Job 010 :: The Rememberence Job [Action/Written] {All day on the 7th}
[Nice and high and far apart - tl;dr introspection, warning: violent and disturbing imagery]
[There's been dreams about fire over the last week. Burning, scorching fire reducing everything in its path to ash, a hot path of destruction. There's always fire, taking, searing, destroying. It's mostly a burning building, suffocating smoke, dancing flames, no way out. Sometimes there are others burning with her. She recognizes them for who they are; her mother, father, brother, sister. The others who were there with her on that night.
(The medical report says they died of smoke inhalation. That they died painlessly. Ginia knows better; blood loss from blunt force trauma and gunshot wounds were the real culprits and their last moments were anything but. The report lies because the medical examiners were paid to lie, because truth is something that can be bought for a few grand. She was there. She knows the truth.)
The dreams are distorted fragments of memories that should have been buried long ago but manage to claw back to the surface. She relives the moments she's never wanted to go through again but can never help revisiting. It's an old scab, one she can't help pick open and let it bleed again, then forget about it and let it close, only to reopen it when something irritates it. She's a deranged individual even without Alice and her dreams are proof enough.
The difference is this time they feel more real, more recent. It's not the old wounds of eight years past, but something much fresher. The mental and physical wounds of eight days ago. It's the past and present colliding together and if she were in any saner and stable state of mind and body, she might almost laugh at the parallels.
Despair. Fear and anger. Desperation. An act of revenge because if you couldn't attack the person you wanted to hurt, hurting their loved one was the next best thing. Fire. Death by fire.
(The key difference was they had their revenge. They'd brought Avery in. Threw his body on the ground like a piece of dirty laundry, made sure they all saw his desecrated body before they continued vengeance on them. Made them examples.)
Past and present come together in her cloudy mind. The bar becomes a bakery then a bar again. Words are mixed up, reasons, statements. There's an earthquake. It's all terribly wrong, but comes together in all the right away. The only constants are the ones who suffer. It begins as her family and she watches them die over and over, small changes here and there, but still the end results. More recently she dreams of her friends. Giles screaming and pleading for them to stop, offering himself to their rage if they'd only stop, all while bound to a chair with his kneecaps shattered and slowly bleeding out from a gunshot to the gut. Helios, with his fingers shattered on one hand and crying as they pin him down on a table and spread his other hand in front of him.
And Grune--
Ginia wakes up shaking and crying and nearly throws up, because oh god it's Grune and no no no. She only goes back to sleep when exhaustion takes over and her only saving grace is it isn't Grune, but her mother again and she can't fathom which one is truly worse.
It's a week of torture as her dreams get worse and past and present come together. When she's awake and seeing her visitors, she smiles and pushes it all away, pretending everything is fine. Sometimes, for the minutes she laughs and spends time with her friends, things are okay, but when she's alone again, the memories come back. The nightmares, the memories, they all come back.
It only gets worse on the Seventh.]
[Action]
[Ginia knew it would be a bad morning. Never mind the nightmares gripping into her, all the faces beginning to bled together in a horrific medley of the ones she loved the most dying. It was snowing. It was November seventh and it was snowing.
The first flakes drifting lazily through the air and landing, sticking, on the ground. Once upon a time, she would have been overjoyed at the sight of snow and gone out to play in it. Stick out her tongue and try to catch flakes and blink away any that landed on her eyelashes.
Now all she can think of is snow and ash look awfully alike when they're drifting through the air.
Ginia is almost inclined to go back to sleep (its only 7 and it's not like she needs to be anywhere until later), but she knows there's no going back to sleep and even if she did, there'd only be dreams. So she gets out of bed and goes to wash up, get dressed, and go on with her day. She can do this. She can pretend to be normal and that everything is perfect and nothing is wrong. She can do this.
What better way to prove her absolute normalcy then with some baking? Everyone likes some fresh muffins for breakfast, right? She works quietly, whipping up a batch of banana nut muffins, then some chocolate chip muffins, and oh, maybe not everyone likes muffins some perhaps some scones too. It's a mini bakery in the kitchen of floor 3, community house 7, and once she's finished, she'll distribute the goods onto all the floors. To be nice. And normal. Feel free to catch her at any point between baking and distributing. She may not be as chatty as usual, but she'll still be personable.
After her small baking spree, Ginia heads out toward the item shop. She browses for anything remotely useful or interesting, but she's specifically looking for packets of flower seeds or bulbs. There are a few flowers in mind - chrysanthemums, marigolds, daffodils, forget-me-not - but she'll accept whatever she can find. After she finds whatever she can, she'll head out to the memory garden, find a quiet plot, and begin quietly gardening. Whether or not her planting will be successful remains to be seen, but it's the thought and effort that counts.
Her third stop is to Cloud Nine and pick up a bottle of red wine, a bottle of Jack Daniel's, and a wine glass. The three items will be carefully placed in her bag and then she'll set out for the river. Finding a spot on the bank to sit at, she opens the bottle of wine and pours herself a glass.
She takes her time drinking, watching the water and occasionally the snow as she sits outside, lost in her thoughts. When she finishes her glass, the rest of the wine is poured into the water, a ribbon of red weaving away.
After a few more minutes, she takes her journal out of her book bag and begins writing.]
[Written]
November. It's amazing how time seems to fly here. We're in the last month of autumn and look, it's already begun snowing.
In my world and country, there's a holiday called “Thanksgiving” celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month. Traditionally, it was a celebration of the end of a harvest season and a way for a community to celebrate after all their hard work. A harvest celebration. In modern times, it's a time for family and friends to get together and celebrate with a big feast.
My family owned a bar. On Thanksgiving, we would stay open and celebrate with whoever wanted to come by that night because not everyone had family to celebrate with or a place to go. We had a lot of familiar faces every year and people brought by food to share with everyone, but we always had new faces too. Someone coming in for the first time. Dad always smiled and personally invited them in, seated them himself and served up a plate and a drink. It was part of his philosophy as a bartender; everyone was welcome through those doors and he wanted people to leave at the end of the night feeling better then when they came in. It wasn't just about serving drinks, but giving people a safe place where they didn't have to worry about whatever was going on outside. Bartender. One who tends bar, but also the hearts of everyone who sits down. I always respected him for that. Learned a lot about bartending and people from him.
[Ginia stops writing for a moment, taking a few deep breathes as she gets choked up a little. Even at the end, her father had been so welcoming and kind when they came in. Greeted them with a smile until they dropped the body of his son on the floor. She struggles to banish the memories and push a smile back onto her face.]
Sorry, I got sidetracked there. But Thanksgiving. I was thinking maybe it'd be nice to have that here? Have a big friendly gathering for everyone with lots of good food and stories.
Though I'm curious what other holidays there are in other worlds. We just had Halloween, another holiday from my world, so I'd love to learn more about holidays from other worlds. Or stories in general. Stories are always nice too. I like stories.
[Action cont.]
[Ginia will spend some time going over and replying to any responses that come in, but otherwise she continues on with her day, doing her best to keep it all together. She goes down to the Battle Dome, sets up an open desert and takes some time racing around on a motorcycle. In the afternoon, she receives word of the mission she'll be heading out on tomorrow morning. She stops, carefully reading over the words and the description of the mission. Shift testing, not the one she was hoping to get, but she had signed up for it and a mission is a mission. Something new to try out and report back to everyone on. From the Battle Dome, Ginia heads back into the village to stock up on supplies and see what else might have appeared in the shops since the morning. There's a moment when she considers visiting her friends to tell them she'll be leaving, but no, there's time in the morning to do that. Less chance of them trying to talk her out of it given her recent state of health.
Even if she's not working that night, she takes time to stop by Cloud Nine. It's funny; she always wanted to run her own bar and now here it is, in a world of people of all walks of life and from different worlds. Her father would have loved it, loved the people and the stories. She stays at the bar for an hour, cleaning things that don't need to be cleaned, sometimes at the piano and playing through whatever songs strike her at the moment. Through it all, she maintains a practiced mask of composure, peace, and normalcy. Just a day. A bad day personally, but she finds a way to push through it.]
[ I built this place with broken parts - Locked to Giles ]
[It's evening when she finally returns to Community House 7, cold and a little wet from a day out in the snow, detached from a day lost in too many thoughts in a mind beginning to run out of space. She makes herself dinner, eats in solitude, cleans up, grabs a glass, and returns to her apartment. She takes a long shower, turning up the water until it's almost scalding hot and stays inside until the water runs cold. She dries off, walks to her bedroom and changes into a plain t-shirt and comfortable sweatpants and... stops.
It's the end of the night, she can stay alone and stop pretending to be normal. There's no one left to bother her. Her mask slips off her face, leaving behind the emptiness and the sorrow she's been struggling against all day.
She hurries out of her bedroom and to the living room, pulls the bottle of Jack Daniel's out of her bag and sits down on the couch. She cradles it in her hands, debates cracking open the sea and pouring herself a glass, but stops to look around the room. Empty. Plain. Uninhabited. One day she'll get around to putting pictures on the wall, maybe find new furniture, make the place her's. Why she hasn't yet, she doesn't quite know. It isn't as if she wants to leave the place, on the contrary, she's come to love Luceti even with all its flaws and ability to fuck things up.
Maybe the inverse; when she finally moves in and claims the apartment as her own, that's when she'll leave. It'd just mean a mess for someone else to clean up.
She wonders who would clean out her apartment for her. Grune? Helios? Giles? Maybe some combination of all three, who knows. God, there's a task she never wants to leave for any of them. Thoughts of cleaning out Erika's portion of their apartment in Davenport spring to mind. Deciding what to give away, what to keep, what to donate or throw away. Item by item, piece by piece.
Was that what it'd been like when her family's apartment was cleaned out? Her grip tightens on the bottle. Who had been in charge of that, going through all her family's personal belongings and sorting them. Hatter? It had to have been Hatter. He was the one who gave her a box of everything they'd been able to salvage. There'd been heavy smoke and fire damage. A lot of things had been ruined. She remembers those words, remembers seeing the pictures even when she knew she shouldn't have looked. There were a lot of things she shouldn't have done. Read autopsy reports, the real autopsy report. Looked at the pictures. Memorized every little detail about the crime that'd been committed to her family because few others would know the truth or ever care to know it.
Her family was dead. Not just dead, bur murdered. Tortured, defiled, systematically torn apart and then left behind to burn.
Ginia opens the bottle and pours herself a drink, downing most of it in one go.
She drinks. She remembers. She drinks some more.
To hell with remembering. To hell with everything.
When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.]
((ooc; It's a bad, bad day for her. Feel free to run into her at any point or place while she's out and about. Anywhere. She'll be putting on a smile for everyone and pushing herself through the day, friends may noticed she's a little more detached and distant than usual. Also go wild with timelines and even locations; she'll be all around the village and the only set constant is Giles talking to her at night.))
[There's been dreams about fire over the last week. Burning, scorching fire reducing everything in its path to ash, a hot path of destruction. There's always fire, taking, searing, destroying. It's mostly a burning building, suffocating smoke, dancing flames, no way out. Sometimes there are others burning with her. She recognizes them for who they are; her mother, father, brother, sister. The others who were there with her on that night.
(The medical report says they died of smoke inhalation. That they died painlessly. Ginia knows better; blood loss from blunt force trauma and gunshot wounds were the real culprits and their last moments were anything but. The report lies because the medical examiners were paid to lie, because truth is something that can be bought for a few grand. She was there. She knows the truth.)
The dreams are distorted fragments of memories that should have been buried long ago but manage to claw back to the surface. She relives the moments she's never wanted to go through again but can never help revisiting. It's an old scab, one she can't help pick open and let it bleed again, then forget about it and let it close, only to reopen it when something irritates it. She's a deranged individual even without Alice and her dreams are proof enough.
The difference is this time they feel more real, more recent. It's not the old wounds of eight years past, but something much fresher. The mental and physical wounds of eight days ago. It's the past and present colliding together and if she were in any saner and stable state of mind and body, she might almost laugh at the parallels.
Despair. Fear and anger. Desperation. An act of revenge because if you couldn't attack the person you wanted to hurt, hurting their loved one was the next best thing. Fire. Death by fire.
(The key difference was they had their revenge. They'd brought Avery in. Threw his body on the ground like a piece of dirty laundry, made sure they all saw his desecrated body before they continued vengeance on them. Made them examples.)
Past and present come together in her cloudy mind. The bar becomes a bakery then a bar again. Words are mixed up, reasons, statements. There's an earthquake. It's all terribly wrong, but comes together in all the right away. The only constants are the ones who suffer. It begins as her family and she watches them die over and over, small changes here and there, but still the end results. More recently she dreams of her friends. Giles screaming and pleading for them to stop, offering himself to their rage if they'd only stop, all while bound to a chair with his kneecaps shattered and slowly bleeding out from a gunshot to the gut. Helios, with his fingers shattered on one hand and crying as they pin him down on a table and spread his other hand in front of him.
And Grune--
Ginia wakes up shaking and crying and nearly throws up, because oh god it's Grune and no no no. She only goes back to sleep when exhaustion takes over and her only saving grace is it isn't Grune, but her mother again and she can't fathom which one is truly worse.
It's a week of torture as her dreams get worse and past and present come together. When she's awake and seeing her visitors, she smiles and pushes it all away, pretending everything is fine. Sometimes, for the minutes she laughs and spends time with her friends, things are okay, but when she's alone again, the memories come back. The nightmares, the memories, they all come back.
It only gets worse on the Seventh.]
[Action]
[Ginia knew it would be a bad morning. Never mind the nightmares gripping into her, all the faces beginning to bled together in a horrific medley of the ones she loved the most dying. It was snowing. It was November seventh and it was snowing.
The first flakes drifting lazily through the air and landing, sticking, on the ground. Once upon a time, she would have been overjoyed at the sight of snow and gone out to play in it. Stick out her tongue and try to catch flakes and blink away any that landed on her eyelashes.
Now all she can think of is snow and ash look awfully alike when they're drifting through the air.
Ginia is almost inclined to go back to sleep (its only 7 and it's not like she needs to be anywhere until later), but she knows there's no going back to sleep and even if she did, there'd only be dreams. So she gets out of bed and goes to wash up, get dressed, and go on with her day. She can do this. She can pretend to be normal and that everything is perfect and nothing is wrong. She can do this.
What better way to prove her absolute normalcy then with some baking? Everyone likes some fresh muffins for breakfast, right? She works quietly, whipping up a batch of banana nut muffins, then some chocolate chip muffins, and oh, maybe not everyone likes muffins some perhaps some scones too. It's a mini bakery in the kitchen of floor 3, community house 7, and once she's finished, she'll distribute the goods onto all the floors. To be nice. And normal. Feel free to catch her at any point between baking and distributing. She may not be as chatty as usual, but she'll still be personable.
After her small baking spree, Ginia heads out toward the item shop. She browses for anything remotely useful or interesting, but she's specifically looking for packets of flower seeds or bulbs. There are a few flowers in mind - chrysanthemums, marigolds, daffodils, forget-me-not - but she'll accept whatever she can find. After she finds whatever she can, she'll head out to the memory garden, find a quiet plot, and begin quietly gardening. Whether or not her planting will be successful remains to be seen, but it's the thought and effort that counts.
Her third stop is to Cloud Nine and pick up a bottle of red wine, a bottle of Jack Daniel's, and a wine glass. The three items will be carefully placed in her bag and then she'll set out for the river. Finding a spot on the bank to sit at, she opens the bottle of wine and pours herself a glass.
She takes her time drinking, watching the water and occasionally the snow as she sits outside, lost in her thoughts. When she finishes her glass, the rest of the wine is poured into the water, a ribbon of red weaving away.
After a few more minutes, she takes her journal out of her book bag and begins writing.]
[Written]
November. It's amazing how time seems to fly here. We're in the last month of autumn and look, it's already begun snowing.
In my world and country, there's a holiday called “Thanksgiving” celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month. Traditionally, it was a celebration of the end of a harvest season and a way for a community to celebrate after all their hard work. A harvest celebration. In modern times, it's a time for family and friends to get together and celebrate with a big feast.
My family owned a bar. On Thanksgiving, we would stay open and celebrate with whoever wanted to come by that night because not everyone had family to celebrate with or a place to go. We had a lot of familiar faces every year and people brought by food to share with everyone, but we always had new faces too. Someone coming in for the first time. Dad always smiled and personally invited them in, seated them himself and served up a plate and a drink. It was part of his philosophy as a bartender; everyone was welcome through those doors and he wanted people to leave at the end of the night feeling better then when they came in. It wasn't just about serving drinks, but giving people a safe place where they didn't have to worry about whatever was going on outside. Bartender. One who tends bar, but also the hearts of everyone who sits down. I always respected him for that. Learned a lot about bartending and people from him.
[Ginia stops writing for a moment, taking a few deep breathes as she gets choked up a little. Even at the end, her father had been so welcoming and kind when they came in. Greeted them with a smile until they dropped the body of his son on the floor. She struggles to banish the memories and push a smile back onto her face.]
Sorry, I got sidetracked there. But Thanksgiving. I was thinking maybe it'd be nice to have that here? Have a big friendly gathering for everyone with lots of good food and stories.
Though I'm curious what other holidays there are in other worlds. We just had Halloween, another holiday from my world, so I'd love to learn more about holidays from other worlds. Or stories in general. Stories are always nice too. I like stories.
[Action cont.]
[Ginia will spend some time going over and replying to any responses that come in, but otherwise she continues on with her day, doing her best to keep it all together. She goes down to the Battle Dome, sets up an open desert and takes some time racing around on a motorcycle. In the afternoon, she receives word of the mission she'll be heading out on tomorrow morning. She stops, carefully reading over the words and the description of the mission. Shift testing, not the one she was hoping to get, but she had signed up for it and a mission is a mission. Something new to try out and report back to everyone on. From the Battle Dome, Ginia heads back into the village to stock up on supplies and see what else might have appeared in the shops since the morning. There's a moment when she considers visiting her friends to tell them she'll be leaving, but no, there's time in the morning to do that. Less chance of them trying to talk her out of it given her recent state of health.
Even if she's not working that night, she takes time to stop by Cloud Nine. It's funny; she always wanted to run her own bar and now here it is, in a world of people of all walks of life and from different worlds. Her father would have loved it, loved the people and the stories. She stays at the bar for an hour, cleaning things that don't need to be cleaned, sometimes at the piano and playing through whatever songs strike her at the moment. Through it all, she maintains a practiced mask of composure, peace, and normalcy. Just a day. A bad day personally, but she finds a way to push through it.]
[ I built this place with broken parts - Locked to Giles ]
[It's evening when she finally returns to Community House 7, cold and a little wet from a day out in the snow, detached from a day lost in too many thoughts in a mind beginning to run out of space. She makes herself dinner, eats in solitude, cleans up, grabs a glass, and returns to her apartment. She takes a long shower, turning up the water until it's almost scalding hot and stays inside until the water runs cold. She dries off, walks to her bedroom and changes into a plain t-shirt and comfortable sweatpants and... stops.
It's the end of the night, she can stay alone and stop pretending to be normal. There's no one left to bother her. Her mask slips off her face, leaving behind the emptiness and the sorrow she's been struggling against all day.
She hurries out of her bedroom and to the living room, pulls the bottle of Jack Daniel's out of her bag and sits down on the couch. She cradles it in her hands, debates cracking open the sea and pouring herself a glass, but stops to look around the room. Empty. Plain. Uninhabited. One day she'll get around to putting pictures on the wall, maybe find new furniture, make the place her's. Why she hasn't yet, she doesn't quite know. It isn't as if she wants to leave the place, on the contrary, she's come to love Luceti even with all its flaws and ability to fuck things up.
Maybe the inverse; when she finally moves in and claims the apartment as her own, that's when she'll leave. It'd just mean a mess for someone else to clean up.
She wonders who would clean out her apartment for her. Grune? Helios? Giles? Maybe some combination of all three, who knows. God, there's a task she never wants to leave for any of them. Thoughts of cleaning out Erika's portion of their apartment in Davenport spring to mind. Deciding what to give away, what to keep, what to donate or throw away. Item by item, piece by piece.
Was that what it'd been like when her family's apartment was cleaned out? Her grip tightens on the bottle. Who had been in charge of that, going through all her family's personal belongings and sorting them. Hatter? It had to have been Hatter. He was the one who gave her a box of everything they'd been able to salvage. There'd been heavy smoke and fire damage. A lot of things had been ruined. She remembers those words, remembers seeing the pictures even when she knew she shouldn't have looked. There were a lot of things she shouldn't have done. Read autopsy reports, the real autopsy report. Looked at the pictures. Memorized every little detail about the crime that'd been committed to her family because few others would know the truth or ever care to know it.
Her family was dead. Not just dead, bur murdered. Tortured, defiled, systematically torn apart and then left behind to burn.
Ginia opens the bottle and pours herself a drink, downing most of it in one go.
She drinks. She remembers. She drinks some more.
To hell with remembering. To hell with everything.
When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.]
((ooc; It's a bad, bad day for her. Feel free to run into her at any point or place while she's out and about. Anywhere. She'll be putting on a smile for everyone and pushing herself through the day, friends may noticed she's a little more detached and distant than usual. Also go wild with timelines and even locations; she'll be all around the village and the only set constant is Giles talking to her at night.))