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meikuree · 3 years

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the centre cannot hold

Fandom: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Hitch Dreyse & Annie Leonhart Characters: Annie Leonhart, Hitch Dreyse, Armin Arlert (mentioned) Additional Tags: Canon Compliant, Mild Psychological Horror

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The days blend into a seamless fugue, dreamlike and out of reach.

(Or: a look at Annie's time in the crystal.)

The days blend into a seamless fugue, dreamlike and out of reach.

She can't place what time it is, inside. Time is meaningless. The interrogators who enter complain about the cold drafts puffing through the bricks; she can't feel any of it. Only the blunt sensation of the crystal’s cover, cool as iron is cool, running over her arms and torso and head, her entire body.

Hitch visits, many times. She comes to know her by the telltale skip of her boots on the floor. The way she always leaves the door ajar, as though she hadn’t intended to stay long. Her own eyes are closed now, all the time. It means her other senses become sharper. She hears mutters even through the thick slab of wood that passes for a door, and learns the smell of autumn filtering through the bars of her cell’s sole window, carried into the space in dead leaves stuck to the soles of soldiers' boots.

Those signs are what she begins to rely on to mark the passage of time. In the initial months, it’s an inexact science. Mere guesswork, in which she misestimates, on a few occasions, the correspondence between the oil-stench of polished boots and badges and the exact military festival being celebrated outside.

She listens to the chatter of the scouts who return daily to work out the mysteries surrounding her. How she breathes, what is keeping her alive. She knows the answers herself, of course. In this state she is tapped into the Paths realm; feeding on the otherworldly largesse of Ymir Fritz somehow, her lungs sustained by oxygen piped into her chest by means metaphysical and invisible. How long do you think she’ll last in there, they ask, and she wants to bark a laugh, say: I can stay here for the rest of my life. She starts a betting pool with herself about when they will meander towards or away from the answers, and also memorises some of their names—Anya, Nicolas, Louis—as a matter of personal amusement. Hange is the one who gets closest to piecing together anything about the truth, including the concept of an afterlife and/or higher realm.

Eventually they give up on her. With the Shiganshina basement breached, Hange’s purview as commander shifts to other horizons. The room hollows out as they clear the furniture, the echo that bounces off its walls widening into a sound vast enough to fill graveyards. A looming silence. Still as death. Only Hitch continues to come by, and Annie begins to yearn mentally for the stimulation of her conversations, like a plant straining towards the sun. Towards necessary sustenance.

She reminisces about her history lessons back in the Survey Corps, sometimes. It had been fascinating to see what counted for fact and narrative in a different land. She now wonders if she's become an artefact of history herself. Dead for all intents and purposes, preserved only in textbooks. Pragmatism brings her back to earth, when she remembers that nobody has ever been memorialised for lying in a coma.

Her sensory awareness only extends so far, after all that. It is deep, but not very broad. In the first year she keeps track of worldly happenings by the generosity and latitude of Hitch’s reports. Her passionate spiels, often preceded by a long indrawn breath and groans of despair that could have rivalled Eren’s, span an impressive set of topics ranging from Eren’s whereabouts, the Survey Corps’ movements, and military gossip, to more quotidian ills that ail her: a nail chipped while filing paperwork, her anguish over a sold-out bakery on the way home. The twenty letter-long saga she has going on with a romantic rival-turned-interest-turned-rival-again. Annie becomes the unwitting beneficiary of her ability to transform all ordinary occurrences into effusive theatre.

There are a few signs. The stunning perseverance with which Hitch comes. The verve and enthusiasm Hitch puts on full display before her, as though she is performing—and hoping that somewhere, she might be watching. The fond wonder and melancholy with which she speaks of their short-lived time in the Military Police. Hitch, Annie suspects, comes because she is nursing the remnants of a badly timed crush on her.

In this place, it’s a happy accident. It relieves the slight irritation she feels when Hitch confesses a touch too much detail about the minutiae of her morning routines and new interests. She’s grateful, in some deep unacknowledged part of herself, for the contact with another person from her old life, even if it’s one-sided and not very conversational on her end.

Every now and then she gets glimpses of the activities her erstwhile associates—Eren, Armin, Mikasa—are getting up to, in updates from Hitch spaced months apart. It is amusing, at first, to hear Hitch discuss them with distant respect and reverence as if at a remove, when she has firsthand knowledge of their individual quirks and neuroses, and can fill in the blanks within her iron silence much better than Hitch can. She saw long ago how they were some of the greatest breathing idiots to walk the earth; she briefly wishes she could tell it to Hitch too, puncture the aura of myth that has surrounded them like a bubble.

Eventually enough time passes that she has to recontextualise what she knows of them against the secondhand knowledge Hitch relays to her each time, adjusting her mental picture of who they are, the distance between memory and fact asserting itself. It grows apparent in those moments that they are becoming foreign to her too, changing while she remains fixed here, with outdated fragments of people, an insect trapped in scintillating amber.

Armin drops in to see her about four times in the first year. When he speaks he reaches a hand out to touch her crystal, and probably gazes at her the whole time; she can tell by the soft thud of his fingers upon her looking-glass cage. He tells her about Paradis’s defenselessness, their discoveries over the ocean. Pleads with her for a sign, any sign, that she is listening, and then sits with his knees drawn up, the stone floor vibrating imperceptibly with his motion. After his second call he begins to express his sympathy for her. The belief that he now understands why she had to betray them.

She wonders, idly, if he’s kept his nervous habit of biting at his cuticles. He has a grim edge to his voice now, a flute and gravel ruthlessness she hadn't recalled belonging to him before. Unlike Hitch, he doesn't say much. With him, she gets treated to dense silences interspersed with outbursts of conviction, or emotion. As though he speaks only when he has no choice, no other outlet.

She supposes his approach is one of delicacy, in opposition to Hitch’s: there is no evidence she is conscious, although she is alive, so talking is more or less a fanciful gamble; there’s no guarantee his words will reach a living being. She can’t fault him, on a technicality. She only laments that his idealism has given way to unimaginative realism too. Officially, he is devising a plan to establish contact with underground allies in Marley; unofficially, she wants to ask him if reaching the sea had truly made him happy, or only brought a new wave of troubles.

But her opportunities to have anything to think all these against are privileged and few. The visits are sparse, on the whole, so that she learns to conserve her responses and, most importantly, ration her thoughts—like a precious, corked wine, fit to be let through into her conscious refrain only in drips, a resource not to be exhausted too quickly. She has to remain here until there is certain guarantee she can complete her mission. In layman terms: she has to last through years of boredom.

She repeats it to herself, like an idle song or a blinkered reminder: she can endure it. She has to endure it.

After that she slows down her pace of thinking by necessity. Draws every internal argument that would have taken minutes out over the span of weeks. This dissolution makes her feel not so much like a primordial titan, moving according to vast, immense timespans, but a piece of rubber stretched to its limits, shrivelled and ready to burst.

Dreaming is the most direct analogue for her existence in this crystal shell. But it’s an incomplete description. It’s not like being asleep. She hasn’t relinquished consciousness, simply adopted a fickle and yet compulsory relationship with it. Some days, her mind is sharp and lucid like clear water. Others, she wakes up sluggish and nauseated, with the slow pressure of an anvil headache at her temples, a feverish chill bathing her bones. Like she’s slept far, far too much. Like she hasn’t woken up at all, but passed into a worse, second slumber. The effect is that of being drugged, of being sunk into an unnatural fatigue.

In these moments her choices are confined to the binary of staying awake and suffering, or returning to sleep and worsening it. Her muscles ache and scream for movement or stimulation; but she cannot move, and so has no recourse to relief. Only the sickening ache, the awareness of the uncomfortable fog, her arms trapped by her sides, always, like dumb logs.

Consciousness becomes the centrepoint her life revolves around. Sometimes, its presence is like a bullet aimed at her that she can’t catch: fleeting, painful, inescapable.

Back in the trainee bunkers she’d moved slowly. Pulled off the act of a sullen, indolent girl, better inclined towards a long nap than proper sparring. It’d shocked people that she was in fact a first-class prodigy in hand-to-hand combat. More than once she’d heard herself described by her peers as a concealed knife: inconspicuous at first, lethal once unleashed and in motion.

Those days are behind her now. A trite touch of fate, perhaps, that her languorousness now looks like it had been a rehearsal for this longer, extended sojourn in stillness. She can no longer summon movement; she has no defense against any assumptions people might concoct about her. She can only hope that people will remember the shadow her outsized figure cast as the Female Titan, even in the absence of continued proof.

As it turns out, what is most difficult is not the boredom, or time, or the trappings of her mind. Solitude suits her. She is not afraid of her thoughts. The symptoms of wakefulness frustrate her, but her mind has long been a well-controlled thing, smooth and cunning. She’d perfected the skill of disciplining it through the gruelling, unending hours of training with her father in her youth. Learning great focus, concentrating on the exercises that determined if she got to sleep, or eat, or drink. Disregarding all other excess, like the russet burn of sunset or sundown behind her in the courtyards. Your mind could not be suggestible, in this situation. Not even as an eight-year old.

No; what truly grates is the loss of sensation. Her capacity to interact with the world. Heading inside has severed her from her repertoire of fighting stances, uppercuts, movements. No longer can she understand her environment by the rhythms of her body attuned to it: the sunspots in her vision, the wind whipping her shins, the recoil of her fists against an enemy. She once knew the world by the blows and kicks it directed back at her; they were signals, an entire language of their own. She's been reduced to a lonely speck, disconnected from her single means of communication, her vernacular for parsing the world around her. The lonely, obsessive cycle of thoughts she can stand—but this? The dark, empty corridor of her body where she once had access to momentum, eruption, injury and the lightning burst of revelation in knowing her enemies by their punches, the scrapes and bruises left on them? It’s unbearable.

She resigns herself, but never quite crosses the hurdle. Many times she registers the itch of her limbs desiring to move, a furious bristle skittering upon her skin or on the edge of her brain. There is no outlet for them. Even the smallest movements are off-limits to her. She can’t flex her fingers, or tense her toes. The boundaries of her prison are absolute. These impulses, blossoming and then dead-ended, coil up and accumulate inside her like poison. Like a stricken scream with no release.

After a period of time she tentatively defines as three years, she hears Hitch entering and turning the key in the lock in her usual smooth motion. The tiny clink a struck bell in the gloom of mental oblivion. She perks up. Prepares to listen for any news.

“I know it’s been a while,” Hitch starts, “but we’ve been busy preparing for the Queen’s inauguration— like, god, how many ceremonies do these nobles need?— and I was detained by gift duty, can you believe, which meant I had to shop for the second-tier nincompoops over at the chambers—“

Annie’s blood, a gentle throbbing before, suddenly runs cold. Inauguration? But surely— Historia’s coronation, according to the silver measure of her careful timeline, had passed a long time ago. They should have moved far beyond by now.

“Anyway,” she hears Hitch saying now, a little morosely, “hard to believe it’ll be one-and-a-half years soon with you here. That you’re still in there.“

Annie chokes, a gutted sound in her head. She must have lost touch with her sense of time in the previous few weeks. It’s the one possible explanation.

If it’s only been one and a half years, she can only imagine what the next two, or three, or five, or seven years until her death will be like.

She feels the rug being pulled out beneath her feet. There’s panic now, a stab in her throat, the realisation she has to move back to the drawing board. Reassess everything she knows. She’d kept track well enough in the later half of the first year—what had changed?

Hitch leaves. She doesn’t register it.

Her sanity has so far hinged upon the single, fantastic, incredulous constant of Hitch’s visits to her. It’s a fragile coincidence—Hitch might one day get tired of her, reality outpacing her idealisation of her, and stop coming, too. She is beginning to feel the hours and days like an acrid trap, her thoughts a rapid torrent that her body—inverted in frozen stasis—will never keep up with. Suddenly every second is too slow, too long.

She wants to yell. Wants to rattle the bars of her mind-cage. But the only thing that answers her is drifting somnolence, like a hand passing sluggishly over her head, and then disappearing. The same smiling silence of her unresponsive body, indifferent to her will.

What life will this be, she thinks, what life will I be left with, and tries to plan, to consider the contingencies—but just as suddenly, nothing comes to mind, except the hollow echo of her voice referring across her insensate headscape, the strain of her thoughts thinned into pieces from disuse.

#i'm rusty with writing but! here's a thing #this is mostly about the horror of being stuck in a crystal for four years with your thoughts as your (almost) sole company #featuring very light and one-sided hitchani #i actually love the ship; annie just can't reciprocate because she's. y'know #snk #annie leonhart #hitch dreyse #hitchani #hitchannie #annie leonhardt #my fic #aot #armin arlert

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storyofmychoices · 4 years

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Coordinates

[Bryce Lahela x Olivia Hadley Masterlist]

Characters: Bryce Lahela, Olivia Hadley (OC), Keiki Lahela

Prompt: Memory - @choicesjunechallenge

This takes place after Room Warming. Bryce and Keiki have found a new apartment to move into, but they want a certain pediatrician to move in too. ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

“Are you nervous?!” Keiki teased, watching her brother continue to fiddle with his outfit, the end result each time, looking exactly the same as before.

His fingers ran through his hair once more. He shook his head, his hair naturally falling to the side as it did the ten times prior. “Are you sure you’re okay with this? If you’re not, I won’t go through with it.”

“I want you to be happy. She makes you happy.” Keiki hugged him quickly. “Just, do me a favor, when you show Olivia the apartment, don’t be all weird and cryptic about it like you did with me. I know you were hoping for mystery and intrigue, but it was weird.”

He rolled his eyes. “I question how I manage my life before you got here.”

She shrugged. “I wonder the same thing!”

Bryce let out a low chuckle as he gazed at his not so little sister. “Even if she says no, thank you for this.”

“She won’t!” She offered with a reassuring smile before shifting her attention back to her phone.

“There are leftovers in the fridge for lunch. I’m only working one shift today, so I shouldn’t be back too late.” Keiki barely looked up from her phone. “Don’t leave the apartment and call the hospital if you need anything.”

“Mmhmm,” she mumbled, laughing at something on her phone that was far more interesting than him.

“Oh, and... feel free to use your excess free time to box stuff up!”

She gave him a curt salute. “Aye, aye.”

☆ ☆ ☆

“Thanks for meeting me.” Bryce handed Olivia her regular coffee order that he had picked up for her.

“I won’t ever turn down sharing a morning cup of coffee with you before work.” Olivia happily sipped her cold brew coffee as they began their walk through the park. It took a few extra minutes this way, but they never minded that, plus it was worth it for the view.

He tried to hold back his smile. He was hoping they could have coffee together every morning and not need to make a special plan to do it. “I took your advice and found a two-bedroom apartment.”

“Bryce! That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you and Keiki. Where is it?” She asked warily, hoping it wasn’t too far away.

“It’s actually in my building. One of the top floor apartments opened up. It’s a little bigger than we need, but I was able to get a good deal on the rent.” His fingers absentmindedly thumbed the small box burning a hole in his pocket.

A sigh of relief slipped out of her lips. With their busy hospital schedules, their limited time was precious. She was grateful he would still be close by. “That’s wonderful! Keiki must be so excited!”

“She’s thrilled, she’s already mapped everything out. After this, I won’t be surprised if she decides to be an interior decorator. She’s been looking things up on Pinterest and making moodboards, or something, for each room,” he shrugged. “It keeps her busy and out of trouble, at least.”

Olivia laughed softly. “I’m sure it will look amazing when she’s done. You could do with a bit more style. When can you move in?”

“Officially? Next week. But my landlord let us start moving boxes yesterday,” he responded.

“This is definitely a cause to celebrate!!! I’m making you both a special dinner in your new apartment to commemorate this event. We can bring what we need and sit on the floor if we have to. I want your first memory in the apartment to be extra special,” she declared. “Any special requests or shall I surprise you?”

He tapped the box once more. Now was as good a time as any. He guided her off to the side. “Actually, just one.”

“Of course, anything!”

Bryce handed her the black box. “I got you something.”

“What’s the occasion?” She questioned curiously, slowly opening it, revealing a small keychain. She brushed her fingers over the words “I will love you forever” underneath which were a set of latitude and longitude directions. “What are the coordinates to?”

“Our first apartment...”

She could hear the uncertainty in his normally confident vibrato. She shook her head, her nose and brows wrinkling in confusion.

“At least I hope it is.” He took a key out of his pocket. “Olivia, will you move in with me?”

“YES!” Olivia carefully wrapped her arms around him, trying not to drop the box nor spill her coffee.

“Really?” He hesitated momentarily before returning her embrace.

“Of course, you idiot!” She nudged him as she pushed him away. “I mean, I’m pretty sure that key would look much better on my new favorite keychain than in your hand. Don’t you think?”

Bryce borrowed the keychain and slipped the key onto it, handing it back to her. “A perfect fit.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself!” Olivia gave it one last look, then, placed it safely in her purse. “Are you sure Keiki is okay with it? I know this is new with her, I wouldn’t want to jeopardize your relationship with her. She’s too important to you.”

“How did I get so lucky?” He questioned, taking her hand in his own, as they continued on their way. “Keiki said the same thing about you!”

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Perma tags: @lilyoffandoms ; @raleighcarrera ; @mfackenthal ; @the-soot-sprite ; @virtuallytakenby ; @zeniamiii ; @kaavyaethanramsey; @choicesobsessed; @xjustin-ethansgirliex ; @caseyvalentineramsey; @trappedinfandoms; @anotherbeingsworld ; @obsessed-with-humans

Bryce // Open Heart Tags: @thearianam ; @burnsoslow ; @mvalentine ; @rookie-ramsey ; @missmiimiie; @jamespotterthefirst ; @adrianadmirer

#Bryce Lahela #Bryce Lahela x MC #Open Heart #Open Heart 2 #Keiki Lahela #bryce x keiki #Bryce x Olivia #Olivia Hadley #fan fiction

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latitudeapartments · 5 months

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Luxury Apartments at Latitude | Rent Apartments New Orleans

Welcome to Latitude

Latitude is an upcoming residential tower designed to deliver an aspiring lifestyle to the urban nomad. This 196-unit complex, being built in Metairie, Louisiana, is conveniently located on Lake Pontchartrain's south shore near New Orleans. Often touted to be one of the best places to live in Louisiana, Metairie's spirit of a mixed urban-suburban feel is captured beautifully in Latitude's architectural design.

The city exudes a unique cross-cultural charm making it a favorite tourist spot and a proud home to many enjoying its arts, unique entertainment profile, and French-accented Southern grace. Surrounded by water—the lake to the north and the Mississippi River to the south—and papered with parks, entertainment venues, and historic businesses and eateries. There are a lot of bars, restaurants, and coffee shops frequented by locals and tourists alike.

Latitude is located at 3100 Lake Villa Drive at the intersection of Rye Street and is easily accessible by Interstate-10. And is minutes away from many major employers as well as shopping, dining, and entertainment.

Visit Us: 3100 Lake Villa Dr, Metairie, Louisiana. Call: +1 985 618 1600 Email: [email protected]

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lizzieraindrops · 4 years

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Your chance to make the sun rise thrice (Chapter 3)

that a garden will grow (11,143 words)

"There are no happy endings, because nothing ends." - The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle That does not mean that there is no joy.

Veera is alive.

Also on AO3 | Playlist soundtrack | Aesthetic sideblog

Happy autumn equinox, everyone.

When I started this story as a oneshot back in 2016, I had no idea that it would turn into a series spanning four years of new life for these characters, much less that it would end up taking me nearly the same amount of time to write it.

I wrote the first part during the darkest yet time of my life as an abstract fantasy of being in a better place. I finish writing it today from a better place, physically, mentally, emotionally, and even spiritually. If I've learned anything from this, it's that your own creativity saves you and is powerful enough to call the better things that seem so impossible into existence.

This is my tribute to Veera as a character and everyone like her and anyone who has identified with her. She changed my life. Even with all OB's many, many flaws (dear god there are SO many), without the explicit representation of Veera's neurodivergence in the Helsinki comics, I don't know how I would have figured out that I'm autistic. That has been both the biggest hurdle and the greatest blessing in the trajectory of my healing. Since it's been so central to this story and its writing, I've included a link to some resources for autism spectrum self-diagnosis.

Part 1: Herbs on the windowsill

Part 2: Someday colors

Part 3: Your chance to make the sun rise thrice | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

***

Veera wakes gently, early, unexpectedly so. As she sits up, her weighted blanket slips off and crumples around her waist like a shed skin. Bands of muted morning coming through the blinds slide over her as she rises from the plane of the bed. The summer sun has still risen first, of course. True dark never falls here in the summer, at this high a latitude. But right now, its light is softened and diffused by a thin veil of cloud over the city. Listening, the others aren’t up and moving yet.

Slight shifting of her relaxed limbs makes the softness of the sheets into an extravagance. She’s in a rare, delicately balanced state, one where her senses have sharpened just enough to turn ordinary sensations exquisite without overwhelming her. She’ll have to spend some time listening to music – and with Niki and Beth. That was the plan anyway. But the others aren’t up yet.

Today, there’s a restlessness in her. Most days, she gets up slow, simply waiting until her body is ready to go about the day. Yet a quiet kind of discomfort has made a home in her core, nudging her to get moving. The feel of it is neither full nor hollow, not exactly painful yet nothing like comfort. It’s just there, a subdued directionless yearning.

But her mind needs to go at its own pace waking up. Inertia drags at her when she tries to move too fast or cut corners in her daily ritual. Subtle distress quickly follows that inertia if she tries to press the issue. It shows in the incrementally increasing fine tension of her muscles, slowly winding her up like clockwork. So she sits with the feeling. Motionless except for her breath in the middle of her bed, she thinks.

Light. Leaves. Home. Hunger. She should eat soon. They’re out of cereal, though. There’s a farmer’s market a few blocks away that should have fresh summer fruit. She could go. She does, sometimes, early in the morning like now, before Niki wakes up, and just wanders around. As long as she keeps it short and doesn’t talk much, she should be able to manage it without giving herself a headache.

Twenty minutes find her feet traversing muted pink granite. Neat rectangular stone cobbles pave the street below her living room window. The rumble of a loud truck passing right by close makes her flinch, but she manages to shake the discomfort out of her neck and shoulders easily enough once it’s gone. Other than that, the streets are unusually peaceful. Most people like get out of the city this close to midsummer.

She steps lightly over the stone in snugly laced canvas shoes, toes touching down first. There’s some sort of bird hidden in the trees lining the street, singing two repeated notes on a slow loop. A flycatcher, she thinks.

Being in motion somewhat soothes her restlessness as she slips through broad swathes of clouded morning light between the shadows of buildings. The persistent sensation is nothing so strident as the hypervigilance that used to keep her so high strung. But its subtle company has been constant, lately. She can tell she’s internally processing something, but she can’t quite pin it down. Maybe that’s why she’s been waking up so much earlier than normal.

Lately, a strangeness has been gently tugging at the edges of her mind. In part, she knows it’s a growing awareness of how much things have changed since four years ago. It’s happened so gradually. It was nigh invisible until she cast far enough back along the path of her own footsteps to see how far she’s come. She almost died, but she didn’t. She’s no longer in a desperate race to survive. Now, she’s alive. The question of who and what she is now is an unnervingly open one.

These days, she wakes within a body that is soft and scarred. She is both a wounded creature walking this world with strange steps and a thing healing yet already whole. More often than not, she finds her shoulders loose and her chest open, instead of curled tight into a semblance of stone. They can still seize up when her fears circle back around to worry at invisible scars. But it’s not an endless anxious state. It isn’t everything she is anymore.

Likewise, her nightmares don’t spend as many nights haunting her. Weeks pass between them, sometimes. When they do steal back to the surface of her psyche, the quiet fear they stir up saps all her energy and trails lazily through the daylight hours like an oilslick. She spends those days baking something sweet in the apartment’s warmly lit kitchen. Or she takes inventory of the shapes and textures of the leaves that hang suspended in the air of every familiar room.

It helps, even if dreams or memories linger smoldering in the back of her mind the whole time. The sensations and sense of space keep her grounded, both within herself and outside of the fickle fear and pain that flares and fades and keeps returning. Of course, nothing is so immediately comforting as the presence – and, in this searingly ephemeral moment, presences – that remind her she is not alone. But even when they aren’t there, the space itself reminds her that she lives with and in this place she’s chosen to call a home.

The apartment is the first home she can remember that feels the way she suspects one is supposed to. It fits around her, small and enclosed enough to know every inch without uncertainty scratching at the bounds of her awareness. Tucked away up on the third floor, it nests in a quiet old brick building that’s as comfortably worn in as her favorite hoodie. Its wide windows spread big and bright in every room, reminding her to breathe freely. She is no longer a creature caged. Shadows are soft in this place, and the sunlight is as much a part of it as the walls. Its radiant forms lance through glass and smile through aches, never failing to wrap her in warmth.

Leaves unfurl gently in every window. She likes to run the living silken or waxy greenness of purposeful growth between her fingertips. Perhaps their green faces are outnumbered by all the strangely familiar human ones in the photos along the whitewashed walls, marking where friendships have germinated. But then again, perhaps not. It’s a close call, and there’s always more of both growing. They’re still something of a miracle to her, after so long alone.

Low murmurs of outdoor conversation bring her back to the pop-up stalls of the market hovering just ahead. She’s there.

There are somewhat fewer visitors than normal, but the market still appears to be proceeding about business as usual. Early on, this Saturday market tends to be quieter than the Sunday one, not quite as full of people. It's that perfect balance of un-crowded enough that she can keep to her own internal world without interruption, but bustling enough that she doesn't stand out. She's just another woman at the market. Once in a while, gazes will slide over the scars on her cheek, or her upper arm if she’s wearing short sleeves (not her leg or ankle, as she never wears anything except pants). Her skin begins to remember to crawl - but then the eyes keep on sliding past, on to the peppers or the green beans or the fresh cut flowers.

Weaving her way into the dispersed crowd, she heads for the egg stand first, just in case they run out. They often do. With a dozen blue and brown eggs in tow, she roves about until she finds a stand with peaches she can smell from several paces away. Their sweet tang fills the air as she picks them out. She also gets some fresh apricots, brushing her fingertips over their velvety little coats of fuzz. She tucks the stonefruit and eggs safely into the backpack she brought and keeps moving. A yeasty oaf of fresh bread for picnicking later joins them. The rounded tip of the long loaf pokes out the top of the zippered pocket, hovering just behind her ear. She leaves the top of its paper wrapper open so it stays crisp.

Live music rolling out from the street corner captures her, pulling her out of her trajectory mid-stride to swing toward the unadorned sidewalk stage. The resonance of shimmering metal strings and singing wood flows over her and through her, and she simply sways with it, part of it. It sparkles over her skin and hums along her bones, making her flutter her fingers in pleasure, and it’s blissful. After everything she’s been through, the long gauntlet of near misses and fires and nightmare flames, it still seems wrong somehow for things to be this okay, to feel this good.

That’s why, when visceral self-consciousness swoops down on her again without warning, its familiar fear is as much something like relief as it is a thorn in an old wound. Nothing even causes it, really: just a stray passing glance from a stranger that slid over her hands instead of her scars and didn’t even linger. But it makes her remember the oddness of the ways her hands move, when she’s happy, when she’s stressed. It makes her stand out if she doesn’t make the effort to hide them – or if she takes a little too long to think in a conversation – or if she lets on that she can be hurt so easily by the smallest, normally inconsequential things.

In more dangerous times, standing out could have ended very badly for her. The feeling of being hunted might have retreated to the back of her mind, but it has never truly left. In moments like this, she still snaps back into old habits. Her fists clench into stillness, her mind into sharp wariness, her whole self into the ache of immobility except for consciously calculated movements. It’s not quite the old full-body taut-wire tension of terror. Nonetheless, it’s a painful tender twisting inside, pulling things skewed and wrong in her chest.

The thing is, she knows she’s one of the lucky ones. For so many people, the fear never gets to recede at all. Either the danger remains ever-present in the casual cruelties of the world, or their wounds never get the care they need to heal. Not everyone can be set free by toppling a single old castle of corruption into the sea. Veera gets to try to heal, as impossibly hard as it is and always will be. She has support to fall back on now, kind hearts that hear her, arms that will hold her when she hurts. Though they’re rare, she has days where she doesn’t feel like she has to hide at all. It’s so strange. Even before the Helsinki fire, she spent so long becoming acquainted with the wariness of attracting too much attention. She’s still trying to understand who she even is if she’s not hiding.

That’s why she’s doing the work she does with CYGNet. They’re all muddling their way toward healing from their one-off odd brand of hurt, but the support system they’re building could be useful for so much more. In her mind, they’re just the beginning. One day, maybe they can expand to help even more people beyond the Leda project. The Beths with different faces but surviving the same family history. The Nikis with different nightmares but recovering from the same betrayal. The Veeras with different scars who are just as overwhelmed by the everyday world, but deserve just as much of a chance to experience it without having to hide their truth in shame and become someone they’re not.

Well. Maybe one day. For now, one thing at a time. She has to take care of herself and her own healing if she’s going to make any progress down that distant path. Sometimes, the path she’s on right now still seems to stretch so much further ahead than she can fathom.

Eyes closed, Veera takes a breath into her tense stillness. To her own fragile heart, she whispers, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. She breathes; it passes.

Giving herself a few minutes more to listen to the music, she waits until the grip of physical memory lessens. The sound is still lovely, even if she can’t quite fall back into the two-piece symphony the way she did mere moments ago. She calms further as she carries herself onward again down the tent-lined street. Under the surface, though, in the same hollow where her restlessness lives, her heart remains sore where something still won’t settle into place.

Fortunately, there are other good things at the market that help soothe the ache. Even for someone like her who needs to limit her exposure to overstimulation and crowds, they make it worth braving all the bustle now and again.

A small smile tugs at the corner of her mouth at the sight of a profusion of green fronds leaning out from beneath the awning of the stand up ahead. It's bursting with foliage in more shades of green than she knew existed, and chock full of rows of those knobbly little succulents she loves so much. The vendor is a quiet man with a ponytail and a kind face. He merely smiles at her whenever she comes by. He’s one of those strangers who are friends by the shared appreciation of silence. Sometimes words get in the way.

He nods at her in recognition as she ducks into the stand to avoid a loud group of shoppers. Though there are people in there, something about the vendor and the greenery keeps things calm. The tiny forest is an island in the flow of people. It’s nearly on the opposite end of the market from where she started, and it always provides a brief respite where she can recover a little before heading back. Besides, she likes to look over the lacy ferns and trailing philodendrons and all the tiny succulents in every color of the rainbow, even if she already has too many.

She still leaves most of the houseplants to Niki to look after. But to her own surprise, she’s quite good at taking care of the succulents. For the most part, she leaves them somewhere sunny and ignores them. They love it. Sometimes they even treat her to little shiny-papery flowers in brilliant pink or yellow.

Ranks of mini succulents line one of stall’s tables. She’s barely skimming her fingers over the surfaces of a row of flat, stone-like lithops when she sees it. One of the tiny pots is filled with what appear to be little green spheres like peas. Looking closer, they’re round, succulent leaves attached to thin trailing stems. Sprouting from the end of one string of them is a long, spindly stem curving up to a closed flower bud that bobs in the breeze. She’s never seen anything like it.

The man running the stand notices her looking at it. Veera points at the plant and tilts her head in a question. He smiles and extracts a sheet of paper for her from a messy pile half tucked under the cash box. Its a care sheet for Senecio rowleyanus, or string of pearls.

Veera did promise Niki she’d stop bringing home so many succulents. But the plant man’s pressing the little pot of pearls into her hands, waving her wide eyes away with a smile when she reaches for her wallet. This one will have to be an exception. Her small smile and wave of thanks receive another nod in acknowledgement and farewell. Cupping the pot in both hands, she ventures back into the mid-morning river of people to take herself home.

On the way back down the street, the plant cradled against her chest draws smiles from the crowd. They often transfer to her as well. Something about the green thing in her arms softens people’s expressions, even when they see her scars. It makes it easier to walk softly, and to carry her dull ache of residual fear just as gently.

As if struck, she stumbles when she remembers that today, she gets to go home to her two best friends in the entire world. The ache that knowledge calls forth is just as arresting as the kind that comes with the clinging oilslick fear, yet different. This is far stronger and far sweeter, its truth a soft clarity. Veera clutches her plant close to her chest with one hand as she catches her balance on a fruit-covered table with the other. A handful of little oranges roll off as she bumps into it.

Stammering apologies, Veera scrambles to gather up the fallen fruit. A nearby woman browsing the citrus in a purple sweater kneels down to help her. Veera wasn’t planning on buying mandarins, but she can hardly knock them all over the ground and run off. She hopes she has enough cash left. Straightening up, she looks for somewhere to sit the fruit down so she can check her wallet.

But the woman in the sweater holds her hands out for them. She’s already put the ones she picked up in a canvas bag.

“I’ll take them,” she says. “I was gonna buy some anyway.” Her sweater is a few shades bluer than the warm purple of Veera’s own hoodie.

Veera blinks at her. “Are – are you sure?” She holds out one of the mandarins, showing its dented skin, fragrant with released citrus oils.

The woman gives her a small smile. “Yeah. I’ll eat that one first.”

“Oh. Um. Okay.” Veera delicately hands three more mandarins over. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Don’t worry about it.” The woman’s voice is like her smile: small but kind.

Veera whispers her thanks again, then hurries home before she can be waylaid by any more painfully kind gestures from strangers.

***

Veera’s so relieved to walk through her own door into the kitchen that she doesn’t realize someone’s in the living room, not until she hears a soft sob. Her head snaps up. Niki’s on the couch with her face in her hands and Beth next to her with an arm around her. Alarmed, Veera drops her bag on the kitchen counter and begins to make a beeline for her. But she hesitates. She’s used to offering Niki comfort whenever she can, but is she interrupting?

Too late. Beth makes a small sound of surprise when she notices Veera hovering halfway into the room. Niki looks up too, but she wipes her eyes and gives Veera a watery smile. It’s okay.

Niki holds a hand out as Veera makes her way over to the couch. Gladly, Veera takes it. As Veera stands there before the scruffy secondhand sofa in the hazy light from the window, the three of them are briefly an interlinked chain. Beth watches the other two with soft, understanding eyes, her arm steady over Niki’s shoulders.

Niki heaves a shaky sigh. Then she gives Beth’s knee a thankful squeeze and uses Veera’s hand to lever herself up to standing. She briefly embraces Veera, who returns the gesture. “I’m okay,” Niki whispers. Veera nods. Then Niki slips away into the kitchen and starts bustling around, half-seen behind the half-wall that divides it into an alcove off the main room. Presumably, she’s taking a moment to collect herself while unpacking Veera’s groceries. She does that. Niki doesn’t mind if Veera sees her cry – or Beth, apparently. But she always takes a moment alone afterward to put herself back together.

Veera shakes her head to clear away the traces of her second unexpected fright of the morning. In its wake, the empty spot on the couch is too inviting.

She flops onto the cushions next to Beth with a sigh and goes limp. Maybe going to the market was a little too ambitious for today. She’s already had too much excitement this week with Beth visiting, and she hasn’t slept well because of it, which only saps more of her limited energy. Even good things can be so exhausting. She knows she needs to get more rest than most people do, especially when there’s so much happening. But that’s so hard to remember when she knows that this moment is such a rare blessing. Both of her most important people are right here with her right now. It’s so hard to not throw herself completely into every possible joy she can have, in this transcendent sliver of time.

She rolls her head where it rests against the back of the couch to look at Beth sideways. “I got breakfast,” she offers.

“Looks like you wiped yourself out doing it.” Beth leans against the arm of the sofa to look at her. “Morning.” Her own tired eyes twinkle.

Veera smiles. She tries to fix this moment into memory: the wisps of Beth’s unbrushed hair catching the light, the wooden clatter of Niki opening and closing cabinets in the kitchen.

“Are you okay?” Veera asks.

Beth runs a hand through her hair. “Yeah. We were just talking, about,” she waves a hand around, encompassing all the faces in all the photos on the walls, “everything. We’re so different. But some of the stuff, it’s the same. The things we’re all going through. You know?”

Veera does.

The kitchen clatter intensifies as Niki starts moving pots and pans around and clinking them down on the stovetop.

“How many eggs do you want?” Niki calls, voice more steady now. When Veera and Beth come over to investigate, she’s already got a skillet out and is debating with herself whether to start a pot of porridge, too. Veera’s always in favor of porridge no matter what, and Beth’s never had proper Finnish porridge before, so that settles that.

Niki starts scooping the mixed grains into the pan without measuring, like normal. She fills it with an unknown amount of water from the sink with some arcane skill of estimation that Veera has never understood. It always turns out fine. As Beth gets to work slicing some of the fresh fruit, Veera sidles up to Niki and lays a light hand on her arm.

Niki meets her questioning eyes. “I’m okay,” she says again. But she leans into Veera’s touch and stays there. Veera says nothing, just strokes a thumb over Niki’s shoulder and holds the space. Oats and rice swirl in the saucepan as Niki stirs them into the water with a wooden spoon.

“I was talking to her about what happened with Aleks, and mum and dad.” Niki’s voice goes soft, but not hushed. Her words aren’t directed at Beth at the other counter, but they’re not hidden from her, either. “How it made it so hard to trust anyone anymore. Especially Suvi, ‘cause she was there before. And you know how that gets me all... ugh.” She twiddles her wooden spoon in the air. Then she leans even more into Veera, into the arm that curls around her in half an embrace. To think, that Veera is someone who offers such gestures now with hardly a hesitant thought.

“She just gets it, you know?” Niki continues. “Not that you don’t, but it’s different. Like, you understand about how people are always expecting things from you. People see what they wanna see, and only take you seriously if you play along with it. It’s so frustrating. And it’s bullshit! I’ve never met anyone who understands that better than you.” She stirs the porridge again.

“And Beth... she was telling me some about her dad. She knows about having someone close to you just pull the whole rug out from under your world.” Niki pauses her stirring, and looks at Veera. “I’ve always been amazed, how you just landed on your feet and hit the ground running, when you found out. I couldn’t have done that, if I was alone.”

Veera shrugs, incidentally squeezing Niki sideways. “I never was very close with Matti.”

Watching her, Niki’s face falls a little. “I’m glad he didn’t hurt you that way. But I wish... I don’t know. I wish you’d had someone who was there for you, then. Everyone deserves that.”

“Huh.” Veera blinks. “I’d never thought of it that way.”

Arms suddenly wrap tight around her middle, a face tucked into the crook of her neck and shoulders. The handle end of a wooden spoon presses into the muscles between her shoulderblades.

“Niki!” Veera exclaims softly.

“Hey, look.” Her voice is sniffly again. “I’m having a day, okay, let me just –” She holds Veera tight.

“Nikiii,” she cajoles. “I’m fine.” Her eyes flick toward Beth over Niki’s shoulder. Her hand hovers over a peach on the cutting board as she meets her eye. Veera tucks her head down a little, embarrassed. But Beth’s smiling, if also looking a bit watery.

“I know,” Niki says into her shoulder. “I know you’re fine. You’re wonderful. But I’m here, okay? You’re always here for us. But we’re here for you, too.” Niki reaches an arm out blindly toward Beth until her fingers make contact, then gathers her in as if calling in backup. Beth gladly lays down the knife and joins the impromptu embrace next to the stove.

“Um.” Veera automatically relaxes under the extra pressure. It’s nice. But she’s still flustered. And the vociferous burbling of the porridge is getting a little concerning. “I think the porridge is going to boil over.”

Niki releases her with a groan. Veera’s sure she’s rolling her eyes, even though she’s a little too overwhelmed to look at either of them.

“That doesn’t mean you’re getting out of letting us be nice to you,” Niki says as she returns to the stove. Soon, the porridge is placated and eggs sizzle in the skillet, providing a crackling accompaniment.

When the food’s ready, they crowd around the table squeezed into the little kitchen nook below the window as if they do this every day. They pick slices of ripe peach and apricot off a cutting board in the middle. Spoons click in bowls as they do their best not to elbow each other. Stonefruit and cinnamon mix in the air with the light sulfur of fresh eggs and the pervasive aroma of the basil in the windowbox.

After a languid breakfast and a long morning spent simply enjoying each other’s company, the cloud cover is well on its way to burning off. The three head out to the nearby park, determined to make the most of the sun while the two Finns show off the splendor of the Helsinki summer to Beth. They pack up the fresh bread and cheese and the rest of the fruit for a picnic later.

Veera’s companions’ eyes are bright and animated as they leave behind the crisscrossing tracks of the train station and step into the shelter of the park’s old trees. Boughs bend and leaves whisper lazily in the light wind breathing over the bay. Veera follows them. With the hood of her jacket pulled down, the cool and verdant breeze caresses her short hair. Shade and sunlight dapple the grass between the footpaths and spatter the old blanket that they throw over the green, the one that usually lives on the couch that Beth’s currently taken over. They’re exposed to the open sky and anything else that might wander the earth with them. But branches lace and lattice across the blue, and the handful of other park-goers are too immersed in their own summer reverie to pay them any mind.

It’s surreal, almost. Niki basks like a lizard, looking like she needs nothing else in the world to keep her happy. Beth keeps running over to stick her toes in the salt water of the little bay. She takes every deliberate step into grass and gravel as if both she and the world are fresh and new. Peace settles into Veera’s bones. She spends half her time watching the others while reading an old fantasy novel in the shade. The other half, she looks upon the scene as if watching herself, absolutely bewildered by the way she both sees and cannot see the pain that still lives in the three of them, even as she still feels the scores it left trailing across her heart.

It's a long and lazy afternoon in the best understated way. By the time they return home sunwarmed, though, Veera’s starting to feel the effects of having been out all day doing too many things. Her skull is beginning to ache. But it’s familiar and cool and quiet here. She can rest.

Once they unpack the remains of their picnic, Niki makes good on her earlier threat of not letting Veera get out of being fussed over. She chivvies the other two into the living room and onto the couch. To Veera’s mild bemusement, Niki sits next to her, across from Beth, looking far too pleased with herself.

Then Niki pulls all three of them into a cuddle pile with Veera caught in the middle.

Veera lets out a little squeak of surprise as she’s smothered in limbs and warm laughter. Beth’s only too happy to help Niki tag-team her, the traitor. She squeezes Beth’s wrist in retaliation, but all that gets her is Beth slipping out of her grip just enough to tangle her fingers with her own.

With a little shuffling, Veera ends up with Niki pressed comfortably up against her side leaning her head on Veera’s shoulder. Niki also tucks an arm around her, as natural and necessary as breathing. Curled up against her other side, Beth backstops her. She lets Niki play with the ends of her long dark hair with the hand that reaches around Veera’s shoulders. Beth’s still holding onto Veera’s hand, steady like she’s never planning on letting go. The intense late afternoon light slants into the room, sending stars refracting off of the glass bottles on the sill that trail green-leaved vine cuttings.

Veera doesn’t know that she’s ever been as happy as she is right now. She watches herself in half-believing wonder, then stops. She breathes. She feels the others’ breathing like her own. She reminds herself to just be here, just exist.

But the restlessness that she awoke with doesn’t cease, even now with the two presences she treasures most on either side of her, tucked almost as close to her body as they are to her heart. It still aches and whispers in her ear with a soft insistence. Something about the fragile intensity of this moment calls to that unknown quantity like its own.

This little apartment on the edge of the city was never meant to be more than just enough for her and Niki to carve a safe space out of a terrifying world. And it has been that. But then there was more. There were the herbs keeping the kitchen and the succulents dotting the shelves. There were the colors covering the floor in rugs and memories covering the walls in photos. There was ample quiet to replace chill silence, and the fullness of kind words spoken like truth. There were pancakes. There was sunshine. There was Jade and Justyna and Janika and Sofia and Sarah and Helena and Katja and Aryanna and Danielle and Alison and Cosima and Jennifer and Tony and Femke and Fay and Krystal; and there was Beth, and there was Niki, and there was her.

Perhaps that’s the strangeness that keeps plucking at her mind. Not only have her situation and surroundings strayed so far from what her life used to be, but she herself is someone different now. She emerged changed out the other side of the two fires that consumed her entire life. Maybe the flames were bookends. She doesnt remember anything from before the first, and the space between them was long and lonely. The person she became during that in-between time is still fused into her foundations.

And yet, so much of the structure of her self has shifted. New parts of her unfurl daily. Being within her own body feels both utterly familiar and completely new. She can look back at the strange girl she once was and still recognize parts of her as the strange woman she is now. Now, she’s someone who gets called Veera with a voice full of love and Mika with sense of wonder and Leda with mild curiosity, and they are all her.

The unexpectedness of being given so many names still leaves her bemused. There’s a surprising intimacy to them, the way people speak them like they’re describing the shape of her in so many other lives. She’s unaccustomed to it. As difficult as people can be, what she has now is... good. When she thinks on it too hard, it makes her ribs feel like they’re closing in on her heart even while her lungs expand to take in the whole sky in an single endless exhilarated breath.

She’s thinking about it now. It’s not just a thought. It’s a longing and a fulfilling, an ache and a balm, a memory and a future, a call and response. It becomes all of her in this moment, and she shivers with its intensity. The shiver ripples into the bodies nestled on either side of her. Only a few years ago, she could never have imagined being so close, or wanting to. Sometimes it’s still too much, even with Niki – even with both of them, now, who are both so inexplicably easy to be around. The companionable solitude bathes her soul like the green breathing of a forest in eternal spring. She thinks about the unlikeliness, the flouted impossibility of it all. The feeling that it calls into bloom from her seed of a heart is almost too much.

“Veera?” Niki turns to face her in response to the shiver, her golden head catching and holding the gilded afternoon light.

“You alright, Veer?” She blinks at the new sound of the new name spoken in Beth’s softest-leather voice. It fits, too.

Veera inhales to speak, but words evade articulation. She releases the breath again to its own wordless purposes. The hand that’s been interlaced with hers squeezes gently as Beth makes a little questioning sound like a cat and shifts the comfortable weight of her knees in Veera’s lap. On Veera’s other side, Niki leans even further into her than she has been and rests her chin on Veera’s shoulder.

The press of their affection and concern envelop her in dearest aching, and it’s so much. She wants to stay right where she is. But she’s hardly slept for the past two nights and she’s tired and aching from overextending herself and her words have left her again. The immensity of feeling blooming inside her on top of everything else is just too much. She won’t be able to stay like this much longer. She needs to be by herself, to quietly sort through the backlog of everything she’s experiencing that’s stacking up faster than she can process it.

First, though, she needs them to know how much this means to her. Her ears pick up every breath and brush of smallest movement, and her world is filled with little strokes of sound that fall across her skin and hum in her chest as if painted there. They’re closer and dearer to her than anyone has ever been. Veera lifts Beth’s hand with her own and sweeps Niki’s hand into her grasp as well. Then, she presses both of them hard against her heartbeat. She bends her head down and locks her arms over her own chest to hold them there. No sound escapes her except a minute whimper.

Wordless murmurs and small shufflings to stay close tell her that they understand what she can’t say right now, and tell it back to her twofold. She sniffles a little, then begins to untangle herself without yet letting go. She doesn’t want to leave. But if she doesn’t, the waves of overwhelm that currently shove at her will become a tide that pulls her under and leaves her head pounding.

Niki’s voice, low. “You getting overloaded?”

Veera nods.

“Okay,” she says gently. “Go wind down. We won’t be loud.” Niki’s always been so understanding, right from the very first moment she’d shared her strangeness. Secret for a secret, she’d said, guarding Veera’s like her own and holding her trust like a treasure.

“Take care, Mika,” Beth says, mimicking Niki’s tone. Beth’s never been here here for this before. But Veera has texted with her at length numerous times in the past, when she can’t bear conversation out loud but still wants company. Veera can still hardly believe that Beth’s really here, proving herself as compassionate through soft sounds and touches as through a keyboard. “Don’t worry,” she adds as Veera still hesitates to let go. “We’ll be here later.”

Veera breathes out and nods again. She manages to stand, still holding one hand in each of hers. She squeezes them one more time, one after the other. Then she picks her way around the blue-and-brown mess of clothes spilling out of Beth’s suitcase onto the living room floor and steps softly into her own room. She closes the door.

With the blinds half shuttered against the afternoon light coming through the west-facing window, it’s cooler, dimmer, quieter than the main room. Veera likes it that way. She needs its restful seclusion as much as she needs the sun-glazed warmth of the rest of the place. Filled with muted purples and greens, there’s no dizzying array of photographs here. The only picture on the walls is a large cream and gray poster of a detailed sketch of the moon with all its craters arcing over its surface. Stubby succulents dot the heavily book-laden shelf and her cluttered desk in front of the window. They sort of glitter in the sunlight. The beams catch the water stored in the overlarge cells of their chunky little leaves, brightening their soothing shades of green, grey, dusty lavender, and mauve.

Nerves spangling, she changes out of her jeans into something softer without looking at what she’s doing. Sometimes, even just looking at things gets to be too tiring. Her hands know exactly where she keeps everything stashed in her dresser drawer, and her fingers are familiar with the texture of nearly every piece of clothing she owns. She doesn’t need to see them to tell them apart.

Veera sinks into the soft give of the comforter spread over her bed with a sigh. When she pulls the weighted blanket at the foot of it over herself with the rain-like rustle of plastic beans in its quilted pockets, it wraps her in gentle even pressure from above and below. The heaviness of it flattens out the frayed edges of her nerves. Laid out flat on her back with her arms floating loosely on either side and her elbows bent upward, the blanket covers everything except her face and hands.

As the creeping tension begins to trickle away, another sigh escapes her lungs. It’s a slow process. With how large her emotions are now, and with all the excitement and exhaustion of the past three days, it will take a few hours to wear down the worst of it. The tightness of her shoulders and the pinched feeling in her neck will fade. But they won’t completely disappear for a day or so – and that’s if she does nothing but rest her body and mind. The strain is mental as much as it is physical. Her brain just does what brains normally do, only sometimes slower and sometimes faster, and getting there via unorthodox roads. When rushed, the process only gets backed up, the road blocked, the paths tangled. Pushing it is like trying to run with a twisted ankle. It only makes it worse.

At times like this, it’s even easier than usual for the world to turn into sandpaper on her soul and senses. Overexposure to the riptide of existence all around rubs her nerves raw, living faster than she can think and burning brighter than she can bear. Sounds become ocean waves with weight behind them and lights fill her eyes with their intense brilliance. Gentle touches catch her skin like fire, while firm pressure forms a gravity well that could either pull her into a stable orbit or sling her satellite round reeling. It’s so easy for her to get overwhelmed by pain and pleasure alike. The line between them is faint and fluid.

To some degree, that vibrant intensity was always going to be part and parcel of the way she experiences the world. She was always going to be strange. Maybe if she hadn’t been put through two fires, it wouldn’t be quite so overwhelming quite so often. Probably. But she doesn’t know where the scars end and the inherent self begins, because they’re the same now. Whatever the cause, the person she is now is someone subject to both exquisite sharpness and terrible softness, captivated by so many infinitesimal pangs of ache and grace. It’s a lion’s share of pain and wonder across a lamb’s shoulders.

She wouldn’t change it, if she could. She didn’t choose it, but it’s hers. It’s her. It’s given her an unprecedented ability to be gentle in just the right ways with the people who need it most. That comes in handy considering how many traumatized Ledas she works with. Besides, she’s found all sorts of unusual yet efficient ways to do what she needs to do, because the normal ways don’t work for her. Sometimes that results in really neat new things, like the advanced cyber-security system she personally designed for CYGNet. It hasn’t been beaten yet, and if her constant updates have anything to say about it, it never will. If she ever gets tired of co-running the organization with their board of Ledas, she could always actually go into the tech field.

Right now, ever leaving CYGNet seems such a remote possibility. After a couple years of a reduced workload so she could actually finish school and take a few courses in database management to supplement her work, she’s finally returned in her full capacity. It feels good. Between her responsibilities managing the sheer volume of information DYAD had surrendered to them and protecting both it and their secure communication network, she has plenty to keep her mind busy and satisfied.

Now that Sofia and Aryanna take care of most of the administrative work, things run a lot smoother, too. Sofia’s steadied into tenacious steadfastness as her confidence grows, and she’s got a level head and a killer knack for budgets. Aryanna’s a great project manager and she’s got plenty enough charisma to handle the public-facing parts of CYGNet that Niki used to wrangle.

Niki’s stepped back a lot from CYGNet since Veera came back full time. She’d only been involved out of circumstance and necessity in the first place. For years, Niki had been the smiling face of Leda to the world, giving their story the life it needed to be told. Veera doesn’t know how she’d ever have done any of it without her. But really, all Niki wanted was a quiet life with the people she loved. So now that things were steadier and the world’s scrutiny had moved on, she was taking more time for herself. She worked part-time in a cat café downtown a few blocks away from the park, went on dates with Suvi around the city, and came home smiling to Veera and their little apartment.

Niki seems softer these days, happier. It’s like she’s settled into her natural gentleness, rather than defiantly clinging to it like a lifeline after the fire tried to burn it out of her. Her recovery is a thing of beauty. Sometimes Veera is stricken into stillness at the sound of Niki humming to herself in the next room, or at the sight of her smiling to herself while reading in a patch of sunlight, her legs stretched out on the couch. Sometimes, the memory of almost losing her so soon after finding her four years ago floats forth, casting Veera’s current joy in a sickly shade.

But they’ve talked through that fear they both have, many times. They’re both here, alive. They both care too much about the closeness they’ve created to ever choose to be too far apart. Anything else that might separate them will just be the ebb and flow of life, and that’s always true for everyone. Veera tries not to worry about it too much. She’s lucky to have Niki in her life. And these days, Veera’s gotten better at believing her when she says she wants to stay.

She finds her mind going unfocused, her body gone heavy like she needs a nap. It’s been an eventful day. Veera curls up on her side under the blanket, burying the rough texture of her scarred cheek in the softness of her pillow. To see her now, anyone might assume she was one of the others, marked only invisibly. Instead, a chapter of her story is written all down the right side of her body in curlicues of too-light ridges and and too-dark indentations, dappled from face to elbow to ankle. People don’t always read past that page to reach the rest of her. Much of the time, she still can’t, either. But at least there is another chapter now. It’s right here where she’s living in this strange new moment.

Her already heavy limbs go slack. Thoughts shift and sift and slip over each other half-defined. Maybe there will be more chapters she can’t even imagine yet, even better than this half-healed, aching glory.

***

When she wakes once again, Veera finds evening falling in its long, slow descent. It’s late. The sky glows with that particular kind of soft, omnipresent golden glow that only comes with the midnight sun at the height of summer. Niki and Beth have probably gone to bed already. They’re both early risers, and Beth is adjusting relatively well to her jetlag. As usual, the evening belongs to Veera.

Evening here is a half-seen time, gilded in twilight in the summers and shrouded in restful darkness throughout the long winter. Her eyes get a reprieve from the sharp definition of day among the soft placement of shadows. Even in winter, she rarely turns on the lights. Navigating the familiar space is easy by the sound of her feet on thin carpet and linoleum, by the brush of her fingertips on the matte whitewashed walls. She’s usually the only one awake. Even when Niki wakes up with bad dreams and seeks her out for comfort, they don’t talk much. Voices are kept low. Most of the time, it’s a space for her to be alone with her thoughts, turning them over and laying her experience of the day to rest before she sleeps.

Cautiously, in case Beth’s asleep in the living room, Veera pries her door open so it doesn’t clunk in its uneven frame. Sure enough, Beth’s curled up in her nest of blankets on the couch. Niki’s bedroom door is ajar, and through it she can just catch the barely-heard sounds of an occupied room, the imperceptible breath or rustle of presence simply felt. It’s the difference between quiet and silence. It's subtle, but worlds away from the dullness that permeates an empty space. Having grown up roaming two floors of dim, silent rooms with only the click of the keyboard from ‘uncle’ Matti’s office for company, Veera is endlessly familiar with that emptiness. This is something else: a living seed hidden under the soil; a flower that’s closed its petals for the night.

Pulling the hood of her well-loved purple hoodie up to shield her ears from the mechanical hum of the fridge, she slips out of her room and heads into the kitchen. Things are less sharp now, but she's still unusually sensitive, especially her ears. Retrieving a tall glass of room temperature water and a tin of chicken soup tipped into a bowl takes only a minute. She doesn’t heat it. The quiet is worth more to her than the warmth, in this comfortable stillness. She retreats to her room with the bowl clutched in her hands and curls up at the foot of her bed for a quiet dinner.

She’s far more relaxed and grounded now than she was earlier. But, checking the clock, she’s just woken up from one of her exhausted five-hour recovery naps. She’s too awake, if in a mild and focused sort of way, to go to sleep like she normally would around now.

Well. Though she’s mostly taking the time Beth’s here off from CYGNet work, she has been checking once a day just to make sure nothing critical or time-sensitive has come up. She hasn’t done that yet today because she was absolutely and completely passed out and dead to the world for half of it, so she might as well get that done now.

She cracks her door partly open so that the presences of the others can better keep her company at a distance. Then she boots up her computer and dials down the display to a dim setting in the endless dusk.

Everything looks fairly normal. There’s nothing of note in the security reports, just the usual bots automatically blocked. Other than that, there’s only two messages in her inbox that have been flagged for immediate attention by her custom filters.

The first is a notice of identity confirmation for Jennifer Fitzsimmons in the States. She filed a request not long ago for all her information retrieved from DYAD to be destroyed. It’s one of the solutions they originally came up with to make sure CYGNet didn’t just replace DYAD as a repository of excruciating detail. The whole point of the organization was to help them all reclaim the autonomy that had been stolen from them. That meant making sure every Leda had full control over their own records. CYGNet couldn’t do much for those who didn’t contact them except seal and guard their data in case they wanted it someday, which Veera did dutifully. But they could make sure that anyone who heard about the organization knew they had the option to cut that unauthorized tie.

Veera was surprised how few chose to do so - only 34 of the 113 Ledas in contact with CYGNet. Many seemed to simply consider it a comprehensive if unnervingly detailed medical history that they could refer to for their own use. Others, like herself, saw the data as a window into otherwise lost parts of their lives. After she’d decidedly parted ways with Matti, she had no one to tell her anything about the times she was too young to remember. Still others, like Beth, wanted nothing to do with their records, but chose to preserve them as proof of their ordeals.

On the other hand, a minority including Jennifer had made contact for the exclusive purpose of requesting their data be destroyed and didn’t seek any engagement with it. CYGNet verified their identities to make sure the files in question pertained to the one who was actually making the request. But they made a point of doing the verification by traditional means. They’d all had enough of blood tests and lab rats.

It was more common for people to decide to delete their data after actually accessing some of their records, the way Niki did. After confirming the identities of her monitors, she’d wanted nothing to do with any of it. She said all it did was hurt. She’d already experienced enough of the sharpness of betrayal without knowing the prickly details of every last lie. Her DYAD records were the first ones they erased. Veera deleted the digital files, and Niki burned the hard copies herself, her smile strangely grim yet satisfied as she set them alight with shaking hands. She seemed lighter, after, and less wary of the warmth of flames.

Veera spends a few minutes completing the second half of double-authorizations for Jennifer’s digital and physical record destruction (permanent removal needed confirmation from two board members) before initiating file deletion. She watches the progress bar creep toward 100% while sending the requisite forms off to Danielle in record storage. She’ll put the hard copies in the incinerator. Set to its lowest volume, Veera’s computer gives a small congratulatory bloop as Jennifer’s digital data disappears for good.

Finally, the only other thing that needs her attention is a request for the general Leda health packet from a new sender, [email protected]. Piquing Veera’s curiosity, it specifically asks after the packet’s chapter on the autism spectrum and common comorbids, even though the sender “would hardly deem it necessary, but my new psychiatrist wants to be thorough.”

As she delves further into the odd letter, it hurts a little to read. It’s laced through with the kind of disdainfully certain air of superiority that reveals just how deeply someone has internalized the cruel views that the world holds of certain ways of being. Veera’s found that this attitude is particularly common in people who actually are on the spectrum, but have been taught since before memory, consciously or unconsciously, to suppress every natural expression of their own differences from the norm. They’re more likely to notice and disparage any deviations in others, specifically because they’ve spent so long trying to disavow their own. They’ve gone so long unsupported, learning to see support only as a weakness instead of as a natural and too-often-denied necessity.

It’s heartbreaking, because Veera’s recognized so many of her own eccentricities in so many of the others, and hardly any of them know what it probably means. She sees it again and again, over CYGNet video conferences and at the occasional Leda meet-ups. Cosima’s hands dance while she talks in much the same way that her own flutter when she’s nervous. Tony’s always blasting his music like his life depends on it, and as far as sensory regulation is concerned, it probably does. Rachel deliberately tilts her head in just such a way that Veera can tell she’s masking, trying to remain poised while she takes an extra moment to process and adapt to a situation.

It’s not that surprising, really, since they all share the same genetics. Most people don’t notice, though, because they only know the broadest and most inaccurate stereotypes. That’s why Veera had insisted on adding the neurodiversity chapter to the health packet.

Veera lightly skims her fingers back and forth over the keyboard without pressing down, thinking. The clicks of the barely jostled keys clatter out a tiny rhythm. Normally, they’d want new contacts to establish a secure CYGNet account. This email’s tone and its throwaway address, though, suggests that it’s either from someone who either isn’t comfortable making contact, or who is struggling too hard with internalized shame to ask for help without doing so anonymously.

It’s an easy decision. Veera attaches the health packet PDF to her reply and sends it along with just a few words of her own.

Hey,

Here’s the health packet, including the neurodiversity chapter. Whether or not any of it applies to you, I hope it helps you find your way closer to yourself. We’ve all got a long way to go if we’re going to build lives we can call our own.

Veera’s fingers hover over the keys. She wants to somehow tell whoever this is that it’s okay. It’s okay to wonder, to look into their own strangeness, to perhaps embrace it. But they’re probably not ready to hear it.

If looking into neurodivergence ends up being a path you need to walk to do that, you’re not alone. I’m here, and so are a lot of the others. You know where to find us.

She signs off as merely MK, hoping that whoever it is might feel more comfortable with another semblance of anonymity. That’s all she can do, and for herself, that’s enough.

All at once, weariness weighs her down. Synthesizing such a delicate appropriate response takes so much effort. She’s gotten better at it, especially when she has time to compose and distill her thoughts. But such nuances don’t come naturally to her. She sags, shoulders loose. Though the light is still golden, it’s actually past midnight now. She hadn’t realized how long she spent trying to craft her words into the right shape. She folds her laptop away and sits on the end of her bed, opening the blinds to stare at the glowing amber of the summer night sky.

Now that her senses are less flooded than they were this afternoon, they itch in the way that means they’re craving some kind of input to regulate them, to calibrate her back into balance. Her vast collection of shared music is her go-to for that. There’s really nothing for it quite like becoming a song for a little while. It lets a steady measured flow of clean water smooth down the troubled riverbed of her nerves, torn up by the passing of the flood.

With her headphones on, she’s bathed in a swell of sound that washes over her like the cool sea on a warm day and just as refreshing. Her widely varied tastes change from hour to hour and minute to minute, but she always comes back to metal. The density and intensity of it literally drown out everything else with that single symphony of sensation. Now, she sways to its current in much the same way she wanted to at the market earlier – was that just this morning? Except now she can because she’s alone, and the only people near are the ones she trusts most. She lets herself dance in it, soothingly rock herself back and forth within its waves, shake out her hands along its endless ripples. She forgets the passage of time for awhile, existing only in the sound and the single present moment.

She emerges from her reverie far more relaxed and substantially more grounded. Setting the headphones aside and stretching her spine out along the bedspread, her limbs have gone soft and slow. Even with her long nap earlier, her overload was exhausting enough that she can probably manage to sleep again til morning. The thought is barely formed before she’s already drifting off.

***

She knows what’s different, when she wakes in soul-deep stillness. Lingering tendrils of vague golden-glazed dreams might just be yesterday’s memories. They retract from her consciousness like opening petals, only to birth her into that same sunlight. She can see the brightness without even opening her eyes, warmth flooding into her room through the door she’s left open.

It’s not just that she’s different now; it’s that she’s actually okay, sort of. And even after years, she’s also clearly not. And somehow... it’s enough.

The truth of it holds her in stillness for a nascent moment, like gentle hands around the wings of a bird about to be released into the sky. Then her eyes open to a room washed in brightness. Her neck and shoulders still ache, but her sight is sharp and clear. The bedroom is the same it’s been for years now, furnished simply, with a mess of cords spilling over her desk to the power strip and the too many favorite books crowding the shelves. But she can see it now, the way it’s filled with life in a way that these traces only barely begin to show. It’s not alive because she moves things around and grows plants in it now. She grows plants in it because she is vulnerably, tenaciously, heart-breakingly alive. She is what is filling the space.

Her life is now full of joy in ways she once could never have imagined. Her happiness feels strange because she is not used to it. She is healing, but she is also just beginning to understand the shape and nature of the scars on her heart and mind. They are just as deep and real as the ones on her skin. They may never truly leave her, and she has made peace with that. But that has done absolutely nothing to stop beauty from seeding her life and springing from every fracture like grass from cracks in concrete.

The restless discomfort that’s been plaguing her has been nothing more than her own hesitance, holding back from fully inhabiting this current joy. Some part of her must still believe that it’s undeserved, or that it’s impossible until she is completely okay.

But it’s not. It’s right here and already making itself hers, as broken and whole as she is. She’s been looking at every new leaf wondering if she’s allowed to love it, even while it’s sinking roots into her life and breathing life into the air.

Few people like her get the opportunities she has; to heal, to help, to grow. She’s already trying so hard to give back as many of those chances as possible, even if it's just to the handful of Ledas she’s been able to help. But that doesn’t change the fact that these opportunities are hers; and yet she’s still half holding back.

She could take them. Not from anyone, but for all of them – and for herself. She could choose it in the unknown names of all her people who have been so lost and alone and longing, the ones who never will be found and the ones who are still hoping. She could believe for all of them that she deserves the joy right in front of her. Maybe this whole time she’s been trying to help the others, she’s been trying to heal herself.

It's a terrifying prospect. But maybe doing right by people like her means doing right by her self, too. Maybe it’s as simple, as impossibly hard, as just letting herself be where she is.

With a shock that catches her breath, she realizes that she’s already made her choice. Somewhere deep inside, something has already shifted like a flower turning toward the sun. She has changed.

It’s never going to be easy. She is going to be healing for the rest of her life. Not to mention, she’ll have to do it in a world where she knows all to well that people are often cruel. But there are also people it’s easy to be around. People like her, and unlike her, but kind people, understanding people, even strangers like the plant vendor at the market and the woman with the oranges. Perhaps she needs to mourn the fact that it took her so long to find any. But now... oh, now.

She tumbles out of bed in yesterday’s clothes. She makes her way out of the room past the crusty soup bowl that she left on her desk last night. Brushing past the great glossy leaves of the swiss cheese plant like a forest creature through the undergrowth, she steps into the central room that’s blazing with light and color and life.

As she enters the kitchen, she ignores the twin cries of greeting from the stove. She casts about for her new little pearls plant. Looking around, she spies it in the kitchen window half hidden under the canopy of the basil. She marches right up to it and into the vault of sunlight streaming in.

One by one, each round little bead of a leaf leads up to the stem holding its spindly floating flower - and it's actually a compound flowerhead. It’s opened up several miniscule pinkish-white flowerets with five pointed petals each. They’re giving off the most incredible, intense smell that fills that whole corner of the kitchen and seems like it couldn’t possibly be produced by something so tiny. Her hands flutter near her shoulders in absolute delight. As she breathes in, the little flower’s fragrance mixes with the pungent aroma of the herbs growing next to it. She drinks it all in deeply, breathes in the smell until it fills her lungs. Sometimes she feels as if she could survive on the richness of such things alone, like a hummingbird subsisting on nothing but nectar.

Nonsense. Her world is so much larger than she ever thought it could be, and she wants it, chooses it. Unlatching the window, she flings the shutters open wide to the trees just outside dancing in a kaleidoscope of green and brown and gold and the sunny city beyond and the blue sky above. The summer breeze that rushes in ruffles her messy hair with a wonderful effervescent sensation.

She laughs out loud, then turns around and practically throws herself at Niki and Beth with arms outspread. She seizes them both in a messy hug that somehow manages to include that wooden spoon again. Veera still laughs, and she feels tears on her cheeks, too.

“Whoa! Hey, girl.”

“Oh, shit! Hi Mika.”

“Hey, Veera, are you okay?”

No. Yes. Always. Never. She finds herself crying harder than she’s ever cried in her life. But she’s still smiling, steeped in a deeper kind of joy and certainty than she’s ever felt before. Someone threads their fingers through her hair and strokes her head until the tide turns and sets her free. And then, still, she is held.

None of this will last. Nothing does. There is more elation and agony and monotony and uncertainty and wonder up ahead. And yet, they’re still here, and she’s beyond grateful. She’s never stopped being here. Maybe this really is exactly where she needs to be. Maybe all she needs to do is tell the garden of her heart that it doesn’t have to stop growing.

When she can, Veera breathes in deeply, her ribs pressing against the arms circling her. She feels the way her exhale blusters soft and warm in the small space between her face and the shoulders she leans it into. The yielding soft pressure of the embrace engraves itself into the very bones of her arms, and she will never ever be able to forget the ache of it and will never want to.

Fuck the fires – this is what’s real now. She wants this to be what makes her who she is. This dance of joy in strangeness can be the story she makes of the rest of her life. All she needs to do is remember her choice, and make it, again and again and again.

“Hey, there, hey... there you are,” Beth murmurs. “You’re here. I’m here. We’re here.”

She is; they are.

They are.

#orphan black #clone club #veera suominen #beth childs #niki lintula #mk ob #fic #long post #herbs on the windowsill au #queerplatonic #aroace #lizzie's adventures in writing #lizzie taking up space #it's here!#it's done.

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paleodictyoptera · 4 years

Text

I had a dream about a marketing salesman advertising snow.

~~~~~

I had a dream on the 20th of October 2020 (record keeping) that I found unusually profound, especially since it was, from at least one perspective, marketing-themed.

This portion of my run of dreams is the only one I really remember from this night, but its lead-in feels important. For whatever reason, I was in some crummy-looking bathroom from a nightmare and had trouble finding a stall I was comfortable with taking a dump in. I've had this kind of confusing-bathroom nightmare before, which is something I only remembered after the fact.

I walk into a stalled portion of the bathroom, and the style of the architecture shifts like I’m in an experimental design, covered in silver foil like the outside of a ventilation shaft. As I round a corner,(the floor plan is the size of a small room if you take all the sq ft together) I get ready to take a dump on what looks the most like a potty. I believe it was labeled, "intake valve."

Before I let loose, a man walks out of an alcove in the ductwork and introduces himself as Mirushi Hiruchi, and this was his Hiruchi machine. I told him straight up, desperate as a dog, "Hi, I have no idea how to use your machine." He then leads me down a hallway which wasn't there before (dream logic, bruh) and either gives me a speech that my brain wrote out and gave accompanying images with, or a translucent brochure where the images scroll by automatically, and which my brain read out loud in his voice. Again, dream logic bruh.

He said that this particular Hiruchi machine was in the possession of his dear friend Mōshi, who was the inventor of the company's trucks. I think the next part of his speech was about what his company does, but I don't honestly remember the general, but I do know that currently, he was trying to make marketable snowballs. And he had found a place with practically ideal conditions for snowballs; the snow fields of Ashton(I don't know about state or province dude, this was the last thing on my mind, Ihadtotakeacrap, but it was like, stuck in my butt from holding it). Here was an image of a field of snow with occasional bits of plants and twigs sticking out, bathed in the light of a sunset or sunrise. My brain could feel the denseness of this snowfield. He said something about how the sunshine was just right as to make material for the perfect snowball, but this too was a bit fuzzy. Maybe it melts the snow a little but not too much? I dunno. I got Canada or Northern State vibes, but maybe just because they’re stereotyped with that.

He then told me that if I wanted to help spread the word, he would appreciate it, and to tell my family, friends, and neighbors that "The snowfields of Ashton are known for their remarkably heavy and round snowballs.” This was paired with an image of a lady completely buried in warm clothing, puffy insulated jacket and tufted beanie included, holding what might be close to a pound of snow within her hands. These particular clumps weren’t rounded into snowballs, but I don’t know if you can even hold that much snow without at least some of it falling apart; I’m from a desert, so my snow experience is limited to say the least.

This all happened as I was in the hallway that had appeared, and not moving very much for some reason, even though I felt it in my gut the need to poop? Dream logic again. He thanked me and left back down the hallway. Next thing I know, I woke up with a turd in my butt and proceeded to the bathroom. After I had recovered from this plausible-yet-off-the-walls dream, I collected the majority of this experience while I was on the toilet and accidentally on purpose in the bath. I was so focused on this I couldn’t take a crap and proceeded into the bath to try and wash my butthole clean. Even though I used toilet paper? Dream lo- wait, this was reality.

I feel… many things right now. Things like, "This has SCP energy," or "This man is like Willy Wonka but Japanese and not specifically targeted at candy making, because if he is willing to merchandise snowballs he's willing to sell anything, like actual, crystallized joy." I spun up a whole bunch of theories and ideas about what the heck had happened. Was I just hijacked by a viral memetic entity? I sure feel unusually compelled to share about the heavy snow fields of Ashton and their perfect snowballs. Did someone in Japan hack into the dreamscape and is now using it for marketing purposes? I don't kNOW, man.

But this feels important, somehow, and so would you kindly spread the word, about how the snowfields of Ashton are known for their remarkably heavy and round snowballs? It’s a surreal meme in its own right, so it can spread, and if it’s true, bruuuhhhhhh...

~~~~~

Ashton County, Virginia; my brain just decided to say that's where it was. After a little research, I've found two places that could be this place: Ashburn, Virginia; and Ashton, West Virginia. Intriguingly, both are right next to a river and exist at nearly the same latitude. Both are on the fringe of being a real place; Ashburn being a CDP and Ashton an unincorporated community, so understandable why it was hard to specify.

I’ve had experiences with the spirit world and mindscape before, but none this catastrophically and simultaneously mundane and profound; partly because I’ve rarely had this level of verification and solidity before, and never involving a real location on Earth. I want to go see the snow fields of Ashton, or possibly Ashburn, and play in them, and have a real, splendid snowball fight. I grew up in the Valley down here in AZ, which is not known for their unusually ideal snow fields, but for their saguaro cacti and dust-colored everything, so this speaks to me more than others.

I must (again?) emphasize how utterly used I feel in this experience, but like, used for a greater good or at least a good purpose? It’s like encountering a mildly benevolent entity who only slightly inconveniences you to achieve their ends. Bear in mind this is the first post I’ve ever made on Tumblr, so it has had the power to send me forth headfirst into a website I have heard described as cursed, in an attempt to bring remarkable, marketable joy to others.

P.S. I woke up at ~4:30 with this dream and have spent the last two hours collating this haphazard post, so, there’s that. I don’t feel particularly tired after this, so if Mr. Hiruchi is selling, I might have bought some of his well-being juice.

#benevolent god #dream logic #dreamlogic #bonehurtingjuice #butlike #bonehealingjuice

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freereignastarwarsstory · 5 years

Text

Chapter 14: Mission’s Bane

Disclaimer: We (@zazabelle and @draksisreborn) own nothing but our OCs. Star Wars belongs to Lucasfilm and Disney. Please review and enjoy this latest installment.

“...In short, we might not have to build the data table at all! If I could install a section in BX’s chest to integrate the power flow of lightsaber crystal, then we could have a walking data table-!”

Lerti and BX weren’t paying much attention to Nek as the three of them sat in a city transport speeder on their way to the orb’s directed coordinates. Lerti sat up front near the driver, head in her hand and helmet on her lap as she watched the rain streak off the hovercraft window while they soared in between city buildings and stayed within the near impossible lanes of 3-Dimensional traffic. Nek and BX sat in the back; Nek was still rambling on about his new design plans to no one in particular, unless you counted the driver, who didn’t seem any more interested than the rest of them. BX sat stoically, head bent, staring down at the old rusted lightsaber he still gripped in his left claw.

BX had been unwilling to hold the orb again to see if the same coordinates would come up, so Lerti had to immediately recorded herself saying the series of latitudes and longitudes she could remember from the sequence before Nek compared them to the map of the city they had on file in the ship. The closest they could find to the sequence that Lerti remembered was a large living complex called “Iron Gate Residential” located on the southside of the 3rd quadrant in the sprawling planet-wide city. This wasn’t impossibly far from docking depot The Raving Titan was being housed in, so a short city transport ride later, Lerti, Nek, and BX were now arriving on an entrance platform nearly 200 stories up the living complex.

As the cab slowed to a stop, Lerti gazed up at the skyscraping tower and cursed silently to herself as the ridiculousness of her life once again set in.

Paying the driver, Lerti nearly started cursing less to herself as they exited the cab. As soon as the engineer and the droid’s door slammed shut, Lerti turned with a frown on her teeth.

“Did none of us think how we were going to know what apartment we’re looking to head into?” She snapped, quickly shutting up Nek who had still been talking, “Or, what we’re even looking for to begin with!?”

The two were quiet for a moment before Nek shrugged, “I mean, I figured we’re looking for a holocron.”

Lerti sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, “BX? Any ideas?”

Lerti looked up.

BX was gone.

“Wha the-? BX!?” Lerti called as Nek spun around to find the same nothingness.

Nek quickly pointed as he spotted the tall droid moving through the crowds and rain towards the living complex’s 200th story entrance. Lerti and Nek jumped to action to keep up. The two called out to the droid but the commando seemed fixated on something in the distance.

They caught up just as BX was entering the building and saw the droid wasn’t fixated on something far away but was instead holding the old rusty saber out in front of him almost as if he was holding a compass.

As the droid entered the ‘lobby’, or rather a very run down, big room with a receptionist and moldy smelly couches, Lerti grabbed BX’s arm and, with effort, spun the droid to face her. BX’s attention suddenly snapped to her as she hissed, “What are you doing!?”

“Following the sequence.” The droid explained, motioning with the lightsaber.

Luckily the saber was so rusted, from a distance it likely resembled more of an old drainage pipe than a near-mythical weapon. Just to be safe, Nek eyed the Ithorian receptionist to look for a reaction but the alien’s slug-like face didn’t move away from the holonet screen she watched lazily from behind her desk.

“What do you mean?” Nek whispered as he turned back to the conversation, also keeping his voice down for their one audience member.

“There is a sequence of very subtle sounds rising from this device echoing off another device in this building and so I was following.” BX explained in great detail.

“Sequence of sounds… you mean like a song? Like Vis talks about?? How can you hear it?” Nek questioned with a hint of jealousy in his voice.

“I believe it is connected with the error that occured in my system earlier today. Or my trick circuit is acting up again, but the connection seemed viable enough to act on. Though the sound is very faint.” BX explained with a shrug to his tone.

“That’s so cool.” Nek breathed.

Lerti snorted softly, “You sound like Vis.”

“Well you smell like Vis.” Nek retorted.

Before Lerti could begin to even scrape the surface of whatever that was supposed to mean, BX was off. Again the droid made his way across the lobby but this time Lerti and Nek simply followed. Stepping into an elevator at the other end of the room, BX stood for a moment, contemplating the nearly 400 floors worth of buttons on the inside of the elevator’s panel.

He held out the saber in front of the buttons.

“3… 1. 4. This is the correct series.” BX concluded as he selected Floor 314.

As the lift doors slid to a close, Nek caught a glimpse of the Ithorian receptionist lazily pointing to a plaque on the wall Nek hadn’t seen before, her eyes never leaving the screen in front of her.

‘Trespassers will be shot.’ The sign read.

“Lovely.” Nek sighed as the door clicked closed.

On the ride up, Lerti contacted Soron and updated him on their status and position. “From the looks of things we may be in for a heist, but we don’t know who it is we’re stealing the box from.”

“Who knows?” Nek cut in, “Maybe it’ll be some wise old Jedi who’ll see the purity of our hearts and hand it over.”

“Well… Maybe? No. Probably not.” Soron’s doubt filled voice responded over the comlink.

“Yeah, you’re right.” Nek’s voice deflated.

With that, the elevator doors slid open and the three left the lift. Hanging up on Soron, Lerti and Nek followed as BX wove purposefully through the maze of hallways and rooms just on the 314th floor of the skyscraper.

The hallways reflected the 200th floor lobby that they’d entered in from: dark, dingy, and wrought with this planet’s varieties of mold. And no doubt the rooms within also reflected that same proviso. The lights above them seemed to flicker with each step they took and voices could always be heard around each corner but each cause of the sound quieted before any of the three could make out a word.

Lerti had placed her helmet on in the lift but now kept her hands near her blasters at her sides and Nek reciprocated her caution by keeping a hand along the shaft of his double bladed vibroblade he had strung across his small, but sturdy form. BX, on the other hand, did not seem concerned with the lights or the voices. The normally alert and defensive droid seemed somehow distant as he held the saber in front of him, only adding further to the eerie nature of the situation.

BX suddenly came to a stop outside a room only one door away from the emergency exit door at the end of the hall. A notably prime spot for anyone needing conveniently to escape.

“Room B-214e. This is the correct sequence.” BX announced in a hushed voice.

Lerti, snapping to attention, drew her weapons and made the motions for Nek and BX to get into position next to and in front of the door. BX crouched and backed away so his back was nearly touching the door across the hall. With Nek just across from her at the edge of the door frame, Lerti gave the signal for BX to scan the room for life signs.

After a moment BX silently looked to Lerti.

“Anyone home?” Lerti whispered.

“There are life signs in the room above and in the rooms two doors down but none in this room or its immediate neighbors.” BX reported quietly.

“Alright. Nek? You want to be the one ot do the honors?” Lerti said motioning to the keypad on the door.

Nek nodded quietly and got to work debasing the keypad frame and rewiring the circuits holding the door shut. A few moments later, the door slid open. In the near silence of the dingy living space, the sound was deafening.

Lerti gave the signal for how they were to enter and the three of them slid into the pitch black room. But…

“Hold.” Lerti commanded as they finished taking their positions, “Something’s off.”

The three stared curiously at the scene before them. It was no wonder there were no life signs of the neighboring rooms if this one was empty.

There was only one room.

BX’s eye lights shined in through the open door. Nek inched forward, his eyes darting around the room.

“If I’m seeing this right, it looks like the two rooms directly to the right of this one have been knocked down and I think the two rooms in the hallway adjacent to this one have also been joined.” Nek surmised quietly.

The space was filled with crates. Though, to Lerti it looked like a garage sale compared to the large scale black market operation that herself, Cenden, and Vis had stumbled upon in Tiss’sharl. Nonetheless it was still an impressive amount of things to put in the “one” room.

The three crept into the room, leaving the door open for extra light and the first point of escape if need be. Nek fidgeted where he stood with vibroblade at the ready, “BX, can you hear the singing?”

BX was quiet for a moment, looking towards the lightsaber like he was waiting for it to talk. The droid then nodded and pointed somewhere deep in the crate maze, “I believe it’s somewhere in that direction.”

Nek followed BX further into the darkness, his back to the droid and vibroblade extended as he watched the inky surroundings. Lerti stayed behind in the open space of light, blasters drawn.

She was exposed this way. Anyone coming in, or hiding within, would be more likely to focus on her and not the two procuring the item. Lerti gazed about, expectantly, for while BX’s scans for lifeforms were mostly accurate according to his programming, but there were plenty of ways to trick a droid, especially one acting as strangely as theirs.

Listening to make sure she could still hear BX’s clanking footsteps in the distance, Lerti allowed her attention to move from examining the darkness for shifting shadows to examining the storage room itself.

Even in the dim light, Lerti could make out the basic shapes of the crates around her. They weren’t identical, so she figured this wasn’t an official business like Jinx had, or even like Beebs carries out. Whoever was collecting these things didn’t care about presentation.

“I sure have been stumbling into some real junk piles lately.” Lerti said to herself thinking of the blackmarket of Tiss’sharl, Vis’ mismatch temple, and just Cenden in general.

She heard a metallic snap sound from open somewhere in the storage room followed by the fainter sound of a lid being placed on the floor.

Lerti put her hand to the comlink button on her helmet, “Find what we came for?” Lerti asked.

“We found the holocron.” BX’s voice returned.

“Let’s get out of here.” Lerti said turning towards the door when something caught her eye. Something glinted in the dim shadows that stretched across the ceiling right above their escape route.

‘A hatch? ...A hatch into the room above.’ Lerti realized too late.

The metal hatch shifted.

A silhouetted figure fell to the ground blocking the door, the only thing Lerti could see was the glint of a smile revealed from beneath a wide-brimmed shadow.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

“I’m just saying,” Nek whispered, “You being able to hear the kyber-crystal makes no sense, especially without the orb. I mean can’t Jedi only do that stuff cause of stuff in their blood? You don’t even have blood.”

BX was receiving the sound of Nek’s voice perfectly to his receptors and the data was being processed accordingly, but the droid had decided he couldn’t hear him.

Nek wasn’t interesting.

Interesting, to BX, involved acting outside of his calculations for reaction. Interesting meant that BX would feel that nearly inoperable loose wire in his head twitching and telling him to fix something. And the wire that caused, what Soron called “house cleaning mode”, didn’t care about Nek’s rambling and his obvious questions.

BX knew what was possible and what wasn’t. He’d been built to fight Jedi in The Clone Wars, as the war had been named. He knew how Force-sensitives operated, and they did interest him. Their spontaneous nature beyond his calculations, the way they defied odds, was a mathematical nightmare for someone built on the idea of calculating and defeating odds.

BX turned one of the dark corners, and stopped.

The sound had quieted to near nothingness.

Lightly shaking the lightsaber he held before him, he strained his receptors against Nek’s babbling and continued on for a few more steps.

Nek’s obvious questions were nagging at him. How was he hearing that slight… ringing? That was the only way the droid could think to describe it. A ringing sound pulsating in and out of the saber’s rusted hilt, and somewhere in the distance, he could hear the same sound reverberating off of something else.

But truth be calculated, the sound was growing dimmer and dimmer by the moment. The sound was an anomaly in his system that he had first defined as an error. Sending him data that he had not previously stored, only for it to disappear upon his attempt at recovery. Not to mention the coordinates… It took nearly everything in his system not to reject the noise to his malware protection systems. But as long as that loose wire sparked...

The sound stopped.

BX lurched to a halt, Nek lightly bumping into the sudden stationary object in front of him.

“What?” Nek said urgently, once again spinning to watch BX’s back.

The droid did not respond, he was now interested in his sudden lack of interest. The wire sparking in his head had gone dim.

BX turned in a circle, looking for something, anything that would make the interest begin again.

‘If the drive of interest does not begin again, the engineer will again begin his talking which I don’t want to hear.’ BX ran this train of thought through his mind before turning and, completely at random, yanked open one of the crates.

Nek let out a small whistle as a faint blue light was cast into the room.

Inside the crate, sat a single holocron.

The crate had been specially designed to hold just this one thing, and appeared to be weighed to feel heavier in the anti-grav registry screen.

“Nice going BX. How’d you know it was in there?” Nek asked as he carefully lifted the holocron out of the crate.

“Odds…” BX answered quietly with a very human shrug while staring at the crate.

“Find what we came for?” Lerti’s voice suddenly came over their comlinks.

“We found the holocron.” BX answered.

“Let’s get out of here.”

The sound of metal grinding on metal shrieked out into the darkness.

Blaster fire rang out.

Nek cursed and, throwing the holocron into his backpack, ran to where they’d last seen Lerti.

BX’s programming poised him to run, but suddenly his wire twitched and he looked at the lightsaber in his hand.

Blaster fire burst out in red light not far from him. He needed to move… but first.

Opening his back systems panel, BX wedged with difficulty, the lightsaber into his back before taking off.

Taking in the sounds of blaster fire and his crew mate’s shouts combine with his life scan, BX picked out where the odd-ones-out stood.

Pistons in his legs and feet tensed.

BX launched himself upwards, he pushed off some of the stacked crates that became below him.

The “not crew member” was spotted in BX’s flight off the crates and BX twisted his leg through the air as the ground came up to meet him.

The figure ducked and BX’s foot snagged something that came flying off the figure’s head. Tucking in his body as he connected with the ground, BX snatched the item off his foot and examined the wide brimmed hat he found in his claws.

“Hand the hat over junk pile, and I might consider letting you live after stealing my holocron.” A metallically-garbled voice drawled as a blue wrinkled hand extended out from the figure standing across from BX.

BX’s head shot up.

This time the wire didn’t have to twitch, as raw memory data flooded his circuits with the voice match he had on file.

“Cad Bane, bounty-hunter employed under the Separtist Order.” BX relayed.

“Formerly Separtist, currently Empire.” He corrected nonchalantly.

“Wait, who?” Nek’s voice struck out from where he and Lerti stood pushed up against the backs of two small crate walls, weapons still smoking.

The figure stepped slowly into the light, jet-boosters on his shoes clinking with each step. An old Duros emerged from the shadows, his blue skin was wrinkled and weathered. Around his neck was installed some sort of breathing device that ran metallic tubes from the square of his jaw to the center of his neck. His lipless mouth was pulled back into a scowl practiced over the ages, but his red eyes seemed to defy his age, piercing through his surroundings, swift and calculating.

BX readied himself.

“Am I supposed to know who this is!?” Nek again intervened.

The bounty-hunter smirked at this, and stopped to adjust the cuffs on his coat long, leathery trench-coat.

“No, no I suppose you wouldn’t know me...” Bane paused, “But you will.”

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Blaster bolts rained, replacing the sounds of the storm outside.

The old bounty hunter hadn’t given them the chance to speak again, he’d barely given them the chance to find cover before he created a maelstrom of his own within the confines of his antique shop.

Lerti and Nek had dove out of the way in opposite directions, readying themselves behind crates.

BX stood his ground.

Tossing the hat aside, the droid launched forward, fist extended.

Bane spun.

CLANG! BX’s fist plunged into the metal crate that had backed Bane before BX twisted his leg through the air attempting to connect to where the bounty hunter had maneuvered to.

From the corner of his lens, BX watched the blue blur duck and roll beneath his swing.

The man was behind him.

BX turned to move.

The panels that made up his back suddenly cried out as damage receptors flared to life with the two impacts that struck BX numb.

The droid collapsed to the ground for the second time today, just barely managing to receive the data that told him the old Duros had retrieved his tossed hat back onto his head as he turned and walked away.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Lerti heard the loud metallic thump, she assumed to be BX, vibrate through the floor as blaster fire suddenly returned in full force.

‘He’s just trying to spook us out, that’s why he’s not coming to us. Maybe he knows he can’t take on two against one?’ Lerti’s mind raced.

In her time with her own clan, she’d heard of Cad Bane, but never in all of her time touring the galaxy had she wished she’d been paying more attention to what people gossiped about.

‘What are the odds…?’ Lerti thought, shifting her weight as she remembered catching BX’s monotoned worded drifting over the com’s.

“Nek? We’re going to need a distraction.” Lerti spoke over her comlink softly as blaster fire still rained steadily down on her.

“I don’t have visual on the bounty hunter, but I’ll try and take out the turret gun!” Nek said hastily.

“Turret gun!?”

Lerti’s eyes darted over her shoulder.

Sure enough a blaster turret had unfolded from a near invisible panel in the ceiling, that was what was shooting at her.

Lerti’s head turned as she ducked back down.

A face. Inches from her own.

A hand shot out and threw the rest of his weight against her.

Lerti shot in front of her just before her helmeted skull smashed against the ground and the world pierced with white, searing light.

Clenching her teeth, Lerti pushed herself off the ground in a flurry of blind, dizzying clouds of pain and nausea.

She swung out her leg.

Nothing.

A fist suddenly knocked her across the face.

Lerti twisted her stance in the direction the blow had come from as her vision began clearing.

She found Bane standing only a foot away. Launching herself forward, she feigned a sweep of the leg before throwing her shoulder forward.

Her shoulder connected with his chest before an arm appeared around her neck and, what she guessed was a fist, buried itself in her kidney. She found herself doubled over but didn’t remember again hitting the ground.

The world swam as she heard Nek scream.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Nek launched himself off the tops of the crate stack, vibroblade poised to strike. He plunged the simple staff adorned with adjacent twin blades down to strike the old blue man.

The Duros twisted as Nek struck.

Right before Nek’s feet met the ground, he felt a tug on where his staff had dug into the air. Cad Bane suddenly had his grip on the staff. Nek’s single foot hit the ground as Cad yanked the staff, swinging it’s other sharp end into Nek’s chest.

Nek stumbled back in off-balanced surprise, but hadn’t released his grip on the blade.

He felt blood begin to leak from his chest where, luckily, only one of the sharp pommels had pierced him.

“You should really leave the sword swinging to the Jedi.” the bounty hunter drawled, looking Nek up and down as he released his grip on the staff, “Speaking of Jedi, what are you three planning on doing with a Jedi holocron?”

Nek glanced at Lerti. She still lay on the floor, her head bobbing about as she attempted to raise it up but her helmet seemed to be imitating a block of stone attached to her neck. And BX…

Before Nek even had a chance to glance over his shoulder, Bane fired a shot inches from Nek’s head and into the crate behind him. Nek jumped and locked eyes with Bane.

“Answer the question.” Bane said with a sigh, almost as if he couldn’t be bothered by any of them. “Not sure that crate of explosives behind you deserves to take another hit like that though. But I’ll give it another go if it means filling you with shrapnel.” Bane threatened as he backed a few steps away, slowly.

Nek’s stomach dropped a floor and his mind raced.

‘I’m going to die. I’m going to die. Be brave? Stupid. Plea for mercy? He might not let you live. Going to die. Going to-’

“Like I’d tell you!” Nek shouted.

‘Stupid.’ Nek thought.

Lerti bellowed as her body suddenly pulled off the ground towards Bane.

A blue stun ray erupted from his blaster and Lerti’s war cry was silenced as she fell to the ground in complete stillness.

Nek stared at her unmoving form for a moment before he noticed the metallic clanking sound rushing in from behind him.

BX dove over the crates that were stacked behind Nek, smoke still trailing from his haul. It was a wonder he could move let alone perform acrobatics.

Cad Bane smiled and pressed a button on a wrist gauntlet hidden under his sleeve.

BX’s body lurched suddenly mid-air before flying up to stick to the ceiling.

Nek watched his happen and slowly turned his attention to the bounty hunter, “…Y-you couldn’t have sprung for any floor mounted t-traps?”

The Duros motioned with his gun, “They’re technically on the floor in my apartment.”

Cad Bane aimed the barrel of his gun at Nek, a hand placed confidently on his belt.

“And now you know.” Bane added as he pulled the trigger.

Blue light enveloped him, sucking Nek into darkness.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I opened my eyes as I pretended to lay stunned on the floor.

The game ended there for now. Everyone was sitting in darkness.

I sat up, feeling shocked.

“Should… Should we be worried about that?” I asked from the floor of the sparring room.

“I’m not sure, is that really what’s going on?” Chol’s gruff voiced asked from his sitting position on a nearby chair.

I’d set up shop in the sparring room, my papers lay strewn across the floor. Some of them rotting old temple papers, others freshly scribbled ideas from my own mind with the orb sitting on top of a pile of lightsabers I used to keep it from rolling around.

I shrugged at Chol, “It’s not like I normally don’t have other people around to test how accurate the things I think and say are. And it doesn’t normally seem like these things are happening in real time. More like… past time I think.”

Chol nodded and heaved himself to a standing position, “I’ll let Soron know something might’ve happened, ‘because of course it did,’” He added one of Soron’s favorite sayings as he turned to leave the room.

“We need to go help them! Soron and Cenden might not get there in time!” I stood and ignited my own lightsaber.

“NO!” Chol cried out, taking a step back.

I felt fear wash over me as I switched off the saber.

“I-I mean, no.” Chol’s posture visibly relaxed as he cleared his throat, “You keep working on your… uh… homework.”

At that, I felt my guide tangle about my limbs, an idea forming in my head. This was where I was needed I guess…

I watched Chol leave the room and I threw my lightsaber back down into its pile, “I guess I should play a game then…” I said as I put a finger to my lip in thought and squeezed my eyes shut.

‘Why is Chol scared of lightsabers? And this isn’t HOMEWORK, it’s RESEARCH… Homework is for school-people… School-people? That sounds sort of fun... I guess I can pretend this is homework and I’m at real school?’ This shook the worried feeling right off as I gathered void-conjured, faceless classmates around me.

I snatched up a paper off the ground that I’d been reading on kyber-crystals, pushed my back against the wall, and bent my legs like I was sitting in a desk. Leaning over to the “kid” next to me, I whispered,

“Pst! Hey Tiphanie! What’d you get for number S-12??”

The faceless kid glanced at the front of the room before answering, “I got: The meaning of the universe is 42.”

“Huh… Well what’d you get for number 42?”

“Ms. Alacritis! Passing notes again? Is there something you’d like to share with the class??” My faceless teacher barked as she hastened over.

“No Mrs. TheForce!” I said as my legs gave out from sitting against the wall. I stood from the ground as “my teacher” yanked the paper from my hand.

“Well we might as well read it now that you’ve disrupted everyone’s time.”

My freckles turned red as I felt the eyes of all my classmates staring at me.

My teacher put on her spectacles on her faceless-face and turned up her chin to make out the words. “You know we have tutoring time if you’re struggling with the subject, Vis.”

I winced at this, “I’m just… embarrassed I don’t know the answer.”

“You don’t have to know the answer all on your own,” she said before reading the excerpt of scroll, “The crystal is, by itself, the power source of the weapon. Like the Force user, the crystal is attuned to the Force. Without that attunement, the crystal is just a rock. And while a non-Force user could probably ignite and wield a lightsaber, the crystal is needed to be properly attuned to the Force. But for a Jedi, the lightsaber becomes more: it is a manifestation of a Jedi's connection to the Force.” Now. Who wrote this and why?”

I fidgeted, “I… I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s ask another question. WHEN was this written?”

Her faceless gaze was right in front of me now. She held out the paper for me to take, but I kept looking into the blur manifested by my mind even as I took the paper.

As my hand held the paper, I felt the Force building up in my head. I winced as the feeling grew painful. All I could hear was a ringing in my ears, and all I could see was the foggy blur slowly morphing, slowly combining. But I couldn’t see anything…

‘I can’t see anything…’ I looked down wide-eyed at the paper, “I can’t see anything! CHOL! I NEED TO TALK TO CENDEN!!!”

I ran through the mist of people that didn’t exist into the empty halls beyond. The scroll bit with histories of kyber-crystal still clutched in my hand.

#Free Reign: A Star Wars Story #Free Reign #free reign chapter 13 #star wars #star wars fanfiction #zazabelle9200 #zap #draksisreborn #mission's bane #chapter 14 #fanfiction

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