Quote:
The holidays are close to ending and it’s time to start packing away your decorations. In a stroke of bad luck, you drop an ornament (or other small bauble) and it shatters. Inside was a strange, glistening dust that you accidentally inhale. You are immediately met with a strong hallucination of a previous holiday memory. It only lasts for a few moments, but it feels like you are back in the memory, reliving it. It seems so real but when it ends, you are back in the present with no trace of the dust left in sight. Which holiday memory did you relive, and how do you react to being torn from it?
Cleaning up after Christmas was always more than a little bit depressing. Once upon a time, Tristan had family to do it with; reassuring Aderyn had consumed most of the cleanup process, because Aderyn always got more depressed about it than him. She was young and silly and she loved Christmas more than she was ever willing to admit out loud. This year, though, as it had been for the past several...There was no Aderyn, no Mam in the kitchen laughing and baking cookies because she insisted taking the tree down to celebrate the new year deserved just as much celebration as putting it up, no...any of that. Just the appartment he shared with Prosper, and it wasn't awful or lonely, but it also...wasn't the same.
Maybe he'd try his hand at baking, later. Sharing a batch of cookies with his surprisingly-tolerable roommate wasn't quite the same as sharing them with his family, but it was certainly better than just angsting around doing nothing once he was done taking his share of ornaments off the tree.
He'd let his thoughts drift, and maybe he'd let them drift too far, because he reached to pull a plain glass ball off the tree, and it slipped from his fingers and crashed to the ground, faster than he could catch it.
"Damn it," he said, under his breath. It was nothing terribly irreplaceable -- just a red glass ball from a set he'd picked up on the cheap in an after-Christmas sale -- but glass on the floor was still a frustration, and one he wasn't exactly eager to play around with. Probably for the best Prosper was out, because Tristan was not eager to have to navigate someone else around the mess.
He strode back into the kitchen, picking up the broom and dustpan, and started sweeping up the remnants. As he did, he noticed something odd -- a strange....powdery substance in the remnants of the ball, stirred up by his cleanup efforts. It hung like dust in the air, and he was inclined to dismiss it as a strange error in manufacturing, because, well. What else could it be?
He was ready to dismiss it, at least, until he caught a faceful of it as he dumped the pan of glass fragments into the trash. He squeezed his eyes shut as an automatic response, but he knew that he had absolutely inhaled some of it in his startle response.
"Oh, hell," he said, under his breath, tone colored with frustration. He spent enough time in labs to know that inhaling strange powders was a very, very bad idea, especially ones whose origin was this much of a mystery. The smarter thing to do would have been to grab a facemask as soon as he realized there was a strange substance involved, but he'd been more worried about cleanliness than safety, and...stupid, stupid, stupid.
And then, he opened his eyes.
For a moment, he wasn't in the apartment he shared with Prosper Dubois.
For a moment, he was somewhere far from there, and far before.
"Come on, Tristan, get up, don't be such a lazy bum," Aderyn's laughter and her encouraging tugs on the sleeves of his pajamas had him stirring from sleep. For a moment, Tristan considered pretending to be asleep longer, but the smell of bacon and sausage drifting from the kitchen encouraged him rapidly out of bed. "Mam made breakfast, we're just waiting on you to eat and open presents!" She continued, as he rolled out of bed and fumbled for his glasses. A small pair of hands entered the blurred field of his vision, and Aderyn was placing them on his face, slightly askew.
"Thanks, sis," he said, adjustingt hem to get them more in line. Aderyn was bouncing on her heels, eyes wide and a bright smile on her face, and who was he to deny her? "Come on, I want to see what Mam's cooked up, I bet it'll be amazing."
"It always is!" Aderyn said brightly, and she darted out of his room, and he followed, heading down the short hall that went to the open kitchen/living room that made up the main area of their small apartment. It wasn't much; the space was small and somewhat cramped, especially filled with their Christmas tree and presents -- which weren't many, but were enough -- but it was home.
Their mother stood in the kitchen, pale blue hair up in a bun, an apron tossed over her nightgown and a spread of food laid out on the counters. There were eggs, sausage, bacon -- she'd even managed to find the ingredients for laverbread and a plate full of fried cockles.
"So," she asked, accent thicker than either of her children's, "what do we want to do, fy mach rhai? Food, or presents first?"
"Food," Tristan said, at the same time Aderyn said "presents!"
Their mother laughed, shaking her head fondly, and then tapped her chin like she was considering.
"Come on," Tristan said huffily, frowning down at his little sister, "by the time we open presents, the food will be cold!"
"Your brother does have a point," their mother said, sounding more than slightly amused.
"Ugh," Aderyn huffed, "I guess. Food first." She dropped down at the table like it was a great burden, but Tristan knew her well enough to know that she was overdramatizing the whole thing. She was just as eager to eat what their mother cooked as he was, and so when he got a plate together for himself, he made one for her, too, setting it down in front of her. "Thanks!" She said, brightly, and with no more pretense she began to dig in, eagerly devouring the food in front of her.
"You're welcome," Tristan said lightly, and then he went to start digging into his own.
It didn't matter that they didn't have a lot. All they needed to have was each other, and they could all be more than content.
Their mother joined them at the table, and it was a meal full of smiles and laughter.
Once the food was finished, they retired from the table to open presents. Aderyn squealed in delight over a complete set of Harry Potter books, and Tristan gasped quietly at the beautiful, leatherbound edition of Frankenstein that sat in his lap. Both, he knew, were things their mother must have spent all year saving for, and he llooked over at her to see her eyes shining with delighted tears.
It was hardly a thought, to go over and hug her, and then beckon Aderyn in to do the same. It didn't matter that they couldn't get the overflowing piles of presents that might be under other kids' trees. They were a family, and they had everything they could ever need right there.
For a long moment after the memory faded, Tristan stood frozen, the hand that held the dustpan shaking slightly.
He knew that Christmas. He had been fourteen, Aderyn ten, just old enough to really understand why their family Christmases had to be a little smaller than everyone else's. It had been one of the last few they had really bene able to go all out for, before Mom's cancer had gotten especially bad and they ran out of money for doctors.
And before Aderyn disappeared into the mist one night, never to be heard from again.
Tristan made one last check of the floor to ensure there were no stray shards of glass, and once he was confident it was relatively cleaned up, he put away the broom and dustpan, walked back to his room, locked the door, and curled up into a ball.
It wasn't often that he let himself really feel the loss of his family. It wasn't often he let himself really feel much of anything; feelings were a good way to get dragged down into anxiety and misery and pain. but what was he supposed to do, after being slingshot back to being fourteen and surrounded by family and happy?
He didn't cry; Tristan wasn't one for tears, no matter how intense the emotions he might be finally letting himself feel. He did, however, huddle in silence, undecorating project wholly and miserably abandoned. He could finish that...later. Maybe even rope Prosper into helping.
For now, he...missed his family. Missed them so much it was almost hard to breathe, like a physical weight on his chest. Like someoen had reached in and torn out his lungs, and then sloppily shoved them back in, butt hey weren't quite in working order just yet.
Since becoming Mycenae, he'd developed suspicions about what might have happened to Aderyn - that she was a victim of the war he'd found himself pulled into - but not knowingt he exact hows or whys was still misery. At least he had an answer and a gravestone for his mother. And for his father, for that matter, even if it was back home in Wales.
But answers wouldn't change the terrible, looming facts. The simple and unavoidable truth.
Tristan was alone.
[1518 words]
