(If you’ve missed where it started, you can find it over yonder!)
“If you’re certain. Though that does look quite painful. Potentially infected.”
Crowe rolled her shoulders again, seeming to retreat back into herself. Dorothea wondered if pursuing the subject of the girl’s injuries further would be worth it, then cast it aside. It was a symptom, surely, not the root.
“Alright, then. Do you remember the hospital where you woke up? What the doctor’s name was?”
Crowe’s lips parted, a thin hiss of air slipping free. One hand crept up to her face and she began gnawing an already ragged nail.
“Hanscomb. Dr. Hanscomb.”
Dorothea nodded, allowing her lips to quirk upward in a faint smile.
“That’s good,” she said. “But do you know why you remember that?”
Crowe gave a bark that Dorothea assumed was supposed to be some form of laughter, though it sounded more like an animal crying in pain.
“Yeah. I remember it because he was stupid. ‘Hanscomb like handsome, that’s me,’ he said.”
Her hand came away from her mouth, and she turned back to Dorothea, looking at her normally for perhaps the first time, the way one person looks to another when they’re having a cozy chat. Dorothea’s smile widened.
“That does sound a little… hokey, I suppose. But it stuck, did it not?”
“I guess. Doesn’t seem like such a great thing to me. I can remember some dumb doctor’s name when all he did was tap my knees, shine a light in my eyes, and tell me to talk to someone else. Hooray. Can’t remember my name or anything that happened before that, and wouldn’t be able to remember anything else if it weren’t for these stupid things, but yeah, great, progress.”
She rolled her eyes as she shook her mangled and braceleted arm in Dorothea’s direction.
Ah. Getting closer.
“Those help you to remember? How so?”
Dorothea suppressed a wave of worry as Crowe pulled back into herself, putting her knees to her chest and hugging them tightly. Perhaps she’d gone too far, too quickly.
“I dunno. Something…” Her voice trailed off, became almost dreamy. Her eyes went the corner of the room, losing focus as though she was looking at something much farther away than the potted plant that held watch there.
Dorothea let her stare for several seconds, not wanting to break whatever spell she’d inadvertently conjured. When nothing else seemed forthcoming, she leaned forward, hands clasped between her own knees.
“Something…?” she whispered.
Crowe nodded, and when she spoke again, it was in a singsong whisper that reminded Dorothea of when she would sing lullabies to herself as a child.
“Something my mother told me to do. If you can’t remember, snap a band and all is better.”
Dorothea eyed the other woman’s arm again, thinking that the behavior must go quite a bit farther back than this most recent memory loss. Whatever lay beneath the mass of hair ties and rubber bands was much more damage than could have been done over the course of only a few days.
Perhaps things like this occur often, she considered. Then she shook the thought out of her head. Regardless of how often this occurred, step one was resolving the current episode. Then healing could really begin.
“Do you remember your mother, Miss Crowe?”
There was near silence for several long seconds, broken only by Crowe’s hissing breath and the tick of the clock atop the mantle. When she answered, she was still speaking in that child’s voice.
“Sometimes. When I’m bad.”
Insomniac Nightmares 
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