#hannah mccabe

[dylan-stone]

breath of life

It made sense that she had questions. Dylan had gone so much of his life not talking about his ability that trying to explain it to someone all of the sudden seemed awkward and unnatural. He didn’t know where to start explaining something that was both part of him and completely alien. He’d never gotten any sort of real practice with his abilities, never been able to normalize it for himself, but at the same time he could never forget. If he slipped up, if he forgot what he was doing, if he did exactly what he’d done tonight and brought someone he didn’t know back to life, he would be throwing away part of his life. Dylan had never even considered what it would be like for another person, suddenly being yanked from death and returned to life. He’d never imagined that he could possible return someone who’d been dead more than a few minutes, so he hadn’t envisioned the consequences to them and to the world at large. He’d sacrificed part of his existence to return Hannah’s, but had failed to factor in that the connection he forged between them wouldn’t end there. It couldn’t. And now he had to let her into a world he himself barely wanted to acknowledge. Dylan could admit it: it scared him.

“I was born with it, yeah. My mother told me it’s part of our bloodline. She’s… a psychic of sorts. I don’t know how much of that is faked and how much is real. It usually goes through the women.” He shrugged, glancing back at her to make sure she was following. “Of course, it’s usually not this strong either. I’m the first to be able to bring people back in years.” Dylan gave a short, self-deprecating laugh. “Some distinction, huh? Sorry.” He paused. “This is probably really overwhelming, isn’t it? If you need a moment to process…” Giving her a searching look, he lapsed into silence. Despite the difficulty of speaking about it, Dylan didn’t know where to stop or start. He’d had years to acclimate himself to this, while Hannah was just barely beginning to understand it and only then purely by necessity. If he hadn’t lost control of himself, none of this would have happened.

Dylan colored, a flush rising in his cheeks. His tinted complexion, courtesy of whoever his father happened to be, hid at least some of the blush, but Dylan still felt incredibly obvious and out of place. “I- I didn’t think you deserved to be dead.” He didn’t want to go more into it than that. Saying that someone as young and pretty as she was ought to be alive was beyond embarrassing, and he refused to put himself through it. Saying that she deserved to be alive had to be good enough. “I was thinking that and it just… happened.”

When she tripped, Dylan instinctively reached out for her, hand finding her shoulder just as she righted herself. He withdrew his arm immediately, cursing himself in his mind for being an idiot. “’s okay.” Trying to put the moment behind them, he didn’t let himself focus on it, heading towards the kitchen and hovering in the door instead. “Lactose. Got it.” A wry smile crossed Dylan’s face. “I wasn’t planning to put Penicillin in your food.” If she hadn’t spoken, he would just have headed into the kitchen, which, in his opinion, would also have saved them both a chunk of embarrassment. Instead, Dylan turned back just in time to watch her undo the belt on his pants.

The noise he let out could only be possibly described as undignified as Dylan turned away as quickly as possible. “Crap, sorry, I didn’t know you were-“ He let out a long, slow breath through his nostrils, pulling himself back together. It wasn’t as though Dylan had never seen a girl naked before. He’d seen lots of naked women, in fact, though the vast majority of them were dead at the time, and therefore totally unappealing. It was the fact that she did appeal to him that made him flinch and turn away, not wanting to be that kind of man. “They’re my best friend’s.” Dylan spoke with his back to her, facing determinedly into the kitchen. “All the stuff here is hers. We’re just close. But not like that. So it’s fine to wear them – use whatever you need. The second drawer in the bathroom is hers too.”

Hesitating another moment, Dylan moved into the kitchen, frowning when he opened his fridge. Though he had a passable amount of ingredients – he always did – he had no idea what to make. Removing the dairy option, that was still a wide variety of things she might or might not tolerate. He didn’t keep sheep or goat cheeses on hand, only getting them when there was something specific he wanted to make, despite how pathetic it was to make meals just for himself. Cooking soothed Dylan, and if he ended up eating something nice while sitting on the couch by himself, so be it. It was hard to think what might be both quick and warm, given that she’d expressed a preference for that.

To buy himself time to think, Dylan returned to the living room, skirting around the side so that he could give the wall some serious contemplation, rather than having to look at Hannah in a possible state of undress. Unlocking the window, he shoved it upwards, arms straining at the point where it always stuck until there was enough room for her to lean out and flick ash onto the ground below. His apartment might smell a bit like cigarettes even after she’d left, but Dylan decided he could accept that. “Here. It’s hard to open, so… whenever you want to.” He chanced a look back over his shoulder, hoping to god that she was dressed already. “How do you feel about eggs and toast, or maybe oatmeal? I could make something else, but that I can put together fairly quickly.”

[v-engence]

Standing in a too-big shirt with no panties on and in a stranger’s living room wasn’t that big of a change for Hannah. She had been in plenty of strange men’s homes, half-naked or fully naked, and in their living rooms and waiting for something to happen. Generally the dude was naked with her and they were about to fall onto the couch or the floor and screw, but it was close enough that she didn’t feel entirely out of place. Then again, Dylan wasn’t even looking at her and she felt more than weird because of it. Men looked at her because she was pretty. She was skinny and had big boobs and was blonde and pretty, and men looked at her. Hannah counted on that. She always had. Dylan, however, had his back turned to her like she was a modest virgin or something.

“So…are monsters real?” she asked, fitting her fingers beneath the edge of the shirt’s collar and tugging at it, looking at Dylan. “I mean, you brought me back to life and all that, so are vampires and werewolves and whatever real, too?” Hannah may not have ever bought into the horror movies and supernatural TV shows that her mother was addicted to, but she was still a curious person. It was why her mother had always called her Felix when she did something particularly idiotic, like climbed the two hundred year old tree in the park and fell out of it because she wanted to see the view from up there. She was a cat with nine lives, her mother would say, but she was running out of them. Hannah wondered how many she had left. There had been falling out of the tree when she had been twelve, the car accident that had put Bailey and her in the hospital but survived, the time she had almost drowned when she was kayaking with Trevor when she was fifteen – and then she had died. And been brought back to life. That probably account for at least four lives, so maybe she was running on her last one.

“’Cause, like, your ma’s a psychic and I always thought that stuff was hookey, y’know? I mean, I’ve been to Cassadaga and had my palm read, had my cards read and all that. Didn’t really work out so well for me. But, like, you brought me back to life. There’s gotta be more to it than just that. Right?” she asked, lifting a leg and brushing her bare toes against the back of her calf, licking across her lips and glancing at Dylan again. He still wasn’t looking at her. Hannah wasn’t sure if that pissed her off or not. Turning, she pulling out a pair of grey sweats and unfolded them, looking them over carefully and trying to decide if it was weird to wear another chick’s pants without panties before shrugging. She was cold and Dylan had offered, so she wouldn’t think much of it. Bending down, she stepped into them, tugging them up and knotting the ties at her waist. They weren’t a perfect fit but she didn’t feel like she was drowning in them.

Slipping the too-big shirt off over her head, she laid the shirt over the jeans she had borrowed. Hannah glanced down, eyes searching for her tattoos. The ballerina on her ribs, the rose tattoo curled about her belly button and – Hannah tugged the edge of the sweats down a tad – the bright red flash of cherries low on her hip, edging towards obscene with the way it sat. She was more than happy with the fact that she hadn’t somehow lost those in her state of death or whatever. She had lost her tongue ring and her navel ring from the paramedics, probably, or maybe Dylan had taken them out. Piercings were one thing, but tattoos were in an entirely different ballpark. Hannah hated needles, and she could close her eyes while she was having one jabbed through her skin, but with tattoos, she had to lay still and pretend like it didn’t freak her the hell out of that it didn’t hurt like a bitch to be jabbed and prodded with a point covered in ink for a few hours.

She straightened herself and shot him a dirty look. “I didn’t think you would. Just, y’know, it might come up eventually. If something happens.” She didn’t bother to elaborate. She didn’t want to think about why Dylan might need that information. Dying once had been enough, but if something should go weird in the night, she wanted him to know. With a little sigh, she plunked herself down on the couch as Dylan skirted away from her, moving towards another part of the apartment.

Hannah looked around, tucking her lower lip between her teeth. The room was a bit bare, not at all like the cluttered rooms she shared with her mother. There was always something stacked too high, a dish or mug left out for a day too long, or a pile of Hannah’s clothes on the couch that she had yet to fold. Dylan’s apartment made her wonder if he had just moved into the place. It wasn’t as if she had ever met him before, considering that the city of Chicago was big and she sucked with faces and names she didn’t have in her phone, so she couldn’t say for sure. It didn’t look empty, exactly, or as if there were boxes tucked away that had yet to be unpacked and set up, but it had the ghost-y feel that she hated. It made the walls seem too big, the floor too small and everything tossed out of proportion. Hannah liked clutter. She liked space taken up by things that she have been tossed away years ago, magazines spread out of the floor and drooping onto the hardwood floors and she liked clutter. She liked when things were filled so the rooms didn’t feel so empty. It was probably why she had conned her mom into buying her a king sized bed that covered most of the floor space in her room.

Reaching over, she plucked the drink and a pack of cigarettes off the place she’d dropped them, turning the pack over in her palm to read the name. It wasn’t one of her favourites, but nicotine withdrawal wasn’t something that she felt like going through any time soon. Cinching her teeth on the plastic coating, she peeled it off, unwinding the line of clear plastic and setting it on the table, setting the bottle next to her. Hannah looked up when Dylan walked back into the room, her eyes following him as he moved to the window, snapping it up and holding it into place. She raised her eyebrows.

“Oatmeal,” she said, giving him a look over. He didn’t look like a crazy axe-murderer, but he didn’t look like the kind of guy to just bring girls back to life, either. “What part of the city are we in?” she asked, glancing towards the window. Where was her mother now? Were her friends in their homes, mourning her death, or were they drinking and having a good time at that party at Coral’s they’d all been ready to go to? Hannah figured it would be the latter. Her friends weren’t the type to stay down, even if one of them dropped like a swatted fly. Her mother was an entirely different thing, and Hannah wondered if she was still in the city or if she had screwed off to her aunt’s. Hannah really hoped that she had gone to visit her aunt, because that meant she wouldn’t be alone – and it was so much easier to deal with things when she wasn’t thinking about her mother.

[dylan-stone]

breath of life

The silence was deafening. Dylan had never really known what that phrase meant before, unable to understand how silence could be anything but silent. He didn’t find the quiet oppressive. It wasn’t like a smothering blanket to him, something to throw off at the soonest opportunity in case it never let him go. Quiet was… quiet. It was nice. He’d always enjoyed being alone with his thoughts, able to just focus on whatever he was doing without the constant background insecurities of interacting with another person, the certainty that he was going to fuck it up and so there was no real point in trying. Dylan knew what drew people. He understood that confidence was sexy, that people looked at the self-assured and wanted them. They wanted to be them.

That had never been Dylan. He didn’t mean to be awkward, but he didn’t know how to interact with people like that. To approach them as though there was no chance of them brushing him off when in reality he could easily be ignored. It had been especially difficult when he was a kid. He knew he wasn’t unattractive now, that there was nothing wrong with him, but he still held onto the mentality that his ears stuck out too much, he was always the last to get picked for gym, and he tripped over his own tongue. The latter, at least, was still somewhat true. Words didn’t spill from Dylan’s mouth with slick ease, but rather came slowly, because he focused hard enough to summon them. In most cases, he’d feel more secure in the quiet, knowing that he couldn’t embarrass himself, but right now he just felt antsy. As though his skin was too small, or maybe just that Hannah’s presence took over his car. He hadn’t known that someone around a full foot shorter than he could so easily suck out all the air.

It probably reflected no better on him than his silence, but when she offered conversation he leapt on it, words spilling out of his mouth before he quite knew what he was saying. “No, that’s not it at all – I mean, yeah, I brought you back, but…” His brows drew together. “It doesn’t have to be girls. I can bring back anyone. Any age, any gender.” Hesitating, Dylan glanced over at her, lips pressed together. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t tell someone this, but under normal circumstances he wouldn’t be talking about his questionable gift at all. Normal, he supposed, had been rendered a bit null and void. “…the last person I brought back was my mother.” It shouldn’t have been difficult to say. It had been years before, a freak accident that he never wanted to experience the likes of again. But Dylan had brought her back the moment he saw her lying there, knowing that she would have told him not to and not caring. She was his mother. The only parent he’d ever had. No matter what it did to him, Dylan wouldn’t let death take her before her time.

He exhaled slowly, eyes firmly back forward. “I’ve never brought a stranger back to life before.”When he thought about it, it sort of was like an inconvenient boner, and if this whole thing had happened because short girls way out of his league were Dylan’s type, he was certain he was never going to live it down. If only in his own mind. Bad decisions fueled by pretty faces and enticing tattoos was firmly the realm of thirteen year olds. Dylan had no desire to venture back there. “I sort of… figured out I could on accident. My best friend went into anaphylactic shock when we were six. She stopped breathing. Then I touched her. And she started breathing again. So it doesn’t have to be on purpose.” He made a rueful face. “But I haven’t had an accident… for a really long time. I sort of thought I had it under control.”

It reassured Dylan that she was at least willing to drink what he’d gotten her. It wouldn’t substitute for food, but there were some decent calories in it and he figured anything was better than nothing for the recently undead. There was nothing he could do if she wanted to smoke. Though he abhorred the habit, it was her life and her choice. He managed to work through friendships with smokers without going crazy or anything, a night with one he didn’t know in his apartment wouldn’t kill him. He didn’t need to take care of her or anything. The responsibility he’d created when he brought her back from the dead didn’t extend to every aspect of her health. Food, clothes, a place to sleep, help transitioning into a new identity… he wasn’t going to end up taking care of her for the rest of her life or anything. Just until he could fix what he’d screwed up.

Climbing out of the car as well, Dylan checked the backseat for anything he might need before leaning over and folding the blanket she’d left behind her, setting it back in the trunk. Satisfied that he’d gotten everything together, Dylan closed the doors and locked the car, moving around to her.“Third floor. Come on. I’ll take you up.”

They didn’t care what time you got in here. Ten or twelve or three in the morning, there was certainly no curfew in his building. The closest thing to that was people who would poke their heads out and glare viciously at you if you were too loud too late at night, but other than that, too many people came in and out at whatever hours they wanted for anyone to care. He thought there might be something in the lease contract about it, but he didn’t remember and no one had ever given him grief. As far as Dylan knew, most of his neighbours wouldn’t recognize him if they passed him on the street. The idea didn’t bother him, given that he wouldn’t recognize them either.

Checking to make sure that Hannah was following along with him, Dylan took the stairs, climbing two at a time. He’d never really gotten in the habit of using elevators. They made him feel vaguely ill, the way changing altitude in a plane did. No one ever complained about an epidemic of stair-users or anything of the sort, so Dylan didn’t feel as though there could be a problem with it. Used to the climb, he reached his floor quickly, waiting for Hannah before he quietly pushed the door open, gesturing for her to go through it. “Come on.” Conscious that other people were probably sleeping, Dylan whispered as he ushered her along, carefully keeping his footfalls as light as he could and digging through his pocket, pushing past his phone to get to his keys. Usefully enough, his place was pretty near to the stairwell, and about ten feet along Dylan turned towards his door, unlocking it quickly and flicking on the light before again letting Hannah go through first.

His apartment was sparse. A main room dominated the majority of the space, with a room separated only by a large archway posing as a door that he used as a dining room to the left and a painfully small kitchen off of that. Down the hall, there was a closet, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Dylan had decorated almost none of it, putting up a few things that had been given to him but otherwise keeping it clean and almost empty seeming. His couch folded out into a bed, and he had enough storage that everything he owned fit somewhere he could easily find it. To Dylan, that was enough, even if people claimed that his apartment looked like a ghost lived there. It made sense to him, and therefore he liked it.

“Um, make yourself at home,” he offered. “There are girl clothes… and toiletries and stuff in there.” Dylan gestured to the end table off to the left of the couch. It was originally meant to be a nightstand, with a shallow drawer above a little cupboard, but it worked better to keep Sybil’s things in instead, so he left it out where she could access it. “I’m just going to make you some food. So you can… take a shower if you want. Or not. The heat’s pretty good but I can’t say a lot for the water pressure. There are blankets in the linen closet at the end of the hall, and you can just tell me if there’s anything else you need.” Dylan paused, trying to remember anything he might be missing. “Oh. Do you have any allergies I should know about? Or… preferences?”

[v-engence]

Logically, Hannah knew that she shouldn’t trust Dylan. He was a stranger, someone that she knew nothing about, and although he seemed perfectly harmless albeit a little awkward, she couldn’t totally trust him. The situation depended on the fact that she spend time near him. It was the only reason she was in such close proximity to him, on his way up the stairs to his apartment without knowing anything about him. Her arm cradled the packages of cigarettes, fingers itching to tear them open and push them between her lips, inhale the tang of tobacco and tar on her tongue, but she could refrain until she knew where she was going. Hannah could flee if she wanted to, but if everything that Dylan had told her was true, she would have nowhere to go. Her mother would welcome her with open arms, sure, but everyone else couldn’t know of her walking-corpse status. Paramedics didn’t make mistakes as severe as accidentally calling time of death on an alive girl anymore. These weren’t the days where coffins were buried with bells, just in case they woke up and the graveyard workers would hear them. Shit like this just didn’t happen in the real world.

There were so many questions that she had for Dylan, but she knew they would have to stay on the backburner until she got her life figured out. Hannah had never believed in ghosts, ghouls or goblins, the monsters that went bump in the night and the supernatural world, but she liked to read about it like any teenager (and, sure, she was twenty now, but she still felt like a kid who had been allowed to grow up by mistake) did. She liked movies about haunting and summon demons, and she liked to watch that TV series that followed the supernatural and extraterrestrial through every new season. The difference between Hannah and all the nutjobs were that she knew that it wasn’t real. Vampires didn’t drain strangers dry and men didn’t turn into howling wolves on the full-moon – and hulking men didn’t bring back dead girls to life. She was clearly going to need to reevaluate everything she had believed in.

“Were you born like that?” she asked, forcing her stiff legs to pick up the pace, lopping up the stairs behind Dylan. She cursed herself for being so short sometimes. It wasn’t as if she hated being tiny compared to the average American, but she was more body than leg, and it took her extra energy to follow after everybody else sometimes. It had been the entire reason she had learned to skateboard when she had been fifteen. Realizing that she wasn’t going to grow any taller and she would be stuck trailing behind everyone else, she had taken up skateboarding to get around instead of toddling after her taller friends. She wished that she had one now, if only to hunt down the prick who had hit her with his car and smack him over the head with one, wheels first. “I mean, it’s not like something that you can gain from doing something, right? Like a spell or summoning some weird demon-monster-thing to give it to you?”

She felt stupid for even asking the questions aloud. They were stupid questions a day ago, but now they seemed all too real to her, all too important and things she desperately wanted answered. Dylan had brought back his friend and mom from the dead – and he’d done it for Hannah, too. By accident. She wrinkled her nose at that, trailing behind him and glancing about the empty hallway, wishing that she could climb into some of her own jeans or shorts. Even though they were tightened at her hips with a belt, they were far too long, and Hannah was surprised that she hadn’t fallen flat on her face with the way she was stepping on the hems and stumbling on her heels. Everything about the situation seemed stupid and impossible to her. Glancing up to make sure Dylan wasn’t looking, she shifted her armful to the side, raising her hand and pinching the skin of her forearm.

Nope. Definitely not sleeping.

Glancing around the hallways, Hannah quickened her pace, teetering on her heels so she wouldn’t fall forward and bash her chin off the ground.“Did something happen?” she asked in a hush whisper, licking at her chapped lips and glancing up at him. “I mean, today. Something that made you bring me back or just…” Hannah sighed, giving up on the question. It was stupid to think it. Hannah was Hannah, and although sometimes when she was drunk or stoned she thought differently, there was nothing special about her. It was dumb to think that because some guy brought her back to life that would change. True, it was a situation that belonged in the movies about the prophets and chosen ones, but her life had never been a fairy tale where the good side always one and she had the world at her fingertips. “Never mind,” she mumbled, waiting for Dylan to unlock the door, glancing down at the ground.

The tired was creeping up on her again, but she shoved it away. There would be time later for sleeping, but she wanted to smoke a few cigarettes, eat something and get in a few questions before her tired mind forgot them all. Hannah hated when that happened. She went to bed thinking about something, only to wake up the next morning with the feeling of forgetting something important. There were questions that she needed answered, things that she needed to set in stone and curses she needed to send Dylan’s way simply for being the one to wake her up and get her into this mess. True, she was thankful that she wasn’t dead anymore, but she was waiting for the other shoe to drop and for shit to his the fan. It always did with her life. Case in point: her parents broke up and a week later her father was fingered as the local serial killer.

She paused when he held the door open, leaning forward to peek into the apartment. Nothing looked like an immediate danger to her, but she wasn’t always the best at feeling out a person on the first meeting. She had had enough shitty boyfriends to be able to say that with confidence. Shooting a wary glance at Dylan as she stepped into the apartment, she stumbled, letting out a short yelp before catching herself, shoulder leaning against the door. Eyes wide as her heart thudded in her chest, she let out a breathy, apologetic laugh. “Sorry,” she said, shifting the bundle in her arms and straightening herself, taking a tentative step forward without tripping and breathing a sigh of relief. Her mind was still reeling, her head thick with something like sleep and she didn’t need to give herself anymore injuries. True, her body was healed from the crash – at least, she was pretty sure it was, because car accident victims didn’t walk around without bruising or injury – but she didn’t need to make herself more exhausted by way of smacking her head off the ground or against the wall.

Shuffling forward on the flats of her feet, Hannah glanced around, blinking when Dylan spoke and looking over her shoulder. Her bangs slipped from behind her ears and into her face. She ignored it, even as the spikey strands tickled her nose. “Penicillin but that’s about it. Kinda lactose intolerant, too,” she added, shuffling towards the drawer that he had gestured to, setting the bundle in her arms on the table carefully, thankful when nothing fell to the floor. She leaned down, poking around the things in the drawer, eyebrows pinched together in a frown. “Are these your girlfriend’s?” She glanced over to where Dylan had been standing, tiling her head to the side and pushing her hair from her face. “Like, I feel kinda weird wearing some other chick’s clothes and stuff if she’s someone you’re banging. Chick code and all that.”Hannah shrugged, straightening her spine and tugging at the latch of the belt, undoing it with slow movements. Her hands felt stiff and sore, like they had been in one position for two long, clenched around something and thick with arthritis. Flexing them carefully, she glanced up at Dylan.

Unzipping the jeans, Hannah wiggled her hips and let them fall off her body, stepping out of them and leaving her legs bare. Her mouth twitched at the ink still staining her thigh in the shape of a gun-and-garter combination. Nothing on her had changed, save for the stud through her tongue being removed and the gold hoop through her belly button missing. She could deal with getting pissed off with that later, once she had eaten and rested and her head wasn’t a huge mess of too many jumbled thoughts. Leaning down, she snatched the jeans off the floor, folding them quickly and dropping them onto the side of the couch. Cool air brushed against her bare skin. She might still be cold, but at least she didn’t feel like she was drowning in clothing anymore.

[dylan-stone]

breath of life

At least he had a specific set of instructions. That, he could work with. Dylan knew how to do specific things. If told to take care of a girl he’d just accidentally brought back from the dead, he’d find himself at a loss, staring between himself and her as though just looking at her was supposed to make things better. Obviously. He hadn’t managed to do a great job at all, even though he was supposed to be helpful. But a list of things he could do to help a girl he’d accidentally just brought back from the dead, that was good. If he could just complete every step in the bizarre sort of checklist she’d given him, get her some more comfortable, better-fitting clothes and give her food and a place to sleep, at least he’d know that he’d done everything he knew how to do. Dylan wasn’t the best at anticipating the needs of others even under the best of circumstances – he wasn’t even good at understanding his own needs all the time, anyone else’s were just downright confusing. Checklists, however, he was good at.

He really did want to do right by her. On one hand, it could definitely be considered a gift to get a second chance at life, and from that perspective Dylan had already done as well as he could for Hannah, literally giving up some time in his own existence to return her to hers. On the other, it was confusing, stressful, and her life would never be the same again. That part, at least, was his fault. When he was younger, he’d protested that his mother was just quoting Spiderman when she told him that power was responsibility. Now, without the help of her knowledge and experience in this situation, he found that this really was a responsibility, and one he wasn’t entirely certain how to shoulder. The least he could do was listen, and respond to what she expressed

That she chose to phrase her question in quite that way, though, made Dylan groan, passing a hand quickly over his face and trying not to flush. Honestly, it wasn’t as though he couldn’t talk about sex or sex related functions, but doing so with strangers was not his idea of a good time, especially not younger, recently undead strangers whom it would not be out of the realm of possibility for him to ‘pop an inconvenient boner’ in response to. No. No thank you. “It’s not quite like… I was fifteen the last time I did it. And even then that was kind of on purpose. I’m not really sure why you…”

He had a better idea than he wanted to admit, though, because what kind of moron brought someone back to life because she was too pretty to die? That was no kind of logic at all, to look at a twenty year old lying dead on a table and think that she deserved to be alive and to find that the restoring had just been pulled out of him. It was rather too similar to getting hard out of nowhere for Dylan’s taste, and if he was becoming a necrophiliac he needed to strongly consider removing himself from any society at all forever. No matter what people said, he did not have sex with corpses, he was not attracted to corpses, and the notion that that might be changing significantly disturbed him.

Dylan looked at her sidelong, sighing. “Sorry. I’m not at all used to this. Though I don’t usually… think of myself as a queen. Of any kind. For any reason. So…” What was there to say? Glancing at the four little boxes he’d set in her lap, with the blanket around her like some kind of makeshift royal robes, he thought he’d probably overdone it. Maybe definitely overdone it. But while he wasn’t rich he wasn’t destitute either ad he could afford to get her a couple different kinds of cigarettes so she didn’t have to smoke anything she found unpleasant. It was like… a conciliatory gesture. Sorry I ruined your death but at least you can probably hasten the rerun? That didn’t sound at all uplifting. More sarcastic and judgmental, which he didn’t particularly feel. Dylan didn’t like smoking by any means; it irritated his lungs. His ma said she’d quit when he was a baby because he wouldn’t stop coughing. If he’d just been brought back to life after spending eight hours dead, though, he imagined that he’d want to smoke too. Or at least stick a cigarette in his mouth and lie on the couch and stare up at the ceiling for a while. So she probably didn’t want to talk. Even if she did, he wasn’t being a very good conversationalist at the moment. It was better to just drive.

Fastening his seatbelt again, Dylan put his car in gear. He didn’t have to think very much to drive home. The useful part of living in a city was that there were things like convenience stores directly on his route home from the morgue, so he didn’t even have to focus on where he was going. His brain took over for him, putting him on a navigational autopilot. Of course, as it was dark at night, Dylan drove more carefully, giving lights and stop signs a greater breaking distance in case he needed to go anywhere, though there were very few people on the roads, and generally just paying close attention to his surroundings. A couple times, though, he found his gaze straying, leaving the front window to wander right to where Hannah sat in the passenger seat, lit up by the passing street lights.

Bundled in a blanket she looked so very small. He knew she wasn’t a big person at all, from the way she’d pressed into his side, the top of her head not even passing his shoulder, and he thought it wouldn’t take him any effort at all to pick her up, but this was something else. This was her blonde hair turned slightly orange by the lights outside and the way she seemed a bit ravaged, as though she was the worse for wear after her trip into death. Dylan couldn’t help but feel guilty for that. He should have been able to do something. He wasn’t sure what, but something. If he’d brought her back sooner, even, when she was first coming in and he was heading out, at least she might have adjusted better. People, apparently, should not be frozen solid. It didn’t seem to do much good for their health.

When he reached his apartment building, Dylan had to circle the adjoined garage several times before he found a place to park. His normal spot was taken, which happened sometimes when he left too early and came in too late. It wasn’t a big deal, though it meant that they would have slightly farther to walk, which she seemed at least able to do. Finally, he looked over at her properly, clicking his seat belt open and offering up a small smile. “So this is my building. If you can just follow me… I’ll take you upstairs and then make you something. That work for you?”He wasn’t sure what he’d do if it didn’t. What if she refused to get out of the car, or finally snapped and got angry with him? He wasn’t prepared for this at all. Aside from the selfishness of wanting to live as long as he could, this was why he didn’t bring people back. It was a whole ordeal, and an awkward one at that, one where he didn’t know how long he’d need to help her, as her life might be a mess for a while yet. At least, he reminded himself, he could feed her and give her a place to sleep for as long as she needed it. 

[v-engence]

Hannah looked at Dylan. She studied him, taking in the flicker of his features through the street lights overhead. The artificial yellow light did nothing to flatter him, but Hannah still looked him over as if he were a piece of artwork hanging on the wall. She may not understand art, but she understood faces. She had always considered herself straight, but there was something about people that Hannah could spend hours just looking over. Whether is was the indent of muscle sliding into the edge of a man’s jeans or the slope and flare of a woman’s hips, she could spend hours looking at them. Maybe she wasn’t getting off on touching women, but she loved to look at women as much as she did men.

Whatever it was that she liked so much, Dylan had it in spades. Barring the fact that he’d been the dickwad to bring her back to life hours after she’d been on ice, he had slanted cheekbones that could cut glass, a strong jawline that she knew models would kill for, and a mouth that she wanted to trace the tip of her pinkie over. He was beautiful, in short. Awkward as hell, she had decided back in the morgue or wherever they had been. It was like he was walking around eggshells with her, as if she were fine china that could break if you even looked at it wrong – as if everything he did might offend her in some way. Even watching him now through the slants of yellow-white light, he acted as if she might suddenly lash out at him. True, she had lashed out, but the thought of her mother being so fucking alone had made her feel so angry. She’d always had her mother. That was the entire deal. It was just Shiloh and Hannah, and even if sometimes her father flitted in when he needed something, he was locked behind bars. The thought of her mother without her had sent her into a panic, and although she felt bad for yelling at Dylan, she wouldn’t take it back.

Her eyebrows hitched up, trying to come to terms with what he was saying to her. He had done this before. He had done this before on purpose. He had brought people back to life because he could, at the cost of a bit of his own life. Maybe in the morning Hannah would feel grateful – in fact, she was pretty sure that in the morning she would break down in tears and throw herself at him, unable to thank him enough – but right now, she just felt like she’d been pulled inside out. Some people called Hannah stupid. A teacher had once said as much, but while she was aware that she lacked some common sense sometimes, she didn’t think of herself as stupid. The consequences of her actions were always taken into account, and if she could die, she probably wouldn’t do it. Stepping off a curb had killed her. Trusting a total stranger who had been groping a feel when she’d come to probably wasn’t considered smart, but she had nowhere else to go. Home wasn’t an option. Her mother was her next-of-kin, and it was only logical that she would have been called when Hannah had been declared dead. She could spend the night at Dylan’s place, scrape together some kind of explanation and try to decide if he were part of a Satanic religious cult that brought back girls from the dead.

“So…you just bring back girls from the dead because you can?” she asked, a head tilting to the side as she searched for something in his words to grab onto. Why he had brought her back still alluded her. Apparently he didn’t know either, and Hannah wasn’t okay with that. She’d never really cared for the journey of something, because she’d much rather know the why of something and decide if she wanted to get there. It was why she read spoilers about TV shows and movies because she actually saw them, why she read the last passage in a novel before deciding to buy it or not. She liked the outcome. She wanted to know the outcome before she got there, to decide if she wanted to get there or not. Dylan wasn’t helping appease that part of herself.

Her head still felt clotted and thick, her tongue sticky with words she couldn’t form. “I mean,” she said, glancing down at the cartons of smokes stacked on her lap, the lap tucked beside them, “it’s not like youhave to bring people back. And like you said, it’d be an issue if you just had people getting up and walking out of a morgue all the time, right? But you brought me back by accident?” She frowned, tucking her lower lip between her teeth and chewing at it mechanically, trying to connect the dots. How did one accidentally bring back dead people? Hannah had seen movies and read books, even looked into some cults of necromancers, and there was never just a touch on skin. There were always black candles and the blood of a baby deer or something, a black book written in an ancient language, a dead body on a slab of marble in the depth of the Earth. There was always something really loud that screamed occult to the rest of the world. People weren’t brought back to life in city-funded morgues while their clothes were being snipped off by cold scissors.

Picking up the bottle that he’d dropped off with the cartons of cigarettes, Hannah snapped the lid off, taking a sip. Some kind of name brand vitamin water that catered to college kids with hangovers and a needed boost of energy in the middle of the day. Snappy comments on the back to draw you in while you were drinking it, and a shiny-looking label that even Hannah had fallen for when they had first come out. The takes of raspberries flooded her tongue, soothing a place on the back of her tongue that she hadn’t realized had even been there. Swallowing another mouthful, she forced herself to fit the plastic bottle between her thighs, pulling the blanket over her shoulders again. Drinking too quickly would just make her feel sick. She really didn’t need to have to make Dylan pull over so she could throw up.

As they pulled into the parking lot, Hannah felt her heart rate pick up, fingers curling around the bottle as she glanced towards the building. She missed her apartment with her mother. She missed her dumb stuffed animals that she refused to throw out, the graduation cap she’d stolen from her school the night she was supposed to be at prom but ended up banging Trevor McGuire in the girls’ bathroom while Bailey had deflected her principal’s attention. She missed the band T-shirts tacked onto her walls, clashing horribly with the cream velvet colour she’d painted it when she was sixteen. She missed everything about her house horribly, but she couldn’t turn around and run. Parked and the car turned off, Hannah paused for a moment before nodding, pushing open the door and standing out onto the pavement. Barefoot and in clothes that were far too big for her, she felt like a child. Her fingers clenched around the bottle in one hand, the cartons of cigarettes tucked and cradled in her other arm as she turned around to look at him.“Which floor do you live on?” she asked.

[dylan-stone]

breath of life

“Okay.” Dylan nodded carefully. Hunger, at least, he could do something about. He had no confidence in his ability to navigate the legal and logistical snake pit that would be finding a place for Hannah in a world where she was supposed to be dead or in taking on any kind of a role as a spiritual mentor through the process of un-death. Those things were so beyond his skill set it was laughable, or would have been if he wasn’t right in the middle of it, and feeling as though he’d like to thump his forehead against the steering wheel a few times over. Feeding people, he knew how to do. A bit of absurd relief that that was all she wanted bubbled in his chest. Dylan was realizing all too clearly how unequal to the task before him he was. He had no idea what to do with an undead girl. Someone hungry, he knew what to do for.  After all, she hadn’t eaten in over eight hours. Was it like waking up in the morning hungry, he wondered. Some people had those sorts of metabolisms, the ones that required input the moment they got out of bed. Was there anything different about crawling back from death, or did it leave someone as hungry as they might be if they’d just been sleeping for all that time? Presumably the sudden and impossible healing she went through had burned up some serious calories. “I can do a PB and J. Or tell me if you want something else.”

Now that he was thinking of calories, Dylan was no longer sure a sandwich would be sufficient. How much energy did healing deadly injuries instantaneously even take? What kind of glucose needed to be burned through to restart a literally half frozen heart? If Hannah didn’t want anything more, he wouldn’t force it on her, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to make it available. Dylan had never tried coming back from the dead and had no plans to, seeing as there wasn’t even anyone who could restore him if he moved on, but he knew it took recovery time.  Fixed, directly proportional to duration of death, exponentially related… Dylan wasn’t sure.  She said she felt empty, and he didn’t know how to fix that. Hunger was one thing, emptiness entirely another. How much time would it take before she felt like herself again? As long as he was the one to bring her back, he was responsible for her until then. He wasn’t going to turn her out into the world he’d forced back upon her if she wasn’t ready.

Reassured that her seatbelt was on, despite her less than safe position in the seat, Dylan started the car, shifting from park to reverse before he stopped, engine humming. “Are you still cold? Here.”Stopping the car again, just to be safe, he leaned almost entirely into the backseat, pulling out a fuzzy blue blanket, one that was both warm and big enough to wrap around him comfortably. Dylan set part of it between the two seats. “You can use that if you want. Just… if you’re cold. Or you want to.” He shrugged, starting the car again. He could have put it around her, but if she didn’t want it that would be weird, and considering he’d accidentally almost taken her clothes off, forcing her to wear his, he thought he’d invaded her personal space enough for one night.

He’d meant to just drive home, back to his apartment, neat and usually quiet, except when the neighbors decided they could listen to their music at no less than ear shattering volume. Maybe they couldn’t. If they ever used headphones, Dylan suspected they would have blown out their eardrums in seconds. When she mentioned that she wanted a cigarette, though, he changed lanes. The benefit of living in a city like Chicago was that something was always open. If you needed a pack of cigarettes at three in the morning, someone had you covered. “I’m going to need to make a detour for that – if that’s okay? I don’t smoke… not that I mind if you do. I just don’t have cigarettes on me or anything.” Dylan shifted his hands on the wheel. Making conversation with strangers was difficult for him at the best of times. When they were strangers he’d brought back from the dead, it was downright impossible.  He had no idea what to say to Hannah, how to reassure her that everything would be okay when he wasn’t even sure that it would be. Dylan was so very out of his depth.

Despite the slight awkwardness of her question, he was grateful for it. An invasive question was better than uncomfortable silence, and he sighed, hands twisting a bit on the wheel, which he gripped at ten and two. “No.” Dylan shook his head, unintentionally quieting his voice. “No, I haven’t… not for years. It would… kind of be a problem for my job if all the corpses got up and walked away.” He offered her a smile, slightly weak in the street lights, but better than nothing, Dylan assumed. “I don’t even know if I could bring back the ones who are in pieces, especially not if bits are missing – Sorry. That’s way too much information, isn’t it?” He pulled to a stop along the street, in a place that announced you had to pay to park between seven and seven. They were well outside that. Even though it was the middle of the night and everyone ought to be asleep, the world hadn’t quieted down yet, people still out and about, at least a few of them. Cities never silenced, really. “I’m not really used to doing this,” he admitted.

Clicking his seatbelt open, Dylan sat for a few moments, thinking. He could bring Hannah in with him, but he didn’t really want to put her on any security cameras if he could help it. Who knew who would be watching? “Um, I’m going in. Please stay here, it’ll just take a second.” Opening the door, Dylan slipped out before Hannah could change her mind. He locked the car, not to keep her in but to keep anyone who would see her as an easy target out, and put his hands in his pockets, shoulders hitching up a little. Without the protection of the jacket he’d given her, it was kind of cold out. Living up to the nickname the Windy City, a breeze blew through, making the hairs on his arms stand on end.

The twenty-four hour convenience store was exactly what one would expect. Grimy and somewhat unpleasant, with incredibly cheap and crappy things strewn everywhere, intended to cater to teenagers and people who didn’t have to funds or desire for anything else. Dylan couldn’t remember the last time he’d been inside one of these places – probably on a road trip where he had to pee, but it would serve his purposes. Picking up a dubiously nutritional smoothie type drink from the coolers, he walked up to the counter, trying to look as though he belonged out and about at three AM, or at least as though it didn’t make him uncomfortable. He didn’t really have anything to be afraid of, he just didn’t like it. The way people looked and the things they saw in the middle of the night was far different than during the day. As quickly as he could, he got in and out, returning to the car and climbing back in the driver’s seat with some relief.

“Here.” Dylan dumped the contents of his hands – a drink and four different cartons of cigarettes – in Hannah’s lap. “Um, they asked me what kind to get and I wasn’t sure, so… one of those works, right?” For all that he’d been friends with a smoker for years, Dylan didn’t pay much attention save to ask her to take her cigarettes outside, not that she would have smoked indoors anyway. But the cashier had asked as though it meant something, and he’d just guessed. “I also… here.” Dylan pulled a lighter out of his pocket, offering it to her as well. “Since you don’t have yours anymore. But not in the car, please?”

[v-engence]

It was like an uncomfortable high, Hannah decided as she looked out the window. A hollow high that physically hurt her when she came down from it. She’d tried shrooms a few times when she’d still been in high school, and it felt like that. She had hallucinated, yes, but she’d been laying in a field outside of the city’s limits with her friends, staring up at dancing stars and a sky that seemed to stretch on forever. It had felt empty somehow, like she wasn’t tasting everything that she could, like she was missing some critical part of the big picture. Her entire world had narrowed down to a puzzle, and she was missing the important edge pieces that held everything together. When she’d finally crashed down, she’d been so sick that she could barely move. Throwing up had just made everything worse, and her limbs had felt as though they’d been torn off and sewed back on. The pain of coming down and off of the high hadn’t been worth the high itself.

It felt like that now. Tucking her lower lip between her teeth, Hannah watched the world whizz by from inside the car. She had felt like this a time or two before when she hadn’t been stoned off her ass and going into tirades about da Vinci’s natural roots of the masculine and divine feminine and Newton’s laws of physics. Even when she’d been younger, she had this distinct feeling that she was looking in on something through a glass pane and not actually part of it. She felt like that now.

“Huh?” Hannah had heard a noise, dull and toned down, but she hadn’t placed it as an actual voice. Her mind had been stuck on that feeling of an empty and painful high and not on everything else going on around her. The burst of energy she’d had in the morgue had been temporary, apparently. Maybe adrenaline boost from the realization that everything had spiralled out of control and her mother thought she was dead. Hannah turned her head to look at Dylan, feeling sluggish and slow. She was tired, but the thought of going to bed was terrifying to her. What if she didn’t wake up? What if she died all over again? What if she woke up on a metal slab again and had someone cutting off her clothes? Hell, what if all of this was just her dying, her brain breaking down and chemicals being released? Her white light looked more like a new level of personal Hell. “I could go for something hot,” she said softly, keeping her gaze locked on Dylan. “My insides are kinda…cold.”

Connecting the dots and paying attention to what was going on hadn’t been something that Hannah had done very well before this. She had always been caught up in something else, her attention blurring into something else and new instead of focusing on the old. She’d always been moving, always been jumping to something new. She should have known better than to keep up with that thought process. Not making the connections or paying attention to the fact that she had been dead for a good eight hours or so hadn’t invaded her head yet. If she had been dead for that long and Dylan had just been going about prepping her body, that meant she had been on ice. Which meant her insides didn’t just feel cold because she had just freaking died, but because her body was cold. Because she had been dead.

There was no way she was going to get used to that.

Shifting the blanket he had tossed around her while she hadn’t been paying attention, she pulled it closer over her shoulders, snuggling beneath the fabric. Maybe she could hide in it forever and just disappear into the bottom of the car. Everything had become so brutally fucked up because she had died. If she had a choice, she might have ignored that entire coming-back-to-life thing and just stayed dead.

Hannah pressed her lips together, mulling over the information Dylan was handing to her. She could accept that she was living again. That much was true and obvious, due to the fact that her blood was pumping and her brain was firing off electrical pulses. She had done fairly well when she’d been in school, but biology had never been her strong suit. Whatever was going on in her body to wake it up again, it wasn’t happening nearly fast enough. She knew that people didn’t just wake up from death for no reason, and if she’d been on ice for more than a few hours, there was no possible way for her heart to still be beating. Stories of people surviving for a few minutes after they stopped breathing and their heart had stopped pumping had always littered the Internet, but she had never heard of anyone walking away from hypothermia after almost half a day. And yet, here she was, cold and tugging the blanket closer around her body, in a stranger’s car and with no where to go.

“Are you saying it’s like popping an inconvenient boner?” she asked, turning her attention to Dylan, the corners of her mouth tugging down. “You just brought me back because you couldn’t control yourself or something?” That was just the icing on the cake. Hannah could appreciate the fact that she was alive, but her head was too fuzzy to do anything about it right now. She could deal with it all in the morning, and although she had once passed out on a park bench while at a bush party, she had no want to sleep in the streets. Trusting Dylan to not sell her to the slave trade was pretty much her only option for the night. Hannah glanced out the window at the brightly lit store. There were worse people to trust, she thought.“I’m not really used to any of this. I coulda got behind the entire waking up in strange places,” she said, looking over the signs proclaiming monthly specials and store hours tacked onto the windows, “but the whole brought back from death thing is my personal inconvenient boner, dude.” She rubbed at her eyes. The beginnings of a headache were starting to bubble in her temples.

The telling click of the locks on the doors echoed through the car as Dylan stepped out and closed the door. Hannah’s mouth opened automatically to make a noise of protest before pausing, clamping her teeth closed and pressing her fingers against the lock button. You couldn’t exactly lock someone inside a car when they knew how to press a stupid button to get themselves out. Turning her head, she watched as Dylan walked into the store, the thought of ditching from the car and bolting crossing her mind. She had seen all the horror and thriller flicks in the world, knew bad things happened to people who didn’t screw off from the weird things immediately, but this was just a bit too weird for Hannah to process. If it were happening to anyone else, she would gladly yell at them to get their ass out of the car and head to the nearest cop shop, but it wasn’t anyone else. It was her, and she was pretty sure some weird shit would go down if she talked to a cop about her Houdini act.

So she stayed in the damn car, thumb stroking over the smooth tab of the lock key. If she could just focus on one thing outside of her own body, she could get through this. And to remember to breathe, she thought, sucking in a sharp breath and holding it for a moment before exhaling. Breathing was an automatic thing, something that her body didn’t involuntarily to keep existing. Hannah found herself focusing on breathing, the stretch and fill of her lungs as she took in each breathe, the expanding of her diaphragm and the way it hurt to hold it in for too long. If she could focus on the simplicity of breathing, then she could get through this entire night. Maybe.

Breaking her concentration as the door was unlocked and Dylan slid into the car, Hannah’s head turned to look at him again. Packs of cigarettes and a drink dropped into her lap, she blinked. Her mother had always called her a chain-smoker with no control over how many cigarettes she lit up in a day, but the number that Dylan had bought was a little extreme. She opened her mouth to comment, but all that came out was a little noise of laughter as Dylan explained. “You’re a really awkward voodoo queen,” she said, reaching an arm out from underneath the blanket to pluck the lighter from his hand, picking up a package of cigarettes in one hand and turning them over. She’d been smoking Pall Mall’s for so long that anything else had never crossed her mind. Hannah had always figured a cigarette was a cigarette, but it turned out that American natives tasted like death in a stick. Considering that all of the packs had labels on them, she figured any of them were safe to inhale. “Thanks,” she mumbled, looking over at him again.

[dylan-stone]

breath of life

"Oh." Useless as it was, that was the only thing Dylan could think to say in response to her confession. He’d never thought of death as warm or nice. The way he’d always seen it was as something cold and hard and desperate and punishing. Dylan stopped believing in God the first time an unbreathing girl returned to life under his palms. There was nothing after. A heaven you could be dragged back from was no more a heaven worth faith than a heaven that wouldn’t accept a six year old girl. That idea of blankness had been tacitly confirmed for him when out of six - now seven - people he’d returned, no one had ever before spoken to what it was like when your heart stopped beating. Of course, at most, the other six people had been dead for five minutes. Whereas Hannah might have been gone… up to eight hours. He didn’t really remember what time she’d been brought in. It made sense that her experience might substantially differ from the others he’d heard about. Or not heard about, as the cases were.

There was nothing to feel guilty about, he tried to reassure himself. She’d been mangled by an oncoming car. Bones broken, head cracked open, sent flying with no more ceremony than a rag doll. It wasn’t as though she was a suicide, dragged back to a world from which there was no relief. Hannah’s death had been a tragic accident, as he was sure the news about it would proclaim repeatedly. Dylan wouldn’t ever bring back a suicide, when they fought so hard to be rid of the world in the first place. Not that he wanted to bring anyone back, including victims of negligent vehicular homicide. At least with Hannah, though, she hadn’t wanted to go. She was… how old was she? For a moment, Dylan stared at her, willing himself to remember the information on her chart. She didn’t seem like a teenager, but then again she could easily be one of those rebels who grew up quickly. He furrowed his brow. …Twenty. She was twenty. Looking down at her, that seemed so young. Or maybe he’d just gotten old without being aware of it. Twenty year olds deserved to live. At twenty, he hadn’t wanted to die. He’d never wanted to die. That was why he refrained from doing what he’d just done, jeopardizing himself by bringing someone back. He was truncating his own life bit by bit and it seemed he would no longer even be allowed to decide if he wanted to. At least he could remind himself that Hannah deserved to live. By bringing her back, unintended or not, he’d made himself responsible for that opportunity not blowing up in her face.

She was still so cold against him, it was as though Dylan could feel the ice box she’d been in radiating off her skin. He hadn’t meant to get that close to her. If he’d been able to see any other way to get her out of the situation, he wouldn’t have. Not that he had any untoward intentions. Were that the case, he literally would have been planning to have sex with a dead body, before he accidentally woke her up. Dylan shuddered briefly. That thought was too awful to contemplate. All he wanted to do was get Hannah somewhere safe for the night, not to take advantage of his unexpected position of power over her. And then the next night, she could face her mother or look for her father or whatever it was that she needed to do. He would help where he could. There was only so much that Dylan could do or even could think of to do that might be of use to Hannah. Overall, he had no particular skills in subverting the law. The most Dylan ever did anymore was avoid police officers. That had to seem remarkably tame, to a girl who had no uncertainty about where and how she could acquire a fake ID. From her father. In maximum security. Even without the half-frozen recently undead girl, this situation would have been far more than he could handle. Of course, without Hannah around he wouldn’t have any reason to go to Stateville either, so the point was moot. Just an idle wish that he hadn’t found himself in this situation and a corresponding guilt whenever he looked at her, knowing he was essentially wishing her dead.

"You should try to sleep at least," Dylan offered. "Even if you’re not tired. I mean, I have a bed and all the stuff you might need, so… I can get you some food and whatever else. It’s never happened to me, but I’ve heard it’s tiring… y’know. Coming back. So you can stay, if you want."  He didn’t want to press her into anything. It already felt a little like that, what with the few options she had. What else could Hannah do, except either go home to her mother and stay up all night trying to explain how it was that she was alive, or she could put her trust in him, a complete stranger. He didn’t envy her that choice. She didn’t know he wouldn’t hurt her. He’d explain to her if he could, but how did you say to someone that you were sorry you’d accidentally brought them back to life without making it sound like you were sorry that they were alive? Dylan didn’t blame Hannah for having returned, he just didn’t know how to say to her that he meant not to add more difficulty to her life. Whether he could actually follow through with it was an entirely different story.

In the driver’s seat, Dylan carefully fastened his own seatbelt before looking over at Hannah. Curled up beside him, she looked tiny. Like a little girl sitting in the front seat for the first time, not sure what to do with the way it drowned her. But there was none of that excitement of being grown up when she wasn’t. Instead, it was the weighty responsibility or being grown and alive and not able to turn to anyone else that hung around her neck. "Please put your seatbelt on." It was a request, not an order. He wouldn’t drive without it, but Hannah could have that control at least. If she didn’t want him to drive, he wouldn’t without her seatbelt on. That was only fair. He couldn’t offer her any sort of equivalence or safety, but he could offer the dignity of not ordering her around. He wouldn’t be very good at that anyway. Giving orders. Dylan didn’t want to play dictator. "Whenever you do that, we can go… get whatever it is you need." She couldn’t even have her cell phone or her ID. Dylan might have given her her life, but he’d taken it too. For what? Because Hannah was beautiful, and beautiful girls deserved to live? All girls deserved to live. And he didn’t save them all. He’d lost control with her. For that, Dylan had some atonement to do.

[v-engence]

Accident-prone as she was, Hannah had never been in a real life-and-death experience. No almost-dying had ever come colliding into her life, barrelling forward and knocking her on her ass. Even the car accident she’d been in when she was seventeen hadn’t been a huge catastrophe. Despite the fact that she’d been T-boned by another car, she’d managed to get out with minimum damage, the scar on the bridge of her nose the most prominent injury she’d ever sustained. Scraped knees and blotted bruises blooming on her skin at random times were things that she got used to. It probably had something to do with the fact that she dove head-first into everything she did, but Hannah didn’t mind it so much; she had fun, and she didn’t regret much.

All it had taken was one car not stopping while she’d stepped out onto the street for everything to end. She could have probably asked Dylan to see her the report that came in with her body, but Hannah didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to look at the proof that she’d actually been dead, and that there was a dead body laying in an icebox before she’d taken another breath. Hannah still felt cold, the chill instilled into her bones not fading despite the fact that she was wearing clothes that would trap her heat on any other occasion. The fact that she’d been brought back from life was still numbing her brain as she mechanically reached over without a retort, tugging the seat belt across her chest and clicking it into place. Dylan had explained it in a strange, summarized way, but Hannah still couldn’t get a grasp on what was going on. People couldn’t bring dead bodies back to life. It was just a fact. When Hannah’s first dog had died when she was a child, she’d done her best to will it to stand up and walk again, but she’d learned what happened. When people died, they stayed dead – there was no way around that.

The entire idea that Dylan was capable of bringing people back to life was completely confusing. It just wasn’t something that happened. It just wasn’t. Voodoo priestesses and cheap Halloween affects aside, people didn’t just climb out of their coffins and walk around as if they were alive once more. But Hannah was sure that she’d been dead, because she could remember her skull cracking and the blackness swallowing her as the light had gone out of her eyes. She was more than sure she was dead, because she’d woken up in a morgue with a dude leaning over her clipping off her clothes and getting ready to do an autopsy. It felt as though she’d taken a really long nap physically, but mentally, she felt as though she’d been smacked upside from the head and yanked from the warmth of a home that had swallowed her whole. Like a bucket of ice water splashed on her face, everything had been ripped from her and shoved her into a place that felt completely different than it had before. The coming back part made her wonder if she’d lost a part of herself wherever she’d been. Maybe she had come back wrong.

Or, maybe, she amended as she glanced over at Dylan, lips pressed into a thin line as she curled her legs up onto the seat, wrapping her arms around her knees, he was the one who was wrong in this equation.“I’m more hungry than sleepy,” she said softly, tracing the pad of her thumb down the line of her calf, blinking slowly as the lights outside flickered over her. Little dots of white danced across her vision. What if she had come back wrong? What if something was missing in her, or was something that had been crossed and attached in the wrong place? Hannah’s thoughts turned to her father. He was something entirely different to herself. Violent and sleek, where she was pretty and bubble-gum pink. He was her father, yes, but he’d killed people for the hell of it, been violent and destructive towards so many people. She’d struggled for a long time with it, balancing herself on a sharp point and wondering whether or not she would tip the scales and turn into him. “Can I get something to eat?” she asked, turning to look over at Dylan. Shadows played across the slants of his cheekbones, and for a moment, Hannah’s attention was caught on that. “A PB and J sandwich would probably do. I just feel kinda…empty.”

Hungry, empty – neither of those things were really registering with her. Whenever she was feeling out of sorts, she’d make herself a cup of peppermint tea, snag a few cigarettes and crawl onto the couch and watch dumb sitcoms until she felt better. More often than not, she’d fall asleep on the couch and wake up with an afghan draped over her shoulders. That was out of the question, though, and it would be until she’d been settled enough to figure out her next move. How would she explain to all her friends, her mother’s friends and family, that she wasn’t actually dead was completely unnerving to her. Was she supposed to just set up her life somewhere else? Skip out on Chicago and find somewhere else to live and exist in? This wasn’t what she’d planned for her life and she was sure that her mother would feel the same. Explaining this to her mom would be hard enough; explaining it to her friends and acquaintances was out of the question. Packing up and starting over was her only real option.

Her fingers tapped an inane pattern on her calf. “A cigarette would be good, too.” Hannah’s tongue slipped across the front of her teeth, sliding over her left canine as she turned her head to lean her temple on the window. She hadn’t been dead for very long, apparently, but long enough for the world to catch onto her being dead. Her friends had been there with her, and they’d probably have gotten the info that her life had been snuffed out. Her mother would know by now. Her father in the morning.

“Do you do this often?” Hannah asked, tipping her head to look at Dylan. “The bringing people back to life thing, I mean. Do you just…go around bringing people back to life or whatever?” She wanted a distraction from it all, and the second most pressing thing on her mind was how he managed to fill life back into her body. After-school specials didn’t exactly fill you in on how to deal with being resurrected from the dead. Dawson’s Creek and Malcolm in the Middle didn’t exactly have Christmas specials on dealing with morticians with nice eyes and sharp cheekbones who brought you back from the icebox and let you stay at their house until you were functioning again. Although, if Hannah were being honest with herself, she would say that it was entirely Dylan’s fault for her predicament. No, she hadn’t wanted to die, and she’d much rather be alive, but the mess that had been thrust into her arms upon breathing again was more than she could handle.

[dylan-stone]

breath of life

"Okay?" He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with that information. So her mother was working. That didn’t really answer any of his questions, only led to more. Such as where she was planning to sleep. At his apartment or at her mother’s house, he didn’t particularly care, but he did need an answer to know what to do next. "As you were positively IDed, they would be able to find her. It’s possible, but not likely, that she doesn’t know." Yes, that complicated things. But then again, this whole situation was a complication. He could hope that her mother was relieved enough that her daughter was at least alive to overlook the fact that she’d been declared dead. In his experience, there was no good way to explain that he’d been born with some kind of freak genetic combination passed down through his mother’s family that allowed him to bring back the dead. If the automatic desire to avoid situations of cognitive dissonance allowed her to smooth the whole situation over without too closely questioning how her daughter had lived, so much the better.

For the moment, they really did have the present to deal with. This whole situation was far from preferable, but it existed, and nothing could be done about it. Even if he’d wanted to kill Hannah again, which was about the last thing Dylan could think of stomaching, he would have had to replicate every single one of her injuries, so that if anyone but him looked over the photographs and paperwork they wouldn’t notice any discrepancies. He didn’t think he could physically do some of that, much less mentally and emotionally. She’d been struck by a car, and the fact that her body had healed itself from that was nothing more than witchcraft. Or, more accurately, the exchange of his life force for hers.

He’d literally given over some of his existence to bring her back from the dead. How much? He had no idea. He’d brought back Sybil and his mother and he hadn’t died yet, so that was at least twenty five years he got to live, but for all he knew he could die at twenty six. Or ninety-three. There was no record to look at for what these exchanges were, and though he didn’t mean to, he resented Hannah for it a bit. She didn’t even mean anything to him, just a girl who hadn’t deserved to die. There were people in the morgue every day who didn’t deserve death. He didn’t lose control of his power then. So why her? There was no logic to it, and as understandable as her fear was, she’d gotten most of her life back. She could make a new one, after all. As much as change disturbed Dylan, and he had sympathy on that front, his own death was irreversibly sooner than it had been before because of this. To him, at least, that was somewhat meaningful.

Running a hand through his hair, he looked down at Hannah. "So. If you want to stay at my place tonight. My best friend is a girl. You can have actual girl clothes and a proper bed and she keeps her… girl stuff in one of the drawers." He assumed that there were tampons and pads in there, considering she’d asked him to go out and get some once, but other than that he had no idea. Whatever toiletries Sybil needed stayed there and Dylan left them alone. "Then in the morning we can find your ma if you want. Or you can go… where ever. Or hang around. Or if you want me to take you to Statesville, I will." He didn’t often miss work. Rarely sick, Dylan saw little reason to take time away from his job, considering it was most of what he did. When people accused him of being a workaholic, he could only shrug. They weren’t wrong. In this case, though, he could skip a day. This was his mess, after all, and he’d clean it up. "If you go on a different day, maybe guards who don’t know you will be on duty. Or you can go by yourself. Or wait until Saturday." He shrugged. "Whatever works for you, really. We just need to get out of here."

At her threat, Dylan shook his head. Aside from the fact that he didn’t think she could kill him even if she wanted to, it wouldn’t apply. Not that she’d ever find out if the cameras were off, but they weren’t. They were crappy and old, but worked. Stealing corpses was far more common than people thought. Still rare, but frequent enough to be bizarre. "They’re on. They’re always on. Just walk quickly." Despite his discomfort with having to do so, he pressed close to her, keeping his body as much between her and the camera as he could. At least it only pointed at them from one side. If there was one on both, they’d have to get really creative. Or try to fake a miracle. Neither of which sounded like a good option.

He tried not to look awkward and suspicious as he opened the doors, even though he knew that the way he turned to lock them, trying to hold Hannah steady on the opposite side of his body with one arm, was extremely graceless. With any luck, his co-workers would assume there was nothing wrong with it, if only because they thought badly of him anyway. Muttering apologies, he pressed her forwards, trying to get out of the range of the camera as quickly as possible. Only when they stood in the flood of a street light, well away from the doors did Dylan move away from Hannah, jamming his hands into his jeans pockets. "Sorry about manhandling you. I didn’t mean to." Turning, he began to walk towards his car, assuming she’d come with him. If she ran, where would she go? She was in too-big clothes with none of her possessions and a world that thought she was dead. She was his responsibility now and he was her best option. Whatever he could do to ease the transition, however brief, from death back to life, he would. That much, at least, he owed her.

[v-engence]

“It was warm there,” she mumbled quietly, blinking as her minded slowly thawed from the inside out. Hannah knew that logically she was in the basement of a morgue with a man who’d brought her back to life, but it was like when she tried to look at the facts, they blurred in front of her eyes and left her mind feeling muddled. “Warm and…it was nice.” And dammit, she sounded like she was babbling about nothing, but that place she’d been in for only a few hours had been her more than floating. But it had been only that much at the same time, because there was nothing that Hannah could relate it to. Sometimes she was warm and thickly-wrapped in something that felt like comfort, and then other times she was moving in something that felt like water, thin and skimming over her skin while she moved. It had felt just as comforting as nice as the other place. All the traffic lights and sounds of Chicago had ceased to exist so abruptly that Hannah had felt peaceful for once. For the first time in her damn life.

Hannah kept her mouth shut, leaning back against the warmth of Dylan’s body as she tried to keep her mind in check. Things were fucked up. Things were so fucked up, and it was like she couldn’t get a grip on any of it. She’d been yanked from whatever comfort and warmth there had been, the eternal white noise that was slowly coming back to her into visions of white warmth. God, it’d been so warm there, a pleasant buzz like when she got a little too stoned off her pipe or when she swallowed down mushrooms for the first time. Caught somewhere between pleasant and bubbly, it was like being dropped into a place of hard line and violence so suddenly. Hannah wasn’t sure how she was going to deal with it, or how she was going to be able to process it when her mind wasn’t numb from it all. Remaking her life wasn’t something that she ever wanted to deal with. She’d just wanted to cruise through her life, buzz around and maybe do an awesome thing like do a road trip across North America or maybe travel to Scotland and flit through castles and meet a boy with an accent and settle down when she was done being dumb and young.

This hadn’t been part of the plan at all, and she couldn’t seem to find the words to explain anything. There were lines and trails of thoughts that she couldn’t exactly get a hold of to think over for more than a moment, because another thought would flit across her mind and keep her constantly moving. It was like her mind was playing tricks on her, mimicking her life before she’d woken up on an embalming table or whatever the hell it was with a strange man leaning over her. Hannah had been constantly moving, a thing that had driven her mother insane when she wasn’t around to look after her and keep her grounded, but her mind had always worked perfectly well, being able to grasp and pull at images or words without trouble and hang onto them as long as she wanted to. There was no way that she could hold a thought in her hand for longer than a moment.

Hannah blinked, squinting past the lights radiating down from above the door. Darkness swelled in the distance, but too-bright lights flashed and illuminated the world around her. In the concrete box of the morgue, there was light, but it’d been contained and there had only been her and Dylan inside the building. Outside, there was everyone. And lights that were hard and bright, filling her eyes and making her squint past the strangeness of it all. In the warm place, there had been a dim light. Nothing shiny and bright that burned her eyes. This was just like being reborn and forced into the light, and Hannah wasn’t even sure if it was something that she wanted to deal with. Shaking her head as Dylan parted from her, Hannah took a small step to the side, keeping the distance between them. She wasn’t sure if touching him anymore than she needed to was an entirely good idea. He’d been the one to bring her into life from death, and although on any other day Hannah might appreciate it, she felt like touching him might turn her into Benjamin Button. Reversing back in age wasn’t what she wanted, and touching her made her feel that warmth spreading through her fingertips like when she’d been in that place.

“I…” Hannah sighed, eyes closing as she steadied herself and crossed her arms across her stomach. “I don’t think I can sleep. But I can’t go home.” The mere thought of facing her mother tonight made her want to crawl back onto the cold, metal table and hide in a dead body until she had her mind back up to speed. Any of the questions that she would have would have to be deferred to Dylan, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted him to have the reigns in this little adventure. The thought of just letting him take over made her feel on edge. Hannah needed to gather whatever bits of control she had over her life anymore, and she needed to hold them closely to her chest and keep them tucked near her heart. She didn’t get a choice in the things that were happening, and even with the choices that Dylan was giving to her, she felt numb to it all. Like they weren’t choices she was making, but someone giving her the ultimatum. “Can I stay with you?” she asked, tearing her gaze away from the flickering lights of the street lamps lining the sidewalk near the parking lot, turning to look at him.

He looked tall. And dark. And with sharp lines that reminded her of those too-perfect lines that Taylor could draw freehand when they were in art class in their junior year. He looked like one of those male models that Bailey and Rebecca and her would ogle while at the mall when they were doing those store openings. He didn’t look like a crazy psycho who brought people back from the dead, but Hannah had never been that great at judging people the first time she met them. Shaking her head, she clambered into the car, tucking her legs up and not bothering to tug the seat belt across her chest. 

[dylan-stone]

breath of life

In the face of Hannah’s anger, Dylan winced. Logically, he knew that it wasn’t about him, that she’d been through what would probably be the most stressful experience of her life - dying and thencoming back to life. And he didn’t so much feel threatened by it, though it wasn’t preferable. She was, after all, about a full foot shorter than he was. She couldn’t hurt him. He still felt guilty for his hand in the way her life had been flipped on its head and turned into something completely different and probably unrecognizable. After all, things would never be the same again now that she knew resurrection was possible and that she had been brought back. He’d wonder if it had been the right choice if it had been a choice at all, but instead he’d just… done something. Lesson learned. Self-control really was his best friend.

"I know." He shook his head. Maybe they were coming to it at different times, they had a different sense of scale, something. Because that had been his problem from the first moment, that people who knew her might see her alive when she ought to be dead, and that she’d have to change her entire identity and never again venture anywhere she knew or was familiar with. Having to actually leave Chicago, he wasn’t entirely certain about. After all, even if she was the most social person possible, she could still only know a few thousand people in a city of over two million. The general facial recognition of people wasn’t that great, and unless they personally knew her, cared, and kept up with the news, which narrowed down the pool quite substantially, they would not be a problem. It was just her friends, her family (whom she understandably insisted on telling that she was still alive, though how they’d explain that fallout, he didn’t know) and the government that were the real problems. He thought to tell her it wasn’t as bad as she was expecting. That she wouldn’t have to leave the city or to leave behind her entire existence, though going to see her father would be a problem. She probably wouldn’t be able to keep doing that. Otherwise, though, her world wasn’t falling apart nearly as much as she seemed to think it was. But doing so didn’t seem wise at the moment, considering how freaked out she was. Reasonably so. It seemed wiser to try and talk to her about the realities of her situation later, though. When she wouldn’t yell at him for it.

At the moment, the shock seemed to be lifting. Not the physical, medical kind, but just the state of being mentally stunned that let her go along with him, change into his clothes without complaint and follow him as he went back and forth, abandon her things and listen to him, even if she argued. They appeared to be coming to the end of that period, and Dylan wished it could have lasted a little longer. Just enough to get them out of the mortuary. It wasn’t that she’d become more argumentative, but that she backed away from him, looked around the room like she was seeking a place to hide. She could hide from him, but not the reality of the situation, so neither was really productive. Not that he didn’t understand the impulse. If he could hide from what he’d done, he would take that option. But Hannah would still be alive where she ought to be dead, and since he wasn’t going to orchestrate getting her hit by another car, they needed to do something about their situation.

Dylan shrugged. "If you think you could explain to your ma tonight, I’m willing to take you home." He’d have to stay up trying to give an explanation for what had happened here, and likely her mother would be far less willing to accept it than Hannah had to be, even though she’d probably seen her daughter’s body either in person or in image. He regularly stayed up later than this, sleeping at odd hours and sometimes crashing for a whole twenty four hours at a time to deal with his sleep deficit. So long as her mother didn’t involve the police, it was an option he would consider as valid as any other. Hannah had said she wouldn’t break from her parents, so he’d have to face it sooner or later, if he wanted to prevent this from becoming an investigation. That, he couldn’t handle. "I can do whatever. But first we’ve got to get out of here." Taking charge was not a particularly strong skill of his, but in this situation Hannah really couldn’t be expected to. He at least sort of knew what he was doing. Not in terms of circumnavigating the law, but he had spent enough time in the morgue to have every facet of it memorized, including the cameras that produced grainy security tapes which would undoubtedly be looked over when Hannah’s body was discovered missing.

"If you’re okay with…?" He held his left arm out. Preferably she’d be able to stand on his feet, but small or not, she wasn’t quite little enough for that. The hazard of someone noticing the difference in their leg lengths would just have to be prayed around, begging for reassurance from a god Dylan didn’t really have faith in. He’d seen too much death and too many interpretations of death to believe in some kind of omnipotent being, standing on high and handing down judgment like Halloween candy. "Seems like the fastest way to get out. And there’s a blanket in my car if you’re still cold. And then we can do whatever you need." Sure, it was two in the morning, but there were always things open at two in the morning in a big city. Always someone doing something, and no one would know he was walking around with a girl who was meant to be dead. 

[v-engence]

Hannah’s eyes closed, her fingers curling into her palms as she breathed deeply, stale air filling her lungs as she tried her best to keep steady. Her entire life had come crashing down around her, snapping and breaking into pieces and shattering as they crashed down. Her life hadn’t been perfect before this moment, but there wasn’t going to be something to hide. Somewhere to hide behind, like a new name and fake ID. Hannah didn’t know why Dylan was being so optimistic about this. She’d seen her father do this before; she’d torn apart his office in anger after his arrest and conviction. The licenses and social security cards had been endless, a perfect stack in his second drawer of his desk. James Holbrook had been his birth name. Hannah couldn’t get over that part.

She’d died. It was a fact that Hannah was beginning to be able to breathe around, but all it did was make her legs feel weak. Being hit by a car had been the easy part. She was guessing the way her head hit the windshield, smashed into the pavement beneath her feet when she’d been knocked down, had been the reason everything had been so blissfully white. There had been no white light at the end of the dark tunnel, or lulling black that rocked her into sweet relief. There had been white. So much blinding white that had consumed her to her core, left her drifting in something that she couldn’t explain. Maybe it was just her brain shutting down, neurons firing off as her organs failed and her blood thickened and turned to jelly. Maybe it was just a chemical reaction, but for a moment, Hannah had felt utter peace. No chaos induced by the city streets she ran on, no hot shame latching teeth onto the back of her neck when someone asked her what her father did for a living. There was nothing but white, curling around her in tendrils and peeling away all the years she’d abused herself for instant gratification.

There wasn’t any white here, and Hannah felt it all too violently. Even in the dull room, the colours of the wall pale and bland, everything was too bright. Violently, vibrantly so. It burned her to look at it now, and her eyes slipped to the floor, shifting back on her heels as the smooth, coolness slipping away from the bare soles of her feet, the warmth that had begun to move through her body with her blood heating it. “My mom was supposed to be working tonight,” she said, curling her arms across her stomach, fingertips flexing, “but if they know who I am, they would’ve went to the hospital lookin’ for her. She doesn’t have her cell phone on her when she’s workin’.” Hannah worried at her lower lip with her teeth, breathing in deeply, the edges of her nostrils flaring as she rolled the thoughts around in her head. If her mother had identified her body, there was a slim chance she was still in the city. Shiloh had never taken to certain things well, and it had been something she’d passed onto Hannah. Hannah wasn’t one to sit around and soak up whatever thing had happened. She’d gather her things, drain her account and leave. She’d done it enough times before. “I dunno if she’ll be at our house or not.”

Hannah let her eyes crack open, glancing up at Dylan. How the fuck he could be so calm when her world was falling apart was beyond her. Her entire world was literally falling apart. There went her two part-time jobs, because she was dead. There went all the important people in her life, because she was dead. There went her entire identity, because she was dead. The group she’d been with had included a few of her childhood friends, the ones who’d stuck around even after the media storm had subsided. There was no way she could explain this to them. Hannah couldn’t just call them on the phone, say hi and ask if they wanted to catch a movie anymore. She couldn’t throw a party in her basement and ask Tyler or Haley to supply the booze because she wasn’t twenty-one yet. There would be no more late-night prowling through the graveyards with them on Halloween. Birthdays were out the door. Cancun during spring break was crossed off the list. Hannah finally getting her things together, looking through the courses on the pamphlets that her mother had brought her from the local university, was completely out of the question. All her friends had done the same recently. Tyler and Zoe had asked if she’d wanted to get an apartment with them, and Hannah had been looking forward to that. To finally growing the fuck up and fluttering out of the nest – even if it were only a few streets away from said nest.

Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, Hannah took a step forward, moving towards Dylan carefully. She didn’t trust him. At all. He was the asshole who’d just complicated her life, and, sure, he’d brought her back to life and all that jazz, but she’d been fine in her white room, drifting. Yeah, she’d been dead, but Hannah hadn’t felt like it was black and dreadful. It had been calming and quiet, and maybe her mother would feel the burden of it all, but the world moves on and life keeps spinning. She knew that better than anyone else. Warily watching him, she stepped closer, pressing her shoulders against his frame. He was massive compared to her, even drowning in his clothing. “If the cameras turn out to be off,” she muttered, running a hand through her hair to shove it out of her face, “I’ll kill you. I feel like I’m four when I’m this close to you.”

[dylan-stone]

breath of life

Dylan frowned with uncertainty, loosely crossing his own arms and rubbing next to his elbow without thought. Hannah might be right, but then again she saw her own death differently than most people would. It shattered her world. Probably her mother’s world too. Maybe her father’s, though he’d definitely have heard by Saturday so that was a moot point. But Dylan had seen death again and again, and the scariest, most reassuring part of it was that life went on again afterwards. For the most part, death stopped no one, interrupted no facet of their lives. "Most people don’t read the obituaries," he mentioned quietly. He did, of course, but that was different. The only way to make Sybil touch that section of the paper would be at gunpoint, and aside from the morbidly curious, not many people cared. "Your accident will be on the radio but people die every day. Likely it’ll be mentioned once and not come up again. It’ll be on the internet if you know to look for it. I assume people are probably not expecting you to die?" Her information, what there was of it, hadn’t mentioned any kind of chronic condition or a reason for anyone to be concerned. "I don’t know if they’ll know. What happened, that is. It could go both ways. Is there another choice?" The question was asked sincerely, Dylan hopeful that there might be an alternate option. He didn’t want to explain what he was doing walking around with a living dead girl either, and they’d need Hannah’s recognizability to get into Statefield. One didn’t just waltz through the door of a maximum security prison.

When she snapped at him, Dylan all but curled in on himself. It was two in the morning, a breathing corpse was wearing his clothes, he had no idea how he’d get away with bringing her back to life (quite a reversal from the norm) and somehow her anger was still the scariest thing he was facing at the moment. "I’m sorry?" As he stared at the ground between them, Dylan’s mind raced ahead of him, searching frantically for any kind of out that would suit her better. Assuming everyone she’d ever known knew that she died, the possibility of using her father to craft her a new identity wasn’t good. She’d be taken aside and questioned, bringing down exactly the kind of attention they needed to avoid, if they so much as ventured near Stateville. That meant they’d have to find someone else to forge her next identity. He knew exactly nothing about faking a death or faking an undeath or subverting the law in any identity-related manner. Did one simply go and hang around the worse parts of the city, fending off prostitutes and low-rung drug dealers until a forger approached? This seemed to be far more Hannah’s territory than it was his. "What do you want to do, then?" That ought to be a safe question, though with Hannah he was rapidly realizing he had no idea what was safe or not. Mentioning that he thought the prince was supposed to be gallant, not the steed, seemed inadvisable at the moment.

Eyes flicking between Hannah and the closed drawer, Dylan raised one shoulder. "There are the morgue doors. We back the vans in and take the bodies out with us." That option didn’t entirely appeal to him, keeping in mind that someone would undoubtedly ask what he’d taken out the doors and hey, by any chance was it the dead girl who was supposed to be here and then wasn’t? Dylan wasn’t prepared to pull off that kind of lie, even though it might be the only option. Suspicion would hang over him in an impenetrable miasma for weeks, even further distancing his co-workers and those in related jobs around the morgue, who already thought dimly of him. The police would be called in and the whispers that he might be a necrophiliac, ones people thought he couldn’t hear, would be branded to him permanently. Faking another crime was a terrible idea, because that too would bring down an inquisition. If he knew more about electronics and gaming them, he might stop the cameras for a moment, or run a feedback loop through them, if that wasn’t something that happened only in crime fiction. Dylan wasn’t sure.

Unknowingly, he had begun to pace, rubbing across the knuckles with his left hand with his right. Upon realizing what he was doing, Dylan stopped, offering Hannah a stilted smile. She probably thought he was a serial killer. Or a serial necromancer. Or something else like that. "I’m not a psycho," he blurted, then wished he hadn’t. "But, um, getting you out. I think the back doors are a bad idea, because that would be the best place to get rid of a body." He wished she could just walk out with him and then they wouldn’t have to deal with any of it, that it wasn’t the middle of the night. During the day, no one would look twice at a young woman coming out of the mortuary, even if they hadn’t seen her go in. They’d just assume they missed it on the tapes. When he was the only person in the building, though, that made things a lot more suspicious. He couldn’t leave her overnight, or even more than a few minutes, concerned as he was that some form of shock was setting in for her. If he hadn’t thought it would make her more upset, he’d have searched the symptoms on his phone to see if her complaints aligned. 

"If you’d be alright with it, I think the simplest thing would be to just… hide you with my body? I mean obviously you wouldn’t have to get in my clothes or anything like that. The cameras just aren’t state-of-the-art, they’ve been around for a while, and if I kept you on the side of me that they’re not facing, maybe under my arm or slightly in my jacket or something, just for a few minutes, we might be able to get past them and to the parking lot." There, they’d be safe. He didn’t actually know how feasible this idea was - even with grainy images, a person was person-sized and two people were two-person-sized, but it was the best one Dylan could think of. If he kept Hannah on his left and then rotated her a little to stand in front of them as they walked away… He was far larger than she, with something like a foot of height on her and a definite greater mass. So long as she was willing to be relatively physically close to him, which she should be considering that they’d kind of hugged for a moment, Dylan thought they might be able to get away with it. Hopefully. It was the best solution he could think of.

[v-engence]

“Dude, do you live outside of these four walls?” Hannah snapped, the irritation riding in her system as she crossed her arms tighter across her middle, the delicate line of her jaw setting haughtily. She saw them all the time when she logged onto the Chicago paper online. The first headline was always the biggest tragedy, the one thing that humanity consumed on, and Hannah couldn’t wrap her head around why everyone seemed to feed off the tragedy in lines. The Boston Marathon attack had filtered in real-time thanks to Twitter and social networking, and just last week there had been pictures of dead teenagers from a bus crash on the Internet before the media had even gotten there. Hannah wasn’t stupid; people knew that she’d died and people had seen her dead body. It had to be written somewhere. It always was.

Her fingernails dug into the flesh of her palms as she watched him. “I don’t care that only a couple people will ever see that article or obituary or whatever – people that I know think I’m fucking dead! And I get that this isn’t registering to you, but someone’s gonna figure out that I’m not really dead when they see me walkin’ around, y’know, alive. Which means I have to leave the city, at least, because this is where everyone knows me. And I get to go on a rampage of figurin’ out how to be someone else with a different name. Because I’m not dead. Oh, shit, why am I not fucking dead?”

The panic was eroding everything else away from her mind as Hannah took a tentative step backwards, her muscles spasming as they trembled, her body lurching and her stomach twisting into knots as she watched him. She’d always been a distrustful person; perhaps it had something to do with the fact that her mother never trusted anyone or maybe it had to do with the fact that she, herself, had been screwed over more than once. It had happened with friends since she was in the sandbox and boys since she’d first kissed Tanner Kinney behind the school parking lot when she was twelve-years-old. She was used to being screwed over, having everyone dangle things in her face and then snatch them away before she’d even been able to react, and she knew that probably had something to do with her trust issues. Anything to do with her father was something she vehemently refused to talk about, to even think might have an affect on her. She was Hannah de Rossi, and she could deal with anything, she’d always told herself, and it was something that she had always believed, too.

It felt as though her entire world had been ripped from beneath her feet, and now she was straddling the line of a whole new level of fucked up. When she’d found out her father was a serial killer and her mother had known it all along, that was fucked up, but Hannah had notched her chin up and marched on, because there was nothing else she could do about it. She could sit and cry about it, but it wouldn’t help her. She dealt with the whispering and the media attention zoomed in on her, no matter how hard her mother had tried to shield her from it – but she’d dealt with it well enough, and maybe if she’d gotten into fights with catty bitches in her school’s hallways, they deserved it. It wasn’t as if Hannah had gone looking for fights or yelling to do, but it had come at her with a fierceness that she couldn’t touch with her own hands, because all it was were ghosts of words laying thick on her tongue and coating her skin. She’d been a kid, it hadn’t been her fault, but everyone seemed to think she had something to do with it.

This was entirely different. This wasn’t something Hannah could fix with a fight and a broken nose. Scraped knuckles and bruised shoulder blades wouldn’t help this. Nothing would, as far as she could see, and she had a distinct urge to tuck tail and run from the room. To hide and survive, self-preservation outweighing her need to snap and be angry as she glanced around the room, feeling all-too-small and all-too-vulnerable in Dylan’s presence. She didn’t know him, and the facts were that he’d somehow brought her back to life. Sure, it was something that would make anyone feel as though they’d been knocked on their ass, but it just made her feel like he was all the less trustworthy. People just didn’t bring other people back to life. It didn’t work that way, and it didn’t make logical sense to her. It just wasn’t something that could happen. It just wasn’t something that worked out that way, and she knew it. It just didn’t happen. It wasn’t the way things worked.

Hannah had never thought of the supernatural. If it was real and she could touch, she believed it was there. God and ghosts, they had no place in her life. They didn’t belong because they weren’t real, and blind faith was obnoxious to listen to at best. But this wasn’t a material she could pass her hand over, and it made her feel dizzy on the reality, the notion of her being alive once more swallowing her whole as she took another step back and away from Dylan. “I just wanna go home,” she mumbled softly, fully aware of how pathetic she sounded. She wanted her mother and her father, and she wanted to curl around them and be safe and a child again, hidden from the world and okay with being that way. She didn’t want to deal with this and it’s consequences; she didn’t want to be dead again, but she didn’t want to be brought back in the first place.