It felt like there was a storm cloud in Quinn's head. Thunder and lightning and rain and wind all mixed together into a howling cacophony that rushed through the rest of her too, locking her in place like she was paralyzed. Like she was chained down in front of an oncoming train that knew she was there and didn't stop. Like she was at the bottom of a deep, dark well and floundering desperately as she slowly, surely sank below the surface. It made it hard, so hard, nigh-impossible, to think. To articulate ideas, not just to Dahlia, but even to [i]herself.[/i] And each individual word that Dahlia said to her was like a pebble dropped into the well. They echoed down to her as though from a great distance. A faint [i]plop, plop, plop,[/i] as she sank further, barely even audible above the deafening thunderclaps inside her. [i]Broken, broken, broken.[/i] But that wasn't right, was it? She wasn't broken. Not really. Being [i]broken[/i] meant that something had been there before to break. She was like—she was like a [i]puppet.[/i] She wasn't putting herself together from shattered pieces. She was trying—trying, failing, succeeding, failing, trying again—not to fix herself, but to make an entirely new [i]thing[/i] out of whole cloth. Figuring out who and [i]what[/i] she really was past the layers and layers and layers of trauma and pain. Who was she? She didn't know. She wanted so much to hug Dahlia. But her legs had turned completely to jelly, and a part of her knew that if she tried to get up to move to the other side of the booth she'd crumple before she even made it halfway. So instead she squeezed Dahlia's hand in the one that she'd taken and gently laid her head on the table, staring with nigh-unseeing eye out at the virtually actualized beach. When she spoke her voice was weak and weepy and hard to understand through the still-flowing tears, but that utter defeat still filled it. She clamped her eye shut. "[color=ffe63d]They—they d—didn't [i]take[/i] anything f—from me. I'm...I'm just a d—[i]doll.[/i][/color]"