It hurt more coming from him. Tom. She could hardly say his name, because it meant her mind's eye would replay their argument in crystal clear Technicolor and surround sound, and tears would prick at her cornflower blue orbs which she was quick to blink away just as soon as they came – she didn't want people to think she was weak. They all thought – correction, they all knew that she was a bitch. In Scout's words, she was an Army tart. What alarmed her was that that didn't offend her much anymore – on the contrary, she almost thought of it as a compliment, which was worrying.

It hurt her to breathe when she was around him; when she could smell his aftershave on his smooth skin and see the flecks of grey, green and brown in what others thought to be his pure blue eyes – she couldn't deal with it. Nicki Boston was a jealous, bitter, stubborn woman by nature, but she would move heaven and earth for that man. Not that it was any use now – he too had fallen victim to the vicious, sharp tongue that wrecked everything without her mind's prior consent, and she'd succeeded in having a massive argument with him before she'd even thought about what she was saying.

Back in Rochdale, she would never have said most of the things she had to Scout. When she'd first been at Waterloo Road, back when things had been relatively normal, she'd been quite well liked amongst teachers and pupils, which wasn't something she was particularly used to. Yes, she could be strict, but she knew that the kids generally wanted to earn her respect, and that was something that had pleased her enormously. But when they'd moved to Greenock and she'd stayed in Manchester, things had just gone so badly wrong in her mind that she was almost entirely sure they'd never be right again. She didn't know what had triggered it; she'd always thought herself to be too strong to be affected by something like this – friends in the Army had suffered it upon their return from Iraq and other warzones, but she'd settled back into civilian life relatively well.

But now, she was sat at her desk after school, head in her hands, massaging her temples with her long fingers which some may call elegant. She just called them skinny. Locks of chocolate brown hair fell over her ears as the tears began to fall from her eyes, making salty tracks along her too-pale skin as they made their way to her slightly chapped, parted lips. Removing her hands from her head, she reached into her handbag and took out the bottle of pills from the inside pocket, shaking slightly as she double checked the label on them, before tipping out a small handful and throwing them into her mouth, eyes rolling back in her head as she tipped it back.

She was glad that she was on her own, sometimes. It was easier that way, she supposed – there was nobody who she could snap at, wind up and anger with her irritability. Other than her pupils and colleagues, which was how she unintentionally took out her anger – she never meant to snap; she never meant to shout, but she couldn't stop herself – her mouth seemed to have a mind of its own, and before she knew it, she'd said exactly the opposite of what she had intended to. Like with Scout, or Barry, or, hell, even Tom. But she couldn't help it. Not since...

"What are they for?"

At the sound of Tom's voice, the bottle of pills seemed to spontaneously fly out of her hand and to the floor, the fragile glass smashing on the thin carpet which merely made the concrete beneath more aesthetically pleasing, if not any softer. She cursed loudly, knowing that there was no point in keeping up her pretence of calm in front of him. He'd seen her at her most vulnerable, and still not made her feel it.

Almost instantly, he was next to her as she knelt on the floor, trying desperately to salvage the tiny white pills from the ground as the tears dripped down onto the dark blue carpet. She cut her quaking fingers on the shards of brown glass the pills had been stored in, carrying on gathering the pills while staining the carpet scarlet, seemingly not feeling the pain until she began sobbing silently, rocking back and forth as she knelt on the carpet as if she was a small child with a carpet burn, the pills cupped in her bleeding hands.

She felt his strong hands on her shoulders, and willingly collapsed backwards, dropping the pills and leaning against the desk with tears streaming down her face, her breathing fractured by her sobs as she clung to his hand desperately, her scarlet blood staining his lightly tanned skin where he steadied her. He was crouched in front of her, the sleeves on his cream shirt turned up after his long day at work, his left hand on her shoulder, the other holding her bleeding hands still as she curled up her lean body against the cold, hard plywood.

He had to admit, it scared him slightly to see her like that. She was strong on the outside, very rarely allowing anyone to get close to her, and it was a little disconcerting to watch her curled up against her desk with blood all over her hands and tears streaming down her face uncontrollably, flooding over the reddened rims of her bright blue eyes like a tsunami in an ocean; begun by the earthquake that he imagined was probably happening in her mind.

Miss Nicola Lauren Boston, 07-02-1982.

Mirtazapine 40mg.

"Antidepressants." She said in a barely audible whisper so as Tom had to strain to hear her soft voice. Her skin was stained with dark tracks where the tears had taken jet black mascara down her face, leaving trails from her eyes, all the way down her face and onto her elegant neck. She looked up at him with wide, red rimmed eyes which made the blue stand out even more than it ordinarily did. The cuts on her hands were still bleeding, the scarlet liquid running down her forearms and soaking into the cuffs of her shirt, deepening the midnight blue fabric to a purple tinted black.

He really hadn't got a clue what to respond to that. Women had told him that they'd had miscarriages, they were pregnant, hell, even that they were dying, and he'd had a reaction for each, but for the idea of Nicki Boston being on antidepressants, there was nothing. Mainly because he felt enormously guilty. He'd accused her of being a bully, of singling out students and having a personal grudge against them. But all this time, she'd been battling her own mind; the demons that he was lucky enough never to have experienced firsthand – yet here she was, sobbing against a desk with strong antidepressants scattered around her quaking form, blood seeping from the cuts on her hands.

"Nicki..." he started, entirely unsure of what he was going to stay to her. His voice was low and caressing, comforting her slightly so as she loosened her grip on his hand, leaving a large scarlet mark where she'd been grasping onto him desperately. In return, he pulled her up gently until she stood almost as tall as him, and he realised that she'd left her shoes under her desk – without them, she was three or four inches smaller than him, standing at five foot eight or nine.

He took an antiseptic wipe from the first aid kit by her desk and began to wipe at the broken skin on her hands. She hissed in pain as he caught a shard of glass stuck in her hand, and she grimaced as he carefully took it out, holding her hand firmly yet gently as she sat down cross-legged on her desk. Only then did he realise just how thin and fragile she looked – she'd certainly lost quite a bit of weight in the few months between him and her moving to Scotland, and skinny really did not suit her – she looked far more beautiful when her body was strong, the muscles toned as he used to look forward to seeing if she stretched and her shirt crept up to reveal her midriff. Not that he'd ever completely zoned out just watching her. As he set about bandaging the cuts on her hands, he realised that he could feel her breath on his neck, and smell her perfume, mixed with the scent of strawberry Tic Tacs and her shampoo, a smell which was unusual yet so like Nicki. As he stepped back from her and the desk, he noticed her looking at him from underneath her thick, dark, slightly damp eyelashes and smiling vaguely.

"I'm sorry about what I said to you, Nic, I didn't realise." He stated, a little embarrassed by his earlier actions, "I should have known you weren't like that... I know you're not."

After an awkward silence, she responded, seeming to choose her words with care as if she knew that what she told him now could very well affect their relationship for years to come. She took a deep breath and bowed her head in what seemed to be uncharacteristic shyness before she spoke;

"It's the meds." She began, and then expanded on her short statement after seeing his confused expression, "I can't keep going without them, but they make me so irritable, and it's not that I mean to say these things, but I just don't have control of what I'm doing. And they make my muscles and my joints seize up, and make me dizzy and sick, but if I don't have them..." she stopped suddenly, as if she'd surprised herself with her own words. She had begun to slur her speech towards the end of her sentence, and he presumed that was probably the fault of the medication, too – she hardly drank, and surely she wasn't stupid enough to mix alcohol with the pills. Was she?

Instead of further pressing her, he instinctively put an arm round her bony shoulders, feeling her body shaking with sobs as she clung to him and rested her head on his shoulder. His body was warm in comparison to her ice cold skin, and he felt a single tear roll down her face before she became still but for her slow, deep breathing. He could feel her ribs through the thin material of her shirt, realising just how thin and fragile she was, and sighed deeply, before feeling loosening his grip as she seemed to pull away a little.

But instead of screaming at him and telling him to get out as she practically had earlier, she looked up at him with soft eyes as if she was about to say something, but it was Tom who spoke first.

"Let's go and have something to eat, eh?" he offered, and she smiled; the first proper smile he'd witnessed from her since she'd arrived. She slipped her shoes on, smiling to herself, picked up her handbag cautiously with her torn hands, and followed him out of the school and to his car, both of them smiling identically without wanting the other to see.

Only then could I bind the struts
and climb the rungs of her broken ribs,

and feel the hurt
of her grazed heart.

Skirting along,
only then could I picture the scan,

the foetus of metal beneath her chest
where the bullet had finally come to rest.

Then I widened the search,
traced the scarring back to its source

to a sweating, unexploded mine
buried deep in her mind.

Six stanzas borrowed and edited slightly (changing 'his' to 'her') from probably my favourite ever poem - "Laura's Poem; The Manhunt" - Simon Armitage.

I'd like to thank a few people at the end of Chapter one;

Hannah ( HedgieX) for giving me the idea,

Whoever decided that The Manhunt should be in the Moon on the Tides GCSE Anthology. And of course Simon Armitage for writing such a beautiful poem (if you've read it you'll realise that the final stanza has been omitted from this chapter, and that may give you some clue as to what will occur in the future of this story).

You, for reading this – I hope you enjoyed this first chapter; please review because it makes me happy, and makes me type faster!