esther rosen. (pyreticus) wrote in willowbrookrpg, @ 2014-02-22 05:51:00 |
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Standing by the window, Esther watched the clouds coalesce over Willowbrook. They'd been slipping in all morning, turning a clear, crisp day into an overcast afternoon, muggy-warm and tepid beneath the stormheads building in the sky. She wished, not for the first time, that it would be practical for a weather-manipulator to have their way with the sky, leech away some of the power behind those clouds and carry away the strong stench of ozone before the lightning could break. Ominous clouds over the school always darkened her mood, which was already heavy to begin with. She should have been feeling good; despite the challenges of her mission, it had been quite a success. The students seemed to finally be getting a grasp back on their powers after the problems posed by the vaccine, for whatever reason, and that was a thing she knew she ought to be grateful for. She was, yet she didn't feel optimistic. Maybe it was the approaching holiday, or the conversations about it that she'd had on William's entry that had left her feeling so detached; though she was holding a mug of black coffee in her hands and a low, blue flame was simmering from the tips of her fingers to her wrists to keep the cup heated, she hadn't taken a sip since she poured it for herself. The interior of Willowbrook looked vastly different from how she remembered it growing up, thanks to all of the work they'd put into tearing apart the interior and reconstructing it into a home rather than an asylum, but a part of her could never stop hearing phantom screams when she stood too close to the walls. It wasn't psychometry: just a subtle, subconscious trigger to old memories, the part of her mind that couldn't ignore the fact that she stood on a foundation built on pain. She always said (she had said it, just earlier, to William) that it wasn't a thing to be buried or forgotten, but rather a part of her that would always be indelibly imprinted on her core. A fact of her life. So why did it still hurt? Old pain in her bones, a tremble wanting to work its way down her arms into her hands that she held back with practice and pure strength of resolve, pressure on her ribcage that made it hard to breathe sometimes — those were the manifestations of the past she couldn't seem to shake, no matter how many years passed. She looked out at the clouds, but she wasn't seeing them anymore; her focus was inside herself as she went through old memories like flipping through a deck of polaroids. Why did they still do this to themselves? |