Phantom hands grabbed her, tugging at her, pulling her clothing from her as she buffeted around. No, that wasn’t real, that wasn’t what was happening. But the voices cackling at her, the jeers the cat calls felt real enough, so real her rational mind was almost convinced. But she wasn’t back on that ship, fighting off the hands of men she had served beside for years, men who had called her brother and sworn drunken oaths to always have each other’s backs. Men who turned on her when it was discovered it was sister not brother they should be calling her. Not men, sheep. They followed their commander’s orders lest they join in her punishment. That some had eyes wet with tears and apologies as they violated her mattered little. 

But that wasn’t happening again, part of the screamed at her. These are memories, not reality. But the hands of the party guests she jostled in her haste to get out were real and in her maddened state the real touch simply reinforced the terror of the memories that were drowning her. She heard a voice call out behind her, 

“I got your back.” It called, the words so like the one’s her shipmates had shouted back to her that she felt her terror rising up inside her like the swell of a wave, pushing itself out of her mouth. She put her hands over her mouth, clamping her lips shut and keeping in the scream that wanted to rip from her. No, she wouldn’t scream, not for him, never. 

He won. He had won again but she wouldn’t scream for him. 

Finally she was out of the press of bodies. Away from the finely dressed guests, or was it that she’d made her way off the ship, with its all too eager men? It hardly mattered. She was out in the cooler air and that was real enough. She stumbled to a stop and sucked in a deep breath of the cool air, sucking in the scream in the process. She took that scream and jammed it deep inside her with so many other screams she would not loose. She whimpered, but it wasn’t a scream so that was as close to victory as she would get this night. 

Still not quite seeing she stumbled blindly into the night, needing to get away. She was broken, there was no doubt about that. She had been broken for so long that she forgot what it truly felt like to be whole. The closest she got was when she smoothed out all the jagged edges of herself, lining them up so that she presented a smooth, unblemished face to the world. The pressure of her control was all that kept the jagged shards lined up and when her control slipped, she shattered and anyone nearby was sliced and cut by all the sharp ends of her. 

She found she had stopped and wasn’t certain when. The cold stone of a bench under her bottom when she came back to herself. She blinked her eyes slowly, they felt raw and swollen with tears. As they came into focus, blinking off the last few flashes of leering faces as she shrugged off the last few phantom touches and pinches she saw what lay before her, a small pond, man-made but pretty and floating on the surface were the red and pink and creamy white of night blooms. 

The sight of them stabbed at her and her weeping began anew, not raw and ragged and terrified this time. The tone of her tears turned to that of infinite sadness as she realized just what it was she had lost. She couldn’t go back, not after this. She’d made a spectacle of herself. The slip up with the Captain in her cabin was nothing compared to this. She pulled her feet up onto the bench and with arms wrapped around her knees she let her tears come.