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 Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 6:07 pm
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Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 9:41 pm
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[SOLO 1] : Home Again
Janice's return home from Barren Pines had been spontaneous and unexpected. There were no letters, no phone calls; she and her luggage had merely shown up at the doorstep and walked inside one morning, looking unusually disheveled even by her standards and smelling curiously of smoke. Her mother's gaze had followed her pointedly up the stairs, silently asking for an explanation. Janice responded by turning her own gaze back, her features exasperatedly calling attention to her less-than-prime state that had already been noticed, and how that essentially meant "ask again later," and continued her trek up to the second floor of the house, disappearing into her room with the familiar quiet click of her door latching shut.
This was more or less a normal occurence. The Fitzpatrick family did much of their communication in meaningful gazes-- they were all just too round-the-clock busy to have the time for a full spoken conversation, and had since learned to condense them into five-second glance exchanges. Some people found this kind of disturbing. They found it efficient. They were all very concerned with efficiency in their everyday lives.
Which was why there were no protests or called questions in the direction of Janice's closed door; she had her own things to do as well. If nothing else, the answer to the mystery of her daughter's return and appearance would come in the form of a concisely-written account affixed to the refrigerator.
Janice was exhausted, famished, and desperate for a shower from a unit that didn't involve the erratically-behaving water heater the Barren Pines dorm had. However, instead she opened one of her suitcases (which wasn't technically hers, she'd just picked the least charred and most intact ones from the wreckage caused by the fire) onto her bed, surveying its contents.
There wasn't much. Or, at least, there wasn't much left of what she'd brought up there. And what was left was tattered, ash-smeared, aged a decade from the damage it had all taken. She'd lost a favorite chess board entirely to the disasters at that irritating excuse for a school. The Monopoly and checkers boxes she'd managed to salvage would probably turn up missing pieces when she opened them, and there were yet others she was going to have to start replacing once she got settled back in.
Her closet, previously overstuffed, was now only lined with typical teenager clutter. It was disheartening to look at.
She felt particularly bitter about the loss of her Scrabble board. All that she'd had the good fortune to find of it was was a single O tile, chipped and the lacquer burnt away.
Janice turned her attention to picking her bony hands through articles of clothing she'd haphazardly thrown into one briefcase: these were methodically sorted into "washable," "donate to Goodwill," "trash," and "possibly not mine but still worth keeping." It had been difficult and ultimately unrewarding work to find much of anything she owned underneath all the rubble and dust and ash, so the latter three piles ended up dominating most of her findings, with a pair of pants from the uniform the singular item in the first one - probably not hers either, but they were her size, and that was good enough. She'd grown fond of the red plaid; it was definitely better-looking than the skirt she had to endure at Meadowview, and wasn't about to give up the Barren Pines look for good even if her short-lived career as a student there was now over.
Thank God it was over, really, and she was a completely faithless individual thinking this. The social dynamics of a public high school was going to take some time to get readjusted to, but she had better and brighter things to work for alongside that.
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Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 8:40 pm
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Posted: Sat Dec 26, 2009 4:19 pm
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Posted: Sat Dec 26, 2009 7:23 pm
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[SOLO 2] : No Need to Feel Betrayed
The news was met with mixed feelings.
Janice had left (escaped?) Barren Pines on order shortly after she’d been recruited. She had no more reason to be there, the reason she was there was taken care of the moment her star seed had been corrupted. Her station was not at that school, which, as she figured out, hadn’t turned out to be a school after all. It was a Negaverse operation. Whatever the case, though, she had left and mostly allowed herself to forget about it in favor of more important, current events, until her father passed a newspaper article by her with remarks of gratitude that she had left when she did. That place was dangerous, she’d been smart to escape -- too bad about her transcript though, couldn’t use a fake school to make an application look more impressive...
“...and at least you didn’t let yourself get traumatized over this,” he was saying, as they sipped at their coffee. “God, I know some people who’d come out of this looking like war veterans, Janice, but that‘s never been like you.”
She took the article up to her room, looked over it. Really, the whole thing read more like a memorial montage than an article, an embellished obituary, reflecting on what a tragedy the whole ordeal was and briefly highlighting some of the prodigies that were lost to it. Somewhere in the article there was list of survivors (which was abysmally short, considering the number of students who had attended the school), and it was here that Janice narrowed her eyes, read and reread the list, disbelieving.
The entire list only had two V’s in it, and neither of them spelled the name she was looking for. The list was at the end of the page -- but it didn’t go on anywhere else, no “Continued at ‘Barren Pines,’ page 3” to make her even suspect that there were more names to prod through. And yet she flipped through the pages, flicked her gaze across the front and back of each of them, looking for evidence of a misprint, something she’d missed, anything that suggested that she hadn’t read what she thought she had. But there was no mistake.
Vera Valentine was not on that list. She had... died.
She was dead. Janice wondered for a moment why it even bothered her, why this fact was taking so long to process. She read about people’s deaths all the time, caused people’s deaths all the time, nowadays. And she’d only encountered Vera a handful of times, they’d never even exchanged a word, never really had to. Being around Vera had been just as pleasant as being alone. Perhaps she honestly did miss the... company, as unfitting a word as that was to describe the few interactions they'd had.
Picking up a ballpoint pen and clicking it a few times, she wrote the girl's name, in her straight spiky scrawl, in the margin. At the bottom of the page, under the article. Vera Valentine. The name had really looked a lot better in her handwriting. She fished a pair of scissors out of her desk, clipped the article out, and carefully stored it away in her filing cabinet.
If she'd lived she would have recruited her.
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Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2009 9:32 am
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Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2009 2:33 pm
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Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2010 8:10 am
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