002 - TM (TW- Death Mention)

[lingeringwill]

Terra Mason 06/11/17 near Recollé University

blue and green no longer exist outside of a few select cases. somehow, retrospec had the power to do that, along with everything else what don't they have the power to do? i wonder what else they've done that we may have just not noticed... the other day, someone got me thinking about patterns, and i started to realize something... let me conduct a bit of a morbid social experiment, okay? but in the interest of fairness, i'll go first when i was little my mother died. it was fast and sudden--a case of severe pneumonia. she was taken so fast. thief in the night, yeah? the first thing i can remember in my entire life is the look in my dad's eyes as he tried explaining it to me. i was too young to understand at the time...but even as i got older, i still didnt. how can she get that sick, out of nowhere? and just die. i know there's tons of rational reasons for it, but it doesn't sit well, it never has. i realize that this sounds like im refusing to accept the truth but...i can't help wondering. the pneumonia was like a switch. she just died. the universe didn't find her fit to exist anymore or maybe something else i think its obvious what im getting at so, show of hands, everyone. who has one or more dead parents? and if you know i already know the answer to that question...i'm sorry for bringing this back up. really.

Comments

[lingeringwill]

[ouch]

i'm sorry about your mom, alison

1/???

[seeker]

sure.
[Stubbornness isn't always one of her best traits, but she's too wounded, at the moment, to concede. This is too tender a subject for her to fold right away.] whatever, right? what's done is done. but hey, don't worry. you're not the first person who

[has said something stupid about it, is how the sentence would end, if it had ended at all. Instead it cuts off here, the line of conversation dropped on her end for perhaps a worrying amount of time, because —]

2/3

[seeker]

[— because she's remembering something. A fever flash of thought, too rich and vivid to be fake. She is young, tucked here behind a great bear of a man dressed in furs and leather. He glances down to her, and his eyes are so sad. But then, he always is. Somehow she knows this.

There's a boy in front of them, older than her. The memory provides a name, brief and short, one-syllable, but she can't make sense of it. The words are garbled. What he says though, is not. His hands splay out in front of her: calloused from diligent, repetitive use of bow and spear. They are shaking, but he's so grateful when he says,

Thank you. You saved my life. Thank you so much —

More men, now. All dressed like the bear-man in front of her, their faces streaked here and there with blue tribal paint, their eyes hard. They are carrying bows like the one she discovered not long ago, so carefully tucked in the back seat of her car.

Speak no more, boy! The leader of this group of bear-men says. They are outcasts! And she...

He glances down. She tucks in closer to the man shielding her, her hands small and white-knuckled around the fur coverings that smell of campfire wood and home.

She is motherless. He spits it out. He says it like a curse. Like it's the worst thing in the world. She is so confused, and so hurt. What had she done wrong? Why had he said such a thing?

Later, as she walks home with a knot in her chest, a boy her age stands up on a ridge and shrieks in cruel delight, No-Mother! A rock strikes her forehead, a burst of pain that still hurts less than the words had. The second time though, she's ready. When he pitches another, she ignores the blood pooling into one of her eyes, making it sting, and catches it.]

3/3

[seeker]

[a considerable amount of time later:]

jesus CHRIST what the hell
i'm cutting this argument short. i'm sorry about your mom too, sorry for being an ass.
something more important just happened
god, no. scratch that. that sounds terrible.
something weird just happened