[ HEY LOOK A THREAD delilah-bloom ] So there is a mistake. A blip. An error in the otherwise messy life that is Alana Bloom’s existence anyway. That blip is, was, and forever will be referred to as ‘College Tommy’. What Alana calls her ‘flirtation with normalcy’. Maybe she brushes too close to it, because, almost, she grazes domesticity. Winds up pregnant. Takes the year off and chooses she’ll give the kid up for adoption. College-Tommy, the boy-man who fell in love with her after three weeks and proposed after four, attempts to stalk her and then comes up: no Alana. Back to Chicago, instead, where her Mother briefly shouts at her and then stops when Alana cries, says she has to do what she has to do, and then stubbornly swears next semester she’s overhauling classes to graduate on time. Because pregnancy is a blip. That’s it. It’s a beep that pings and disappears. (She gets really tired of Eddie constantly asking her if he can help, and Jesse pretending not to mother-hen her when it’s all he’s been doing for months. College-Tommy keeps hanging around at her old apartment and Alana keeps not being there. He doesn’t even seem to be able to recall the details of her emphatic ‘fuck off, Tommy’ when he became -very- angry and grabbed her sharply by the shoulder after rejection of that ridiculous month-in proposal.) There’s a daughter who Alana names Delilah, because Lilah is a beautiful nickname and she thinks the kid deserves it. She cries for exactly forty-two minutes and her Mama bakes her biscuits for four days straight. Alana dyes her hair bubblegum again at the ends and resumes her ‘self’ feeling. Brash and yet polite, brilliantly opinionated, with a 4.0 GPA, an affinity for recklessness and a mouth that doesn’t know when to stop shouting. She meets Vicky one night at a club in Brooklyn. Vicky is six years older than she is, a total mess. Alana sharply digs into two guys who have the nerve to harass her, and the cynical, millionaire trash-heap photographer tells her to fuck off. She doesn’t. They drink coffee and for months they ‘don’t talk about it’, as Vicky puts it, but Alana gets Vicky to finally kick her abusive jack-off husband out. Vicky, an undiagnosed anxiety disorder waiting to happen with heavy connotations of BPD, gets worse, better, worse. Alana picks up her pieces until Vicky doesn’t want her to pick them up, anymore. So there goes that engagement and in the middle of the night Vicky leaves Alana a note that says 'I love you but I'm killing you', along with all her student loans paid off, her med school free, and like $500,000 in her bank account. She goes to Budapest and becomes a surprisingly self-sufficient human being. She and Alana still talk, and they're still two of the most best-friend-worthy people in the universe. Alana doesn't hold Vicky's only selfless decision against her. But she lays awake at night frequently enough wondering what makes her so easy to leave. She leaves all her happy memories in New York and Manhattan feels like a ghost town.
Cue John's Hopkins. She meets Hannibal Lecter, a picky, red-eyed gentleman with a kind way with words and a scathing intellect. She falls in love with him but does jack-all about it. After Vicky, everything feels a little tainted. But he becomes her better half-- not a best friend really, a soulmate.
And then spring ahead, and she finds out he's a fucking cannibalistic serial murderer. Dr. Alana Bloom, FBI forensic psychiatrist, consultant, a damn fine family trauma therapist, confronts him with a set of knives in his hands and she says 'STOP' and his eyes flash red, his spine flinching. He stops, and his hesitation gets him incarcerated. She thinks about him and she hears his voice in the dark, hears him commenting, unwelcome, in her head.
She deteriorates. Thins. She can't even think about a fucking steak, and everywhere she turns she's become accidental celebrity victim Alana Bloom, who is either 'the poor psychiatrist slut who fucked the devil' or 'the completely untouchable source of confusion who is no longer human anymore'. Her time off is mandated, and she thinks she prefers throwing up to the taste of how bitter this failure is.
She isn't fine. She hasn't been fine. Doesn't think she'll ever be fine.
What she wouldn't give for a reason to be fine.
