Memory Share for deercountry (2022)

[inkedspell]

These are memory share options for people interested in seeing some of Saeri's life.

One -- The fight where she gets trapped in the Mystlands
Two -- Traveling through mountains and getting attacked by a rainbow eye mountain lion.
Three -- When she is tortured by the Kraal and threatened with the lives of other captives to help adapt their weapons
Four -- Saeri wakes up to the aftermath of what she'd done when the Soulcarver awakened and Certain Choices Were Made to try and get herself free of it...which did not end well for her arm.
Five -- When she begged argued with JD to let her come with the Inkmetal Forge.
Six -- Her first reconstruction site after joining the Inkmetal Forge while helping after a major flood
Seven -- Baby Saeri memory of literally almost dying because her brother is a fucking horrible person who locked her in a windowless storage shed in the middle of a California summer.
Eight -- A talk with her older sister, Dahlia, after her brother destroyed her birthday cake when she was seven.

Comments

Four (Age: 17) (cw: disorientation, emotional breakdown, aftermath of amputation)

[inkedspell]

Everything hurts, but it hurts in a distant way. Like she's feeling someone else's pain secondhand. Saeri is not sure she's even awake. Her brain is clouded over, but there's light. She's sure there is. All she sees is blobs and shadows but shadows can't exist without light. She is awake.

She is alive.

She drifts and fades and maybe she falls asleep again but eventually her mind isn't so grey and her eyes focus what little they can on the room she's in.

There's a hand touching her face. Big, callused and warm. She knows that hand. It pulls her back into the now.

"You really want my beard as white as my head," the voice says.

She's too tired to roll her eyes. Too tired to do more than give a soft grunt that sounds more like a moan. The moan turns into a cough in her very dry throat. The hand leaves and there's a strangled pain that isn't physical that cuts through her. Suddenly, a chip of ice is being put into her mouth. The melting water soothes her. She lets it dissolve entirely. It feels like it happens all too quickly.

She breathes, licks her lips. They are so chapped. How did she not know how she was so thirsty? Thankfully another chip is put into her mouth and she sucks on it. The cough subsides, but the hand returns to her hair, thick fingers stroking through the messy curls.

"Rrrrrrrroan," she mumbles.

"Who else would it be, Smurfberry," he says. That hand keeps stroking her hair and she is feeling more and more present. She can't see, because her glasses are missing, can't feel because her fingers are wrapped in something too thick to allow movement, but she can remember.

The dark glow, the black lightning, the shaking over the room and the crystals spreading across her--

--Oh. She woke the crystal up. Somehow. It woke up and tried to eat her.

"I fucked up...again..."

The hand doesn't stop.

"Maybe, but we'll figure it out," he says. "We always do, don't we?"

"But..."

"Now, girl," he says. "don't start with that. We'll handle it together, when you're better."

In that moment, he doesn't sound like Roan at all. Roan, who is hands off and encouraging, who lets her do things her own way, find her own path and take her own licks from them if needed before dusting her off and letting her go again. No, he was not the one to scold her about being careful and not doing things alone, or reminding she had people now who would carry her instead of leave her to fall. He sounds so much like him that the tears start falling before she even realizes it.

Hot tracks down her temples and cheeks from her reclined position.

Saeri doesn't realize she's mumbling until her voices gets louder, apologizing over and over in her slurred voice, tongue still not cooperating fully. A repetitive litany of remorse and self-recrimination.

"--so stupid, 'm sorry, fuck, fuck, sorry, sorry, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't--I'm so--"

The blob at her side moves, closing in and those arms are wrapping around her. Solid and warm and so safe. She tries to bring up her own hands to cling back, but her left hand is so stiff and heavy from all the wrappings. It doesn't work, it will not let her. It feels wrong and broken. She can't be surprised when that thing had been trying to devour her left hand first. Who knows what they had to do to heal it.

She had been about to die, a broken hand is nothing in the face of that.

Her right hand digs into his back weakly, her sore, bandaged fingers aching from the effort, but she ignores it. The physical pain is such a distant thing. She wants to hold onto him forever, fuse their bodies together so she never has to let go.

"It's all right," he says. "Cry it all out if ya need to. Let it out. I've got ya. I've got ya."

Saeri doesn't know when she stopped crying or if she lost consciousness first. It all blends together, but Roan is there, hand still stroking through her hand and holding her as close as the hospital bed allows.