A/N:

All the usual stuff.

She would make a book and call it "What to Do When the World Stops" because she knew a lot about that.

She knew that it could stop just when you thought it had settled into some semblance or pattern.

She knew that it could stop when you thought things couldn't possibly get any worse.

And she knew it could stop on a day, on the day, she needed it to keep moving.

When the world stops, you don't shudder or fall, you don't really feel anything at all. You thought you should, you thought you should be tripping all over yourself, you thought other people should be tripping over themselves as well, but none of that happened. The world stopped, but everyone else kept going.

And you were expected to do the same. You were expected to keep up your own patterns and routines while the world stayed silent and sullen under your feet, reminding you each day just why it had stopped in the first place. It turned cold on one side and very, very hot on the other until you weren't sure what you were supposed to feel. Sometimes, you leaned more towards feeling cold, but other times all you could feel was hot.

She preferred the hot, because hot was red anger coursing through her veins, making her lash out but soothing the gaping wounds all the same. Cold was wet tears and an odd apathy that she didn't like feeling. She didn't lash out when she was cold, just huddled in her room or her studio and built a fire with her own pain.

She didn't like the cold because it teased her and hurt her and didn't allow her to retaliate.

When the world stopped, you were supposed to keep going.

She had kept going so often for so long she'd gotten good at holding it all in. She knew, on some level, that there were people who had it harder than her. She knew, on some level, that there were people starving and dying of disease and no one to even hold their hand. She knew, on some level, there were people losing a brother or a friend.

She knew these things but they got lost, frozen in the cold or burned to ash in the heat.

How dare they take away from her problems?

How dare she take away from theirs?

Oh yes, she knew a lot about the world stopping, but this time took the cake. This time, she felt the jolt and, this time, she felt the burn of the heat. She'd landed in the rays of the fiery sun, she was going to burn unless she found some shade.

Shade came in the form of just the person she was hoping to see: Daphne.

And she said some things she didn't want to say, and she said some things she's didn't really mean. And Daphne looked so hurt and so confused and so sorry, but she knew, on some level, she'd still meant to kiss him.

She knew this and, much later when the world was slowly starting to spin again, she came to terms with this. It wasn't Daphne's fault that he loved her, it wasn't Daphne's fault that he didn't love her.

It wasn't her fault either, and the world was beginning to move faster, and she felt like she was on a rollercoaster slowly rolling forward. The world jolted a bit under her fit and she bit back tears as she painted his face on a piece of clean canvas and wrote her name on top and wrote her name on top of that: Three letters drowned in the intruding army of six.

She calmed herself down, she let the world move, and she kept going.

She knew what it felt like to have the world stop, freeze and shudder and come to a halt. She knew what it felt like to have the world stop but...

that didn't mean she was used to it.