Jenny Lowe

There was an odd silence surrounding a particular individual the morning that Jenny Lowe had decided she was going to take a wander near Lincoln Park. She had yet to go out there, having been actively discouraged by strangers because of the news and the stories of monsters that lived behind the wall. She had been compelled there, an odd buzzing sound in her mind that had meant she was drawn towards it, if not just to find the source of it, but she was distracted by the silence and she'd walked towards it, helpless to fight as she came face to face with... herself.

A version of herself that was slimmer, had longer hair and was emitting silence.

( Lessons and Learnings )

The knock knock on the front door of Alec's house was shaky, stuttered as if she wasn't entirely sure she should be knocking. Jenny was stood outside Alec's front door, looking up at it. Lights were on inside, so there were at least people awake. It was getting late, but it wasn't unacceptably late. She hoped he wouldn't mind even it if was.

Inside she could sense minds, two animal, warm and comforting and more, people, she guessed Alec and his housemate, Toby. The houses around them were giving off noise too, conversations that filled her up. Her eyes burned, stinging from the wind and from the tears that were just waiting to fall.

It hadn't taken her long to realise that she needed someone. The house had been empty and she was still afraid.

She knocked again, a little stronger this time and the door was pulled open by someone she didn't recognise, his glasses sat on the end of his nose and he looked at her the way someone might look at a randomly tearful stranger standing on his doorstep. It was a very 'what the fuck?' look, which was what Toby was thinking.

( Can Alec come to the door? )

( Sleeping Over )

Jenny chewed on the edge of her thumb as she sat in the big bay window in her lounge. The sun was streaming in through the panes of glass, but Jenny felt cold. She was nervous, it felt like a mass of snakes had set up shop in her stomach and were wriggling over each other.

Her heart hadn't really left her throat since she'd departed from Rhiannon's. They had a plan. It was a good plan, if not a scary one, and probably very stupid because Jenny knew that the servants would be a problem, yes, they were slow, but they were strong and loyal.

She kind of wondered if they would all come out of this alright. Bumps and bruises weren't things she was particularly fond of getting and dying definitely wasn't on her agenda.

( Thinky thoughts )

[Voicemail to Alec included within]

Jenny was restless. It was unnerving, the silence in her mind. It actually allowed her to hear her own thoughts above any other extraneous noise and that was a strange feeling.

She caught herself looking at people in a new light, how everyone looked so different without that sparkle around them, the lack of radiating light that told Jenny how healthy they were, how close to death.

She was at the hospital again, sitting in the waiting room and waiting for Alec to come onto his lunch break so that they could go and get food, or coffee, or something. She had already had a fairly good conversation with one of the nurses about anti-psychotics and she had spoken to a couple of patients, but that itch underneath her skin was crawling, knowing that she should be able to see and hear more than she could was unsettling. It was wrong in so many ways; why couldn't she hear them? Those idle thoughts that plagued the minds of everyone? And what had happened that meant she couldn't see people's lives anymore?

She supposed she should be grateful? She was normal now. She was better. Fixed. Whatever her father wanted to call it, she wasn't a freak anymore. But she wasn't special anymore either. As much as her 'gift' had plagued her, she missed it. She didn't like the silence.

( Catch Up )

( Table for Two )

( Idle Conversation )

It had felt like something out of a bad dream. In fact, initially that was what she had thought it was. Jennifer Lowe jerked upright, whole body aching and muscles feeling like they were on fire as she stumbled towards a nearby bun. She dry-heaved into it, the nausea overwhelming and not helped by the stench of rotten food that was assaulting her senses. Her throat burned, as did her stomach, the acrid taste of bile lingering on the edge of her tongue as she stayed where she was, head hanging and hair touching the rim of the bin.

She would need to shower when her body was done throwing up.

She didn't know what she was doing outside so early in the morning. Blackouts were a new one for her. She had never done that before. It was a worrying turn of events if she was suddenly going to start blacking out.

Her stomach twisted in fear; where was she exactly? How had she got there? What had happened? She was preoccupied by not knowing where she was that she completely missed the silence in her mind where there should be noise. She supposed she had been lying weirdly on her arm as she had pins and needles across her left shoulder blade, but it was nothing to worry about, the fact that she was retching into a trash can was more concerning for her.

( Going Home )

( Quiet? )

[Voicemail to Alec included within]

Sterility. Hospitals were white and sterile, little things that dispensed alcohol gel at every doorway into the wards to clean your hands so that the patients didn't get sicker. So that you didn't get sick from what they patients had.

Sometimes the floors were shiny enough that, when looking down, it was possible to see a reflection staring back at you. Jenny always thought it looked a little like there was another her, just trapped in the hospital floor, the reflected hospital. Like another, mirror world. Maybe in that world she wasn't crazy, it was impossible to tell.

At least today she didn't look like an ex-mental patient, which was always a good thing. She'd combed her hair down and was twisting chunks of it between her fingers as she listened to the buzzing in her mind, feeling the drain as she approached another ward. It was a more general one and her feet dragged, feeling the sick and the ill all around her, desperate thoughts warring with hopeful ones for pride of place in her mind.

She watched someone in a hospital bed coughing. The grey around him flickered and turned to that translucent, light colour as she watched. He was going to live, he would be fine. Her feet took her over to his bed and she sat down on the edge, covering his shaking hand with her own as his coughs subsided.

( 'I ain'y buyin'' )

( Are You Okay? )

( A life saved )

( Something special )