OOC: First Memory (Sight and Sound)
Beautiful midday, warmly sunlit room, a music box playing a satisfyingly familiar lullaby-like song off to the side. There was a man with a camera in front of her somewhere, who she found easy to ignore, busy playing with another pretty blond child who, if she'd cared to make a point of it to herself, in fact looked very much like herself only a boy, in a glass box of dirt and ants placed before them.
Ever amusing and stimulating to a sense of curiosity. They had only started, they hadn't touched the ants yet. Still, she pictured the invisible marching trails they were starting to form and imagined them scattering when those trails were disrupted, panicking if hit with a flash of light or blast of air, appearing at the bottoms of tiny funnels of dust digging their way out of having a handful poured over them.
They weren't going to touch them this time, either, because they had an idea of a new little experiment.
The boy lifted up one hand. He was pinching a dragonfly, which was twitching and struggling with a series of indescribable sharp, almost metallic noises between buzzes and whacks. It kept them up as, both of them grinning, the boy plucked its wings off, two by two.
Then he let it go, into the ants.
They stopped their marching around in circles as if it had been formal signal and surged towards it, still twitching with a long, bright blue taillike abdomen jerking back and forth, surrounded in a matter of seconds just like the rest of the poor bug in an even outline of unperturbed, numbly single-minded ants, bent on taking as much of an obvious source of nutrition as they could carry back to a queen they couldn't climb the walls of the box to get to, but would mechanically try to gather some type of worthy tribute for anyway.
They both leaned in. She was sure those were the ants' little jaws she could see snapping erratically at the dragonfly's exoskeleton, chipping little piece after little piece of it away until they could get at little pieces of dragonfly instead.
Some of them may have already gotten through. The dragonfly was struggling less and less. She wondered for a second how much pain it felt at this stage, and how insects took pain.
She and the boy connected looks through the corners of their eyes. They were both smiling. As she pushed back from the box, he did simultaneously, and did again when she turned her face to him.
They leaned in a little closer together, both their smiles deepened with their eye contact. They were sharing, confirming, and further taking delight in each others' thoughts. No articulation necessary. She knew they both knew what they were. There was fascination, a sense of pride and power, amusement, and countless others secret to everyone but them, special friends and playmates.
The camera leaned in closer as well, as if its operator were trying to make out something he couldn't.
The music box slowed to the end of its song.