Aaaghghg.

Shit.

How long had I been in this rust-heap again? Weeks? Months? Oh, yeah, I knew the exact measurement, of course. 3 weeks, 4 days, 22 hours, 36 minutes, 29 seconds. 30. 31. 32. Y’know, that sort of counting thing. I’m the demon child of Whistle-Fucking Time, after all. I know these things.

What I also know is that 3 weeks, 4 days, 22 hours, 36 minutes, and 37 seconds totally hadn’t passed. Because there wasn’t time. It wasn’t happening. The clock wasn’t moving. It was a stand still.

It was driving me nuts.

Like….how does something like that even happen? How does time not move? Weren’t we aging? Weren’t wounds healing, babies being born, people being slaughtered? Wasn’t that time based? Wasn’t there a place for this in the great slip-stream of time, a niche of history where all these things going on had a designated area on the shelf? You’d think so. There was a goddamn invasion here—an invasion I spent delirious with infection, unable to help these desert folk hold their home. They were able to hold it themselves, but…still. That’s not the point. The question was whether something like this was a part of the world’s—no, the universe’s grand archive of things that have been, things that are, and things that will be?

Honest answer? Nope. The time stream left with Daddy-dearest. Unless I somehow invoked it again, we would be stuck in this limbo where nothing really mattered but it did matter but the universe was telling us to suck it, and seeing as I had no damn clue what I was doing and hadn’t figured out how to invoke it again…

Just…Aaaghghg.

Shit.

Yeah, I needed go. It’s been real, desert wasteland, but I needed to figure out my crap and get my ass into gear. The time (ha) I’ve spent sick with fever and dehydration with an infected burn on my chest had been a truly shitty experience. I’ll treasure it forever and always.

So I left the shade of the palm trees I had been resting under. My legs worked, but they were asleep so that was a thing I had to deal with. With a few stretches and a trot here and there, I made my why north, away from the oasis and the blinding light shooting up into the darkened sky that I had thought meant something. Turns out it meant…something, but nothing I was actually interested in. It didn’t stop my jittering nerves or the sense of impending doom I was feeling--okay, sure, it wasn’t as though I were on a time crunch (ha), but even in my bones I knew 3 weeks, 4 days, 22 hours, 37minutes, and 13 seconds was too long to be idle. I needed to do something. Even if I didn’t know what the hell I was trying to do.

I didn’t think about my dreams—I’ve been having a lot of them. They aren’t pleasant. Just—my dad and my Ma and people I knew and didn’t know and all their eyes on me, their eyes and their judgments pouring from their mouths and their ears and their eyes as they settled on me—

Well. Okay.

I was leaving, and I tried not to think about my dreams.



@[Cera]

[Dated before the sunrise. Ros be leaving. Say bye to her.]