nightlogs | [open] I need to learn to let go of the past

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[open] I need to learn to let go of the past

Who: Cammie & you!
What: Cammie dealing with some grief whilst trying to pretend she isn't and going about her routine
Where: Sleigh Room, communal relaxation area, training room, kitchen
When: December
Warnings/Notes: Inevitable discussion of child soldier stuff, mentions of climate disaster, discussion of child death, definite discussion of family death, other warnings in subject lines. (Obligatory note that Cammie's HoH/Deaf, her rabbit ears are her hearing aids.)

Sleigh Room

To most people, the way Cammie continues to throw herself into working on her Holon will probably seem like nothing but than a teenager with a good work ethic. Whenever she's out of basic maintenance tasks—and she is constantly finding more of those to add to the weekly routine—she's working on the jerry-rigged computers so she can better access her systems without being uploaded. Hardware, software, all of it.

But to people who know her better, or perhaps to people who do the same thing, Cammie is clearly distracting herself.

This isn't her favourite time of year. Not anymore.

Alright, it was never actually her favourite. Winters in Scotland were harsh things, all the years she lived there—deadly things, sometimes, with the way the polar vortex was breaking down—not the kind of snow you could play in. But there was joy in the holidays, anyway. The five years where all six members of her family were at home were good years. And then the twins died. And then her Mam. And then her dad. And then it was just her and her Gran until she got herself arrested and ended up in America.

They don't know exactly when her Gran went, too, but it was around this time of year and that hardly improved things.

So, Cammie does what Cammie does best: she buries herself deep in her work so that she doesn't start thinking about all the bad stuff. Never a foolproof plan, but good enough.

Visitors may or may not be noticed, depending on how deep in her hyperfocus on work she is at the time, but those who do get noticed without extra effort might be asked:

"Y'mind handing me that socket wrench?" or "Be a pal and toss me up those crisps?" or the like.

Training Room

There is a giant, mechanical rabbit in the training room. It's not an uncommon sight, actually; anyone who frequents the training room will have seen it in action at least once by now. Cammie's up here whilst uploaded just as frequently as she is in her human body, if not more.

She's yet to take the mech out on a mission. She feels... rusty. And so, she practices.

Leaps and flips and boosting herself so she can skate along the walls. Practising her aim, since her drones aren't functioning quite right just yet. Seeing how much of an advantage the mech gives her when handling the fearling swarms and getting covered in the red paint for her troubles.

If you look past the mech, you might spot the young Scot's flesh body tucked safely in a corner. For all intents and purposes she appears to be asleep; like she sat down against the wall and dosed off. Were it not for the mech, the only giveaway of anything unusual going on would be the small node attached to her temple: a white circle with tiny bunny ears protruding from the edge, and green blinking lights within it.

Communal Relaxation Area

Sat in front of a fire in a nest of pillows and her back against a couch, Cammie is fiddling with what appears to be a small robotic toy. Something a little more simplistic than the kind of thing she'd make back home, but not entirely dissimilar in its design principals to Nugget, who is paying very close attention to what his human is doing.

Every time she sets it down to pick something else up, the little guy keeps 'sniffing' it, or tapping it with one of his tiny feet. Cammie shakes her head at him. "Buddy. C'mon. You've got bloody nothin' to be gettin' all jealous about, I'm not replacin' you. Just pitchin' in with some toy ideas for the wee kiddies. I'd've loved gettin' somethin' even a little like you as a kid."

So would Maisie and Fergie, she's sure, but they hadn't got the money for all the best gadgets back then. Nugget was a personal project, and so were her ears. It was only after Mam and Dad were both gone and she dropped out of school to hack full time that she got all her best equipment.

Pulling a face, she visibly shakes the thoughts off and gets back to fiddling.

Kitchen

It's late. It's really late. Cammie's sleep schedule hasn't improved at all on this third leg of her multiversal journey, because why would it? The disruption of her routine is more than enough to set her back again each time and frankly, she's rarely made much progress in shaking the habit in the first place. Nightmares, workaholic tendencies, and good old fashioned poor choices have always been her frenemies.

It's more than that right now, though.

Cammie is attempting to make hot chocolate the old fashioned way, on a stove in the kitchens. She has all the ingredients and tools she needs, and she's already got a batch on the heat. She's never done it before, not properly. But this was how her Gran always used to make it, ever since she was just a wee babe. Cammie watched her do it so many times it's burned into her memory, and thanks to gen:LOCK she can go back and view those memories with unnatural clarity. She knows how to do it. In theory.

It still doesn't feel like it'll taste the same.

God, she misses her. She misses all of them. Mam, Dad, Gran, Maisie and Fergie—why is it just her still alive? Why did her Gran have to go and be so stubborn and get herself—

One rabbit ear twitches towards the sound of someone else in the room. Cammie scrubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand and swallows, so she can sound like she has her shit together. "Makin' more than enough for two, if y'fancy a mug."

Wildcard!

Totally down for other things. I can be found at

bluecitrine.

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Dan, like Cammie, has workaholic tendencies when he's stressed, and lately he's been going on as many expeditions with Bunny as he can to stay in the field. Dan's skills these days in this setting mostly tend towards damage control, to providing emotional support to people who've just survived attacks from the supernatural and to tying up loose ends, and that means that he's taken on so much of other people's emotions that he doesn't have much time for his own. That's how he likes it. He doesn't want to think about this time of year or the next month. He just wants to sink into harry and hustle until February.

When he hasn't been out in the field, he's been making gifts for people and partying, which, thankfully, is easy to do at this time of year, what with mistletoe and jingle bell rocking and partridges in pear trees. He's been working hard and therefore drinking hard, and after at least one Christmas shindig a yeti has had to carry him home after he fell asleep behind a Christmas tree, wrapped in tinsel and covered in glitter.

It's completely thrown off his sense of time, which means that he's waking up and stumbling to the kitchen for coffee by the time Cammie's making hot chocolate. He rubs his eyes and shuffles over to the window to crack it so he can vape.

"In fact, I do." Dan can read Cammie's body language even when he's half-asleep and hungover, and he can tell she's upset, and that makes him want to stay near to her. He holds his vape up and waggles it. "Will it bother you if I have some nicotine while I wait for the cocoa?"

Edited 2023-12-03 06:39 (UTC)

Cammie shakes her head, giving the pot another stir. "Nah, knock yourself out. I've got the smell 'a meltin' chocolate blastin' me in the face, I ain't gonna smell a thing comin' from you."

As is in her nature, she's perched in an odd crouch on the stool she pulled up so she didn't have to stand the whole time she was doing this. Her PJs are baggy and comfortable, and she has bunny slippers on.

She couldn't hide how exhausted and out of sorts she is from Dan if she tried, and by now, she knows it. So maybe she doesn't try quite as hard.

"Mm. Wish I hadn't done wrecked my sense of smell with smoking. Melting chocolate sounds nice."

He vapes and exhales out the window, letting the familiar wave of nicotine in his lungs flush out the sleepiness like cobwebs. His head hurts, he's nauseated, his back hurts, but he wiggles his toes in his own slippers and rolls his fingers over the corners of the vape and decides that he's still in one piece and that he's going to take that as a blessing. It's not the worst morning he's had, or whatever time this is now that he's awake.

He takes a few hits off the vape before shuffling over to the cabinet to throw together some Irish coffee. He doesn't look right at Cammie, trying to give her her space and time to adjust to him being in the room with her before he tries to coax her into opening up.

"Do you want to talk about them?" He doesn't know who she's thinking of, and that's the tragic thing. It could be anyone in her family graveyard, where the deceased are plentiful as flowers. It could be Kazu. It could be another one of her comrades, torn away from her in a little 'update' from her home dimension. Dan just knows that he's looking at grief, because he's seen it so often in his life.

The sound of whisking stutters, stops, then starts again as Cammie snorts softly and shakes her head. "Swear it's cheatin' how well you can read me when you've never even been all up in my brain. Y'sure you didnae get some me-specific mindreadin' powers somewhere?"

The joking gives way to a sigh and the whisking stops again. Cammie digs out another mug to join the one she had ready for herself—both obnoxiously Christmas themed, of course.

"...I dunno. Maybe."

Dan gives a muted laugh. "I'm just good at reading folks. Survival skill from a life of getting by on the kindness of strangers."

But familiarity has made him good at reading Cammie in particular. They've spent enough time together, bared their hearts enough.

"I ain't going to force you to if you don't want to, just...I know it's a hard time of year for a lot of us."

December is easier for Dan than January, but it still feels like bearing down on a bad stretch that never gets easier, and it's hard not to think of who's missing when there's such an atmosphere of togetherness and joviality. Ghosts press in during the holidays. Absences - voices missing during singalongs, potlucks down a dish, blank spaces at the kitchen table - yawn open.

"Yeah," Cammie breathes, carefully taking the pot off the heat. "Sure cannae say it's an easy one. Fuck, I cannae even remember the last time I did Christmas. Before Dad died, maybe."

Even then, for all her dad and gran's efforts to make the day special, it was never quite the same as it was when it was all of them. Then she didn't even let Gran try, after Mam and Dad were gone too. Maybe she should've. Hindsight.

Just as carefully, she pours the hot chocolate into the mugs. There'll still be some left over.

"Not a lotta time for holidays in war, and all."

"Ellie and me used to try and make Christmas happen each year. I was bad at it. Usually so drunk I'd sleep half the day or too hungover to function."

He sighs and drums his fingers on the counter. He exposed his daughter to so much more of his issues with addiction than he ever intended to. It always just felt like a gradual creep, sliding into drinking a little more than usual because of the holidays, into letting Ellie take care of him a little more each day until she would put her foot down and point out that she was too young to be the adult between the two of them, and he'd straighten out for a while before they did it all again the next year.

He can be honest with Cammie. She's aware he wasn't an ideal parent. He's certain he isn't the ideal paternal figure now, if that's the best way to describe the relationship he and Cammie have.

"Thank you." He takes the cocoa and sits at the table with his three beverages (he decided to complicate the Irish coffee concept by splitting the Bailey's and the coffee into two mugs). "Is there a Christmas you think of as the ideal Christmas? Some time you remember with all of them?"

It's not surprising to hear, no, but Dan's flaws haven't stopped Cammie loving him so far and they're certainly not going to start now. She hasn't even felt like she's been the ideal teenager for any of the adults in her life to deal with, well... ever. She'd only just made it out of her tweens by the time it was just her and Gran.

Despite being a teenager with a pretty big sweet tooth, Cammie doesn't add anything else to her mug. No cream or marshmallows. Just Gran's hot chocolate on its own.

There's a little wrinkle between her brow as she thinks, and her ears pull close together in almost a mimicry of it. "...probably when Maisie and Fergie were about four." It might be the first time she's called the twins by name aloud, in all the times they've ever talked about any of this. "They didnae get sick 'til the year after and they were finally old enough to really, really get into it all, y'know? They were so excited. Gran even managed to get 'em to try their vegetables, even if she had to bribe 'em with pudding. Dad got 'em to give Mam some— fancy thing she'd wanted but kept sayin' she couldnae justify; hard to get pissed about money when its the kiddos handin' it over. Bit cheeky of him, really. But she was happy in the end."

One final Christmas together where everything was okay, before everything went to shite a few months later. When the twins got sick—she's not sure if she's mentioned that part before, either, the how they died. Cammie takes a big swig of her hot chocolate, even if it might still be a little too hot.

"Careful, that shit's hot," he says softly, nodding at her hot chocolate mug before he takes a sip of his Bailey's.

He can picture it. He's been able to picture Cammie's childhood for a while, and the details are like adding color to a pen sketch. It reminds him of his family, of how the holidays were always a time when they'd wring joy out of their hard-scrabble farming existence in their winter bunker. He remembers scheming with Kitty to come up with gifts for their parents, remembers everything handmade under the tree, remembers the way Tab crowed the year she bagged a goose for Christmas dinner.

"That sounds wonderful." He can see how even all the festive cheer of the Pole would fall short in comparison. "Genius work on your father's part. A benevolent con."

He takes a slow sip of his hot chocolate. "This is excellent."

The way she immediately grabs for the leftover milk probably says all that needs to be said about how quickly that temperature comes back to bite her. She pulls a face at her own expense, once she puts the milk down, and wisely seems to decide to wait before going to pick the mug back up.

"He was a real clever one, always was. Mam and Gran were too, mind you." They all had their thing, sometimes they overlapped, sometimes they didn't. But there's a reason Cammie's budding genius was nurtured. Her social skills might have even done better, if she hadn't lost them all at such a key point in her development.

Her gran just didn't have the time or energy to spare to get through the walls she put up, after that.

"...this is how Gran always used to make it," she says, as she picks the mug up again and stares down at it. "She made the best tea and the best hot chocolate you'll ever taste, I swear it. I tried eatin' the powder, once, 'cuz she was busy and I thought ey, if that's what makes Gran's hot chocolate, it's gotta be good, right? Nope. The way I whined..."

"Runs in your family." Dan smiles at her. He remembers he once told her that dead loved ones find places to show up in people's lives, little traits and reminders throughout the day. They show up in people, too. Cammie carries her family with her in her personality, and when she talks about them Dan feels like she's hitting a chord in harmony, strengthening the beauty of something that's already there.

"Don't knock the powder. I eat it straight." Dan widens his grin so that missing molar tucked in the back shows. He can't claim that he lost it doing something cool like in a heroic rescue from a rockslide or a bar fight with the cops. It just fell out one day after years of hurting every time he ate sugar. And he didn't learn his lesson, because he still drinks maple syrup straight and still dresses up his coffee with a half-cup of cream and six cubes of sugar. "She sounds like a wonderful lady. Real matriarch."

Cammie's nose wrinkles, "It's so— powder-y! I dunno how you can eat that straight and not cringe yourself to death. Eugh."

The shudder of texture-based-disgust is only a little exaggerated. Eating that powder raw is a vivid memory of lessons learned as a child. She takes another sip of her hot chocolate, as if to purge the sensory memory.

"She was. She was always there. Even when Mam was away working. Even after... y'know." Her frown deepens. "I wasnae— I wasn't the nicest to her, the last couple years. Sometimes it was easier to yell than deal with whatever I was feelin'. And her face when I got arrested... I dunno."

She's never really shaken the look of pure resignation and disappointment in her Gran's eyes after she realised how Cammie had been affording all her fancy equipment. She'd forgiven her, but that look is burned into Cammie's memory like a brand.

"My standards are rock bottom," Dan jokes. His preferences for cheap, sweet, high-calorie garbage is, like many of his quirks, the product of living barely scraping by on the outskirts of society. Candy's easy to shoplift and has a long shelf life. Junk food is affordable and filling.

He scoots his chair closer to Cammie's. He takes a long, slow sip of cocoa and tries to make eye contact with her.

"Kids are supposed to be a handful. That holds true for grandkids, too. I ain't being sappy when I say I know she'd be proud of you now, no matter the path it took to get you there."

Her ears flatten and spread. Her eyes only flick up to Dan's for a moment, before staring back into her hot chocolate. "She never even got t'know what I was actually doin' out there. Last she knew I was still in Pol Cy, gen:LOCK was so top secret I couldnae tell her even the couple chances I got to talk to her before..."

The next breath she takes is a shuddering one, and she pulls her knees tighter to her chest. The last message she ever received from Gran had been a portent of the summons that would follow only weeks later, when Major De Costa got the unenviable job of delivering bad news to the base's youngest soldier.

She'd already been stressed from the turn the war had taken, the loss of the Anvil and the returned threat of Nemesis. Bad things come in threes, she supposes.

"...she refused to leave her home. Even when the Union was right on her doorstep, she wouldnae leave. It woulda been hard, but there were ways, but she— she wouldn't."

Europe didn't have gen:LOCK to help them push the Union tide back. When Smoke production increased, when they started producing multiple Nemesii, the continent didn't stand a chance. The Union tore through Europe like fire through a dry forest. Tens of millions in the cities were devoured by nanotech, hundreds of millions more were forced to live and die under Union occupation.

Gran lived in Glasgow. Without a Union membership, she never stood a chance if she didn't leave.

Dan understands. He understands both the experience of staying in the face of encroaching violence and the pain of watching someone do just that. He wonders, sometimes, if it would have been better for his father to fight for their family home rather than let himself be arrested and let the land be repossessed. He wonders if he should have resisted more, a sixteen year-old boy who had to be wrestled into the car at gunpoint because he didn't want to leave the only home he'd ever known.

"Stubbornness is a virtue and a curse," he says quietly. "I wish she'd had a little less of it in that case, for your sake."

Because Cammie shouldn't have been robbed of her entire family like that. She shouldn't have been bereaved, orphaned, bereaved again like that, if Dan understands the sequence of events correctly. She shouldn't have had to rely on other child soldiers, some of whom have already been caught in the mouth of war.

"I wish I could might say losing your whole family gets easier, but I can't really bring myself to lie to you during the holidays."

Cammie snorts softly, and raises her gaze from her mug to look him in the face at last, if only to give him a sardonic little smile. "Frankly, Dan, I'd've called you on your shit if you'd even tried."

They've talked too often about the way the trauma clings to you for any such platitudes to come out of Dan's mouth and feel genuine. And that's okay by her. She'd rather have Dan's version of the truth than Dan's version of a fantasy.

"Family make us. You lose 'em all and— a part of you's just gone. No gettin' it back." It felt the same when losing Kazu, if in a much more literal way thanks to the way their minds had all entangled over time. "I asked Gran once, after the twins died, if I was still a big sister. And lemme tell you, she did not know how to answer that question comin' outta a ten year old's mouth."

And as her family kept dying, she never really stopped wondering. Do you stop being a sister, a daughter, a granddaughter? When the person that gave your life that context is gone? Or do you continue on for years, decades, still clinging to those titles that have no basis in the reality of the rest of your life? What lets you keep them, the memories? The things they taught you? The mannerisms, the habits, the skills? Is the echo of their love enough?

Dan figures it would be rude to tamper with Gran’s homemade cocoa recipe, so he alternates the Bailey’s and the cocoa. He feels like he needs something stronger than either. Fucking heroin, maybe.

“I was a little older than you by the time…anyway. I was twenty-three. I just remember thinking I not only didn’t know who I was without them, but not even knowing if I existed no more. Like I was vapor and they were the walls of a container and when they were gone I just didn’t exist anymore.”

And that never went away. He still feels, somehow, like he isn’t really here, like his life is a dream or a story starring someone else. His family was something solid he could anchor his life to and, like Cammie said, they’re gone and he can’t get them back.

“How would you might answer that question? I want to say I still think of myself as a son and brother-“ and father- “but I don’t really think of myself as anything anymore.”

"Christ, I dunno. Cannae say I've ever been sure one way or another. When I'm thinking or talkin' about 'em, then— maybe, I do. But I dinnae talk about 'em much, and sometimes when it's just me and my own thoughts it all feels so... far away."

Like it's all just slipping through her fingers. If the world doesn't end and she makes it to a solid age, there'll be a time when the majority of her life has been without a single member of her first family around her. It's strange enough now, knowing she's spent more of her life as an 'only child' than with the twins.

"...reckon it's some 'a why I dinnae mind so much when the others get bits of my memories. Makes 'em feel more real. Instead of just bein' all in my head."

"Yeah." Dan stirs the cocoa with a spoon to prevent the top from congealing, then drinks some coffee. He still has a hangover, and the caffeine is necessary to sweep it away like so many cobwebs.

"Mm. I like that way of looking at it." But he can't relate. Having his memories on display always feels like a violation. Having the memories at all seems to feel like keeping his family hostage, like if he can't move on, neither can they. They're just alive enough in the memory to be trapped with him. "I'll always keep your memories safe. I got a real ease at remembering things. It's a blessing a curse."

"Tell me about it." Maybe if she didn't remember so much so clearly she wouldn't still be so messed up by some of it, but she's weighed up the pros and cons of deleting memories before. The cons won. "...thanks. I know you dinnae like it so much. Never even get much choice about it when some memory weirdness happens on these jumps."

A part of her is already expecting another incident the likes of those they've experienced before, at some point in their time here, to make it three for three.

"I always just worry folks are going to look at me different after they see my memories. I don't need that. I don't need them asking me questions about shit I don't want to talk about."

It's not that Dan's afraid of pity, but afraid that people treating him with extra sympathy will just feel like a feedback loop where he can't escape thinking about death and loss. If people behave normally around him, it's easier to fall into the flow of the day and put everything out of his mind for a few minutes at a time. He isn't like Cammie. He isn't adjusted to the idea of having his thoughts shared.

"It's been a minute since we had our tragic backstories splayed open for the world to see, though, ain't it?" He drinks some more Bailey's.

"Been a hot minute now, aye. Cannae say I ain't expectin' it to come up again, the Rig and the Green could hardly have been more different and we still got swept up in somethin' of the like both times."

It's hard not to see a pattern developing, and if it happens again, well, it stops just being a pattern and starts being something more concrete. Cammie's always been a little genre-savvy, it comes from being a teenager dragged into what should have been the stuff of sci-fi stories, and they've done this enough by now that it's settling into the same zone.

"...hopefully for your sake it won't be any time soon, if at all. Feel like we've got a lotta new faces around, this time. Always weirder with newer folks, even for me."

"It's just a matter of time, I reckon." Dan knows that he and Bunny likely wouldn't have gotten together if they hadn't seen through each other's memories what kinds of people they were. He figures he would have a lot more explaining to do to other people around here if they hadn't seen the parts of his life he hates to talk about; even Cammie has context she only could have gotten through seeing Dan's life.

But he still hates it, so he drinks some more, first the cocoa then the coffee then the whiskey.

"You met anyone new you really like?" Dan appreciates the opportunity to pivot into something he prefers: gossiping about their peers. "I told Miguel about you."

"Aye, he said. Or, well, he said he'd heard high praises and it wasn't exactly a leap from there to you bein' the one singin' 'em."

He wasn't the only suspect, some of the others could've mentioned her skills in passing, but he was the certainly the prime suspect.

"I like him so far, bit gruff but he didnae get all offended when I said I'd let him help me out with the e-brain so long as he didn't forget I was the expert. Which gives him some points. And Rowan seems cool too, helped me out some with gettin' my set up a bit further along."

"I did tell him I didn't know a computer from a hole in the ground, so I'm glad he took my recommendation anyway - and recognize you as the expert." Dan's aware that Cammie can get shoved into infantilized roles, and that sometimes out of overprotective instincts he leans into that. He's glad Miguel's not smothering her.

"I ain't met Rowan. Beautiful name, though. I did always love nature names."

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[open] I need to learn to let go of the past

Kitchen

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cw: discussion of mass death and occupation

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