She's tired, but that's not anything new. She's been tired for almost a year. Tired and drawn since the kidnapping, and the baby inside her has only made it worse, keeping her awake with insistent kicks on the rare nights that the nightmares don't find their way into her mind. And, of course, the nightmares are back, if they ever left. She doesn't tell him when he asks. There's nothing he could do to help. They're her own demons to kill.
She wakes herself screaming or in a cold sweat most nights, but they haven't shared a bed since the child was conceived, a small relief to her. That way, she didn't have to worry about him finding out unless she told him. She would never tell him. She had decided on that long ago, when the nightmares first started. She had never told him everything that had happened in the shed or in the house; he would worry, and she would cry, and the words always choked up in her throat if she even thought about it for too long.
She hates being weak. Hates when tears come unbidden, hates when she can't sleep because she still feels the ache in her jaw where the bone never healed right, hates screaming into her pillow in rage and frustration and sorrow and a host of other feelings she can never seem to put into words. Hates herself and hates the world in turns. Sometimes she even hates the baby and hates him. But she whispers to herself when the tears have stopped and the hatred has ebbed away that she was strong once. She'll be strong again.
She prefers the dreams where she's back in the shed or in the house. Anything she feels then is only phantom pain, twinges in her ribs or her jaw or her nose or anywhere else they hit her, and she can handle phantom pains. She can wake herself up and set a fire and know that she's safe in her own home. They can't touch her there. They don't know where she lives. They can't know where she lives. She has to have at least one space in the world that is her own, where she can be by herself and never be found, by them or him or anyone else.
The baby will be a girl. Cat feels it so deeply in her bones that she cannot believe it will be otherwise. She dreams of the child, too, and those are the dreams she wishes she could drink to forget. They are the dreams that wake her in cold sweats and set her stomach rolling, keep her awake until the sun rises and she can go back to town.
In her dreams, the girl is grown. Blonde hair and blue eyes and a smile just like her father's, so pure and pale and sweet that...it's as if Cat never existed. He is there, of course, laughing with their daughter and teaching her music, and her voice is as sweet as any bird's. But it's the lack of herself that frightens Cat. She does not exist in that child's face or skin or hair or eyes or smile, and the girl stares through her, as if she isn't there. When Cat reaches out to touch her cheek or get her attention--anything to hear the girl call her "mother", her hand phases through, and the girl is made of nothing more than smoke and ash. She falls to pieces in front of Cat's eyes, and he stands there, staring at her, and she knows that if she hadn't been greedy, hadn't touched her daughter's cheek, she would still be standing there, they would still be--
She tries to shake those dreams off, but they haunt her, coming back every time she feels the baby stir. Some days, all she sees when she closes her eyes is her daughter fracturing, dissolving, because of her. So she hides, withdraws into her own mind, finds safety in the dangers of the Pony because that's the only constant place.
But she still dreams the nightmares, over and over again, reliving things past and yet to come and sometimes hardly telling the difference of what she's dreamed and what she's lived.
