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?

(You can only relive a memory from a holiday in December and it must be from this lifetime. Characters who have lost civilian memories, such as in a side swap, will have a much vaguer memory. Locations and faces will be blurred and unrecognizable, and the memory will not reveal anything about their previous life. These characters may be left feeling a little hollow after the memory.


The holidays were over. With the new year starting, it was time to pack away the ornaments, lights, and other decorations. It was a bittersweet feeling for Jadyn with so many of the ornaments on the tree carrying memories of his childhood. His sister was currently at work though and he wanted to surprise her by having at least half of the work done before she got home. She had always worked so hard and it was past time he started to work hard to help her out more.

Outside it was snowing, and freezing, and it was getting dark. He'd have to take down the outdoor decorations tomorrow. Instead Jadyn hauled the myriad containers out of the hall closet and started to take the bigger decorations down first. His father's Santa figurines that they had put up again this year. The delicate snow globes with winter and Christmas scenes inside that his mother had collected. He and Marni had even put up some of the things they had made as children, things their mother had saved and preserved. He carefully wrapped and padded everything that went into the larger boxes.

Into the next box went the lights, coiled around hollow plastic barrels. Inside the plastic barrels went the tinsel, also carefully coiled up. He was hoping that they would stay that way for next year. No tangled lights for them next year! He had battled with those damn lights for almost three hours this year. Marni and Zakuro had laughed at his frustration, but his stubbornness had him laughing it off along with them even as he continued until he had conquered the tangle of lights. That memory made him smile as he finished putting the strings away.

Next were the ornaments themselves. He started at the bottom, using tissue paper to pad the more fragile ornaments, and settled them into the box. Everything was going fine until he got about halfway up the tree. In the process of taking one ornament down, he knocked another off the branch. There was some impressive gymnastics going on to try and save it from shattering but in the end both the ornament and Jadyn ended up on the floor.

"Damn it," he sighed. He'd been so careful... Sitting up, he looked at the pieces and began to contemplate the best way to pick them up. His next breath in was full of some weird glittery dust that had somehow been inside the broken ornament.

And then he wasn't in the living room anymore. Well, he was, just... Not his eighteen year old self. His thirteen year old self. It was the last Christmas he and Marni had had with their parents. Earlier that year, for his birthday, they had given him his very first camera and he had been going crazy taking pictures with it. He drove his sister up the wall with how often he had the camera in her face. His parents had just laughed and encouraged him and he could still remember their faces.

That Christmas, the memory he was in, most of his presents were accessories and add-ons for his camera. He had been so excited, even over Marni's groan of irritation. And film! There was so much film that he could use. It would take him months to get through it all! He had hugged them both so tightly and thanked them profusely.

"Ahh, but that's not all!" His father had laughed and stood up, moving over to the desk in the corner where he and Marni did their homework. "I hid these under the desk because I knew neither of you would look under here." Taped under the desk were two envelopes, one for him and one for his sister. They had given Marni lessons to a cooking class. Her happy squealing had been shrill and she was almost as excited as Jadyn had been when he opened his envelope.

"Photography class! I get to learn how to develop film, too? That's so awesome!" He had always been fascinated by the process as he had seen in movies and television shows and now he could see how it was really done. His parents made him promise that he would be extremely careful during that part of the lessons, as he would be handling or at least around chemicals. Of course he promised, he wouldn't do anything to compromise these lessons. He was so excited! It had been the best Christmas he could remember.

The memory ended soon after that and Jadyn blinked back to awareness. He was still in the living room, but it was present day again. He was eighteen and laying on the floor next to a broken ornament. There was no dust anywhere that he could see. What the hell was that? Everything had felt so real, looked so real. He could have sworn that he was back there, at thirteen, excited for his first ever photography lessons. For a split second, while he was reliving that memory, he had thought the past five years a roller coaster of a dream.

But he was back, and everything in the last five years had actually happened. Yeah, he would change one or two things if he could. He would have loved for his parents to have been able to meet Zakuro, but life had had other plans. He hoped wherever they were that they were watching, that they knew how happy he was with her. How happy they had made him and Marni while they were still here by encouraging them to always follow their dreams. He hoped they were proud of their kids.

He lay there for a while longer, running through that memory and many others. By the time he stood up again to get the Swiffer vac thing, his turquoise eyes were a little shinier than they had been before but he was happy. For the first time in a long time, Jadyn felt completely at peace with the world. He had gotten the rest of the ornaments down safely with no further weird memory things happening and everything put away by the time Marni got home.