Of Being Here
Posted on 22 Dec 2023 @ 12:13pm by Chief Petty Officer Ibis Xeri & Major Porter Wallace
Edited on on 06 Feb 2024 @ 10:07pm
Mission:
M4 - Falling Out
Location: Obsidian Command, Wallace & Xeri's Quarters
Timeline: M4 D4 2300hr - Following "Becoming Unglued"
1380 words - 2.8 OF Standard Post Measure
Wallace sat for a few seconds staring at his shoes after Agaia left. Ibis still stood facing away from him. She felt like a spring about to uncoil its energy, awaiting for an excuse . He knew what that felt like and knew to tread carefully.
At that moment, her anxiety building in the silence Agaia left behind, breathing was about all Ibis could focus on, and even that felt wildly out of her control. Desperate not to gag, she yanked her sweater off over her head, casting it away. But even the cool air was choking her. She stumbled up the shallow stairs to the dining room to lean on the back of a chair. There was no time— all of time, past, now, forever, dilated to this present desperate feeling. She’d never been able to breathe, she’d never breathe… no. No, that wasn’t true, either. Get a grip, Ibis. she willed herself. Her hands clenched the back of the chair until her knuckles grew white.
“Let it out,” Wallace said, as if he was reading her mind. Don’t get a grip. Grips don’t help. He stood and walked over to her, not touching, just standing next to her. “Let it out.”
When she felt like she had to either collapse or inhale she gasped, and then reflexively pushed over the chair she’d been grasping at. The action led to an impulse to push away everything. Her vision was like a tunnel formed on anything in front of her and with a grunt, she shoved scattered paper and supplies from the table to the floor. A few more chairs fell around her, then a shelf of decorative things that were just someone else’s idea of a furnished room fell victim to her arm’s reach.
Almost to the end of sweeping the shelf clear, a spiral milky glass vase was somehow captured in her hand. Ibis stood with it, taking big heaving breaths and, suddenly aware of it cool and heavy in her hand, guilt set in, making her ashamed for her panicked flail through the room. She found herself replacing the vase repentantly on the otherwise clear shelf.
Kneading one hand with the other she spun around, Afraid she’d find disaster in her own wake. But the room didn’t even look that different for her little outburst. She righted a chair, and then at her feet she found a few scribbled pieces of paper… Ikemba’s. Ibis bent to save an armful of them jealously from the floor, her eyes finally blurring with tears. Her breaths were coming in gasps and sobs.
“Altha, why?” she whimpered, pressing the papers flat again on the table.
Two arms wrapped around from behind and Wallace buried his face in her hair. He didn’t dare tell her it was okay. None of it was ‘okay,’ it never was. He couldn’t say it would get better. He wasn’t her, he didn’t know. She could be fighting this for the rest of her life and never get ‘better.’ Instead, he simply said, “I’m here.”
Ibis turned around in his arms and buried her face into his chest, heaving with sobs when she wanted desperately to just apologize and laugh for him and wipe her face dry. She wanted him to rest easy. She wanted to help prepare Olivia to start school. She wanted to be clear minded for her new science team. She wanted to show her mother that she was fine. She wanted nothing more than for Agaia to be wrong.
“I’m here,” he repeated.
Nodding, Ibis balled her fists up with his shirt, knowing he was here, but trying desperately to keep him all at once. She knew, she knew he was always there. That he’d always been there.That he would always be. Ibis settled her ear against his heart. She tried to speak between sobs but could only babble half starts. “It hurts. So much. I can’t.”
“I know.” The uncontainable pain of grief and anger were old companions to him. It hurt him to know she was on the same path, but it was one he’d trod before and unlike him, he’d be with her every step. “I know,” he repeated.
Pressing into his heartbeat, Ibis knew now too. Wordlessly she cried, her face flushed and feverish. She knew in her every fiber, inexpressibly— She knew that this, this invisible canyon sized wound running through the middle of her, cutting like Porter's own pain of absences, had always been what he’d tried to keep from her. And she could remember her old naive self foolishly willing him to cross that chasm. As if it was a matter of him wanting to badly enough, and just choosing the pain. Like a wounded animal who wouldn’t accept help.
Gradually, she saw it differently as they would sit and wait for the end on Korix. She knew those years in the life before, Porter hadn’t chosen the absence over her, but what used to fill it. As the camp became a ghost town, he had seemed to arrive at some kind of acceptance. She’d thought she was modeling her own acceptance in the strength of his. She had thought naively somehow it would be different for her, that she wouldn’t have to pass this way— on Korix she had thought that she could take each of those losses and somehow imbue each death with meaning and memory and do them some kind of justice herself.
In truth she just had never really believed she would survive Korix either. The idea of escape became an intangible dream, a distraction, a distant unachievable place— not real. Like the goddess Fana, she imagined she would be death’s midwife, attending the passing of everyone else. And in the end it would come for her just the same. That was real. Her suicide pill, formulated with her own failure, was real. And now it was gone. She’d braced for death for so long. And it hadn’t come.
Sobbing and heaving, Ibis settled into a pattern approaching the rhythm of Wallace’s heart until she was just sniffling between each ragged inhale and every full body exhale. Her hands relaxed again and she reached around him, too. She thought about how she’d left him behind, how she’d lost him. How many ways she failed. How she was failing him now. “I’m sorry. I’m not—” What wasn’t she? Strong enough? Stable? Happy? She wasn’t sure what she was sorry for. For overreacting? Being selfish? All of it? But also, she wasn’t sure what to do with any of it. She would put it all back. She would put everything back on the shelf. But she didn’t know what else to do. She didn’t know how to put anything else back. “Sorry, I.”
She thought how inadequate she was for everything in the lab. The equipment and updated processes. Even the interfaces… She had failed almost everyone in the camp, and now she wasn’t anything she wanted to be for her family. Not like this. Not when she could barely even talk. And losing her voice was her own fault too? Psychosomatic. Self sabotage? Frustrated, Ibis bounced her forehead against Wallace’s chest a few times, as though she could jog out the disappointment with herself, wincing as she tried to unthink it, but it only felt more constricting for the effort.
“I thought—” she gasped like she was trying to suck in air between the peaks of waves. “All the time. Of being here. The other side of. Everything.”
The awful truth, Wallace knew, was that there was no ‘other side.’ The experience would be with her - with them - for the rest of their lives. “I know,” he repeated.
“I’m scared. What if I wake up. And it’s gone too. What if. I can’t. Speak.”
He squeezed her, kissed the top of her head, and confidently said, “It won’t come to that, but should it we’ll deal with it. Together.”
