Some children never grew up. Their bodies stretch and fill, their hair colors and styles change with the times, their social circles rotate and warp, their personalities struggle to find a balance, and their priorities begin to shift. But growing up and growing old were not mutually exclusive. One Death hunter in particular fell into this sometimes hard to define area.

Zoey’s dying thoughts were not on the deaths of her squad and friends, nor the impending doom of their failure, nor the faces of smiling loved ones – nor were they even on the peaceful floating into eternal sleep.

No, what 21-year-old Zoey Renolds thought about, in her final moments of consciousness, were her beanie babies.

~ ~ ~

When five-year-old Zoey was asked to draw her family in kindergarten, she drew herself on a big blue bird soaring away to who knew where, with a distant waving figure of a smiling father.

He was her favorite color after all, and that had been the only thing that mattered in the beginning: a toy Daddy had gotten for her birthday so that she could have something to hug while he was out. Rocket was blue, brave, and the best at everything he did; Zoey was never without him. He was the superhero that Daddy was not – Daddy was a man she saw after school who still kissed her when he came back but was often too tired to do much else. Rocket could fly through the sky – Daddy could flop on the couch. Rocket could earn world records – Daddy could reach the top of the shelves without a chair. Rocket was anything and everything she wanted him to be – Daddy was Daddy and did Daddy things that he didn’t explain because she was too young, like watch tv way past her bedtime, buy bad tasting soda that looked like coke but tasted bad, and keep her up with even more bumps in the night that woke her with pre-emptive tears.

Most importantly, Rocket believed her and could protect her – Daddy did neither. She could tell him all she wanted that she heard monsters in her closet, felt the bumps under her bed, feel like she was being watched when she walked to the bus stop. Daddy sometimes looked in these suspicious areas, or sometimes didn’t – but always he kissed her forehead and just told her to go back to sleep. Pray if you still felt scared. Zoey would clutch Rocket close and have him pray with her, and close her eyes with each “Amen”.

Blue was safety. Blue was comfort. She could be a child all she wanted so long as Rocket watched over her, because nothing could go wrong in her fantasy world. It was the realm she lived in when she wasn’t doing school work, or sometimes even then. It was a realm with talking animals and warm sunlight, pillows and hugs – it was where the moving shadows could not go and where the real Mommy lived; it was where she felt safest, where she smiled most.

And then one day Daddy took Rocket away, because Zoey was no longer a child and should have moved on, should have grown up and act her age.

And then little Zoey Renolds was startled to find that she was no longer five, but seven. No longer seven, but eight. Nine. Ten. And year after year she repressed the idle dreams of a little girl who just wanted her world to be perfect, because the real world taught her this was not so. Cut wounds into her soft flesh and remade it into iron scars, told her this was what to be, what to do, how to act. And for a time she followed their orders, because she didn’t know any other truth anymore. She would rather be what was expected than be herself.

Her own reality had been denied by the one man in her life who was supposed to support her – what else was left to fill the wounded ego of a child who did not want to cope with reality for seven years?

To survive, of course. Live in the actual world, not in fantasy. Stand up and be independent, not rely on someone else. Dolls were for little girls, not grown women.

And thus for six years she cultivated that new personality she had always projected on her plushie protector: strong-willed, decisive, impulsive, always looking to the skies for a new horizon to conquer – cutting the cloth of a new Zoey Renolds with the same metaphorical dagger Daddy had used, for all intents and purposes, to backstab her. In hindsight it might have seemed much, changing one’s personality just because of one doll being taken away.

But Rocket had been more than a doll to her. More than a playmate and cherished icon of her childhood, Rocket had inadvertently become the ideal she wanted of the one man who she depended upon so much: a hero, strong and kind, capable of protecting the meek, who saved the day and always knew what to do and say, who believed her when she said that there were things out to get her instead of giving strange looks and whispers.

It was simply because Daddy had not been perfect. It was simply because the world was not exactly how she wished. Her fragile mind could not comprehend or accept the fact that, in her view, there was so much wrong with the reality, and it broke as a result. The reformed result was the Zoey Renolds who was recruited into the Hunters, who winked without needing reason, who was easily angered at the smallest things, who was stupid and jaded before she even was moved into the Death Division where she would be told and made as such, who acted with blatant arrogance to the danger of their trainee missions.

And yet Rocket was still among her few belongings when she left. Just in case, she’d told herself. It was supposed to be the only weakness she allowed herself, in a private moment maybe once a month.

~ ~ ~

It had been a long day of paperwork and listening to Ferdinand yelling about what could have been done better on a particular mission, and her eyelids felt like tiny weights trying so desperately to fall all the way down. Another Hunter lost, another grim return; she was lucky only her wrist had been broken.

Like every time things went very wrong or she felt herself spiraling downwards, Zoey felt a deep urge to sleep and forget. Though her childish imaginations were not entertained while conscious, in her dreams lately she had found herself to be floating over what looked to be a pale construction of it. Forests with glitter, exotic animals, soft laughter. A flitting figure in a small white dress, an overwhelming sense of peace that left her with tears some mornings. Waking from perfection to reluctant reality, in all honesty.

It was intoxicating; some social outings she missed because she would rather sleep and have a chance at experiencing these phenomena than risk dealing with someone who might make her snap. A sick desire it was, knowing that death was the ultimate form of sleep, knowing that sometimes she wondered if she could live in that realm forever by just ending it right then and now. Did the leaders even mourn them when the expendables died?

She barely noticed the upside down hat on her bed before she flopped face first upon it.

A startled cry, a jerk upwards to view this intruder, this . . . hat? Cliff’s hat? With three guests inside. Three beanie baby guests, each tied with a ribbon about their necks: lion, dog, and unicorn looked up at her with wide eyes and soft plush to hug.

Zoey stared for a moment, slow to process the meaning of these strange gifts until she caught the card that had been displaced when she flopped. Small and with a nature-theme, it was signed by Cliff, Isaac, and Adam – an addendum at the bottom clarified that Cliff had gotten her the unicorn, no lie, in Isaac’s scrawl.

She stared for what felt like ages, not sure whether to smile or to laugh or to cry. Instead, she lurched over her bed and pulled out a small box whose only blue occupant she plucked up and out. Bird, lion, dog, and unicorn –

Cliff, Adam, Isaac, me –

– silly, stupid representations. Children’s playthings. Weaknesses.

Chest so tight, hard to breathe, the red was everywhere – but where were the others?

Gifts.

She wanted a group hug again. She was scared of dying alone.

She took a deep breath –

She heaved and gurgled –

- and decided that she needed to get them all something in return. Hugs were her specialty.

“D-Daddy . . .” Red, red everywhere.

“Quit being an emo, Renolds,” twenty-year-old Zoey Renolds mumbled to herself, hugging the beanie babies. “You have a job to do.” A job to die for. Friends to die with.

Daddy, five-year-old Zoey Renolds cried with a mouth that no longer worked, with eyes shut to fear, with a blue prayer upon her heart until it was shredded. Daddy.

She died with spiritual open arms, ready to cling to the first person she met in the afterlife. Not without regrets, but also not without hope. Perhaps being a Hunter had not corrupted, but only overshadowed, the piece of her that still sought guidance, that still sought after her Neverland.