exnihilo | 12. ibidem

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12. ibidem

[Video, public]

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[Infirmary spam, open to visitors, backdated to 2-4 days post-Shakespeare flood.]

[She wakes up after jumping, her skin tight and and her eyes sore and her lungs aching in her chest. She groans, rolls over, tries to sleep. Maybe she can sleep for the entire toll. She's been trying so hard to be, to live and connect. Maybe she can just not be for awhile.]

(OOC NOTE: TW for suicide if people ask her why she is tolling. Ophelia's narrative was rough on her.)

[Private to Roderick, backdated also]

...can you do me a favor?

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I keep expecting glass. The memories aren't actually tangled up, I know what happened when, but -

[It's disorienting, subversive, and irritating rather than catastrophic failing of her mind. She resents it.]

Tell me a history.

[Something linear, something true.]

[A history. Something linear, something true. Her expression doesn't, exactly, soften, but she does lean forward slightly, the better to smell her with, to taste the edges of her tears at the corners of her taste buds. She can tell a history.]

There was a young woman who became a duchess. She didn't, I don't think, want to be one. That was just how things happened: the last duke died, and there was only her. If she didn't rule, well, then the country would go to the enemy, and she was too much of a tender-hearted patriot to allow that to happen.

So she became a duchess, and she married. Soon her husband died. She grieved heartily, so heartily that she went into hiding for years and years. Nobody saw her, not for the entire rest of her life. When she eventually died of old age, no one outside of the privy council was told, because she had no heir, and without an heir the country would go to those same old enemies.

Instead, the country went to war with those enemies. Over and over and over again, until the soil was tamped down to worthlessness with soldiers' boots, and no crops grew, and all the men were dead. The duchess, who was dead, was prayed to by the people of this country - "Bring my son home," "bring my husband back safe," "give me food to eat and a moment of happiness," that kind of thing. But she couldn't answer their prayers, and so she despaired.

She despaired even though she was dead.

[Just. Making sure she has that right.]

Is that so hard to believe?

[Well.]

It's just not the kind of dead I thought you meant. At first.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Because it is a true history. I'm not making anything up.

I believe in vampires.

[So.]

...I think I met a ghost. Even though they don't have them in my world. Even though he was alive.

[Oscar, she means. Saying things he only knew from his dead-self. That was a quantum ghost talking.]

It's different when you actually know one.

[Hence Oscar. She cocks her head.]

I met one too. It's an odd experience, isn't it?

Tell me about it?

[Mira Hidalgo: patient assassin who occasionally has the attention span of a two year old.]

[A pause. Not because she doesn't want to tell Mira - she does, she planned to tell her from the beginning; it's the rest of the story, actually - but because she doesn't know where the beginning of the end is.]

[After a moment:]

She was possessing a friend of mine. A young woman, who believed in her very strongly. Her name was Alice. She got very sick very quickly, and we thought she was going to die. But instead the Duchess came out of her.

She told us to stop fighting. That we had to take our country back before we tried to conquer anyone else.

Oh.

[True. Mostly linear. She is the disturbance - but maybe that's alright, because the line still runs through it, and through through the telling.]

From the privy council?

From everyone in authority. All the men and women in the army and the nobility who wanted to keep things stagnant.

Stagnation is incredibly dangerous, I've learned.

I suppose it is.

[She wonders whether the Gods qualify or not. How they factor into their own endless calculations.]

So is not asking important questions. I've always thought so.

[She prides herself on always asking, if there's something to be asked. Always checking, if there's something to be checked on. She always has to know.]

[Even if there are some things that seem too dangerous to know.]

You realize I have to ask what happened, yes?

[She glances away and it's not shame, now, just - weariness and sadness, and aching fear that she is inscribed with this below the skin, like so many other things she has been driven to repeat.]

I jumped off the railing.

Because -

[She gestures at the little bedside table, with its complimentary Shakespeare brick.]

Because I was someone who jumps. And because I am. I suppose.

[She takes this in with quiet dignity. It's not - she's not surprised, exactly. It's just that she doesn't know how to deal with it, or thinks she doesn't. She's never known what Mira felt, or feels. Life has always engaged her too much to want to leave it.]

Which one? Or do you think it matters?

Yes.

[It matters. It matters if it was foisted on her or drawn forth.]

I was because I am. It's always echoes and confluence, floods.

You're right. It always is.

[She should think more about what she becomes in floods, but she never does. This is why. Thinking too hard makes you think too hard.]

Who, then?

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12. ibidem

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