[solo] so it seems i’m someone i’ve never met (stormy)

[medigel]

And it was just there like mass graves of pages and rubble. An adhesive stuck to the pear skin flesh of her mind, incomprehensibly delicate for such an image of carnage, glued behind her eyes until they should have been cataracts. The library was, for the most part, destroyed. One day under her command while Ami was out on a mission, and it was just gone.

And shouldn’t she have known it would have ended just like that? How all things seemed inexorably pulled towards death whenever she hovered? It wasn’t some dramatic proclamation that Thane would decry her for, no; it was beginning to feel a little too real, a little too much like a curse. Nevada. Jack. (And he did count, he should have died, he was supposed to have died, why didn't he just die?) Now even Gale had said if she tried to rip her own ghost out, he'd follow suit, like some macabre declaration of loyalty and love.

And hadn’t that witch several years ago done as much to her? Hadn't she all but cursed her in the end? One fatal Haunted House meeting, one wrong split impulse to maim. She didn’t remember the conversation anymore, but she did remember the ghoul’s final words. As above, so below. Macrocosms the same as microcosms. The universe the same as any god. Any god comparable to man. Any man like any individual cell, any cell as much as a single atom, every atom in its particles. Any one thing felt in one plain is equal to all others. To understand one is to understand another; to be lost in one is to be in complete oblivion in the rest.

And if that wasn’t what this was, then what was it? This grey fog she had been crawling through was no recovery, not to anyone paying attention. (Did they pay attention? Did they see? Did they have cataracts as well, or was she the only one blind to the world?) Ironic that the only one beyond Gale who truly did was also the one that couldn’t help her: both she and Ami were lost in their own realms of grief now, at best neighboring islands and at worst bleeding casualties of the same plague. But Ami had a good reason: Stormy no longer did.

And yet.
 

[medigel]

There is still a jagged mark on the door to Room 221B. She still can’t help herself: every time she approaches the door, she touches it from one lip to the next, and she thinks: crooked and rent and wounded and permanent. And one day she looks upon it and feels something dark rise in her, and she welcomes it: it means something more than numb, it means more than merely existing.

They’re both in the last resting place of the library when she asks him, “Did you do it?”

And he doesn’t even look at her.

It feels as if this has been written a hundred times over again. There is always a girl and a boy, and there is always a question that divides them, there is always one who won’t look at the other, there is always one who isn’t in tune, who isn’t in the same key. And now, they aren’t even looking at the same piece.

He doesn’t look at her not to avoid doing so, but because she doesn’t matter. Her question is like so many other inanities he faces: common gnats like do you play basketball, why do you drink so much coffee, why are you always so mean? He makes her wait simply because he can, because she is not longer important. More importantly, because it not longer hurts to.

(What is five minutes compared to a whole year? What is one question compared to a thousand, one hurt look compared to a multitude of broiling emotions he had once had to face?)

And only when he feels like, only when work has been done, only after she’s tailed him all shift long like some waif of a shadow does he deign to turn his head, look down, and reply, “Yes, I did.”

She doesn’t deserve the truth any more, not in any regard. Anything he can do to prolong whatever her suffering was about, he will.

“And it felt ******** great.”

(Forever wounds, Owain had called them when he and Chel had carved their initials in the tree. Gashes that could never be wholly healed.)
 

[medigel]

Both of them have a policy of no secrets with their significant others. The question then comes to how to approach them.

For Stormy, she was a ball of frayed yarn slowly unraveling, growing smaller and smaller until there's barely anything left but that shred of darkness that's begun to grow within her for years now. And it wasn't until she had opened her mouth and asked for a spar that she realized why that was so. She wasn't a violent person, but she was tired of hurting, tired of scraping by, tired of the bugs under her skin, tired of being look at with those concerned eyes, tired of merely existing.

She remembered this feeling the night all glass on Deus broke and couldn't help but wonder if something else had happened during the onslaught of black and blue to make her feel this way. But Thane was quick to point out: this is yours and yours alone. And he was enjoying it in a twisted way, despite the hardships imposed on them both: it was a hollowing out of life, a moving corpse that defied the natural order (she should have died, she should have died, she should have died by now)--a ritual to make yet one more lich.

She pulled her phone out and curled up in what shadowy corner she could find, unable to face him as she typed.

kuropeco

Text to Gale <333: I'm going to spar Jack if that's okay.

Even with her most decisive action in months, she still couldn't do it wholly of her own volition. She didn't know if it was a plea to stop her or if it was merely courtesy anymore.