It felt odd to be doing something so mundane while my parents and sister were being held by a bunch of blood-sucking parasites, but I was a lot more worried about going to sleep than I'd let on a few minutes earlier with Taggart and Isaac. A shower wasn't going to magically wipe away the fact that I'd slept for something like fifteen hours straight not that long ago, but I needed every edge I could get. After fifteen minutes standing there with the warm water trickling down my body, I started to feel some of my internal barriers start to come down. I hadn't been hurrying, not when I knew that my dinner wasn't going to be ready for a while still, but I shut the shower off as soon as I realized what was going on. It didn't matter that I hadn't put conditioner in my hair yet. I couldn't afford to fall apart. It didn't make any sense to head back to the shooting range again, so once I was dressed I passed the next few minutes stripping down my weapon and cleaning it. It didn't take as long as I would have liked it to, but it took long enough.
