closed starter: @solidgrovnd location: the clinic
Darkness, daybreak, rest.
After nine years of… this, Jude knew her rituals well. Rise in the silence, tend animals and land, blink in the early morning light of another night survived. It was finding something to occupy her before the gnawing in her turned into an open wound that could be complicated. An exposed live wire, she clung to a fading grace not to burn everything down. It was not a search for distraction that sent her from the ranch. That would just be what she argued it to be. Perhaps dared to hope it still could merely be such—knowing that she was risking her carefully constructed distance. Knowing was a terrible thing. Hope was something worse.
Jude wasn’t one for airs and graces, her education of manners had been a little robust. A tattered half-read manual. Don’t say that. Don’t sit like that. Don’t rank the hotness of saints during sermon. She glided through halls with no greeting, no announcements. She only halted at what she would have once called an office. An open door, a room with limited medical supplies—she was all too willing to leave behind a white light that had begun to pierce into her skull. Everything was an imitation here. Façades of a world she was forgetting. Places she could not return. Not now. Jude had been in the building before. Just a few times. Wounds she couldn’t reach, pain she could not patch up hastily herself. Stitches and liquor could not replace a knowing hand. Even the stubborn could admit to that and Shaw, well—who would punish her for indulgences now?
Jude unceremoniously perched on the nearest surface, eyes sharp and searching.
"Nice office, hot stuff. Smells like death."