Tubes. Wires. Machines. Beeping. The forced, harsh rasp of the respirator. On the other side of the glass, under yards of gauze and medical tape, was not the girl he knew. She was a container for saline solutions and other people's blood. A testament to modern medicine's ability to keep absolutely nothing held together in the shape of a person. Padraig couldn't feel her anymore, not even this close.

"The brain trauma is too extensive," Evelyn volunteered from beside him, seemingly reading his thoughts. They stood quiet vigil from outside her ICU room, eyes locked on the badly swollen face at the nucleus of bandages and apparatus.

Conversations were taking place in hushed tones behind them, between her mother and the neurological specialist that had examined her, that they both knew would soon make this distance, this sterile barrier, obsolete.

"There's nothing to be done for it."

"Evelyn, you know I never--"

"I know, dear. She hasn't been well in quite some time. This is tragic, not surprising. Let's not go confusing the two. No one could rationally blame this on you."

Padraig frowned and accepted that she was right. Though he was not often a rational man.

"Your daughter seems to think otherwise." Rightfully so, he added to himself.

"She is grieving. We all are. Some of us just deal with it differently than others. Her anger will fade in time. Or not. But you must know that at least some of this is projection. You were there for her in ways that not many can claim. Not even Catherine."

Padraig felt an unexpected hand on his arm, a gentle squeeze, though her eyes never left her granddaughter's face.

"She talked about you often in her more lucid moments. Maybe even more when she was less so." Morgan's strength had come almost entirely from her grandmother. It was probably the only thing that had kept her going as long as she had. "More than anything she wanted to know where you had gone."

"I wanted to visit."

"No, you didn't." There was no anger, no malice in her tone, no venom behind the words. It was a simple statement, as matter of fact as if she were remarking on the weather. "I didn't. And I was…am…her grandmother, for god's sakes. Who wants to hear their grandchild talk about the voices in their head, or how the demons are close now, or how she has to die to keep the monsters from finding her?"

Padraig stiffened at her comment, reflexively, paranoia creeping in, only to be relieved by another gentle, reassuring squeeze of his arm. There was, of course, no way she could know.

"Someone who wanted to help her fight those monsters, I suppose."

"You tried, Padraig. Even she recognized that. She always seemed calmer around you or thinking about you. On the bad days, I would bring you up just to…to have a conversation about something real to her, I suppose.

"She would always tell me how you were out there looking for a way to fix her, were going to find a way to make it better, that you were going to take her home. And she'd smile, and stare out the window, and hum that song of yours…"

She felt him pull away and realized she was treading on raw nerves. "But you can only do so much," she quickly appended. "You can't slay demons that don't exist."

Padraig gave a slight nod. They settled back in to a sorrowful, companionable silence, the only two people left in the world who had genuinely tried to understand what was left of the girl in the hospital room. The two people who felt most like they had failed her, although for vastly different reasons.

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"Did she…ever say anything else?" Padraig ventured, trying to get an idea of how they’d gotten here in the four years since he had last seen her. "Was there any indication that she was going to try to…" His voice trailed off, failing to find any diplomatic way to continue.

"To die? No. No more than usual. When you stopped…became too busy to come by regularly, with your new job and all, we tried to take care of her at home one more time, for a while."

"I got the letters. She had even started to draw again." Padraig tried to sound nostalgic but remembered the drawings all too well. Gone were her idle doodles of elves and fairies in the margins of schoolyard crush letters. They had been replaced by dark things. Stacks and stacks of them.

When he ran the first time, he had left a forwarding address. The letters and pictures began arriving soon thereafter, padded envelopes full of reams of paper, package after package.

Nebulous swirls, abstract patterns, impossible angles and architecture. Fields of dead trees, wooden knots open in silent screams, bleeding sap from a hundred wounds in the bark. Creatures with black wings and red eyes, worked too cleverly into the shadows of a seemingly innocuous still life. And, repeatedly, a woman with raven hair and pale skin, clad in a tempest gray gown, skin covered in arcane symbols, with eyes that seemed to follow you. Those haunting, pitch-black eyes.

Padraig had not left a second forwarding address.

"She got on some more aggressive medication, kept care of my cats, walked through the woods around our little house religiously. I thought she was coming back to me, I really did." Evelyn paused again, letting the cracking in her voice die down. She would rather die herself than let her strength fail when her family needed it most.

Padraig saw so much of Morgan in her; the parts that had raged against the encroaching darkness. The parts he had failed. And continued to fail.

"What happened then?"

Evelyn gave a resigned shrug, laden with memories of the struggles of those dark days.

"The same thing that happens with so many schizophrenics. They take the medication long enough to convince themselves they don't need the medication. The cycle repeats. She became convinced it was poison. Said the monsters wanted her to take it, it was all part of their plan. It made it easier for them to get into her head.

"One morning we woke up and she was gone, along with my checkbook and my car. We reported her missing, but with her medical history, the police weren’t hopeful, and even less cooperative."

The first tinges of bitterness he had heard all evening crept in then, in that moment where Evelyn had first felt truly powerless.

"They found my car half sunk in a bayou. She turned up six months and 500 miles later, doing…things. Whatever she had to, to survive. She was picked up for prostitution, drug possession. Bit a respectable chunk out of the arresting officer's hand. They returned her. We recommitted her. We were getting too old, and Catherine wanted no part in anything that would interfere with her latest boy toy. We thought we were doing what was best for her, Padraig, we truly did."

Now it was Padraig's turn, putting a hand on hers, squeezing, trying to let her know somehow, in that smallest of gestures, that there was nothing she could have done differently.

"I think you did what you had to. Just like she did. Like we all did."

Evelyn considered this for a moment, turned it over in her mind, and finally, reluctantly, turned to face the elephant in the room.

"Why didn't you come back, Padraig? When things were still okay? When she’d asked you to in her letters? Maybe you could have kept her with us. Maybe you could have made her understand."

Padraig could only shake his head, slowly at first, then more vigorously, as though trying to dislodge his own thoughts, his own voice, her voice, that had asked that same question so many times in the dark places of the night.

"You know as well as I do that whatever calm I gave her never lasted very long."

"She was in a different place, Pad. That old fire was back in her eyes, like when you were first together. Maybe it would have been different that time."

"Or maybe it came back because I had been gone so long."

Evelyn opened her mouth for another rebuttal, but a presence behind them made them both turn. A grim-faced doctor loomed, trailed by a tear-streaked Catherine, sorrow finally conquering rage. The rest of the family stood in a respectful, loose semi-circle beyond them, some staring at the ceiling, others at their feet, a few too young to understand the situation staring at their phones, being shepherded away toward the waiting area by adults looking for an excuse to be anywhere but there.

"Mrs. Holme?" the doctor gently interrupted.

Evelyn glanced between the doctor and her daughter, then silently nodded.

"Be a dear, Padraig," she said, putting her other hand on top of his. "Wait with me here, then come say goodbye to my granddaughter."