🤧 – comforting them when crying [ @ abigail because LISTEN, HE CARES, ]

{ Nonverbal Starters }

Sometimes people could say the most insensitive things, thinking that it was meaningless, or that it was acceptable because they were friends with whomever they said it to. As though by being friends with someone, you no longer needed to respect their feelings – because surely, they would understand your intent was not to be harmful and therefore you could be as dismissive and unkind as you pleased and it wouldn’t change anything. 

It wasn’t meant to hurt and so, to claim that it did was to be oversensitive. Or worse, to be seen as angry with a friend who had said cruel things because they were troubled by their own demons. There was no scenario that Abigail knew of where it was permissible to tell someone dear that they were being unkind – it was only to be done when one did not care if they were seen as too sensitive, or when one did not care if that confrontation would cause the instigator pain in return. 

Although Abigail knew Georgina had been jesting, that she had only said those words because she’d been fending off advances from drunken sailors for hours with little assistance from the men who were meant to be buffering such situations due to the fact two of them had been drawn off to assist some men to the town’s surgeon after that awful brawl that had broken out – they still resonated so deeply in Abigail’s chest she thought they might well shred her throat to pieces and leave her worthless on the floor, barely able to breathe but too stupid to die from the pain. 

She had not meant to start crying as soon as she walked through the door – in fact she had only meant to be there for a few minutes, to deliver a book she had seen that she thought the two men living here would enjoy. No sooner had she stepped in, did the familiar scent of her father’s favorite tea hit her, and the next thing she knew she’d pressed her back to the door and placed a hand over her mouth to stifle any sound. 

She was so blinded by the heat of her tears she hadn’t even seen him until she was gathered up in his arms, and some part of her wanted to scream at him. Some wild, dark, horrible part of her wanted someone else to hurt just as badly as she did – and who better than the man who had torn everything familiar from her? But it was no good. She hated that part of herself – hated the idea she was capable of being so cruel – and just as she couldn’t tell Georgina she had been awful tonight, she could not bring herself to tell James how horrible it was to walk into his house and have it smell like the home he had razed to the ground. 

So she stood there, weeping impotently against the frustrations raging on inside of her, until her body was too tired to carry on, and the hurts were numbed by the energy they had stolen from her. She had a headache from the pressure of it all, and she wanted nothing more than to run away somewhere and hide, to sleep until it all fell away, and she could wake up feeling like she could face the day again. 

Instead, she took in a shaky breath, and stepped back – holding up the book by way of explanation for her presence, and gently pushing it toward him, at once unable, and unwilling, to make herself speak as to what had happened to make her break down in such a disgusting manner as she had. She hated it with every fibre of her being, but as there was nothing to do about it unless she wanted to make herself vomit from the sheer disastrous disarray that her humors had aligned themselves into by pushing them further into chaos, she saw no point in thinking too much on the crime she had just committed.