheer intensity of the lemon-acid stab of terror that impales you. Too much, too much; you've been worn to breaking by just the world, whatever she does today will be the thing that irrevocably breaks you—
She stops stirring the pasta sauce, simply and immediately stops moving, watching you react to her. After a few seconds, she sets the wooden spoon aside, turns down the heat, and steps toward you.
You definitely don't own the natty little housewife apron she's wearing. You stumble back a step, involuntary and inadvisable, in pure fear.
"We're going to sit you down and feed you," she sighs, and slips an arm around your waist to guide you to the table and into a chair. She sets a glass of water in front of you, and goes back to the stove; drains tagliatelle and stirs it into the sauce, shreds in basil leaves with quick, efficient little rips of her fingers, plates it for two, slides one in front of you, sits opposite with the other.
"I know how it works," you croak. "All this. I know what I signed up for. You're — tallying this up. For when you decide I owe it back in suffering. Break me some other time."
She picks up her fork, winds pasta onto it. "Yes," she says, in a measured way. "I break you. Eat your dinner."
You shudder all over, and clumsily pick up your own fork.
After you eat, she herds your stumbling steps around; parks you in front of the bathroom mirror and presses a toothbrush into your grip, manoeuvres you out of your clothes and into your softest pajamas, presses your aching body into bed. Slithers into it naked, nestles your head on her shoulder, strokes your hair while you cry a little.
"Rest, sweet thing," she says, and you can't help it, even as it miserably adds whatever terrifying spreadsheet entry will be used against you later; you press your face into her for comfort, and let her lull you to sleep.
