Name: Charley
Story: No Child Is Spared
Colors: host White - Banshee
Word Count: 383
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mention of unspecified mental illness.
Notes: Wendy, who now has a name, is the same girl from the other NCiS fic. I really need to stop writing pre-story stuff and actually get to when she and her brother and everyone else is actually happy and more functional.


She wakes to the sound of screaming.

Wendy tosses and turns as her roommate screams into the night. She wants to sleep, wants to just sleep and sleep until she can't anymore and then take enough pills to keep sleeping until her brother comes and rescues her. She can't though, she can't because of the screaming and because the nurses won't let her and for so many other reasons.

She puts the pillow over her head and listens as the nurses trickle in, listens as they hold her roommate down and sedate her. She still screams for a few more minutes, screams like she's dying, screams like she's drawing out the dead themselves, but it fades soon enough.

And Wendy is let to wonder if this is her fate. If she's going to listen to the banshee in the bed next to her, if she's going to die hearing that screaming and crying and begging.

Tears come to her eyes and she tries to push it aside but it fails. This wasn't supposed to be her life. She was supposed to be with her brother and they were supposed to keep each other safe. This? This isn't what she had in mind for a life at all.

Her heart picks up and she can feel the panic start to kick in at the thought of him. He wasn't near her, wasn't close, no matter what she told herself on the days where the fog was too thick to see through. He wasn't at the end of the road and there was no road and she was a lost girl in the grips of a story that was never meant to be hers.

She curls in on herself, humming softly. Her roommate usually yelled at her when she started humming like that but she was so out of it that it didn't matter. Humming louder, Wendy pretends that he can hear her, that he's dancing in his jail cell, that he's....He's keeping her safe, somehow. She's not sure and she can't come up with a good enough lie but she has to believe he's out there, doing what he can to keep them safe and trying his damnedest to bring the together again, otherwise she's going to start screaming too, she's going to be the banshee.