[This post is from Matt’s point of view.]
“It’s all right,” Matt murmured, fingers tightening in her hair. Hecate wrapped her arms around his leg and clung to him, pressing her face against his thigh. Her tears started to soak through the fabric of his pants, but he didn’t care about that.
He desperately wanted her to stop hurting the way she was. He still wasn’t sure how much of that desire was Cíar and how much of it was him, but he wasn’t sure he cared. Whatever he was feeling, it was real—more real than anything he’d felt in a long time.
“It’s okay,” he said again, feeling helpless. What else could he say? What the hell could he do? “I’m here and I know you won’t hurt me.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” she said into his thigh. “I’m not even sure of that. If I’m—maybe—if—”
“Hecate.”
She looked up, seemingly startled by the gentleness of his voice. She sucked in a rasping breath, slowly sitting up to meet his gaze and mopping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Matt,” she whispered. “Dammit, I am crazy. There is something broken inside of me and I’m not always the one—”
His lips met hers and she went quiet, leaning into his chest as his arms closed around her. Her tears were hot against his cheeks. Matt held her there, almost losing himself in the kiss he’d initiated, his heart beating as hard and as rapidly as hers was.
For once, he didn’t question what he was doing, why this felt right, how he’d known this was the thing to do.
He just kept on kissing her and she kissed him back, tucked against his chest as if his arms were the only safe place in the world for her to be.
Maybe it was.
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered against her lips. “You’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out.”
“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “Matt, I’m sorry. All the things I’ve done, taking you away from them like I did, hurting your friends, I shouldn’t—”
“They’ll get over it,” he said, drawing back so he could look at her. “I’ve already gotten over it. You did what you had to do. It might not have been the best way to get what you needed, but it worked and neither of us got hurt.” Matt brushed a few of her tears away with his thumb. “Now I want you to do something for me.”
“Anything,” she whispered, biting her lip.
“Stop dwelling on it,” he said, gazing at her as if he could see through her eyes into her soul. Sometimes he thought maybe he could, if only in faint glimmers.
What he could see, though, beneath the tarnish and the wear, was something beautiful, something worth protecting, worth saving.
Hecate swallowed hard, looking down, her hair falling forward to veil her face.
“I’ll try,” she said softly, then leaned into his arms again.
Matt closed his eyes and held her for a long time, until they both succumbed to sleep.
Another beautiful scene.
Is she implying split personality or just that sometimes the governors that keep her from spinning out of control come off?
If the later, she needs someone that she can trust implicitly to tell her “no” sometimes.
It really leans more toward the former than the latter–that’s my feeling on it, anyway.
That could be rough.
Each personality has a specific purpose (usually to deal with a childhood trauma, but with an immortal, the rules might be different). The key is that the purpose of the personality sometimes only makes sense to a traumatized child. Most of the time they are there to protect the base personality, either by being someone who will avoid consequences (the good girl), suppressing the base personality and taking the trauma (the punching bag), or lashing out at the real/perceived threat (the rabid dog).
The number of personalities often increase over time since their brain has learned to deal with stress by building a personality designed to deal with the situation (that’s why “reintegrating” a MPD person is usually temporary). Depending on how far gone they are it could take a lot of stress or very little stress to cleave off another personality. Though an immortal who’s survived this long is probably very “stable” that way and does not have any personalities that are self destructive.