002 // text; username: grollschwert

[hauntedsavior]

cw: chronic illness, ruminations on death

Fun one for you tonight.

[this message comes in the middle of the night, when no one in their right mind should be awake. but that's never stopped anna. she can't sleep, and if flynn and ruby and everybody are right then she has to at least try not to keep this stuff inside her at all times. sorrow's silence we needn't bear, or whatever.]

You know a girl. Her body is breaking down and her meds are failing her.
She has years left. Maybe months, if it gets worse.
But something happens, and she gets access to amazing new technology. Things that prevent her body from attacking itself.
Things that stop her timer from ticking faster than everyone else's.
Great, right?
You get to know her better. You entertain her little crush on you. Maybe you like her back a little and maybe things aren't gonna be so bad.

But one day, you do something.
Something that sets off a chain of events that you couldn't have predicted. Not in a million years.
Small things collide into medium things collide into big huge massive things.
And after the butterfly version of you is done flapping its wings, she doesn't have access to that technology anymore.
She's back on the timer.

She doesn't know you did anything.
She never finds out.
You can't bring yourself to tell her, and she wouldn't believe it if you did.

She barely recognizes you anymore, by the end of it.
Her family finds your name on her phone and invites you to pay respects.

Do you still go to her funeral?

Did you kill her?

Comments

[peripheries]

I've been this way since I was born. Only human in form but not in nature. Nor was I raised to be human at all. If I had regrets, my creators certainly would have feared I would be unable to complete my mission out of weakness.

[hauntedsavior]

Well, joke's on them, I guess.

[he can fail his mission all on his own, she thinks, but she's not gonna send it even as she gets halfway through typing it. she already feels a little out of her depth and doubts the joke would go over well.]

At least you're getting a lot of time in for observing other people's regret.
I guess if I start saying something like "regret is one of the things that makes us human" then it's just gonna prove the whole thing this post is about, huh?
Hope you're learning enough to make it worth the struggle.

[peripheries]

Indeed. There was much they failed to anticipate.

[if only smugness he feels could be conveyed through typing.]

Oh, I've been learning so much. People here are very different from the Lilin I met back home.

[hauntedsavior]

Well, we've got people from across all kinds of universes here, right?
Makes sense.
Hell, I ran into a rabbit girl that could, like, talk and type and shit. She's in this post if you look for it.

Just don't pay attention to the cheesy shit I said to her.

[peripheries]

Oh. The romantic. I've spoken to her before.

[hauntedsavior]

Yeah.
I mean, it's probably insensitive to say it or whatever, but I didn't even know sentient animals were, like, a thing?
I feel like I'm learning as much as you are.

Never feels like you're just mimicking everyone else you see and hoping no one else notices, does it?
No reason.

[peripheries]

Mimicking? I suppose so. This is the second time I've been outside the place I was born. So, sometimes I look to others to see how they behave in certain situations.

[hauntedsavior]

Oh yeah, no, no, like, that's what I meant. Okay, just checking in.

Do you mean Earth as the first place or are you also coming from, uh, some weird town that no one else here knows exists?

[peripheries]

Earth. But back then I'd only just left the lab I was raised in for the first time.

[hauntedsavior]

So hold up, you're an angel, in a human's body, who is also an alien, and you grew up in a lab but you're also the child of Adam.
Dog, with all due respect, how is your cosmology doing? Pretty good, it doesn't seem.

[peripheries]

What am I supposed to do about it? It's the way I was created. I can't change anything about that.

[hauntedsavior]

No, like, you're right. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure I was following.
I've never really talked to anyone outside of my own world before I came here.
So I hear angels, I think, like. Wheels and eyes and fire from the heavens.
I'm still getting used to actually running into people from where it works different.

[peripheries]

That's a bit how my brethren are. I'm simply different from the rest of them because I was made.

...I suppose it would be different if you had thought you had an understanding of the world and how it is. But I'd only experienced my world second-hand for most of my life.

[hauntedsavior]

Yeah, probably a lot to be said for starting off as an outsider.
Not that it's doing me much good among all these Dreamers or Sleepers or Deerington citizens or whatever everyone's calling themselves, but whatever.
You think it's easier to just accept that you don't know anything anymore?
Or, well, I guess the whole point is that you didn't have much of a choice... oh well.
Maybe Socrates had the right idea. I know that I know nothing.