Eponine (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
daughterofawolf) wrote2018-12-24 01:35 pm
daughterofawolf) wrote2018-12-24 01:35 pm
[for olive]
The term mental health clinic is an unfamiliar one for Eponine: in her own time, there'd be asylums, or sometimes prisons like Les Madelonettes, where she had stayed for a short time, would hold such girls as did not quite behave properly for their parents to claim them publicly.
This place doesn't look like either, but she still feels a sense of trepidation as she walks in the place and signs in with her name in the waiting room.
She's meant to meet with a therapist, and a doctor -- maybe the same person capable of doing both, she can't quite keep track, and doesn't know, anyway, what they're supposed to do for her or what she's supposed to say. Marcus had intervened on her behalf with the Children's Home, and the school: that's all she knows, or she knows she'd be in a world worse trouble. Perhaps they would be too, with a school accusing them of letting a charge go truant, not attending her classes and failing to do the work, not showing up for detention. She wasn't present for all that was spoken.
Right now, the alternative to kicking her out of school, or of the Home, or whatever it was -- this, mandated because she's still a minor in this place -- seems worse. What is she supposed to say? Well, I was taken advantage of, and it reminded me how horrible men are even in this place where I expected them to be better, and then I killed one of them only half by accident, so no, I haven't been paying attention to school? Not likely. If they think she'll be able to tell some strange man in a white coat all her secrets they're fooling themselves.
She fidgets, casing the windows and doors for an easy slip out. In the room, everyone is subdued: there's a girl about her age in a hoodie pulled up over her head and biting her nails; a young man slouched in a chair who looks like he probably is being seen as an adult; a mother shushing a small, whining child just old enough to be in primary school: which of them is ill is beyond Eponine's ability to tell. Others come in and out.
The wait is interminable, each doctor who appears at the door with a name that's not hers looking less appealing than the next. If she doesn't stay, she doesn't know what happens to her, or to the Home. If she does, she still doesn't know. The room starts to blur, to twist, at the edges of her vision, and finally she pushes herself to her feet all at once, slipping out the door and into the stairwell to catch her breath.
This place doesn't look like either, but she still feels a sense of trepidation as she walks in the place and signs in with her name in the waiting room.
She's meant to meet with a therapist, and a doctor -- maybe the same person capable of doing both, she can't quite keep track, and doesn't know, anyway, what they're supposed to do for her or what she's supposed to say. Marcus had intervened on her behalf with the Children's Home, and the school: that's all she knows, or she knows she'd be in a world worse trouble. Perhaps they would be too, with a school accusing them of letting a charge go truant, not attending her classes and failing to do the work, not showing up for detention. She wasn't present for all that was spoken.
Right now, the alternative to kicking her out of school, or of the Home, or whatever it was -- this, mandated because she's still a minor in this place -- seems worse. What is she supposed to say? Well, I was taken advantage of, and it reminded me how horrible men are even in this place where I expected them to be better, and then I killed one of them only half by accident, so no, I haven't been paying attention to school? Not likely. If they think she'll be able to tell some strange man in a white coat all her secrets they're fooling themselves.
She fidgets, casing the windows and doors for an easy slip out. In the room, everyone is subdued: there's a girl about her age in a hoodie pulled up over her head and biting her nails; a young man slouched in a chair who looks like he probably is being seen as an adult; a mother shushing a small, whining child just old enough to be in primary school: which of them is ill is beyond Eponine's ability to tell. Others come in and out.
The wait is interminable, each doctor who appears at the door with a name that's not hers looking less appealing than the next. If she doesn't stay, she doesn't know what happens to her, or to the Home. If she does, she still doesn't know. The room starts to blur, to twist, at the edges of her vision, and finally she pushes herself to her feet all at once, slipping out the door and into the stairwell to catch her breath.