He leaves without saying a word. Without any indication, hint or clue as to why. He just leaves. He was there one minute and then he’s gone.
It’s a little sad and a lot confusing or – actually maybe it’s a little confusing and a lot sad but no one really wants to feel sad all the time so they just pretend it’s a lot confusing instead.
Maybe it’s just easier that way.
No one really knows.
All they know is that there are a lot of people crying right now.
The funeral is beautiful. There’s a varnished casket, pretty pall-bearers in black suits and lovely white flowers arranged by his mother.
Every word said is kind, laced with a certain kind of sympathy that can be found no where else because, after all, death is forever and what are you going to do about it right?
It happens without any warning whatsoever.
Or at least, that’s what everyone believes and if everyone believes then it must have some truth to it right?
When the police walked in with solemn eyes all his mother could do was cry and all the men in blues could offer his parents were sad eyes and even sadder sorries.
The only thing their not so little boy leaves behind is a makeshift will that reads more like a half assed grocery list than a suicide note.
His writing had been deliberate though, a stark contrast to his normally rushed and illegible chicken scratch left all over his schoolboy notes. In fact, his last known words had been written with such focus and clarity that had many people wondering if he was the one who wrote it, if it wasn’t some weird conspiracy or something even more ridiculous than that.
But it was him, it was undoubtably him, which only made the whole thing that much more sad.
In large black letters written in nothing but capitals were his final wishes.
BASKETBALL EQUIPMENT –> MARCUS.
CDs/RECORDS AND MUSIC LIBRARY –> CASSIDY
CAMERA –> MS. MAVEN
And at the very bottom of the note read something a little bit surprising. It seems he had decided to allocate the money he was saving for a shiny new red car he would never have amongst four people.
$500 –> MARCUS FOR SHOES
$500 –> CASSIDY FOR CONCERT TICKETS
$500 –> MS. MAVEN FOR GIFTS TO HER GRANDCHILDREN
$500 –> LYNDA FOR CONDOMS
–
“Marcus”
He hates talking in past tense. He hates it because there is no way in hell that Castor’s dead, no way in hell that Castor isn’t ever walking through those school doors ever again, no way in hell that Castor killed himself.
No way, no chance.
Did.
Not.
Happen.
“There’s nothing anyone could have done”
Marcus blames himself almost as much as he blames his best friend. He blames himself because he feels like he should have seen it. He should have seen it because Castor was supposed to talk to him about demons that had apparently existed inside his head.
Marcus had no idea.
So now, well now he laughs when people cry around him. He laughs a lot these days. He laughs almost as often as he punches things because he doesn’t want to cry, he doesn’t because he’s still so damned angry about the whole thing.
So Marcus laughs and the people around him scurry away from him. His teammates say nothing, so he says nothing, his teachers look at him with the kind of worry that should have apparently been given to Castor so he looks at them the same way – mostly just to bug them but partly so they’ll stop.
Because Marcus is fine.
“Thank you for being so good to him”
Marcus is fine even when he shoots a few hoops by himself, his tattered ball shoes pounding against the ground, shoots them without a friend to go one on one with because no one wants to play with him anymore.
Because whatever, Castor is dead and there’s nothing he can do to change that.
Marcus decides to march on pretty early on and the day after the funeral he puts on his best dress shoes and heads off to work at the hotel, even when Mr. Castor’s dad tells him he doesn’t have to and that he can “take all the time he needs” because he was “like a brother to Castor” and he was pretty sure there was something about how Marcus will always be family or some other awkward bullshit.
He works and pretends he doesn’t miss his favorite coworker, he goes to school and helps clear Castor’s locker of all of the deadman’s stuff without even a little hesitation, and he goes home, eats and sleeps without hoping to wake up the day after to find out it was all just a horrible dream.
“I’m sorry Marcus”
–
(Cassidy)
There is a lot of talk about how he did it. A lot of people are wondering why. As far as Cassidy knows, there are only a few people who know for sure. The police because, well, they’re the police, his family because they’re his family, his best friend because he’s his best friend and herself because, well she kind of guessed.
So no, she supposes she isn’t really one hundred percent sure of how he did it but she’s ninety nine point nine nine percent sure she does and that’s pretty much one hundred percent and it’s definitely good enough for her.
The reason her guess is so damned close (by her calculations at least) is because she knows him- knew him (or whatever the correct tense is) because they almost kind of sort of talked about it once.
She tells everyone who asks (because yeah everyone does know that her name was on his list) that they only ever talked about music.
Which is true.
Technically (if that’s the right word) at least.
She had known of him or years, they went to the same grade, middle and high school since they started school, but she didn’t really know him. Not until recently at least.
All those years of knowing him but not knowing him totaled to maybe three sentences, two of which were “excuse me’s” and the other one happened to be a “I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking!”
She doesn’t remember who said what when but that doesn’t matter.
What she does remember were the three days her Radio Star Dad had a friend staying at Mr. Castor’s Dad’s hotel and the conversations they had in the lobby when she was supposed to be waiting and he was supposed to be working.
It doesn’t dawn on her until now that both their somewhat distant dads were the reasons for them talking like that.
She makes a note to thank both of them when she has a chance.
Castor was wearing a bellhop uniform the first time they talked and she had laughed at him because he looked so silly and boy she hoped no one snapped a picture of him and showed it around school. (He wore a suit the next day and his school outfit the day after that.)
It’s funny because she doesn’t really even know how it happened but somehow they ended up talking about bands and songs and it was nice because she has never found anyone with that similar of a taste in music.
They liked the same songs, the same bands, and they even ended up playing the same instrument (violin of all things).
See, Castor wore his iPod on his sleeve, and that’s how Cassidy knew everything there was to know about him (plus he kind of told her a lot of stuff by dropping weird music metaphors everywhere but that’s okay because she does that too)
She thinks she found a kindred spirit that day and she’s really pretty sad that she lost him because there was potential there (which basically means that she’s really selfish but she knows that). They could have been close, could have been something maybe, could have fallen in love, could have done a lot of things but they didn’t. Instead, all she has is those three days and apparently five hundred dollars for a concerts he’ll never get to go to (with or without her).
She honestly has no idea how she’s supposed to feel about this whole thing and no one else really knows how to look at her because they think that he didn’t know her and that she didn’t know him.
Which is true.
Technically (if that’s the right word) at least.
–
Really Really, Miss Maven
It’s been two weeks and with every day that passes she begins to realize more and more that she really isn’t any good at her job.
Well, actually, she is, she is very good at her job. She is very good at writing recommendation letters, filing transcripts, calling colleges and universities, and pretty much anything academic.
She just didn’t realize how much counseling a counselor actually needed to do.
Because honestly, no one actually uses the counseling services and when they do, her job is usually to call in outside assistance or refer her kids to someone who can actually help because all she is a school counselor. She loves her kids, she just wants to help, but she’s not the one who can really offer it for this kind of thing.
The school brings in this psychologist but a lot of people still go to her because they trust her more than some random stranger and she has no idea how she’s supposed to do this.
They never trained her for this, she’s never had to do this, twenty years she’s been doing this job and not one student has died while she was doing it. Not from an accident, not from natural causes, and certainly not from suicide.
She knows that’s remarkably lucky because she’s had a lot of students and she knows that death happens to kids. She knows but after all these years she kind of had this idea that maybe her kids were safe because she was lucky.
And then Castor has to go and ruin it all.
Castor, the sweet smart senior boy, had to go and ruin everything.
If anyone should have seen it, it was her. She has signs all over her office with numbers for hotlines and things of that nature but she didn’t. Honestly, the signs, literally and figuratively, were right in front of her eyes.
Because seriously, Castor went from Sophomore year A student with dreams he could achieve to senior year struggling. He was failing half of his classes, kicked off of the basketball team for academic probation and a lot of other things that she should have noticed.
But it was difficult with Castor because it was a slow progression and he was taking a lot of hard classes. It wasn’t like he lacked ambition, he tried, he went to school everyday, he got tutoring, but those classes were just too hard for him.
He was in her office a lot his senior year because she was afraid he wouldn’t graduate and when she asked him what was going on he said he was really trying but the class was just kicking his butt.
She should have known something was really really wrong when he still wasn’t improving despite being knocked down to easier classes.
But she didn’t because she has about a thousand other students that need her help, that need her to keep writing those college recommendation letters because they needed to go to college or graduate or whatever it is her job made her do.
She needs a break because she’s human too but she can’t because her kids really really need her right now.
Although, it seems the ones that need her most never show up.
Marcus comes in once, fist balled, eyes red, biting his lip but he doesn’t say anything other then a brief hello before handing her the camera.
She probably should have stopped him.
She goes through the camera a lot. She remembers when he first told her about it. He was very thoughtful that day, poetic even, and he talked to her about a camera that his dad had gotten him for his fourteenth birthday that was left unopened in a shelf behind an empty picture frame.
She still doesn’t know why he brought it up and she will probably never know but she was the one who told him to start taking pictures with it.
The camera has maybe two hundred photos saved in the card. None of him. They’re all pictures of the things he saw everyday. There’s nothing special about the pictures. Just trees, the hotel, the school, people and students but she can’t help but feel that the pictures are important. They had to have been important. Why else did he give her the camera?
But then she looks at her own picture frame on her desk, the one with her grandchildren in it, and she decides that she’ll never know and maybe it’s better that way.
–
And Lynda
He was nothing but sweet to her even though they were both at fault, even though they were both stupid kids who were a little bit tipsy at a party.
She knows she came on to him because he’s cute Castor, smart, popular, and athletic. Sure, he was dropped from his AP classes but she had kind of assumed that was because it was senior year and no one gave a fuck about senior year. And yes, he had been a little more reserved lately but maybe he was just sick and tired of high school and was ready to graduate. And who cares if he got kicked off the team? He didn’t plan on making basketball his career after all.
And it was one night.
Until it wasn’t.
And then there was this whole thing where she thought she was pregnant and oh my god was she going to keep the baby and how would Castor feel and what was she going to do?
And then Castor told her he would take care of her. That if there was a baby, he would support her, and that she wouldn’t have to worry.
And she thought that maybe, maybe this could work. She didn’t love him, he didn’t love her, but he was a good guy and she was a good girl. He never yelled at her, never got frustrated, he was nothing but patient and kind even though she could totally tell that he was freaking out on the inside.
He went to the doctor with her and he was there when they found out that she wasn’t actually pregnant, that it was a false alarm.
It was one hellish week of what ifs and then it was over.
Or so she thought.
She never thought that he would make time for her afterwards. During, sure, but not afterwards.
It was weird at first but he turned into a good friend, the two of them were even able to joke about the scare and he always took time out of his day to ask her how she was doing.
She never returned the favor.
She feels like she should have, that maybe if she did, he wouldn’t have done it.
The thing is though, she thinks that if she had been pregnant, he probably would have stayed, he wouldn’t have done it.
And she really doesn’t know how she feels about that at all.
It seems the only thing she she does know these days is that five hundred dollars for condoms is a little bit excessive.
]]>
Marxwell Rosser is an artificially enhanced telekinetic and the only son of the late billionaire businessman and researcher Adrian Rosser.
Born on January 16 to Sharon and Adrian Rosser, Marx’s first home was a mansion in the Ritfield district of Origin where he spent most of his time playing by himself. It wasn’t until age 5 that his parents divorced and Marx moved with his mother to a more modest home despite his father’s objections. Afterwards, Marx found himself spending most of his time staying with his mother, only seeing his father on holidays – not because his mother kept him away from his dad but because his dad was always a little too busy and wrapped up with work to take time off to see him. Still, Marx’s life was still financially funded by his father, allowing him to live a very stable childhood.
His mother remarried a few years later and soon Marx found himself with a half-sibling Lilia. He and his stepfather instantly connected and after awhile, Marx began to regard him as his ‘true’ dad.
He attended elementary school with Lelani Kai and Kerney Stills, quickly befriending them to the point where the three became inseparable.
Middle and high school flew by without any major problems. Marx did very well in his studies, participated in club sports and joined Lelani and Kerney on whatever activities they were involved in.
Marx’s abilities began manifest at the age of seven, becoming stronger and stronger as he naturally progressed through his life. Unbeknownst to him, however, his abilities were artificially created by his father and injected into him while he was still an infant.
It wasn’t until the age of seventeen, a few months before his birthday and two weeks into his senior year in high school that Marx’s life underwent a drastic change. Adrian Rosser’s supposed suicide meant that Marx had effectively inherited his dad’s multibillion dollar company, however, due to his status as a minor, his father’s childhood best friend and business partner, Isaac Rowle was put in charge of the company until Marx was able to run it.
During the time between his dad’s death and his eighteenth birthday, Isaac Rowle made it his mission to teach Marx everything he could about business and the company that Marx had become so distanced from. He took Marx under his wing and became his mentor, teaching him about the work they did and the mission that Adrian and he had developed and built from the ground up. Marx grew close to Isaac in this time and picked up on a lot of the business aspects surprisingly quickly. However, he was out of his element when it came to the research and social aspects of the job. Because of his discomfort with the status and the attention of his name, Isaac recruited his son Gerard to teach him how to navigate through the high class social circles and attention that was thrust upon him.
He found Gerard hard to get along with due to the man’s initially icy nature but the two were still friendly all the same. It wasn’t until much later that Marx and Gerard would come to blows.
Gerard helped Marxwell prepare for the several functions he attended in order to dodge the criticism the press was giving him due to his age. It was during one of these functions, the Mavin Academy Charity event, where he first crossed paths with Speaker and Lizzie.
Soon after his eighteenth birthday, Marx found his father’s safe, the contents of which included journals that documented Adrian’s life. Marx shared these journals with his two best friends and the group soon discovered through their readings the importance of a boy named Ian that Lelani was already acquainted with, his and Gerard’s artificial abilities, and a few secrets that led Marx to believe that his father’s death was no suicide and somehow connected to seemingly random attacks happening throughout the country.
Obsessed with finding out the truth, Marx began to dig deeper and deeper into his dad’s life despite his friends’ suggestions of abandoning the pursuit. Unable to leave it alone, Marx began to lose sleep and abandon his other commitments, focusing solely on the company and the research and experiments his dad had conducted. Lelani, concerned over her friend’s behavior, confronted Marx which ended terribly and the two ceased communication until the attack on the building a few days later.
The attack on the building was a two front coincidental attack from different parties with different aspirations. Marx had been in the office on the top floor when the building went under lockdown and refused to evacuate until his personnel and the research projects were safe and secured. He spent most of the first portion of the attack in his office with security, handling the situation as best he could over communication lines.
It wasn’t until communication in the building was cut due to Tech’s meddling that Marx broke away from his security detail – incapacitating them due to their refusal to let him go, and made his way towards the laboratory holding the cloned body with the intentions of stabilizing the body. He was stopped halfway when he ran into Ian and Speaker who were moving towards the roof.
After a brief encounter and information trade, Speaker tossed an old fashioned two-way to Marx that allowed them to chat from a certain distance as the two younger boys jetted off towards the roof and Marx continued towards the lab with the promise of meeting up with them as soon as he could.
Strangely enough, he would then run into Kerney who he instructed to meet up with the other two boys on the roof.
As he entered the lab, he found that one of the surviving scientists, Linda, and chief security officer Amanda were already in the middle of stabilizing the clone. Marx began to help but a message over the two-way interrupted the job. Linda insisted she could finish stabilizing on her own, urging Marx to take Amanda with her to the escalating situation on the roof but Marx refused, locking the two women in the lab until he could retrieve them later.
With the elevators and main power back on, Marx was able to reach the roof in time to watch Kerney’s gun go off, shooting the man he wanted to interrogate about his father’s death.
As Speaker and Ian ran towards a dying girl named Willow and Kerney called for help, Marx was able to have a brief conversation with Karl.Night before he succumbed to his wounds.
As organ farms became a more and more common medical practice, Marxwell only manages to get richer and richer due to his monopoly on the practice. He currently focuses most of his attention on attempting to transfer the consciousness of an entire person to an identical body in an attempt to save Isaac’s life, something Gerard completely disagrees with.
His status gives him a huge pull in Government affairs which is something that appeals to him greatly, especially since the loss of his eye, due to a botched assassination attempt, greatly affected the way the public sees him.
Marxwell is of mixed decent, being born from a fully Chinese mother and an all American father. Initially, he was thought to have been a genetic anomaly for inheriting his father’s green eyes but it was later discovered that Marxwell’s eye color actually comes from the syringe needle that had been injected into him as a child. His skin tends to be on the tanner side of things and most of his appearance is said to have been taken from his mother. In his teenaged years, his black hair was left untouched, with short bangs covering his forehead but now, at the age of twenty-eight, Marxwell tends to gel it up, making his eyepatch all the more prominent.
He stands at an average height of 5’10, with a posture that he’s perfected over the years and tends to wear light colored suit jackets with a more casual twist in an attempt to look less intimidating. He prefers to be as casual as possible but due to his position, he finds himself in suits more often than he’d like.
Ezra felt no joy in the soil beneath her shoes and a part of her just wished that she was back up in the air again.
She looked to the sky, thinking of all the poor disillusioned kids who bought into military propaganda that were lining up at recruitment centers back on Earth and wondered if she was ever that naive.
Well probably but not for the same reasons.
She never wanted to be a hero, to hold a gun against her leg as the holster brushed up against it. She never wanted to kill, to shoot, or to become a drone to military procedure. She never wanted to follow stupid orders that got good people killed without any justice or repercussions on the other side because of some stupid loophole and cocked up coverup that basically marked this, this crime, as a tragedy.
Ezra knew the truth. This wasn’t a tragedy, this was murder, and the people on top had already filed it away and sent empty coffins into empty graves.
And God, all she ever wanted to do was fly, that was it! Not go ahead get caught up in this stupid mess.
It’s just a shame that there was only one way to fly in this world.
She joined up the second she could and her talent got her boosted up a year in flight school which got her out in two.
She never had romance on the mind, none of those stupid childish dreams of saving lives or the extreme patriotism that could sometimes inspire and raise morale, she just wanted to fly and that was enough for her.
Or at least it used to be.
She stood there for awhile, watching as the world spun around her. She watched men and women hurry in and out of the Capital ship trying to do all they can to get her back up to full function, she watched as lowly service workers saluted the higher ups and she watched as the pilots and crew members alike sift through stupid procedures just to do what they were trained to do.
There was too much in between, too much stopping them from doing what was really important and the in betweens were what were making them lose sight of what was important.
You couldn’t be a pilot if you didn’t love what you were doing. You couldn’t fly if you hated everything that flying turned into. You couldn’t fly not believing in what you were doing.
Ezra looked down at herself, marveling in the comfort of her civvies and walked away. The papers she had signed months ago told her that she was theirs for a dozen or so more fortnights but Ezra figured that if they could abandon their own people, she could abandon them.
]]>
As for the piece itself, it was a way for me to experiment with transitions. Where Alex focused on playing with present tense, it seems like Ezra’s all about messing around with transitions. I’m not sure I like the way it turned out but I don’t really care anymore.
The last thing she said to him was a joke. The pilots always joked with each other. It was their way. There was no emotional crap on deck, they couldn’t afford to let that distract them because even in the vast emptiness of space there were still a million things that they could crash into.
They couldn’t afford to crash into everything because everything was an asset and every ship was damned expensive no matter how quickly they were mass produced.
He wasn’t even dead yet but Ezra knew it would still be the last words he heard her say because he was a dead man flying and she was furious.
This wasn’t the way. They weren’t supposed to die like this. There was no honor in this kind of death, no glory in being a piece of meat to be thrown away so easily.
Ezra sat on her bunk, legs thrown off to the side so she could feel the hard steel beneath her feet through her polished black military issued boots. She stared straight ahead of her, allowing her fingers to press against her palms as they molded into tightened fists she was unaware she was making.
She didn’t know where to look.
Not at the ground because it just reminded her of how far away from real gravity she was, not at the beds in front of her because it reminded her of her fellow pilots and definitely not at her shoes that were so spotless she could see her face in them.
She was angry. Angry at how they dragged her away from the fight because she was more “valuable” than some of the people on board. She was angry because of the complete disregard her superiors had to them as human beings. They were pilots, simple as that, numbers, codes- ranks without names.
They were hardly human and she didn’t realize that until it was too damned late. She didn’t realize that before Hotshot and a group of others she called friends took on their last flight to ward off – to distract the raiders.
She was trying to fight off the moments that lead up to her sitting helplessly in her bunk that threatened to invade her head but she just couldn’t, all she could think about was the look on her Captain’s face as he sent her off.
There was a stoicism there that said to her that he didn’t care, that he had done this before.
“But the dumbass barely made it out of flight school!” She had said to Captain Thiliam as he stalked away from her on the hanger floor, the navy blues on his uniform as lint free as ever.
The Captain refused to turn around, instead he continued forward, nodding to a few engineers on the deck, no doubt intending to return to the CIC, “It’s done Lieutenant”
“It’s not done.” She insisted, “We can still pull them back, I can still fly, there are a lot more qualified pilots for this -”
“This isn’t up for discussion.” He said, turning so quickly to face her that she had actually been startled.
“That’s just stupid.” She told him, “They’ll be slaughtered out there- that is if Hotshot doesn’t lead them right into the gravitational range of the nearest moon and crashes on it.”
The Captain had no answer.
Ezra glared, “And we’ll have to be sent out there anyway won’t we? Once those ships are down, the raiders are still going to be there and we’re going to have to clean up the mess only we’ll end up with even less pilots than we had before so I don’t understand the purpose.”
Ezra wasn’t stupid. Everyone else seemed to think that Hotshot and the other pilots out there actually stood a chance against the raiders but she knew better. They had no chance. They weren’t ready. Not even close.
“You don’t need to understand the purpose Lieutenant.” The Captain said, his patience clearly wearing thin, “And mind your tone or are you forgetting who you are speaking to?”
Ezra gritted her teeth, “I think I deserve to know why I can’t fly at the very least.”
“You can’t fly because we need you.” He stated, intending to leave it at that but the look on Ezra’s face changed his mind “We are in a danger zone with most our shields down and our plates damaged enough for a single well placed shot to breach our hull. We’ve only our patrol pilots as decent protection and heavy weapons that we can’t waste on fighters. The fact of the matter is that we need to make a jump right now but we can’t with these things gunning for us. Right now our choices are losing a few pilots or losing an entire sector or even worse have them flag an even larger ship with more firepower than we can hope to muster.”
There was a second of silence as Ezra took the information in before she finally realized what the Captain was really telling her. “You can’t just abandon them!” Ezra shouted, nearly dropping the helmet she forgot she had been holding and causing a few Ensigns to look over at her.
The fighters out there were just trying to draw the raiders away from the ship so that they could make a jump far enough to leave them all behind. They were buying them time.
The Captain said nothing.
“Send us out there, let us take the raiders down then we can all go home when this is all over.”
“Too risky.” The Captain said simply, “And I’m not arguing with you anymore. You’d do well to leave it at that.”
“Then just send me!” Ezra pleaded, “I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
“You graduated at the top of your class Caspian, We’ve no intention of letting you go that easily. We may need you later on. Now leave before I am forced to contain you.”
A loud automated voice counting down the seconds to their jump over the PA system pulled Ezra out of her most recent bad memory. She closed her eyes as she mentally prepared for the jump knowing she’d never see those pilots again and her thoughts drifted onto the last insult she had thrown out.
“Please,” She had said to the brown haired Ensign with a penchant for making goofy faces “A blind woman with one arm can fly better than you”
]]>It takes place in the Mundus Universe and, like the last Alex piece, is canonical, out of order and a way for me to play with tenses.
—
Her chest is going to burst, her lungs are out of oxygen, her feet are pounding on the pavement and she is losing.
Alex is losing.
She wipes away the water in her eyes as she gasps for breath. The men behind her chase her but she feels she is running from something much more terrifying than them.
She is running because she is dying. She is running because she is too stubborn to turn around and face them. She is running because they will kill her.
She wonders when she started running to begin with.
She hears nothing except for the way her feet pound against the ground in sync with the blood pounding in her ears. She loses her usually lightness, her quickness, herself. She loses it in favor for a scared little girl that has no business in her body.
She tries to wipe away her anger.
She fails.
Lasers are flying over her head and even though she can’t hear it, she knows there’s shouting. Alex dares not look behind her. She will not give her murderer the satisfaction of seeing the fear in her eyes. Alex will be defiant till the end. That much she can guarantee.
She pushes against a wall, her hands slamming against it harder than she had intended to. She was moving fast and she was losing control. She had hoped that it would propel her forward, give her a millisecond of distance between her and the hunters, she had hoped for something, anything.
Her body aches and she knows she’s bleeding from somewhere, or maybe everywhere but she keeps running. She sees a parked shuttle in front of her and leaps on top of it, her legs taking her into the sky. Then she hits something and lets herself slide across the hood onto the ground. She lands on her left foot and both her hands are touching the ground. She had forgotten her gloves earlier and now regrets it as stranded pieces of gravel dig into her hands.
For some reason that hurts more than whatever it was of her body they shot at.
She takes a breath and then reaches for the knife holstered at her ankle.
She knows it won’t save her but damn it all to hell if she can’t at least cause one of them pain.
She slows her breathing down and even though she isn’t and will never be religious, prays for her heart to stop being so loud.
There is no way out. The hunters were right behind her, they had chased her here, saw her duck behind the vehicle and it would only be a matter of seconds before they pointed their guns at her.
She hopes they kill her.
And she hopes it’s quick.
She remembers. Alex remembers everything. She remembers the screaming, the crying, the fire, she even remembers her fucking cat strung up by her tail onto a pole. She remembers because they were ruthless and she remembers because try as she might, she couldn’t bring herself to forget.
She sees what they did. She sees it in the men that were chasing her. She sees her brother’s glowing eyes staring down at her and she sees what they did to him.
They made him a servant. They made him a killer.
They made him chase her.
He’s right behind her. She knows this. He’s calling out to her but she refuses to listen. It’s his voice but it isn’t him. He’s lying to her and she doesn’t want to listen.
She can’t listen because if she listens she’ll give in.
He’s not real anymore and he’s not her brother even if he still shares the same blood as her.
He will kill her. She knows this because she knows them. They are sick and twisted and everything evil and they will laugh at the idea that he’s the one who guns her down.
It needs to be quick because she refuses to let him see her cry.
Her grip on her combat knife strengthens and she waits.
It’s two significantly slower heartbeats and one long breath later that she sees guns. But they aren’t the guns she had been expecting.
She’s never been more happy in her life to see uniforms.
Markus and Thi and jump down from a black shuttle hovering twenty feet above her in full gear, shooting over her cover as they make their way towards her.
They say nothing when they reach her. Instead they just nod as Thi crouches down to patch her leg up and Markus continues to fire.
“About time.” She says, pretending to be ungrateful and tough and everything she always pretends to be as she moves to stand up.
Thi puts a hand on her shoulder and forces her down, shaking his head at her. He says something too quietly for her to hear over the roaring gunfire but it was probably along the lines of “stay down”
“You’re welcome you know.” Markus shouts, lobbing something from his belt over the hood of the shuttle.
” ‘m fine.” She grits stubbornly, reaching for Thi’s holstered pistol.
He tries to push her down again but she’s still stronger than she looks even if she isn’t at her best and she stands.
She has to do this.
Her leg still hurts but she moves out of cover, her gun trained up on the only person in the area that matters.
He looks back at her, his eyes still glowing, his mouth twisted into a scowl as he trains his much larger gun on her.
She pulls the trigger, watches him fall, and then she feels herself crumble to the ground as something hard strikes her shoulder.
Alex takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.
]]>It’s not polished and it’s also an excuse for me to practice with tenses so it’s not perfect but I hope you enjoy it anyway.
—
She is strong. Stronger than most, stronger than anyone she knows because she has to be. She isn’t human, she can’t be human, she has to be something more because humans make mistakes and mistakes get people killed. She wasn’t killing anyone today, or tomorrow, or any day after, not by mistake at least. When she holds knives to peoples’ throats and cuts wounds deeper than they had ever felt she does it on purpose.
Everything she does is on purpose.
She is very much aware of everything going on around her partly due to a fear she cares not to admit buried deep into her bones. She isn’t that girl anymore – the girl that hid in the corners of her cage as slavers stalked passed her throwing crumbs they called dinner at her.
But some wounds are hidden behind faded scars and some wounds are so entangled into her psyche that she doesn’t even realize they’re there.
Her name is Alex and she is strength embodied into a young girl.
Alex has killed before, has saved before, has done everything she deems as necessary with no regrets but that doesn’t change the half lucid nightdreams she has. She has never been a sound sleeper. Not even in the safety of what was once her home, tucked away in her mother’s arms as her cat curled up beside her, the soft melodies of whatever classical music was playing through the sound system carrying her off to sleep.
She was always a little paranoid, always a little afraid because she wasn’t stupid and she knew that the things that went bump in the night weren’t just children’s stories that were passed around the neighborhood. Sure they weren’t monsters, weren’t aliens, but the dangers of life were closer than most children thought.
It was for that reason she has survived while everyone else was burned alive.
She tries not to think of her past. It’s done with, it happened, it’s over. She focuses on her future instead. She focuses on her new makeshift family in her new makeshift portable home. The home that travels through more worlds than she could have ever dreamed of as a child and although these worlds were dense with their own problems she can’t help but allow the childlike wonder in her to resurface every time they travel to a new place.
Still she isn’t naive. She knows the dangers of these worlds. She’s seen it with her own eyes, felt the cuts and bruises burned into her back-
Alex shuts her eyes tightly, shaking her head away from the thoughts that haunt her when she’s not busy. Best not dwell on them right now. She can’t change the past but she is secretly glad that her scars are mostly hidden from her own eyes. It was easier not to be reminded of them that way.
She hears the soft clank of combat boots from behind her and turns her head up to see who the steps belonged to but the sound had already faded away as they turned the corner.
No one came to check up on her it seems but that was okay because she’s used to that. She’s capable and her fellow crewmates understood that. Still, it would have been nice to have some company. It’s weird not having the uniforms on board. Despite not trusting them ninety percent of the time they were nice people and having them around the ship seemed to breathe new life into her little corner of their home. They had been curious people, the type of people that would bother her while she was working just to ask what she was doing and as much as she hated their bothersome behavior, she missed them. Plus the improvements they had made on the ship was nothing to scoff at. Their little portable home was running better than it ever had before.
She still isn’t quite sure how she feels about that really.
All things come at a price and she wonders what this one will be.
Her gaze drops to her mechanical hand. She never hides it and is actually quite proud of it. Not only did it look cool and intimidate some of the roughest and toughest self proclaimed space pirates out there but it spoke of her determination. It showed people that she wasn’t one to bow down to pain and that she will persevere in the face of danger but it was a constant reminder of them. It reminded her of all the people she had lost and all the -
She huffs at herself. That train of thought would get her nowhere.
Alex crawls out of the hole she was hiding in, deep underneath the ship where wires and bolts once wrapped around haphazardly with little organization, and feels her body uncurl when she can finally stand up straight. She stretches a little bit, the cramped space could do a number on her back but she was the smallest member of the crew again and so it fell on her to make sure things were doing well down under.
She returns to the main lounge in the crew’s quarters, greeting her closest friends with a tired smile.
They nod and smile at her too but she doesn’t stay long. She’s tired and not really in the mood for conversation. She gets that way sometimes when she spends a little too much time alone.
She hasn’t been like this in awhile. Not since the Uniforms first boarded her ship at least but that was because they were always around. Keeping an eye on them.
They really weren’t all that great with her personal space. Especially that Markus guy. He sure did get on her nerves sometimes.
Alex soon finds herself in her bed, lying back with her mechanical arm draped across her forehead. She’s more tired than she thought and she doesn’t really know why. All she had done that day was crawl around the Espionage’s interior and reminisce on her past.
That was really what did it.
Her past.
She feels her right hand clench at her side before letting it relax again.
Each of her crewmates – her friends had their own stories and pasts they were avoiding but she selfishly feels like hers is the worst even though she knows that comparing their experiences isn’t something that can be done.
But she’s pretty sure that she’s the only one that sees fire when she closes her eyes.
Alex tries to think of something else but it doesn’t work so instead she focuses on the soft humming of the ship as it begins to hover and take off. It’s a comfortable feeling, one that’s familiar. One that feels like she’s home.
She doesn’t think about the fact that the destination they’re headed to was where it all started for her.
She feels her eyelids close and drifts off into her dreamland and hopes that when she wakes she will be able to discern reality from nightmare.
]]>Only I am no poet and I am certainly no refrigerator .
I have a word bank. I use and reuse the same phrases in different contexts, the same words that hold different meanings, I hold them in my heart and hope beyond hope for somewhere to let them go.
I want someone to hear me, not to understand me, not to accept me, but truly listen to me.
Instead my days are rattled with everyday conversations and the things I wish I could say outloud are written down for no one to see them.
I am unable to focus because of this. My mind is elsewhere today and probably this weekend. The science I must learn for class, for life, for my career and for my happiness just passes by me because I am distracted by less than concrete ideas and more flowery language than I ever thought possible.
I pack my writing full of crazy phrases no one in their right minds would use in conversation. I make it sound much more complex than it has to be because I am complex and no words can ever be used to describe the things I think or the things I feel, but I try anyway and I end up telling myself that my days are like “walking through four days of hell only to be turned back and denied my right of passage” or that I feel as if “inspiration is not taken from another source, it is created within yourself through the way you interpret the things that are said to you”
And then these things run over and over and over again in my head like a mantra I will never be rid of.
I look for places I can write them down in, for any old scrap of paper I can find, in the corner of abandoned notebooks, or through the kinks on the walls as I walk between classes.
I am lost as I walk down a thousand stairs alone and I fear that no one will ever hear the jumbled mess that is my head.
Even now this blog, writing – whatever the hell this is halfway coherent and in no way describes one tenth of what I truly feel and I try and try and I write and write because I have this naive and ridiculous hope that maybe one day I will be able to.
]]>I am to reach my goal. That’s it. There will be no distraction from that, no wayward wanderings or lost souls. I have already found myself, I have already committed myself, and my stubbornness will not let me lose sight of my future.
But I think somewhere along the way I had become so focused, so obsessed, so determined that I didn’t take the time to consider the emotional toll that these last few weeks had done to me.
I never realized how tired, how broken down, how much I just wanted my mother again. Everything has just been so overwhelming that I haven’t had the time to really consider the reproductions of my grandfather’s stroke or the emotional states of various family members. I had been so focused lately on being okay, on being strong, I forgot that letting it all out is a way to heal, that crying isn’t something to be ashamed of. That it doesn’t make me weak and that I need to cry every once in awhile.
I get so afraid now after these last couple of years. I get so zoned in on how much progress I’m making that I forget how to be human sometimes. It’s okay for me to feel sad. That isn’t an implication of my sickness, it’s not a side effect of the unbalanced head I hold on my shoulder. It’s just natural and normal and I should cry because I’m not a robot programed to smile everyday. I am human and I am fighting.
And I’m crying because everything just hit me today. I’m crying because I have a moment to breathe. To take a rest from the stressful situations that have been thrust upon me. College is a lot of work, sure, but it’s not overwhelming, it’s just distracting me from my real life hardships and I put so much value into my education (and for every right reason to boot) that I stopped placing a value on my emotional state.
I’ve been feeling so lonely lately like I am much further ahead in my soul searching and value based life. I’m not looking to get drunk or to party or to explore the new environment I am in. I am confident in what makes me happy. I know who I am. I don’t need to look for me and everyone else just isn’t there yet and I’m not meant to fit in. I’m just meant to be me and that means that I am meant to cry when I need to, to miss my family when things are tough, to be stressed out by the workload and to practice music when I’m trying to forget about all the work I just put off. I am allowed to feel a little lonely. I am allowed to sit at an empty table during lunches and to have bad days balance out the good ones.
I am allowed to be human and I’m allowed to let the mantra that replays in my head telling me to smile boost me up.
I guess I didn’t expect this. I didn’t expect to be so sensitive, to be so emotional but that’s okay. I am okay and I feel better already.
My family isn’t perfect but they love me and sometimes when times are tough and I’m feeling like I’m the only person in the world, I just need to listen to my mother tell me she loves me too and to fuss over me about things that I wish she wouldn’t. To annoy me with her constant nagging and to mishear and ignore everything I try to explain to her. It just reminds me of who I’m doing everything for, of why I’ve become so strong in these last two years. It reminds me that even when I don’t want to let myself feel like I’m drowning that when I do let the waves wash over me I’ve got people who love me supporting me even if they don’t understand me.
And that’s the beauty of it. My family doesn’t understand me. They have no idea how it feels like to be me. They don’t know any of the thoughts that run through my head and they can’t understand why I want this so much. And they never will but that doesn’t matter because they still love me and they want me to keep on keeping on. They don’t have to understand me to love me. They just do.
It’s been hard and I never even realized it. It’s been hard because I won’t let myself feel devastated by the fact that my grandfather is sick and that my grandmother is working herself to death making sure he’s okay. It’s hard to know that my mom and my aunts and family member I ever loved doesn’t know how to deal with grief because they’re just too damned proud to show that they’re hurting. And I know this because that’s where I learned it from. We cope with our grief in very strange ways. Often times joking about how silly it is but I know that they’re having just as hard of a time dealing with it as I am.
It’s hard because everything is happening at once and that life is a series of bad timings but I’ll be okay tomorrow even if I’m crying today. And if I’m not okay tomorrow, I’ll just keeping calling my mom again until I can’t stand her voice anymore.
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Maybe he just desired some companionship. Physical, metaphysical, human, animal, hell some object that gave him some peace of mind, anything that would make him feel like he wasn’t the only person in the world.
God had left him long ago, his mother much before that and the word dad had never existed in his vocabulary.
He had never been one for attachment.
Even the glow of his shadow trailing after him or the piercing stare of his reflection brought him no comfort on the frosty nights he found himself tightening his coat to his body.
He was cold and the fire in his heart was too dull to save him from the frostbite that tended to overwhelm him as he hid in Church buildings, schools for children and whatever sticks and stoned buildings he could afford.
He tried praying once, twice, or maybe a few hundred times but when God had no answer he had abandoned his deity, deciding it was better to be the one leaving faith behind than believing faith had abandoned him.
He tried finding the comfort he sought at the bottom of a bottle but found that he disliked the taste more than he disliked the idea of being abandoned by someone who loved all.
He found himself the subject of school children’s tales whenever he wandered by and the object of every mothers’ pity as they attempted to give him some sort of refuge but he had always refused it for pity was not the same as love and he was not so desperate to demean himself any further.
He had patched himself up piece by piece with the broken shards that lesser men had left behind, a jigsaw puzzle or a collage spelling out a message he wanted all to hear. A message that displayed the fact that broken men were not broken by choice, that they were torn down by the everydays and the tomorrows. He wanted to carry the stories of every death he had seen and every loss he had experienced. He carried the stories on himself, haphazardly ducktaped onto his skin as he walked barefoot into the rain, a man who held the legacy of the scars that no longer remembered their own stories.
Yes, the fire in his heart was dull but not gone. There was just enough passion for him to pass on one single idea, one last thought and final one word so that no other man will fall onto his path.
“Home”
]]>She was staring at him, too proud to let him see her cry, he knew. He knew her so well, knew her better than he knew himself at times and he had seen her cry but never over him.
And she would never let him.
After this was over, after they both walked away from each other, after they were done, she would cry but until then she’d stare at him, eyes blazing and holding back the tears that he knew she held close to her heart.
He had been shouting, she had shouted, but now they stood with a million miles of silence between them. A trench bigger than any he had ever known or conquered.
He would not conquer this one.
Speaker took a step back, feeling like he stumbled, seeing himself in his mind’s eye put a hand to his head and close his eyes tightly as he pushed the dizziness back but Lizzie didn’t see that. Instead, she saw Speaker as he really acted. Stepping back calmly, backing away from a girl who seemed much smaller than she had ever been as if he was saying goodbye or surrendering her to the cold.
He wasn’t surrendering her though, he was surrendering himself, and that was something she couldn’t understand.
It was freezing outside. Lizzie’s heaving breathing visible in the midnight air, coming out as violent puffs of something that remained unsaid.
Something that couldn’t be said.
She wanted to cry now, wanted him to turn back so she could retire her weary eyes to her soft bed and drift off into lullabyland but she refused to turn away first.
She would not leave until he did.
He was just as stubborn. He didn’t want to leave either, refused to even, but perhaps for a different reason. Perhaps he just didn’t want to stop staring at her. To take her in. Perhaps he just didn’t want to say goodbye because after tonight, nothing would be the same again.
He just wanted to stand there, gaze heavy and watching the flicker of the streetlamp a few dozen feet away hit her golden hair in just the perfect way, allowing him to see her piercing, although watery, eyes reflect off of it.
She was so much older, braver, stronger, and beautiful in that moment that she had ever been before.
He wondered why he never saw it before now.
“Gerard” She said his name quietly, so quietly that, if not for the total silence of the moment, he would not have been able to hear it “Please.”
And she sounded so tired. So done. So…defeated. And he just wanted to make that go away. He wanted for the last hour and a half to have never happened.
He wanted to pretend he wasn’t the one who caused all of this.
Speaker wanted to go home that night, lay in his bed awake all night with a tired smile, and take a phone call in the wee hours of the early mornings because Lizzie knew he hadn’t been sleeping either.
He wanted to have not been so stupid.
He shook his head every so slightly. If Lizzie hadn’t been paying attention, if she hadn’t been staring at him as he was staring at her, she would have missed the action entirely but she didn’t.
She took a deep breath inward and slumped her shoulders, unfurled her red gloved fingers, and felt herself release all the tension she had been holding in earlier.
“Fine” she stated curtly but she didn’t move. She was still waiting for him to explain, to yell, to something other than just stare at her helplessly. “Fine” She said to herself this time, whispering too softly for Speaker to have heard.
He nodded once, stuffed his hands into his jacket pocket and turned around leaving her just as she couldn’t hold her tears back anymore.
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