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002 // text; username: grollschwert

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?

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I had to do it to save the world. [she's not defensive; nothing to defend when she's already defeated.] Nobody knew what would happen after that.

Then not even an elven court would convict you, if no one could have known what would come of what you did. Legally, you did not kill her.

Is there some situation where she would have lived on, had the world died?

Maybe. It's hard to tell what the guy who wanted to change the world in his evil bastard image would've done with her.

[there's a contemplative pause, and a breath out. now she's smoking again.]

But since she was sick, he probably would've killed her anyway.

Ahhh. So it is less the death of the world, and more an awful change.

What did he intend, broadly?

Cull the herd. Take all the weak souls and feed them to the strong ones. Make a utopia, but only for the people he decided belonged there.

[she doesn't want to bring up, right now, the suspicion that she survived so long because she was one of the strong ones.]

Never found out what he thought weak souls were, but I have some guesses.

[Distaste colors his voice,] That old horror. I doubt much he would have kept it even had you not acted, but it does sound that your, [hm,] friend was doomed either way.

What were these guesses? And--soul, here, this is not poetic, but the part of the self that goes beyond death?

Sick people. Old people. Kids. A few other groups if he really wanted to do some classical atrocity shit.

[she takes another drag to try to calm her nerves and pretend like this person she's talking to isn't right about lillian.]

It's literal. Souls were a real thing that you could capture in jars and experiment on.

[So, and so.

No need to be cruel by dwelling on that.]

...They are not real elsewhere?

I mean like things you can hold and touch. They're still real everywhere else, it's just... complicated. [there's a pause like she's debating whether to share this piece of information. but it isn't like anyone can take it from her.]

Like, I have two inside me because of where I came from. That kind of thing.

Ah, physical things. That is different from most places, I think. [Certainly it wasn't how metaphysics worked on Nephele.]

What--mm. [He's letting his curiosity get him off-track.] I am digressing here, from your original question.

Though, perhaps telling me why you have two souls is something you would rather speak of?

[a humorless laugh.]

With the way this post is going, there's a lot of things I'd rather speak of. Let's just say that you didn't have to capture souls in jars to experiment on them. Any kind of vessel would work just fine.

[He chuckles at that, a little sadly.]

Yes; who would have known so many of the others are awake this late to talk about such a crisis? "Sleepers," I am thinking, is a misnomer.

So you are also an experiment. [That sounds a little like a "me-too" also rather than an interjection.] I am sorry for this as well.

To return to your original questions, [because being an experimental subject also seems emotionally loaded,] given the context, no one could say justly that you killed her. It is as you sensed and as another respondent of yours has said: Each of our actions causes countless ripples that we do not intend and cannot correct once they have begun. To take all the blame for every shore those ripples touch, every tragedy they might cause, is to go mad.

If this is not enough to think on, I have another way to think of it, if you like.

[if he wants to put it that way, she won't argue. experiment isn't totally wrong. she's just not in the habit of calling herself one.]

Maybe it is too much to handle. Just gets easy to blame myself for these things when it gets this late and no one's around in person, and the moon's just hanging there in the sky. [hanging thick like the blood in the air.]

What's your other way? Let's hear it. Experiment to experiment.

There is some merit to that blame--the one that says, "if I had only known a little more, been a little wiser, a little faster", if it drives you to learn. But yes, now is not the time to think this way, especially if there really is no more to be learned.

Have you spoken to the Moon Presence herself about this?

I understand she has gone through some similar things. [nbd just take your personal problems to a pthumerian

He gives a little chuffing laugh, to hear her notice.]

Consider the situation without the weight of the world's fate on it: Perhaps you do not go to save the world, but instead ask her to live with you, maybe to handfast. You are a household now. All these little changes ripple through your lives. She changes where and when she goes to market and how much time she spends at home. One day, she is walking down a street she would not have been on, if she were not with you, at a time she chose because it means she is home in time for dinner, with you. She is struck by a vehicle and killed, a terrible accident.

By changing her life, did you kill her?

[wouldn't be the first time. she'll back pocket it until he gives the alternate situation, which strikes her silent for a moment that feels too long.]

You picked a girl with a lot of heartache to throw that hypothetical at. [she puffs out a breath. no sense admitting how caught up she got in the narrative.] I get your point, but I'd still find a way to blame myself. Even if it's stupid and doesn't make sense, there'd definitely be a part of me that thought it was my fault.

[which is. yeah. that's the point he's making. and she feels, for a moment, a little clearer of mind.]

You think MP would take visitors? Cloverfield did. I think he liked the company.

Forgive me for that. [There's rueful amusement in his tone.] My skills at counseling soldiers on this sort of quandary, they have grown rust over the years.

[The Unearthed had needed none of them.] But, I am hearing this. I do not give you advice I have always followed; I, too, might blame myself.

Because it is better that somehow, I could take the blame for her death through my actions, than there was nothing whatever I could have done to save her.

[Though he has a very different example in mind, and must be silent for a too-long moment himself to let fade the dim spike of grief it brings.]

You spoke to him as well? [His voice is warmer at the thought.] I am glad so many did; he did seem to. Moon Presence, I think--she seems kindly disposed toward us, though distant. I do not know if she desires visitors, but I trust she listens, when we entreat.

Edited (fixes a piratical verb, yarr) 2021-11-17 06:44 (UTC)

[it's better to blame herself than accept that there was nothing she could've done. mm. that's a heavy thought, and it would be even if it weren't the middle of the night. it distracts her; she sounds distant as she replies to the easier part of what he's just said.]

Would love to hold some kind of audience or something with her. To see what's on her mind. If they're all just... people, but bigger. You know?

[she sits in that assumption for a bit, then comes out with it.]

You really think it's as easy as me not handling that I couldn't have done anything?

[He takes silent note of her distraction; not unexpected, given the course and weight of their discussion. The contour of the pattern suggests he should feel the same way--and he does, a little. He thinks. If the moment of remembering Nadya was an indication.

Easy enough to act as if.]

I think of all of them, she is one of the closest to people as we know them. Bigger, wilder, with ambitions that are beyond our grasp, but people.

If you should talk to her, I would like to hear of it.

[Then...

He takes a breath in and lets it out, a deliberate sigh.]

I think nothing in grief is ever easy, and there are many parts to our griefs. But assuming fault where it cannot be ours, this is one part.

To be a part of the universe is to be acted upon as well as to act. And yet most thinking creatures, we find helplessness worse than pain.

Especially when we know we are capable of saving worlds. Why must one life be so much harder?

[it's a good thing this is over voice and not in person. it means she can hide how much she's looking away, up at the moon, thinking about what the Presence must want and how she's hovering there, overseeing everyone always. whether she thinks she's stuck here, too. and while she's looking away, she's listening, processing. hoping that it can get through her stupid, thick head enough to matter later on.]

I spent so much time getting acted upon. [she'll use his words.] Never acting. Until one day, everything changed for me, and I could finally do something about it. Like, dude, I traveled through time on purpose. I didn't think there was anything left that could hold me back.

[she only comes to voice this conclusion because it's late, she's tired, and it's harder to put up the thinnest veneer of resistance than it is to just say it outright. she might not remember it in the morning. it's hard to know.]

I guess I just got too used to that. I forgot there really were things I couldn't change. Things that were stronger than me. Like whatever brought me here.

[This a very vulnerable thing, a thing that resonates with the dim and nearly dead spark of Illarion's soul. He rolls the Omni over in his hands, flat side to round, and considers taking the conversation private for both their sakes.

It feels like cowardice to do it now, when she's bared so much of her heart and he's remained a cipher.

He doesn't. Not until after he's offered as much.]

I also began this way. It was not for many years that I learned to be one who acted--and then, much as you say, I believed I was capable of anything, that my life was all my own to control.

The reminder that it was not was very cruel. [The little box his mother's courier thought was empty; the talons and feathers she'd left him of Sasha.] It was much easier to blame myself, for years.

Some days, I think I still do.

Mm.

[she's giving too much away. when other people start opening up to her, especially people who have been quiet the whole time? she knows she's screwed up. let strangers in too close. she must be in a bad way. but no shit, amaranth, you knew that already.]

But the urge goes away after long enough, you're saying? It's only been... maybe a year.

[He makes a mental note of her response.

Nothing more. While curiosity pries at him to keep asking and see what else he might discover, it isn't his role. A Warlord would be excused the unkindness; a Disciple could not be.]

It blunts with time, like the grief it is part of. If you let it--it is a habit, and any habit you practice, stays sharp.

As for your timeline, I do not know enough to say, and even did I--these things are personal, unique. It will take as long for you as it takes, though it can be eased along.

[she pushes her hair out of her face and works her eyepatch off with one hand, letting the night air wash over her. her glass eye glitters in the pale light, silver and gold veins across a darkened surface. she can't see it, but knows it well enough by now to imagine what it looks like.]

And this is the part where you tell me that the best way to ease it along is to get out there and start talking about it. Don't carry it all. [we are all our hands and holders, right?]

Still don't know how much good tonight'll do me in the light of day. Meeting a whole lot of people who get my worst side as their first impression.

[He's actually startled into a laugh by that. A horrified laugh.]

Queen and Throne, no! You know none of us from Loneliness, why would-- [Oh. Oh dear.] --Did someone put you up to this?

Or--I should say more kindly, did someone recommend this, in all worry for you?

[she laughs alongside him, just as a reaction. maybe she said something wrong? sure sounds like she did. but then she lets him explain, and she exhales instead of laughing.]

I mean, someone probably would've asked me to do this eventually if I kept running my fuckin' mouth about how sad I was. But no, these are just... late night thoughts that my brain can't shut up about. At least this time I put my name to them.

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