Private Finished While there's still something left to save

Jasmine was naked - not in a literal sense but in that she couldn't hide anymore. She sat in this room, white and sterile. Like purgatory. She wondered if this was what death would be like when it finally came for her. The doctors told her that she was showing classic signs of major depression. But that didn't seem right. She wasn't sad, not by a long shot. Jasmine didn't feel much of anything, really.

Sleep, sleep, sleep, repeat.

That had been her routine for several days now. She hadn't had the willpower to tell the people who had come to her dorm room that no, she didn't want to go with them. Didn't want to be stripped out of her clothes and put in a gown. Didn't want her bandages taken and changed. Didn't want to be checked for more injuries than just the fresh ones on her scalp and wrists. Didn't want them to call Sargent Genovese.

The catheter in her arm kept her from dehydrating, but she barely ate. They asked her what she'd like to eat, but she didn't care. It all tasted the same, went down the same. Kept her selfishly and cowardly alive.

The therapist came often. Tried to get her to eat. To talk. It worked sometimes. But his platitudes went over her head, a distant droning that she couldn't quite hear even when she actually tried to listen. Once she'd slipped up. A moment of weakness, a lapse in judgement. He has asked if there was anyone else she wanted them to call. The names left her lips before she could stop herself.

Arianell and Eric. Jasmine had immediately regretted saying it. But she didn't think for a second that they would let her recant. So she just let it sit. Justified it to herself that she deserved it anyway. They needed to see her for what she really was. She needed to stop hiding - they were going to find out regardless. Better sooner than later, so they could hate her and she could get through that pain.

Of course they would let him in. He was a police officer and her emergency contact. He'd want to make sure she was okay. But why? They barely knew each other. And it hurt, seeing him. Feeling her have to catch the word 'Dad' in her throat every time she spoke to him.

Jasmine looked like shit. That much was clear. The doctors had tried to get her to let them even out her hair, but she had do far refused. Ling, uneven strands transitioned sharply to patches short enough to leave her scalp visible.

She curled up on the bed, hugging her bandaged wrists around her knees. She stared at Angelo with a vacant, thousand meter stare.

He was bigger, physically. And the scar was a lot more severe. But she still saw a near perfect replica of her father in him. Even the way he said her name, though he lacked the subtle West Virginian twang.

She choked out a response, struggling for a moment. With the IV in her arm, she hadn't actually drank anything in days. Her throat was dry, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. So talking was going to be difficult. Small words. Short phrases. That would be easier, at least.

"I'm sorry."

Do you want to talk.

It was framed as a question, but Jasmine knew that it wasn't. He was here to talk, and nothing was going to go her way until she did. So still curled up on the bed, she nodded once.

"Am I- did that girl press charges? The one I hit."

She assumed, at least, that Ferret - though she didn't actually know the girl's name - had gone to the police after the fact. She would have. It didn't even cross her mind that the police didn't even know about what had happened at the Lilac Festival that night.

"The doctors say I have major depressive disorder. They want me to take medicine for it." Jasmine squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the pills in the little paper cup she'd taken at their request.

Tears welled up behind her eyelids. She'd always known that she was crazy, and her faith hadn't helped her through it. She'd failed and proven just how weak she was in the process.

She was confused, and it showed on her face. Jasmine sunk her chin into her knees a bit, looking at Angelo out of the corner of her eye with a sad pensiveness to her. "I - my priest always told us that our strength came through God... that my impure thoughts were... a test."

She paused, trying to find the words that she wanted to say. She was pretty sure that Angelo was Catholic as well, so maybe he understood how she felt.

"This whole place feels like a test..."

"Being kind isn't the issue. I just... I feel like this place is changing me. I've started doubting... things I grew up believing. Spent my whole life dedicating myself to. Thinking... feeling things for people I know I shouldn't."

Opening up to Angelo was surprisingly easy if she didn't look directly at him, didn't acknowledge the scars or the longer hair. Just the flash of blonde and muscle and the way he talked. Not his accent but the cadence of it. So much like her dad.

"Girls," she clarified. "I have a boyfriend but there's been this girl and I've been having impure thoughts. I haven't even confessed properly because every time I go to the chapel I see the chaplain and I freeze up. I know he's a good man, everyone says so. But I-I just can't..."

The tears flowed freely now, running down her cheeks and onto the knees of her gown, darkening the fabric where they were absorbed. "Everyone else - the other Enigmas. They've adjusted so well to this place. To all the bizarreness and the modernity. And they've... left me behind. Maybe that's it. Maybe they just... realized that I can't adapt and they don't want me to drag them down with them."