It may very well be the worst thing that's ever happened to you! | OPEN MINGLE

[vitaelamorte]

Who: EVERYONE!
Where: EVERYWHERE!
When: Friday October 27th - Tuesday October 31st
Rating: PG-13, warn if you're gonna go higher!
Summary: A catch all for the Horrible Memory Truth Event!
The Story:

For the duration of this event, everyone's entire room will be replaced with a memory playing on loop. They will likely recognize the moment as soon as they see it – it is a moment they remember as the worst moment of their entire lives. It could be a memory from home or something that happened in Wonderland. Lengths of the memories will vary, but they will find that these are not memories they can merely watch – they can step into these memories and attempt to make changes to them, and the memories will be long enough that they have time to make changes (though no more than 24 hours). However, anyone who tries will find that it is futile. No matter what you do or how hard you try, the outcome is always exactly the same somehow. No changes you make will prevent that horrible outcome. It just happens over and over and over again no matter what you do.

On top of that, perhaps complicating any attempts to make changes, everyone will be forced to be honest for the duration of the event. No lies or half-truths are allowed, and filters will be gone for the entire five days. If something bothers someone then they will blurt it out, regardless of whether or not it hurts someone's feelings, and no one will be able to simply keep quiet when they have something to say. They must be truthful and honest with every word they say.

This is a catch-all log for all of your Worst Memory needs! Please mark your threads clearly in the subject line with your character's name and Room Number + Floor for character rooms, or just location if you're making a top level for a public place in the mansion (like the tea rooms or the kitchen) so people can see if there's already a thread available. And here's the plot post if you need it!

Have fun!

Comments

[normandysbest]

[She smiles, but it's not really anything from happiness; it's the arch of her cheekbones as her eyes close a moment, the squeezing of her face as she tries to hold it together. They know her. They know this, the way they find their path through her ribs and somewhere to her heart.

Shepard lets them take the pace, but gives their fingers a little squeeze as they touch, gesturing with her free hand for Frisk to follow.]

C'mon.

[None of the crew followed her here, when she ran to see his condition, when she bolted through the Citadel. They didn't want to interrupt what was the last moment between them. But Shepard knows herself, and the fact that she was alone for this carries more weight than the war.]

[determinedest]

[They can't do much more than be there. Than ensure that she doesn't have to be alone as she lives this. Her smile approximates a grimace far more than it does something genuinely happy, even mournfully so. They squeeze back, a faint press of fingers around hers, a reassuring pulse of pressure.]

[I'm here.]

[Back they go, then, into the bleached, pristine walls and the grim, foreboding air befitting that of a tomb. Maybe because, for the moment, everyone there knows that it soon will be.]

[They shouldn't speak at all. But it bubbles up regardless.]

It's quiet.

[normandysbest]

Yeah.

[She doesn't remember if it really was this quiet. She remembers this scene simultaneously perfectly and not at all. She knows it in every moment, in each thought of him, but simultaneously can't think of it too hard. If she does, she'll collapse. If she does, she'll go down with him.

Distantly, Kolyat continues to speak, but it's quiet. Shepard reaches forward with her free hand and takes Thane's, feeling the subtle pressure to show it hasn't happened yet.]

I always wondered what would happen if he showed up at the mansion and stayed. If I really got a little more time. But I only saw him for a day.

[determinedest]

Maybe someday he will.

[It's always a possibility, they know. The words that the other person in the room...Kolyat, she called him?
- are too quiet for them to hear. Maybe that's how Shepard can understand them so well.]

I remember him. His picture.

[The picture in her room, on a day otherwise filled with some of their fondest memories.]

[normandysbest]

Yeah.

[It wasn't anything special. Nothing meaningful from their time together.

It's all she had.]

It was his crew photo. From the day he came on the ship for the first time. The day we met.

[This feels kinder and worse. Talking about his life, next to his death. Next to where she damned him.]

Have I ever told you about that?

[determinedest]

[They shake their head. One doesn't have to speak to be truthful, and that's better; they prefer that. It feels wrong to break the silence like this, to encroach on this moment at all. Even if she's being honest when she says she'd rather not face it alone, it still feels like a disrespect.]

[Maybe that, too, is a truth in its own way.]

You don't seem to really talk about him.

[normandysbest]

[Her life is probably best described as a break in the silence. The disruption of something beautiful or tragic, burdened by purpose and duty. No rest. No quiet, shared pauses. Just the unrelenting march forward.]

I guess it's hard to explain to people who didn't know him without it sounding... wrong. I don't know how to describe him the way I knew him.

[Even if their time was so, so short.]

I don't know how to talk about him in a way that says who he was, not what he did.

[determinedest]

That doesn't mean he has to be forgotten.

[What are they saying? Counseling her on the detailings of grief when they barely know how to comprehend it themself? She's older than them, wiser than them, has had to live this life longer than them, and she would surely know better, right?]

[What do they really know about goodbyes, anyway? They haven't said very many, really.]

[normandysbest]

I don't-- I didn't think I was. Forgetting.

[The shift in the scene is so subtle when it does, that it's hard to say when the tradeover happens if you're not looking for it. Like recognizing the first beat of a repeating pattern every time it comes- meaningless, if the pattern continues. And it does. He lives, he dies, Kolyat prays, the doctors wait. And wait.

Shepard doesn't know that even this helps bolster the war. The crying, the screaming she does as the doctors drag her from this space- because when the nurses go home, when they drink with their friends that day, they don't say she was magnificent, they don't say she was so strong. They say she cries over every fallen soldier. She cares. She is so, painfully so human.

(Which would mean a lot, to a woman half synthetic, who has lost everything over and over and has lived only in the cracks, like a persistent weed breaking through concrete.)]

I don't... I don't know if I know how to remember him. Right, I mean. He's just... always been dying. And I've been the girl half-burning. And we... march towards the end, or something. I don't know.

[determinedest]

[Like a phoenix.]

[He's always been dying. Tethered to the concept irrevocably, the same way a fallen child with buttercups between their lips and blood sores crackling their skin could never be remembered as anything but an unavoidable tragedy.]

[They can't know why he was dying. If it was sickness, or some injury, or something they can't explain or describe. Curiosity would demand they ask, but the nice thing about questions is that, in events such as these, they don't necessarily need to crop up. If one doesn't know the answer, one doesn't need to put it forward.]

He still might show up someday.

[normandysbest]

[She hums a moment in response, and then lets out a sigh that would be a chuckle somewhere better.]

Dunno what I'd say to him about Toriel. That'd be a hell of an explanation. Hey, you were dead so I started dating again, sorry. She's not gonna be happy you're an assassin.

[At least that's not happening. Yet.]

Besides. I've had people from my world before. Not all the... actions, are the same. He might not have loved me. He might not remember.

[determinedest]

It's been a long time.

[It's been at least a year. That is a long time to be without someone. It's...maybe not as long as they know it can be, but it's still a long time. A long time to miss someone. A long time to wonder, waiting.]

Are you not allowed to move on?

possibly cw suicide ideation

[normandysbest]

[And this, here, is the hard part. The admission she wishes she could keep to herself, because it only opens her up to sympathy, and people trying to help, and nothing she knows how to handle. But her hand is forced.]

Didn't think I'd live this long. Was supposed to die before this happened. I was supposed to finish the war and let it just be done.

[She's holding on to them both, doesn't want to break the connection, but she'd be pressing her hand to her face if she could, just something to block out the world.]

I just want it to be over. I want my purpose to be over so I can leave.

[determinedest]

I don't want you to leave.

[That's a stupid thing to say. A stupid, selfish thing to say and it pops out of their mouth before they can prevent it and they wish they could claw it back, cram it back into their big, dumb mouth and just shut up the way they're best at, but they're not, but they're not, but they're not and Wonderland won't let them.]

I don't want to see you go.

[normandysbest]

I know. A lot of people don’t.

[And that’s so—gods, why? She can’t be that good a person. She’s hardly even a person, she’s—an icon, really. She’s what they needed her to be. Does that really make her so important, to have been at the right place at the right time? To be doing the particular shakedown run of a particular ship to catch Saren, to find the Reapers before all else, to be whatever she is now?]

But they won’t need me anymore when it’s all done. When I can finally save them.

[determinedest]

We don't need you because you save people.

[In a way, she already has. Hasn't she?]

[It's an awkwardness they can't put into words, that sensation of - someone who understands. Resonating on different frequencies across different threads, a tuning fork stuck in someone else's SOUL.]

You're a friend.

[normandysbest]

[It's hard to say there's a point at which she'll be done, if she really thinks about it. There will always be people in distress, won't there? There's always going to be a hand reaching out to her in the dark, desperate. It's not a good way to think about it, keeping her strung along from purpose to purpose, from one dangerous and impossible scene to the next until it kills her. But it's kept her alive this far. It's... something.]

You've got lots of friends. A lot of people do. And I can't live forever, it's... they're going to have to let me go eventually. Everyone is. The world is.

[determinedest]

But not a lot of friends like you.

[The pool of people who they know understand - what it is to be someone like them - it's not a very large pool at all. Does she know that? Does she know how few people they know, that they really know, that they trust to be able to look at the choices they have made and never pin them with dark and terrible stares and cold judgment and jokes about how they could have tried harder?]

[Is that their fault, for not ever saying it?]

Not a lot of people who understand what it's like. Being us.

[normandysbest]

The ones who move the world.

[She responds before she thinks of it, but it's not like she could stop herself. She knows what they mean. But she's never-- before the Mansion, she's never know anyone quite like that. No one else who had everything resting on their shoulders, being the only ones to move the world.]

Back home, it's just me. There isn't anyone else like that. But I guess it comes with the job description.

[determinedest]

It's just me back home, too.

[Even if they were less alone than they first assumed, in the end, when the final departure closes over them like waves over a drowning person's skull, when they exit the dark and step into the sun, there's the echo of old words in their head, in their chest, in their SOUL.]

[Guess it really is still just you, Frisk.]

I guess it's selfish to think it, but I don't want to lose someone who knows how it feels.

[normandysbest]

[Shepard sighs, more like a chuckle. She catches when the memory loops this time, the tiniest stutter, where she feels the pressure of Thane's hand return. Something familiar. The moving of the world in gentle waves, towards him, and away.]

I don't think it's selfish. To reach for something that makes you happy.

[She passes the pressure along to them, in measures, the link between her past and this future she's built in Wonderland.]

Everyone needs it, right? Just to not be alone.

[determinedest]

...so what about you?

[Do you matter less? Or does your world shrink to only encompass the thoughts and wonders of others, and never your own? That's an easy thing to do, they know; they do it a lot, they think, because they cannot lie to themself and they cannot pretend that they do anything else.]

[Other people are more important.]

[normandysbest]

I... don't know. I don't know if I've really wanted anything past the safety of my friends for a while.

[That probably doesn't sound great, from the hero of the galaxy. From some great savior, someone who's supposed to care so much about everyone.]

Probably should care about more. But that's all I've got.

[determinedest]

If I have to care about me sometimes, then...

[It's probably not the greatest, that they're saying this aloud. But they can't stop it from being said, now that it's there. Now that it's being said, it can't be unsaid and unhappened away.]

Then you have to care about you. It's only fair.

[normandysbest]

[There's a pause, like she's thinking about it. As if she really has that luxury. But she puts a bit of pressure into their hand as Thane's slips from hers again. Funny, how she catches that every time.]

I guess that is fair.

[She'll concede that much.]

Guess I'm not so good at forcing caring. Or maybe I just forgot what personhood feels like.