Anna Amarande (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hauntedsavior) wrote2021-09-04 09:34 pm
hauntedsavior) wrote2021-09-04 09:34 pmEntry tags:
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anna amarande
31/f. happily ever after we lived, the end.
VOICE | TEXT | VIDEO | ACTION
hauntedsavior) wrote2021-09-04 09:34 pm
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No. Not anymore.
[He chuckled, in a bitter and lonely sound as he assessed once more the sheer futility of the circumstances he had been thrust in. While the possibility of his Iskandar returning remained non-zero, they were far from encouraging.
He wasn't ready to give up just yet.]
I've already dealt with this quandary twice now. I never imagined that I would face it a third time.
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[she sighs deeply. it's hard to think of the right thing to say here, but she's trying. it just doesn't seem easy, or that encouraging.]
It never gets easier. It gets harder the more times you run into it, really, you know? 'Cause the first time, you think that's gonna be the worst. You spend all your mental energy recovering from it. Then the second time comes, and if you're lucky it comes when you have the energy back, but nobody's ever that lucky, you know? Then the third time...
[there's a pause, and a conspicuous breath of air from her nose.]
The third time it hurts. It never stops hurting. But by then you're learning that this is just the way this place works. That's when you start figuring out the way of things, and the idea that what happened the first time wasn't a tragedy. It was just normal. All of this is just normal. [her other hand balls up into a fist.]
We can do a ritual for him. Funeral rites. A proper sendoff.
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It was too normal. All of it.]
...There's still a non-zero chance that the Iskandar that I knew from Fuyuki, the one that was here, may still return. With the presence of the multiverse, it's always going to be non-zero.
I know funerary rights are for the living, but I'm not certain if it's premature. There's really no precedent for this sort of problem, is there?
cw: chronic illness, death
Did I ever tell you about Lillian? She's this girl I knew from back home. She was transforming into a robot, too, but when I say that it was saving her life, I mean it a lot more literally. [she thinks, quickly, on how to share this story without making it too dramatic. her emotions aren't the point of it. she litigated this last year. she doesn't need to do it again.] See, she had a chronic illness, and the doctors really didn't give her long to live. But she started getting all these mechanical parts back to replace the ones that were failing in her body.
[and here's where she skips ahead.]
But I met her on the app. The same thing that gave me all these parts of A2. And one day, she fell off the app. She lost all those mechanical parts, and she lost all her memories of the time we spent together. Or she was supposed to, you know? And I didn't think about it until I brought it up here, but... when she died, they invited me to her funeral because they found my name in her phone. [she smiles, but there's that same melancholy pain behind it.] She wasn't supposed to remember anything about me, but I was there in her life right 'til the end of it.
There's always a chance that something can happen that isn't supposed to, is I guess my point. It's always nonzero. [long way to go just to say she agrees with him.] But they did still send her off, in the end.
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[He shook his head, as if the movement alone would help him escape the weight of said imagining, and squeezed her hand.]
That must have been worse than this. Knowing that she was still out there, slowly losing herself while her body fell apart and still risking the chance of seeing her face when you went out to get coffee. A friend-- but now a stranger, except for a small piece of you forgotten on the SIM card of her phone.
[It was almost too painful to consider.]
For what it's worth: I'm sorry you had to endure that, Anna.
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[well, great, now she feels like a dick for digging up her old trauma when she's already told him that story. she looks ahead of herself for a moment, letting the feeling pass, and her gaze goes down to her hands folded in her lap.]
All I'm trying to get at is that, like... whether it's premature or not, I think it's still worth taking the time to remember his life and the time that you two had here. [sigh.] I never took the time to do it and I just ended up living in the past until it all broke last November. I don't want to see that happen to you.
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Waver shifted, and glanced over at her with questions in his eyes. ]
I wasn't here last November. Was it the Zealots, or the Tower?
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Neither. I just had an emotional breakdown in the middle of the night and decided to make it the network's problem. [she closes her eye like she's remembering that night.] I told them the story about Lillian. And because I was really in a fucking state, I started blaming myself for her death, even though there's no way I could've been even a little responsible for it. And that's when I met a bunch of people who were willing to sit down and talk with me about it until I could get some sleep.
But it's a nice little reminder that we can fuck up our own lives without anyone's help, yeah?
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Waver huffed a bitter little laugh and leaned his head on Anna's shoulder, just glad for the companionship.]
Totally. No one can fuck up our lives more than we can ourselves.
...I'll do my best not to make this the Network's problem. For one thing, I'd need to kill everyone if one of my superiors from the Association arrived.
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[she means it as a joke. like it's an obvious thing that any normal person would already know. don't take it too seriously.]
Listen, Waver. I'm not great at this... and, like, you know that by now. I'm still figuring out how to feel my own emotions and everything. But if you need to offload some of your brain power onto me for a while, just, like, let me know, all right? I'm gonna double down on making sure you're feeding yourself, and if I don't see you getting some sunlight I'll drag you out there myself.