[Reaction pt 1]
After her most recent church yard misadventure, Harlow found herself on the bad side of one of Mr. Mister's more spontaneous mood swings. She'd been locked in the attic for days before the first memory seeps over her, honey slow and opium warm. She's sitting at the window, painting her nails by lamplight. It was a bubblegum shade of confetti glitter, mid-stroke on a pinky nail when she froze.
It has been a long time since she thought about her father, but even when she did, it wasn't like this. She'd never thought about what it would mean to watch somebody die before. As a magical being, it just hadn't occurred. The memory rolls over her in waves of grief that should have felt alien, but instead felt so, so real.
There are little details that don't fit her own life, but they are small enough to miss them completely in the moment. In the moment, because that is all that a memory is, a moment and a blip, a heartbeat taken out of time where she feels shoved somewhere else, or somewhere else is shoved into her, whose to say... but the piece fits so well, the main one about losing a father, that Harlow isn't sure what had happened at first. She doesn't immediately recognize it as somebody else's memory, it could just be her wild imagination missing the Dad she left behind.
But there was more to it than all of that. With nail polish spilled all over her hand, Harlow watched her tears slow-dry in the reflection of the window pane while she counted down all of the ways that it didn't fit her. It felt like home, it felt real and comfortable. It fit her like a key in the moment, but moments fade and Harlow knew that there were differences she could count on unfinished hands.
Death being the most obvious one. Her kind didn't die, not so easily. As far as shapeshifters went, birds were some of the more fragile of the species. Sure, they could be killed or maimed, as much as anything else, but they didn't just succumb to disease and die. Cancer was a sad mystery to her, to watch the slow dissolution of a person, a person she loved.
It was a tragedy she'd never imagined, never had to given how infeasible and impossible that it was. But she felt it now, the forever-stretch of time where hope only added to the pain of it all in the end. They talk about it like ripping a band aid off, but Harlow can't think of a band aid as a person. And yet, she wishes now that he could have died quickly, this man she doesn't know(not her father at all, she begins to realize). It is unfair for the girl in the memory, for Harlow to want this, but if she could change the history, even if only for her own sake, she would. She would wish him a car accident or a mid-sleep embolism, but not this. They aren't her memories and she's not making any judgement calls, but the grief feels too big. Like it can swallow her whole.
The pills don't fit her own life either, and the realness of the memory is beginning to slip further and further away from the captive girl in her attic. She's had her fair share of molly and wine coolers, but it never made her feel safe or warm under a blanket. It was never something that she looked forward to or hoarded like a secret. It was never something that she stole from her Dad. The memory is finally realized as something separate from her, and Harlow exhales shakily.