#So ... okay... one tiny net positive in a sea of net loss...

[vanlegion]

I just had a quiet 'A-ha' moment over S19, and for like, the handful of us who enjoy the whole 'Simmons is a Church theory/Au' or 'Grimmons and Chex Character Foils' introspection... I know that throw was likely (98.5%) for Donut, but now I'm kinda happy it was Simmons throwing it to Tex. Like. . . The core of this whole 'A-Ha' moment wasn't 'Oh hey, they're bonding' it was that in this one moment I realized... Oh hey, the two people always prone to 'Fail' at things just 'Fucking Won' . . . . And then viewing it as a Simulation Church is running is like 'I'm letting them have this moment' ... I think that's pretty neat.

[cherrytart-ffxiv]

anniversary.

I know Caius is waiting for me at home. I call him, tell him I’ll be a little bit late.

There’s somewhere I have to go first.

Overgrown grass brushes against my legs, and I hold my hands out at my sides, letting it touch my fingertips too. I remember when this overgrown meadow was a rolling field of green where our sheep grazed, where I’d come and sit with them and let the babies rest in my lap while their mothers nibbled the ends of my hair looking for the snacks I usually brought. You could always hear the sea, feel it, see it. When the sun began to dip over the horizon, I’d hear my mother calling me back, and I’d run and run, giggling as I crashed into her legs while she stood on the porch. She’d smile, run her hands through my long hair.

“My little tornado,” she’d say, and the golden light would make her honey eyes dazzling, make her soft caramel hair glint with gold and red and all of the beautiful undertones in her soft waves. I was positive that she was the prettiest lady in the whole wide world, and the smartest, and nicest, and she always smelled like oranges and cooking spices.

I still can’t eat oranges.

I stand on the porch where she taught me my first guitar chords, training my tiny fingers to stretch over the frets. Whenever she sang, the birds sang, too. Even they knew she was the most exquisite creature to grace our star. Now, the big wrap-around porch she had loved so much groan beneath even my small weight. The wooden planks are weathered and old, cracked, missing. The windows to the farmhouse are broken or so thick with grime that next to no daylight can seep through. Vines crawl all up the dilapidated farmhouse that I’d grown up in, and there’s a familiar ache in my throat. 

Quietly, I take a step inside, gripping the worn door frame tightly. How many times had the storm door been slammed-- specifically, by me? 

I wander through the kitchen, through the old living room. There are signs of people that had come here to party somewhere quiet, in the middle of nowhere. I grimace at the graffiti on the peeling wallpaper, trace the wooden walls beneath with my fingers. My mother had loved the wallpaper, with its yellow stripes that made the midday sunshine even brighter. But my best memories of the house aren’t downstairs.

The stairs leading upstairs groan like the porch had, protesting. It’s a bad idea to climb them, I know. They sag, and some of them even have holes where the legs of the squatters had fallen through. There are plenty of rooms and hallways I could turn to, but that isn’t my destination. There’s only one destination. There’s a feeling of rising bile in my throat as I pass Connor’s room, but I ignore it, hurrying down the hallway to the last room at the end. I press against the door, slowly cracking it open to see if anyone was still in there.

When I step inside, I glance around, my gaze immediately drawn to the mural of soft and fuzzy baby animals painted on my childhood bedroom’s pink walls -- a mural that my mom had painted after coming to the farmhouse. Caius had wondered at how old I was, how long I’d stayed in the room, and the truth is that I couldn’t bring myself to change a thing after my mother passed, even as I reached my angrier teenage years. I set up a cot in the attic and broke the walls with my fists, put cigarette butts in the floor to leave scorch marks.

This pink room, though - fit for a princess - was not something I could bring myself hurt with my rage. The big bed in the corner, canopied in white netting, is still covered in the pink comforter my mother had picked out, now dusty and moth-bitten. She slept in my room more often than her own, prone as I was to having nightmares and running to her, crying. 

Slowly, I sink onto the floor, and it’s only when I reach for a broken wooden doll do I notice that my hands are shaking. It was in my childhood bed that my mother’s fever had first started, and it ended up being that she was too sick to move without causing her immense discomfort. Patrick slept on the floor of my bedroom while I stayed in their bed, in case my it made my mother more uncomfortable physically to be mindful of a squirmy, restless child in the bed. Regardless, I remember crawling beneath the covers on her better days, and her reading me fairytales, smiling despite the blood she coughed into her handkerchief and her feverish, clammy skin. 

“You’ll get better soon, mama,” I told her as I looked up at, so pale and thin, then, lacking the vibrancy I was used to. “I know it for sure. The doctor said you gotta keep fighting, right?”

“He did,” she murmured, brushing my hair from my forehead and straightening my bangs. “Mama will keep fighting, lovebug. She promises. I love you so much, my baby. You know that, don’t you? I love you more than anything in this whole wide world, more than the sun and the moon and all of the stars.”

“More than you love the ocean?”

She smiled, nodding weakly.

“Even more than I love the ocean.” 

I believed her. But I was... scared. Terrified. 

“I love you that much too, mama. Get better soon, okay?”

-------------

Her funeral had been small. I remember throwing my handful of dirt on her casket. Most five year olds don’t really grasp the concept of death, but I was acutely aware of the feeling of loss. Mama couldn’t walk or talk or sing with me anymore, and her body was in the ground, now. 

She’s at peace, Patrick had told me. She isn’t hurting anymore, Audrey.

The loss hurt more as I grew older, though. As I hit puberty, and my world began to dip into chaos, I wanted my mom. I watched other girls with their mothers in the markets, the way they nitpicked at their daughters and the way they laughed. I read books about doting mothers helping their daughters through the difficulties of break-ups, of growing up, of making and losing friends. And my problems, then, were so much bigger than any of those things.

There were so many things I didn’t know, and I knew she was the only one who would know what to do. I wanted her. I wanted to cry into her shoulder and let her tell me what to do, where to go, where to turn. I had no one to talk to. My best friend left me behind with people who didn’t love me. Even though I knew it wasn’t her fault, I felt angry at her. 

Now, a few years later... I’m not angry anymore. I just want my mommy. I want her to hug me and tell me everything will be alright. I have Caius. I love him, and he gives me answers, gives me guidance, helps me with things I can’t understand. But sometimes you need your mom, and I got so little time with her. Even now, as a grown woman, I need her help. I need her to tell me what to do and where to go and where to turn all over again. 

It’s been fifteen years since she died, and there’s so much - everything, really - about her that I’m just now learning. I try to make sense of the letters I found in the lockbox, but what I really want is for her to just tell me. I know she kept things from me as a baby to protect me, that there was too much for me to know. Now I’m old enough. And now she isn’t here to help me through it.

I miss her. And being in the stupid, ugly, falling apart farmhouse only makes it worse. Five years with her. Fifteen without. It isn’t fair.

I don’t try to stop the tears that fall. I double over and let the sobbing consume me, dipping my forehead to the floor as I cling to the broken doll in my hands. I scream into the carpet, and I let my grief overwhelm me. Thunder pounds overhead, lightning strikes the sea, and rain lashes against the grimy windows, pours in through the broken ones. I wonder how far the storm of my mourning carries. Does it drench the entirety of La Noscea? Of Eorzea? 

She was supposed to get better. She didn’t. 

I don’t know that I will ever stop missing her. I don’t think grief like this goes away, and I don’t know that I ever properly processed it. It punches me, now, overwhelms me and shakes me. 

I don’t know what to do without her, at this turning point, and I am scared all over again. But she always told me I was brave.

So I will be.