I Resist the Muses

The electrical blue lightening bolt ricocheted around Gwen Raiden’s bedroom as she was pulled out of her sleep. The edges of the dream barely hanging on to her waking mind. “Shit.” The word was mumbled as she reached for the ever present long gloves next to her bed.

She hated the feeling that accompanied the thoughts of her parents and she rarely dreamed of those years. It was only when her guard was down, when she was exhausted, that the incident of the first lightning strike came back to haunt her. Not the incident itself, since that was a grand adventure, but her parents reaction when they learned she’d been kissed by Mani’to, the Lenape god of lightning.

The large tree on the edge of the Minnesota lake, of the family summer estate, had been the focus of her dream. Gwen could feel the same excitement that she’d felt waiting to see the face of a god all those years ago. With the surreal landscape of a dream, the movie in her mind had taken an unexpected turn. She was no longer sitting in the comforting arms of the tree, instead Gwen found herself in an overstuffed chair receiving the typical disapproving lectures that her parents had perfected over the years.

It was the look in their eyes that brought back the feelings of inferiority that she’d overcome as an adult. Gwen had learned what the word freak had meant the day that she’d been first struck by lightning. Her parents had whispered it into the phone when they’d called Lydia Thorpe.

Shaking her head in self-disgust, Gwen slid the offending glove off again and felt the electricity crackle around her fingertips. Hell, if she’d let them ruin her life again. A satisfying large bolt of electricity flew from her hands and shattered a vase across the room. “I never did like that anyway.” It wasn’t her parents, but it was a satisfactory substitution for her anger.


Muse: Gwen Raiden
Fandom: Angel the Series
Word Count: 328

I'm not sure if it’s a dream or just a memory that played nightly after it happened. I mean nothing changed from the reality of that day, and nothing was in slow motion, or anything else dreamstate like. We’re all in the Tutor Center and Jimmie is still holding his gun on us.

I don’t know. Maybe I played it over and over again wondering if I missed something. If there was any way for that day to end differently. Would Keith still be alive if Jimmie hadn’t left the center? Would Jimmie still have committed suicide because he just got tired? So many questions and there never were any answers. Maybe that’s another reason why I saw it every night. I was hoping to find answers, to find a reason beyond that I stopped being Jimmie’s friend and noticing he was in trouble.

Sure, I could use the excuse that I was away on tour while he was having trouble. But the truth was that I didn’t stay in contact with any of my friends when I left. I didn’t call Luke as much as I should have and I never wrote to Peyton or Brooke. I told myself it was because of the tour and everything, but it wasn’t. That’s just an excuse. It was because I knew they would shine the light of truth on the person I’d become and it wasn’t really a pretty picture. In my dream Jimmie might have represented the friends I let down. The people that I didn’t share the burden of life with.

I guess I hoped I could save Jimmie night after night. He was a good person and I really hate that everyone only remembers the day that he was too tired to go on. Too tired to fight the teasing, the jeers and everything else life handed him. What is that saying? Twenty/twenty hindsight. It was a horrible day, but there was good that came out of it. Marcus, who was an ass, stopped being one. People that would have made fun of Jimmie or others like him took a minute before they did it to someone else.

I’m not naive enough to think it stopped. It probably only lasted a week or two, but in that week or two we got along and thought about others.

I like cooking. Its rather relaxing, and you can let your mind drift. Plus its food. You really can't go wrong offering food to others. Everyone likes food, we all kind of need it. As an exorcist with a parasite type innocence I need a lot more than most. I burn off a lot of energy because my weapon uses it. So I have to consume a lot of food to make up for what I've lost. Hence why I know how to cook. Because sometimes I'm the only one around and when I need to eat I need to EAT.

No I'm not. Frankly I don't care about religion. I have better things to do with my time and effort. So I doubt I'm superstitious. I prefer to believe we have the choices and possibilities to change all outcomes; that we are masters of our own fates. People can predict a possible outcome but it is up to us whether it comes to past. As long as we can fight on and keep walking, how things turn out is in our hands.