[color=DECC9C]“You couldn’t have done anything, child.”[/color] Nemeos never said it like a reassurance. Though it may or may not have been that; it sounded almost accusatory, now. He didn’t mean it that way, of course, or at least Savannah didn’t think he did, but it kept coming back to her. Couldn’t do anything, couldn’t do anything. 

He was right, of course. She was weak.

Her parents were out of town, and fine in the end. They called and came back as soon as the news hit TV, but it didn’t really matter either way to Savannah. In a weird way, the events of the week seemed to just wash over her. Life was mostly the same, besides that school was cancelled, and everything was being rebuilt, and that there were monsters now.

But the big change was those words. Couldn’t do anything. 

On her first day off, she took a bath. She still didn’t want to shower. It made her lightheaded, and she could feel her breath quicken, and she just though about passing out and slipping and hitting her head or something. At least her parents didn’t notice; she was happy to keep these quiet little struggles to herself.

But it seemed like bad memories always followed her here. Steam rose from the hot water, fogged the mirror, and filled the air. The wooden baseboard had started to rot from that time the toilet overflowed and no one noticed, flooding the bathroom. She gingerly stepped into the tub of tepid water, taking a deep breath. This wasn’t as bad, she thought, so she slipped down into it all the way. 
The first time that it happened, she had been walking late through suburban streets, night air cool and crisp, and she liked that it felt like the world was all her own at night. It must have been ten or eleven PM, but it was safe, she lived in a good neighborhood and her house was close. It was a little foggy, and the warm orange lights of the dying streetlamps marked her path through the darkness and the fog. She always loved nights like this, and always loved walking in them. She put her earbuds in and listened to sad music, and it actually made her feel uncharacteristically great. That’s what scared her the most about it: there was no rhyme or reason. It should’ve been a good night. 

She saw this black cat run across the street, and something in her brain just went wrong. She didn’t know what it was, or what started it, and she didn’t realize it at first, but she was starting to breath fast. Faster and faster, and then she was hyperventilating. Savannah didn’t know what was happening, but there was suddenly some awful primal instinct in her brain telling her that something was very, very wrong. Something was going to kill her, she was in danger, there was something suddenly unreal and disquieting about the entire world around her. None of it felt real, it was like a dream, or more accurately a nightmare, and she had started to run home without really thinking about it. She was running and she was suffocating and she was dying. At the front door she pulled out her keys, but missed the whole once, twice, and thrice until she landed it, turned it, and opened it, went in, closed it, and then collapsed against the door frame, sinking low to the ground, crying and trying to breath, because she was sure that she couldn’t breathe and if she couldn’t breathe she’d die. Eventually, still feeling wrong and dying she turned on the TV and tried to calm herself. She watched something she was comfortable with, that she’d seen many times, but it looked all wrong and while the world outside didn’t feel like it was real, the world inside the TV seemed like it was, and that characters threatened to go outside the bounds and escape the screen with some malicious intent.

She fell asleep, eventually. She never told anyone about the episode; her parents weren’t home to witness it, and she was embarrassed, or scared, or something. She just didn’t want to talk about it. She never wanted to talk about it.

The second time it happened was maybe four or five months later. It was the same as the first, sudden and unexpected. She was eating dinner with her mom and dad, but excused herself and went to her room. When they went to check on her, she was buried under the covers, and they thought she must have been sleeping so they left. She was trying so hard to catch her breath under there, suffocating and dying again. She hated that feeling so much. She didn’t find out what ‘panic attack’ really meant until later, beyond the imprecise terms of TVs and movies, and when she did, she realized that’s what it was. That made sense, she guessed.

The third time, it was in the shower. The third and worst time. She didn’t even realize it was happening. She was looking down the drain and thinking about the water and where it went. She turned off the shower and stepped out, and then she felt really tired. Her muscles and limbs ached. She grabbed her phone, and she was trying to do something, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Savannah was trying to type something on it, but she couldn’t hit the right keys so she just stopped and set it down. Her vision was grainy, and then spotty, and then she realized she couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t hyperventilating this time, just suffocating. This time, she really was convinced she was going to die. [i]Need to lay down[/i], she thought, so she opened the bathroom door and tried to make it down the hall to her bed, still naked and wet, but she couldn’t make it she realized. [i]So tired[/i]. She laid down on the ground, for a moment, trying to breathe. The carpet was rough on her skin. [i]The bed, bed, make it to bed[/i]. She stood up again, and then tried walking but she was stumbling instead, stomping down the hallway wildly and blindly. Her eyes closed but she still moved, until she felt something hit her head. When she woke up, she was on the ground, collapsed. She fainted trying to open the door, but she didn’t even remember making it that far, and she hit her head against it, but she couldn’t even remember turning the corner to get here. Her head hurt so much. Shoulders hurt too, against the doorframe, and there would be a bruise there for weeks. She fainted. She didn’t think people really fainted like that, especially when they had panic attacks; she’d thought it was just some Hollywood thing that was made up, but it happened to her now. She felt awful and dead, weak, too, like she couldn’t control her own body and that she was some very unhealthy dying person that [i]fainted[/i].

So, she didn’t want to get back in the shower.

She was afraid.

Right, again, of a shower.

But maybe a bath. Maybe a bath was fine. She felt so filthy, and now here in the hot water she was just wishing she could wash it all off and go away. She dipped her head below the line of the water and just let it all envelop her and swallow her up. She always remembered things, here. She felt the most alone in the bath or the shower and the most like herself; it really was a different world of absolute solitude and stillness. The steam rose from the water, and from her skin and her hair, and it was all the bad things rising up and leaving her, friends that were gone, and parents that were away, secrets and tension all wound up so perfectly tight. Most people she had ever decided she’d liked weren’t here now; and somewhere, those things had meaning. 

Below the water, it was her own world, another level of separation. The tile insulated her from outside, the water insulated her from the tile, her body, and her skin, and her muscles and the tendons, the bone, it all insulated her mind. She didn’t need to breathe her. She was completely unto herself. She felt sick. Nemeos was out in that tile world above the water, and his words still echoed in her head. He could tell she wasn't feeling well, and he'd known since he got here. Part of him wanted a better host.