Welcome to Gaia! ::

She knew a lot of people didn't agree with her decision, but she couldn't find it in herself to regret it. Temperance was a medical professional (well, almost) and someone dying was dying and that didn't mean a police officer could shot them whilst unconscious. She was tired of the blood on her hands that never felt like it was going to come, that she scrubbed away with clean water and still, it lingered. It was a stupid feeling, the lingering; she would have blood on her gloves time and again. Perhaps it really was different when it caked under her nails, dried deep in the grooves of her palms.

Regardless, she couldn't regret what she'd done. But she was curious. So one evening, after a grueling day at university, she slogged up to the hospital. They'd checked her in under a different name, of course, a homage to Resident Evil 4's spinels. So, after catching up with the nurses, she asked which room.

It kind of helped that her father was just famous enough to namedrop. In any event, Temperance eased open the door to the hospital room and sat door in a chair near the bed. Humming softly, she pulled out a cross-stitch. The back was a mess of tangled threads and knots, but Temperance was determined to have some kind of femininity, somehow. Over the circle of canvas, she eyed Melany, trying to see if she might be awake.

"My name is Temperance," she said calmly, stabbing the needle through what was supposed to be a peacock and looked more like a blob. "You're in a hospital in Ashdown." She did not say which one, though it probably said on Melany's hospital bracelet. Temperance couldn't remember if the hospital labeled them like that.

She set down her needlework. "What do you remember?"

"Don't take it off for now. And we couldn't very well register you under 'Melany'. People would find you." Temperance grimaced. She couldn't very well work to save a life and then just throw it back to Shun. "Ezra killed him, afterwards." It was not a pretty memory, but nothing from the ball was.

"We took you out so you wouldn't die." She rubbed her temples. There was always so much blood. "Brought you here so you'd live. How do you feel?" She wanted to pepper Melany with questions about who she was and what she was and how come no other being even tried?

"Why does Ezra want you dead?"

She restrained the urge to roll her eyes. "They probably still want to kill you - they told me to let you die. If you can't hurt them, can they hurt you?"

"Hate isn't the strongest feeling, though." Just in general. There were other things, better things, maybe, though Temperance wasn't going to suggest survival. "What's the... point of making more nobles? Aside from choosing to be one out of fear of you." She paused.

"I doubt you could inspire much fear right now, though."

Melany was wrong. Spite was powerful, yes, and negativity always felt stronger, but it drained in ways things like kindness didn't. It was like the tortoise and the hare. "What do they have to be strong against - to be free from? What's the point of it all?" Abuse creates abuse: a horrible cycle that was hard to break from. Adoelle was kind, Adoelle was gentle, Adoelle was dead. Temperance rubbed her palms against her thighs, almost knocking the cross stitch out of her lap.

"Are you happy with the person you've become?" Was it wrong to feel bad for her - to wonder the things that had happened to make her who she was? Because Temperance did, and she didn't, but she did. Melany - Ashley - was beautiful in this lighting, of course, not looking anything like she'd been one inch from death's door.

She made a strangled noise. "I don't give a s**t about 'The Enemy'." And Temperance didn't. He was a nebulous and uncertain as the concept of Satan. Of course she had suspicions of who and what he was, but knew nothing of his end goal or why he was the enemy. Temperance wasn't about to take someone else's word for it when no one would tell her why the enemy was classified as such.

"He was your patron, right - in the beginning? No one has given me any reason to go after him, claws out, blood thirsty. Excepting the fact that he treated you in a bad way." And then Melany had passed down that treatment - but Temperance was not the type to go after anyone, really. Just... no more dying. She packed away her cross stitch for now. "Does it matter what world is real? There's this place; there's the Ashdown where it rains; there's probably a hundred million other places. I don't necessarily want any of them gone." People had wanted to break the cage, to free 'the enemy', to kill him, and no one had ever bothered to tell her why.

"I'm me, whatever I am, whatever I could possibly be. I don't care about belonging." She moved from place to place because nothing felt like 'home' and nothing probably ever would. "So, M- Ashley, what are you going to do once you're discharged - just go on back? Or are you going to stay on this side?"

"Your sarcasm is showing." She finished zipping up her bag. "And I guess you're right - it's not. Everybody else will be asking, too. Don't tell officer Shun - he's the one who tried to knife you." Temperance stood.

"Want me to swing by later with a book for you or something? Hospitals get boring."