[Reaction]
It feels familiar. Jamie can identify the exact spot where that memory hangs out, chills with its cousins or something. Wedged way deep in his gut, a splinter of dull glass that works away at the glisten of his intestine, clenches everything up like a fist. It's the time that gets him first? The weeks that are packed into this memory, the fitful way time passes, slows down like oil over glass when you wish you could be anywhere but here and there's no prospect of going anywhere but here in immediate sight.
It isn't his, he never ate a marble, just to have it, and he wonders halfway through who this belongs to, the genus is the same (thanks, Tor) but the end result is different, distinct. This is lonely. It's not even the ache of missing something, it's the total absence of anything at all. He doesn't miss, in this memory, he doesn't mourn. He's never had anything to keep in this memory, not even something small and hard and stolen and he feels the weight of certainty, of fear coarsened by knowing it's inevitability, in the bodies tossed into earth, like dried up flowers.
He can feel the rigidity of lacing, a phantom at his belly long after Jamie comes out of it, and he's left with it, the feeling of it, bleak and empty and absent and he gets up long enough to fish Cat from the back of the couch, until she struggles warm and yowling and furry, decidedly unimpressed but weight enough that he doesn't feel echoed emptiness anymore.