I am but mad north-northwest

It's evening outside, and already growing cool enough that someone venturing out onto the lawns might want to bring a sweater or jacket with them.

Elle has neither, but for once doesn't seem to care. She walks across the grass as aimlessly as she did back in Madripoor, with enough speed to suggest she really wants to break out into a run.

But she can't. She can't make herself do it. So she just walks toward the edge of the lake.

Elle spent a long time in the shower. Or at least, a long time for her, which is about seven minutes. But it's a luxury she hasn't been able to use recently, and now is easy enough, as long as she's careful.

She exits X's bathroom a short while later, in jeans and a white sleeveless shirt, still toweling off her damp hair. It's something else she probably wouldn't do were she anywhere else but this apartment, but in this moment, she simply lowers the towel, and slowly folds it over.

(Her steps are slow, and deliberate, as though she were walking through shallow water, and her eyes are on the floor.)

Eventually, Elle had leaned back onto the bed, curled away from Ava, watching the IV drip. The sandwiches have been consumed and the packages discarded. X is sitting at the edge of her bed – Elle has been listening to her breathing, while she waited.

She's not entirely sure what she's waiting for.

But if it's for sleep, that doesn't seem to be coming any time soon.

Wandering outside is about the last thing Elle wants to do right now. But as she can't find X for the moment, and the choice was rapidly becoming step outside or set something or someone on fire, she made her way through the back door and out into the fog.

Elle doesn't look at the forest, or at the building out by the lake. Mostly, she just looks at her feet – she's still in jeans and a black tank top, no shoes. Basically, she's freezing. But the bright arcs of electricity that crackle and flash from her skin, through the fog and up toward the sky, remind her that she'd rather be freezing than on fire.

If those are the only choices, anyway.

When they had returned, Elle had forced her way through the first door she could, if only to, for a moment, get away from Bennet.

Instead, she'd ended up at the Bar. For the first time, she's not entirely sure she wants to be here.

So she'd retreated through the back door, out toward the grounds, making her way to the lawn near the lake. Though it had been the middle of the night in her world, it's very early morning here, sunlight just beginning to brighten the eastern sky. Elle really only pays attention to the extent that she can see well enough to find a spot reasonably apart from the water, where she sits down in the grass, her knees pulled up to her chest.

She's not sparking, but she is, very slightly, shaking.

The stuffed dog sits in the grass a few inches away from her. It had still been in her hand when she walked through the door.

It's been more than an hour since the sunset, but Elle hasn't moved since she climbed onto one of the rocks near the lakeshore in the midafternoon.

Really. She has not moved. Other than blink, Elle hasn't moved her eyes, her hands, hasn't resettled on the rock's rough surface or follow the line of the tide. Curled up against the stone, she'd simply laid down, facing the water, too still to be even waiting for something.

Someone with a typical set of senses might not even notice her.