[attr="class","samknox2"]

[attr="class","samknoxw"]Her forearm hisses across the sheets as Isaac pulls her to him, flattening the numbness of her palm against his warm chest, his beating heart, hand splaying overtop.

It’s a reminder of the things that are real and present and here and made out of flesh and blood. Things that still exist and are worth fighting for.

She’s not debating that. It’s not a case of everything is gone. If only it would be that easy. The problem is the pinch and shove and stretch and scratch of trying to carve a new, normal path through the ghosts of what had been and now was not. There’s a stranger in her bones, her body that had gone through so much-- she’d given birth, for Arceus’ sake-- and now it just. Was not. Had not.

“Do you think I’m being dramatic?” she asks, voice the dry scratch of a small brown rock on cement-- how amazing it had been when you found you could write with it. Skinned knuckles and skinned knees and the stretch of rasped skin.

And because he was Isaac, and certainly would not ever want to hurt her feelings, even on accident, she adds, “You can say yes.”

[attr="class","samknoxt"]Isaac Merlo

[attr="class","samknoxc"]☉

[attr="class","samknox2"]

[attr="class","samknoxw"]A brief moment of regret-- regretting asking him-- makes a ledge within her when he says yes, a ledge perfect for diving off of, deeper into this mire of emptiness, but he quickly recovers and tells her the dramatics are warranted.

Are they, though? It’s a lot to take in, sure. But she’s not mourning a life truly lost-- she’s mourning a life that never got to exist in the first place. It wasn’t real. A figment. A dream. And, if she’s doing that, why doesn’t she just mourn every squandered opportunity, while she was at it?

Not going to Mt. Pyre. Not leaving the Ultra Sea when she had the fucking chance. Not going to explore the weird Cyberspace place. Not being there when Necrozma attacked, the second-first time.

All the nots, knots in her throat.

The entire time she’s thinking, her face is still that expressionless mask, like she barely has the energy to blink.

“But it wasn’t real, was it.” It isn’t a question. “It never happened.”

But the idea of the dream smoke… that’s a new one. It piques her interest, in the way that nothing in the last 24 to 72 hours has. She imagines herself Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Minding it-- having a Pokemon pull it all out of her brain-- out of her body-- and bottle it up. So she doesn’t remember.

The temptation of it makes her swallow. The first sign of automatic functioning in long minutes.

How could she get it exact? Excise the memories like a cancerous cell. It would have to be specific, targeted, or else she would risk forgetting a lot more than just forty years that didn’t really happen.

[attr="class","samknoxt"]Isaac Merlo

[attr="class","samknoxc"]☉

[attr="class","samknox2"]

[attr="class","samknoxw"]For a moment after he asks the question, the both of them are lost in thought. Cyg’s brain has latched onto this concept of memory smoke, dream fog, like meathooks in a haunch, tugging and pulling it around the icebox of her mind.

“The truth.”

How to make it sharp, exact? Like trimming a fractal segment of DNA. Amnesia? Probably not, since it only affected the user. Disable? Disable makes the Pokemon unable to use moves shared between sets. Briefly, she entertains the idea of pulling from her and Isaac’s shared recollections… but that was too risky. She might lose all of their shared everything, and there was no pain severe enough to be worth that.

She closes her eyes. She hasn’t decided, yet, if she wants to go back or forget. She imagines a paring knife slicing through skin, lifting it to bare the soft fruit underneath. Snip snip, says the vet in Babe, standing over the muzzled Boltund, we can do it Tuesday. Or had it been Thursday? And why was her life always boiled down to movie references?

When she realizes she’s been quiet for maybe too long, she slowly opens her eyes.

“The truth. Always.”

For a moment she imagines herself sitting up and walking out into the backyard. The light is pale; there’s laundry on the line. For a moment, she’s that scene in The Conjuring where the sheet flies off in the wind and there’s a human shape in it. The ghost of someone, tortured.

That’s what she feels like. It’s pathetic. She hates it. But everywhere she touches is too raw to really dig in and pick herself up. The edges of this dissociative divide are too steep to climb; its depths too vast to risk jumping.

Her mind circles back to forgetting. A dog chasing its tail.

[attr="class","samknoxt"]Isaac Merlo

[attr="class","samknoxc"]☉

[attr="class","samknox2"]

[attr="class","samknoxw"]
"Sorry."

A thousand sorries. What's one more.

Her eyes went to the little piece of jewelry on the end of the chain, a spark of life where there had been none. She thinks of the fragment of metal she'd come back with, the way she'd thrown it away; it was nothing but a band-aid, a painful reminder, a paltry prize.

She wishes she hadn't.

"If..."

She swallows, because humor is now so foreign to her it's like a different language.

"...if I ever meet Calyrex IRL, it's on sight."

And then he got to the root of it. The crux of it all. It had happened. Unhappened. It could happen again. Not the same, maybe.

But it could.

The years stretching in front of them now all seemed daunting. Full of laborious, hard work. Exhausting. Aching. Miserable.

But that other life hadn't been perfect, either. There were many nights she'd cried herself to sleep. The switching point had been when she'd stopped feeling trapped, stopping feeling stuck.

Started living again.

And it hurt. It hurt so, so bad. There were phantom pains in her stomach and in her shoulders and in her mind. Ghosts of a sweet dream that melted away at waking; the kind that left you sad and spent, like you'd cried all night.

But he was right. The hurt was real but it wasn't all for nothing. They hadn't lost their years, really, just a preview of them. A beta version, an example.

Ever so slowly, Cyg's hand moves up from his heart to the span of his shoulder, palm over the warmth of his neck, thumb brushing across the pulsepoint in his throat.

Warm. Alive. Real.

"Would you want to do it over again?" she asked, almost afraid to hope; like the brightness of it might blind her. "With... with me?"

[attr="class","samknoxt"]Isaac Merlo

[attr="class","samknoxc"]☉

[attr="class","samknox2"]

[attr="class","samknoxw"]
She swallows, and she’s crying without realizing it, crying without a sound.

“I’m sick of it,” she says, like she’s that little kid in the story she used to love to read here, probably still in the living room-- the little kid with their finger in the dam and holding the flood of water back, but suddenly she’s decided she has to move and, boom, down goes all the water. “I’m sick of all the bullshit. I’m tired of fighting gods and-- traveling through time and stopping meteors and. I used to think that was what I wanted, right? Power? To matter? But it sucks. It just sucks. I’m fucking tired. I don’t care about being a badass anymore. I don’t care about being a Beast or being noticed by declan walsh or Felix or Oscar or Elisa or-- fucking, anyone, anymore.”

She was fucking thirty years old and, Arceus above, was she ready to back to being no one? Being another nameless busybody in the nameless workforce? Don her GMH jumpsuit and fade back into obscurity?

A shaking breath breezes through her like a hurricane wind. This feels like bearing her deepest, darkest secrets. Like something she’s been running from, been hiding. Because she has! She has. She and Isaac have talked about this before, the building up of people in her mind; she just didn’t realize until this very moment she’d been doing it with herself, too.

[attr="class","samknoxt"]Isaac Merlo

[attr="class","samknoxc"]☉

[attr="class","samknox2"]

[attr="class","samknoxw"]
At some point, she thinks, the pathetic feeling of feeling pathetic should just wash out, right? At some point there has to be a tip-over, a house of pathetic cards, falling and scattering across a veritable sea of patheticness.

This was okay, is what she was saying, because she was already feeling pathetic.

She buries her face in the crook of his neck and cries into his chest-- not sobs, not really, just tears; like she’s still holding back and they’re just managing to sneak through. She listens to him rattle off her accolades-- her Just Cygne things, not her work, not her inventions, not what she might be to the future or to Rocket or to anyone, else, really except them-- and the warm gooeyness of it makes her temples throb.

“I think I have to be done,” she says, voice warped with tears, the gaspy, sort of echoing rasp of a wrung-out voice on crying. “I don’t know.”

She shakes with a breath, pulls back to rub at her eyes. Feeling more human than porcelain, for a moment.

“I don’t know,” she repeats, sounding more solid, more present. “If it were for something, maybe, I could keep doing it. But it isn’t. I think if… if that future proved anything, it’s blindly throwing our bodies under the wheel doesn’t accomplish anything except make the people already in power stronger. That’s not what I signed up for.” A weak laugh. “Actually, I’m sure it is. A useless, endless war. That’s exactly what I signed up for.”

But at what point does joining Rocket to escape the useless tedium of normal life defeat the purpose if now she’s stuck in the useless, painful tedium of normal Rocket life?

“I like the store,” she says, sort of coming out of left field, like she’s just arrived and taking stock. “I like the-- the apothecary. I like making stuff and selling it and doing inventory and choosing stock and arranging flowers and stealing ideas off of Pinterest.” It’s so blasé, so lame. So very much not the red jumpsuit katana wielding Fall Out Boy’s Folie a Deux era she anticipated for herself. “I miss the flower shop.”

She rolls away from him, staring at the ceiling, the dust having spiderwebbed off from the popcorn texture and hangs still in the dead air.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’d… be thinking this if we hadn’t… if the Shield… that’s okay, right?” she lets her head fall to the side to look at him, cheeks ruddy from crying. “I’m allowed to, like. Change. Because of-- because of one thing. I’m not flaking.”

I'm allowed to want to be happy without endless sacrifice.

[attr="class","samknoxt"]Isaac Merlo

[attr="class","samknoxc"]☉