[Backdated to after The Graveyard RP]
Proustite is Lost
’Do you see the lights? Look what happens when you touch it.’
His sister’s voice. Except it wasn’t his sister’s voice - not as she was now, but as she had been, when he was five and she was nine. They were at a science centre. On one of the few trips that they had ever taken as a family.
‘See? It follows my finger.’
It did. It did follow her finger - a single, skinny bolt in a spider’s web of white light; illuminating the darkness of the glass ball that surrounded it, making it purple and pink and wonderful.
‘Here, Jack. You try.’
You try, Jack.
Jack.
Jack.
Wake up, Jack.
His sister’s voice. Except it wasn’t his sister’s voice - not as she was now, but as she had been, when he was five and she was nine. They were at a science centre. On one of the few trips that they had ever taken as a family.
‘See? It follows my finger.’
It did. It did follow her finger - a single, skinny bolt in a spider’s web of white light; illuminating the darkness of the glass ball that surrounded it, making it purple and pink and wonderful.
‘Here, Jack. You try.’
You try, Jack.
Jack.
Jack.
Wake up, Jack.
“Ugh, ******** off, Coleen.”
He thought he was waking up in the basement of his mother’s home, which was funny because he hadn’t lived there in years. Hadn’t had Coleen crow for him to get out of bed since he’d moved out. He didn’t have classes to go to, or a job to be up for. The last person who’d bossed him around like that was --
… Moonstone.
Proustite shot upright, cracked his head on a boulder and then crushed his hand to the place where his forehead connected with the rock. He swore. There was pressure on his lungs and murder in one of his legs. He rolled onto his side and was surprised by vomit. He tried to swear. Was too busy heaving and emptying his insides out onto the dirt. Spit and bile erupted -and then dribbled- from his mouth. There were tears and blood, too, but a quick sweep of his tongue revealed two missing teeth - no, no they weren’t missing.
They were on the ground in front of his face now, glistening white in a pool of his body’s other rejections.
Proustite gagged and then threw up again on his hands and knees, back arching, hair falling in front of his eyes.
He had woken up in the middle of some kind of storm. Strange to think that the Rift could have weather of it’s own -but what did he know. All around him there was light. It rolled through the air like the webs in the plasma ball; was somehow both beautiful and blinding. Proustite turned his gaze to the horizon and felt five years old again.
‘I might die here.’
As far as thoughts went it was not despairing. It was honest.
He had spent time in the Rift before. Tanzanite had put them all there- Bismuthite, Azurite, Paragonite, Spinel, Wolframite, Ajoite, Uranophane- as punishment for following Hematite in his defiance of what she had called a higher power.
’Metallia.’
Jack came from Roman Catholic stock, but was not religious himself. He had never been. As a boy he once snuck into church and ate all of the little eucharists because he liked the taste of them. He had prayed sometime in his life, but it had never come easy. It had not done for him what She had done for him; whether that was reward or retribution.
On his hands and knees Proustite dragged himself under a nearby outcropping of rock to wait out the storm.
529 words
