"Leave him alone!" Her shriek jolted the adults where they stood. Lorina ran across the room and threw herself against Adam in a kicking, scratching fury, all wild red hair and sparking eyes. "Don't you know he's sick?! Don't you KNOW?!" Adam gave way and stepped away from Reginald with his hands upheld in a supplicating gesture. She planted another vindicating kick in his kneecap and whipped around to see the doctor looming over her father. The concern in his expression was unaltered by the fact that the man had just attacked him.

"Go away go away gowayGOWAY!"

She grabbed one of Reginald's ankles and strained backward, trying to drag him away from the perceived tormentors. When that failed she turned her rage toward the doctor and ran at him, fists and feet striking wildly. Belle broke through her paralysis and swooped in to snatch the girl up, restraining her with a tight bear-hug embrace. She was bitten for her efforts. "He's all right, Lorrie! He's just sleeping. Just slee - "

The child's screams went shrill with terror.  "THAT'S WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT MAMA!"

Something gave way within Belle's mind. The stoic calm so diligently upheld through the week collapsed into itself, sheered from its foundations with one finalizing, vicious stroke. She turned her graying face toward the ceiling just as Lorina began to shriek for her mother in a endless looping howl. The doctor faltered visibly, overcome by a nauseating wave of guilt. Belle sank bonelessly to the floor and curled herself around the struggling child. Adam stepped forward - he alone seemed to retain any clarity of mind - to gather the both of them into his arms and half carry, half drag them out of the room. He flicked a cold look at Reginald as they passed out of sight.

In the chaos none of them noticed the amorphous feline shadow that darted along the wall and came to a noiseless pause beside the toppled hatrack. The spectre cocked its head (or what approximated a head, at least) and seemed to contemplate the flattened remains of Reg's hat, its otherwise featureless face cleaved in two by an eternal grin.

Upstairs the baby began to cry.

_________________________________________________________


Reginald slept.

The drugs mired his subconscious in an unnatural sleep that lasted for two days. He would have been grateful for it if he'd had the mental capacity to understand the kindness it did him. No dreams could form within the deep stillness, no nightmares to plague him. His pain - both physical and otherwise - could not reach him at this great depth, and for a blessed while he was well and truly at peace.

Once, maybe twice a day his mind rose nearer the surface and hovered in the hazy twilight between sleep and waking. He heard snatches of coversation formed of voices both familiar and alien, and on more than one occcasion he heard the sound of weeping. These sounds and words seemed so irrelevant to him, so completely unimportant that he felt no need to push for the surface to investigate them any further. Besides, he knew there were bad things beyond the surface. Terrible things made of smashed daisies and bloody nightgown scraps, things that bit deep with teeth of rust and ice. No, it was better down here in the bottomless calm. Safer. He was content to drift.

"...but couldn't you have pulled back a little? You almost broke his spine!"

"Well then, the next time someone makes an attempt on your life I'll make a point of not interfering. Wouldn't want to hurt the fellow."

A weary sigh. "I know, son. I know. I'm grateful for what you did. I only wish that it could have been done differently."

"Differently!? I could have done 'differently.' I was armed; I could have killed him. I would have if he had gained the upper hand. Tell me, doctor; would it have been wrong? Would you have called it murder?"

The wall clock whispered tic a dozen times before anything else was said.

"No..." The old voice said simply, softly. "I would have called it a mercy killing."

A more familiar voice popped up some hours later. It made him think of teacups and fresh buttered scones. "He won't remember what happened. He never does. Try to understand that he's as much a victim as anyone else in this house. We can't hold him responsible..."

"I don't care. I'll not have her in the house with him again!"

"Oh for hell's bells! Look at him, will you? He's crippled and drugged out of whatever is left of his mind. It will be months before he can walk without a cane and I can firmly assure you that when he *does* recover he'll be more of a threat to himself than any one of us."

Later, a woman's voice. It piqued his attention for a few seconds - just long enough for him to discern that it wasn't his wife's voice. "...she's still hysterical, she thinks he won't wake up...we have to let her see him..."

"Not until he's awake. I won't chance her going to pieces again, the poor dear has been through enough."

The voices were a thousand miles away. His mind sank away from the surface and back into the deep soothing black below. Perhaps his wife was down there, he thought. Perhaps he would find her if he went deep enough.

He would not drift near the surface again for twelve hours.

"...he hasn't even looked at his son...he wouldn't name him...I think he blames - "

"He'll get over it."

"What if he doesn't get over it? What if he doesn't get over any of this? We can't prop him up forever!"

"If it comes to that you can take the children and leave him to me. I'll stay with him until the end of this, I'll stay forever if I have to...but the children need a family, they need parents. They could have that with you and Adam...couldn't they?"

Reginald didn't care. His mind began the long, sleepy fall back into darkness.

"They would, they absolutely would. But taking Lorrie from him...oh, that would destroy him. It might put him past saving."

"Then, as I've said," The tea-and-scones voice shook slightly. "I'll stay with him until the end."  

{Lorrie?}

{until the end...}

Reginald turned away from the depths and pushed for the surface, fighting against the pull of sleep like a tired swimmer caught in a thick, gluey undertow.