there is another world; there is a better world; well, there must be.

[rhinemaid]

Who: Ilde Decima & Cindy
What: The less than triumphant return.
Where: Initially, the Valhalla Inn arrival area.
When: Misdi
Notes: The London Mysteries: Apocalypse cast have had a canon update; Ilde, for reasons detailed within, arrives home first.
Warnings: Suicide (& suicide pact), body horror (flesh suits), PTSD-related panic attack, general goriness and trauma. Hit me up if I’ve missed something and I’ll edit it in.

DONT PANIC.

Ilde keeps staring at the words and-- they don’t help, really, because she remembers that Sonja did that and then she remembers that Sonja isn’t here because Sonja is in New York and nobody is coming for her, not anybody, there was no time and that’s why she’s here and she can’t say better here than there because it isn’t this time and it can’t be, not even with the unreal sound of meat and carapace sliding sickly and twisting into place under skin and she shouldn’t have been able to hear it but the sound won’t leave her mind now, the sight of ripples in dead flesh and eyes opening--

There is still so much blood; her heartbeat feels wrong, beating out of time, beating at all. Kelly isn’t with her and that feels wrong, too, nothing in this room but blood sliding down her skin to pool on the tile below her and a pamphlet she’s already read a hundred fucking times. Her CiD. The razor-blades she’s still clutching in her hand, the only place where her skin isn’t inappropriately unbroken now; she supposes a dead faerie would be of no fucking use at all to Baedal. It hurts, and that doesn’t seem fair, after everything. She should drop them.

Her hands tremble, but for a long time that’s the only movement she manages.

--there’s no time, Ilde--

When the video message goes through to Cindy, the screen is smeared red and where the CiD fell it’s the words carved into the tile that are visible: DONT PANIC. It’s Ilde’s number, from the arrival room; the sound of her breathing, hitching every now and again in long, forced deep breaths, just the unsteady near-silence of all the control she has energy for.

It’s as far as she got, with the first number that came to mind. Cindy’s going to have to figure out ‘come get me’ on her own.