It's all kind of a blur, adrenaline crashing, but the squeeze still sends prickles of shock all through her shoulders, makes her chest feel tight. It's strange and a relief all at once.

Ellie and Abby weren't friends, not exactly, but they'd been allies, once. On speaking terms. Trusted each other. Relied on each other. Ellie hasn't realized just how hard it's been to not have that security, how much she's been holding her fucking breath over this.

She wants to laugh. All it took was the two of them going home, and going through hell again. Just. Together, this time.

The blood smears over her arm grotesquely as Abby wipes her fingers over it, and more blossoms up in the deeper parts of the bite first, filling the rest of the ridges more slowly.

"It's fine, a few of 'em know already," she makes herself say, her mind racing through the people she knows she's told. Glimmer's at the top of the list, she's known her the longest, followed by Clarisse -- and that thought, and the order in which she had it, leaves her breathless. She stops there, then. Short of remembering who she hasn't told, and how big a fuckup that's about to be.

We, Abby says, when reality trickles back in.

We.

"Abby-" it comes out halting, but it pushes hard in the back of her throat.