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the flames of the castle fade into the distance as lockhart pedals away from it to the frantic rhythm of his heartbeat pounding against hannah's thin arms, wrapped tightly around his chest like safety belts. on and on they flee, speeding through the town on the mountainside and past the train station, only stopping when the muscles of lockhart's legs, already burning and cramping from exertion from the moment they left the sanitarium's eel-adorned gates, finally give out. the bike topples to the ground in the middle of a town square with the two of them still on it and hannah calls to the surrounding homes for help as she gets shakily to her feet and drags her unconscious companion out from under it. an old couple emerges from a nearby abode with a shovel for safety and apprehension in their eyes, but they decide to take the unlikely pair in when they see the blood dripping from between hannah’s legs, making her dress and the cobblestones beneath her dirty feet shine black in the moonlight.
--
the little cottage out back consists only of a bedroom and a bathroom but that's all they need, considering one of them is out cold and the other is covered in her own blood. hannah washes the grime away in the porcelain tub while lockhart sleeps, trembling in fear as the bathwater clouds dark around her. with a sponge she scrubs violently at every part of herself but especially there, at the source of the flow, at the private place volmer had forced himself into without her consent. he'd always said her father would come for her when she was ready. instead, she got a monster.
between bouts of sobs she scours herself raw and falls asleep there in a pool of murky water mixed with the salt of her tears.
--
lockhart's throat is painfully dry when he wakes up. he's dehydrated from the escape, but when hannah emerges from the bathroom in a borrowed nightgown and offers him some water, he refuses to drink it.
"no water," he pants raggedly as he turns his back to her, lying on his side on the corner of the bed and clutching at his stomach. he might have slapped the glass out of her hand if he weren't still so exhausted. who knows what could be swimming in it?
knowing he will have to drink eventually, hannah leaves the glass on the bedside table and curls up on the other end of the bed in defeat. she's not used to caring for others. not when she's spent the last 200 years being the one cared for. she falls asleep again, fingers still pruned from her over-long bath.
--
an unrelenting stomachache keeps lockhart drifting fretfully in and out of consciousness all night. his guts feel as if they've been tied into writhing knots and eventually he forces himself to stumble to the bathroom on quaking legs in a desperate bid to end his suffering, teeth gritted to combat the pain of his movements. by the time he slumps in front of the toilet, his previously bone-dry mouth has flooded with hot bile that dribbles down his chin, the foul taste of which makes him all the more nauseated.
he retches into the toilet and at first nothing comes out but a spray of acidic drool, splattering the seat in a sheen of tiny droplets. but then he feels something jerk inside him, pushing against the hand pressed into his belly and surging up his throat to splash into the basin below. as he gasps for air, his stinging eyes crack open to see an eel lying in the toilet bowl, slick with his stomach acid but still very much alive, and he would have screamed if he were strong enough to form the sound. all he can muster instead is a sick belch as his stomach lurches and brings up another eel to join the first. tears of absolute terror leak from lockhart's eyes as he begins to vomit up eel after eel in a violent and uncontrollable stream, some dead and rotted and some still alive, wriggling all the way up his esophagus. in the end he's so weak he can't expel the last eel all at once and has to watch the limp sea creature's head dangle from his mouth as he coughs the rest of its choking length from his throat, gagging on it all the while.
for a long time afterwards he hovers there panting and shuddering, staring down at the eels as they soak in a mixture of burning bile and their own putrid mucus and trying to determine if what he's seeing is really there. after all his time at the sanitarium being brainwashed, he doesn't know what's real anymore. he can't be hallucinating this, can he? the burning of his tortured throat, the hollow ache of his now-empty stomach -- it all feels real. the eels squirming in the toilet certainly look real. but he doesn't know if he can believe his own eyes, and soon he's staggering back into the bedroom to rouse hannah, tearing urgently at the blanket she is curled under.
"hannah," lockhart rasps as she jolts awake with a terrified expression on her angelic features. "hannah, can you see them?"
he grabs her arm -- too hard, evidently, as she immediately begins to cry -- and drags her into the bathroom after him, thrusting her toward the toilet where the few living eels that remain writhe against the partially-digested corpses of their brothers in a bowl of stomach acid. the sight of them has her own stomach churning and her free hand splays over her mouth to stifle her horrified gasp. fingers digging into her flesh, lockhart gives her arm a tug and shouts,
"tell me you can see them, hannah!"
trembling in his grasp, hannah stammers, "i-i --"
twisting her around to face him, he clutches her slender shoulders and shakes her roughly, bloodshot eyes bulging in desperation.
"tell me i'm not crazy!"
there are tears streaming down her cheeks as she shakes and cries: "you're not crazy, lockhart! they're real, i promise, they're real!"
letting her go, lockhart falls again to his knees, shuddering and struggling for breath. for a minute they stand apart before his head dips toward her stomach and she holds him as he hiccups and cries into her nightgown, stroking his sweaty hair with dainty fingers and reassuring him with soft hushes and whispered promises of his sanity.
--
hannah manages to get lockhart into a clean change of clothes that night but he still refuses to drink anything, and by the next morning he’s so weak from dehydration that he can barely lift his head. his breath rattles through pale, chapped lips, and, fearing for his life, hannah begs their hosts for water that did not come from the tap lockhart so fears. they direct her to a gas station a few miles down the road and hand her some money to buy bottled water. she pedals barefoot down the street on her bike even as her womb cramps and aches, determined to save the man who saved her.
by the time hannah makes it to the station she's bled through her clothes again, and when the woman at the counter sees her she directs her to the "feminine products" and tells her to pick up some tampons. as the woman rings up her many water bottles, hannah examines the back of the box.
"how do you use them?" she asks.
the woman looks rather uncomfortable with the question, but explains: "you just stick one inside to stop the blood flow."
"stick one in -- inside?" hannah repeats, eyes widening. suddenly sick to her stomach and dizzy with fear, she shakes her head vigorously and sets the box aside. "n-no, i can't do that."
"get some pads instead then."
she leaves after that with a plastic bag full of imported water bottles and a box of pads. these, she learns, will never have to enter her body. which is a good thing, because she can't imagine she'd be able to put them in without the memory of his terrible fingers digging into her, clawing at her from the inside.
--
when hannah returns with the water, lockhart is nearly comatose. she would have thought him dead if not for the shallow rise and fall of his chest and the twitching of his eyes beneath their closed lids. climbing onto the bed beside him and uncapping one of the bottles, she touches it gently to his lips to coax him to drink.
"please, lockhart," she implores, "please drink, you're dying."
lockhart's eyelids flutter and he lifts one hand to try and push the bottle away, but it falls back down before he can touch it. his lips tremble and mutter, "n... no water."
"it's not from here, lockhart!" hannah shakes the bottle in front of his unfocused face. "it's safe, it was bottled far away!"
lockhart shakes his head feebly, but doesn't have the strength to do or say much more, barely conscious as he lies against the pillows.
pulling back, hannah bites her lip to try and stop herself from crying hopeless tears. she can't just let him die. he saved her life, and she owes it to him to save his.
"i'm sorry, lockhart," hannah tells him, “but you just have to trust me.”
desperate to save him, hannah uses all her limited strength to haul the man up by his armpits against his delirious will, propping him upright on the headboard. she then slips a hand around the back of his neck to keep him still, forces the bottle past his stubborn lips and tips it forward to pour a little bit of water into his mouth. immediately his cheeks inflate and he coughs it back out, letting the water spill uselessly down his chin and wet his shirt. but hannah is persistent and though she cries all through it for fear of drowning him, she keeps tilting the bottle to his lips over and over until he stops sputtering and finally swallows a mouthful.
from then on, it's easy. like a flip has been switched in lockhart's brain, his survival instincts suddenly kick in and he begins to drink vigorously from the bottle, soaking his parched throat with life-giving water that he hasn't tasted since before he arrived at the sanitarium and was pumped full of poison by volmer. with hannah's help he drains bottle after bottle while she dances her fingers over his rippling throat, tracing the path of each thirsty gulp. she only stops when she thinks he might puke if he drinks another drop, setting a half-empty water bottle aside and caressing his pale dripping face while he coughs and gasps for the air he'd forgotten to breathe in his urgency to hydrate himself. there are grateful tears in both their eyes when lockhart's finally lift to meet hers and he croaks:
"th-thank you. thank you."
--
the pads work well to keep blood off hannah's clothes but not her body, and, disturbed by the sight and feeling of it, she takes frequent baths to keep it off her skin. while lockhart sleeps after his ordeal she finds a half-empty bottle of bubble mix in one of the cabinets and pours it into the tub, filling it with suds to hide the clouding water from view.
she's relaxing in the bubbles when lockhart bursts into the bathroom, wild-eyed and brandishing an unplugged lamp as a weapon. initial shock melting to gentle amusement, hannah greets him:
"you're looking better."
upon seeing her familiar serene face and warm brown eyes blinking up at him from a bath full of suds, not eels, lockhart lowers the lamp in embarrassment.
"i -- i'm sorry. i woke up, and you were gone, and I --"
"it's okay."
lockhart goes silent, standing awkwardly in the doorway and avoiding looking at her obscured but still naked body.
"you should eat something," hannah suggests, "they left us some bread and cheese on the counter --"
"-- can i stay?" lockhart interrupts suddenly. with his anxious expression and the baggy striped sweater he borrowed from the old man, he looks more like a lost child than the confident business man she met him as. "i don't want to be alone. i won't -- i won't look."
hannah nods gently and finally sees true relief flood her companion, who moves to the edge of the basin and sits down with his spine against it, setting the lamp on the floor beside him. she watches the back of his head for a moment before continuing to bathe, lathering bubbles upon gracefully extended arms. after a few minutes of silence, lockhart glances back at her face and asks:
"it was all real, wasn't it? not just the eels. all of it."
hannah nods somberly. lockhart blinks slowly and turns away, falling silent a second time to the ambient sounds of her bathing. a while later he turns around again and says:
"...you don't look 200 years old."
a small smile plays on hannah's lips at that.
"i don't feel it either."
--
they sleep in the same bed each night, not just because it’s the only one in the room, but because they’re afraid to be apart from each other. after all they've been through, after all they've seen, they may as well be the only two real people in the world.
while hannah lay breathing softly beside him, lockhart lies awake thinking of what could have happened to her if he hadn't solved the mystery in time and gone to rescue her. if he had been just a little bit older, his brain and body just a little bit weaker, he could be out on that lawn prancing around in mindless circles right now while beneath him hannah is torn inside out by her repulsive devil of a father. he would let volmer rip out every one of his teeth if it would have saved her from that, a torture far worse than anything he'd endured.
he realizes then that volmer was right about one thing. never before has he felt so fiercely protective of another person. not even, regrettably, his own mother. after his father died, he'd shut off all emotion and only cared about himself. but hannah had changed all that. if anything, she was his cure.
she's the only thing he still believes in.
lockhart’s thoughts are interrupted when he hears hannah’s even breaths turn to strained whimpers of pain. heart aching, he reaches for her hand and wraps his own carefully around it -- not roughly as he had when he dragged her to the bathroom in the throes of his mania. her eyelids flutter open in alarm and he feels her fingers stiffen momentarily before she realizes he’s not trying to grab her this time but comfort her. touched, she weaves her fingers through his and lets herself drift back to sleep with a small, labored smile.
--
as lockhart recovers, hannah gets worse. she barely leaves the bed due to the pain of her long-delayed first period and she wakes up every morning in a pool of her own blood. lockhart never scolds or shames her for the mess, just dutifully helps her strip the sheets and rinse them out in the tub. he doesn't have much experience with women's problems -- he's never had a steady partner that wasn't strictly business and could barely keep a girl in his bed for more than a single night -- but he knows that warmth will help any cramping muscle and asks their hosts for a heating pad. they provide him with a hot water bottle that he heats and brings to their room.
"what is that?" hannah asks as he crawls in bed beside her and offers it over to her. she's curled up in a ball on her side, hands clutching at her stomach beneath the blankets.
"it'll help with the pain," lockhart says.
hannah simply blinks questioningly up at him, confused. after a moment of consideration he slowly scoots closer to her on the bed and lies down beneath the sheets, facing her. with arms open he beckons her toward him and she tentatively joins him in the center of the mattress, letting his arm wrap around her back and hold her close. then, carefully, making sure she can see his hands and what they're doing the entire time, he slips the water bottle beneath the sheets and sandwiches it between their bodies.
hannah gives a soft gasp and shivers against lockhart when she feels the heat blossom at her belly, instantly soothing the terrible ache that had preceded it. slipping her own thin arm underneath his, she hugs him tighter and hides her face against his collarbones as thankful tears sting her eyes. lockhart smells like youth (not the stale, borrowed kind she and volmer had, but something alive and new ), and the bar of soap she'd scrubbed her skin with the first night to cleanse her of her terror. she can hear his heartbeat without placing her ear upon his chest, thudding calmly in the quiet between them, and her eyelids droop to its metronomic rhythm. his comforting, tangible presence, she realizes, is relieving her pain even more than the gift he'd brought her. he's something like what she imagined her father might be -- kind. gentle. but lockhart isn't her father. she doesn't have a father.
"are you going to stay with me?" hannah whispers, pressing deeper into lockhart's shirt and breathing in the warmth of his skin. in freeing her from her blind imprisonment, he’d taken her away from everything she’d ever known. he's all she has left.
lockhart nods against her, chin brushing the top of her head. "as soon as you're better i'm gonna get us a ride on that train together and we're gonna get out of here," he murmurs, voice soft but determined.
"will you take me back where you came from?"
"no," lockhart says, with firm resolve in his tone and the hard line of his brow. "no, i'm not going back there. we'll go somewhere else, somewhere far away."
hannah shifts against him, moving impossibly closer and burying her face in his chest. her voice is muffled, trembling but full of hope.
"and we'll be okay there?"
"yeah, we'll be okay," lockhart assures her, with more certainty than he's felt about anything in a very long time. "we're not asleep anymore."