Once...well more than once upon a time, when all of this had first started, the first thing that Alex had done had been to race to turn all of the lights in her apartment on. She'd turn them on, count the shadows, whisper 'apophenia' and try and breathe. It didn't do any good. As much as Alex wanted to feel safe in her own apartment, she didn't especially when she was meant to be sleeping.
When things had gotten so bad for her, Alex had tried sleeping with all of the lights on. It didn't help, because all it did was to make the shadows more vivid around her, shadow folding on itself and expanding in a way that made it impossible to tell whether or not it was what Alex feared so badly. Strand and Nic would tell her that it was her lack of sleep that made it feel so damned real, trauma and the rest of that. Alex is pretty sure that it's a mix of both the theories: yes, some of it is her imagination but some of it also is not.
If anything, the same creepy witch-thing showing up in a tape well before she ever would have seen it only confirmed in her how fucking real it was.
In the end, Alex had come up with a new scenario--a new script for how she behalves in the middle of the night when she's alone. Alex blinks once, while she's drawling in a breath, and she breathes it out in the same way that she reaches out to touch the shadow. Normally, her hand wraps around nothing, her fingers curling in on themselves and she knows that even if there are probably shadows in the room they aren't close enough to hurt her. Well, physically anyway. This time, however, her hand finds something and Alex just whimpers in fear but more importantly, she also refuses to let it go.
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When things had gotten so bad for her, Alex had tried sleeping with all of the lights on. It didn't help, because all it did was to make the shadows more vivid around her, shadow folding on itself and expanding in a way that made it impossible to tell whether or not it was what Alex feared so badly. Strand and Nic would tell her that it was her lack of sleep that made it feel so damned real, trauma and the rest of that. Alex is pretty sure that it's a mix of both the theories: yes, some of it is her imagination but some of it also is not.
If anything, the same creepy witch-thing showing up in a tape well before she ever would have seen it only confirmed in her how fucking real it was.
In the end, Alex had come up with a new scenario--a new script for how she behalves in the middle of the night when she's alone. Alex blinks once, while she's drawling in a breath, and she breathes it out in the same way that she reaches out to touch the shadow. Normally, her hand wraps around nothing, her fingers curling in on themselves and she knows that even if there are probably shadows in the room they aren't close enough to hurt her. Well, physically anyway. This time, however, her hand finds something and Alex just whimpers in fear but more importantly, she also refuses to let it go.