I used to think that only bad things could become ghosts, that the only things that could keep me awake at night were painful memories.
I was familiar with bad thoughts nibbling at my brain, but the best memories of my life brought a different world of hurt.
I knew what was going to happen. I was the only one who knew from the beginning that some of us wouldn't come back from Starpoint. The visions were there before we even fell through the portal.
I'd like to say that I tried my best to prevent things from turning out the way they did, but the comfort of this bed reminded me of the complacency that caused all of this; I shouldn't have trusted him...
He lied to me.
Ring-Ring
The distant sound of our-... of my doorbell sounded once, but I paid it no attention. There was someone at the door, sure, but the only thing I felt was a sense of rage at hearing that sound.
Every part of this house was a memory that I didn't want to see again. I was getting sick of this place.
My dream house? Used to be. Now I wanted to run away from it, or burn it to the ground, but it was the only thing I had left... the only remnant of... THAT FUCKING ASSHOLE!
Ring-Ring
The bell rang again - another memory ruined.
Ring-Ring
Another one.
Ring-Ring
Another.
Ring-Ring
Another. How long were they going to wait for me to open the door? Didn't they have anything better to do? Actually, knowing who it was, he definitely had nothing better to do.
"Hey!"
My heart jumped. Frightened, I fell off the bed, hitting my head on the nightstand on the way to the ground.
"David, what the f?" I asked, bringing myself to my feet. "Don't you know how to knock?"
"Sorry." he apologized as he worriedly rushed to my side. He looked at my forehead and winced. "Oof. You got any band-aids?"
"Yeah. They're..." I made a weak gesture, pointing at the mess around us. "...somewhere."
His face this time was a mixture of disgust and an even stronger concern than when he saw my bruise.
Honestly, I didn't have enough mental or physical energy to explain the state of the house, so I vaguely mumbled something about working on it, and crawled back into bed.
"That's what you said last time, Shiloh." He said, a hint of pity in his voice. That pity made a feeling of anger flourish inside me, and the energy I thought I didn't have poured out.
"If I'm such a disgusting mess, then why don't you stop coming into our-" I bit my lip and internally chanted a two-letter word three times. He was gone, it wasn't our house anymore. "my house. It's my house. Stop coming into my fucking house!"
David's eyes widened, and he took a step back with each poke in the chest. I ranted for a while after that, and I remember little of it, but I remember his expression when I was done: it was still that look of concern.
Why was he looking at me like that? Sure, I wasn't doing the best, but I would get out of it. I always did. Everyone knew that. Shiloh never stayed down for long.
"It's been three months, Shiloh."
Three months.
Three months?
"Three months?!"
"Yeah and I've been here twenty-three times since we came back from Starpoint. That's why I came in without knocking or ringing the doorbell."
"You didn't ring the doorbell?" I asked. Suddenly, I felt a powerful wave of pain in my head, like the migraines I used to get before we fell into that world.
I groaned and slowly shook my head. If he didn't ring the bell, what the hell was I hearing?
"Here." He handed me a perfectly spherical object - an orb. It was just the same as I remembered it: so transparent that finding it was impossible, which was why I hadn't seen it since we returned.
I quickly threw it behind me, hoping that it would get lost again.
"Where'd you find it?" I asked.
"I slipped on it while coming up the stairs." He showed me various bruises all over his body. "Almost died."
For the first time in three months, I couldn't help but giggle a little. "Classic David."
Instead of complaining about me leaving it all over the place, he also cracked a smile. "That's the same thing you guys used to say."
My sliver of happiness disappeared faster than it came. "Way to kill the mood, David." I tried going into bed again, a place where none of my dumbass friends could remind me about things. It was probably a pitiful sight, so I didn't blame David for sucking air through his teeth.
I turned my back to him, so he pulled up a chair to the side of the room that I was facing. Without a word, he put the orb in front of me. It was so clear that I could see his expression through it, meaning I knew what he was about to say.
"No."
I turned my back to him again.
"Why not?"
"I told you already, David. I want nothing to do with Starpoint anymore." I explained. "The rest of you can keep your weapons and your powers, but unlike you guys, I don't have a choice. All I can do is not use them."
"You do have a choice." He picked up the orb and tossed it in the air, missing the catch.
The orb only seemed light, but it was quite heavy. David probably used his powers to lift it in the first place, so that impact to the head was probably enough to knock an ordinary person out. The orb rolled across the floor, coming to a halt at the doorway.
I wasn't looking at him, but I could see everything around my weapon. It wasn't something that I could control anymore, so before I had removed my memories of where it was, I covered it in an old black sweater. That was why it was impossible to find.
"Just take your memories out of the thing, then watch the recording. After that, you can just break it, right?"
Easier said than done. Who knew how many memories were in that thing, or who they all belonged to? We had a lot of enemies on Starpoint, and sometimes we did things we weren't too proud of.
I didn't want to see some of what my friends and I had to do to survive, or see the memories I took from bastards like Nathaniel, but mostly...
"I don't want to watch the recording."
"Come on, Shiloh. Those are his last words to you... and to us." David pleaded. "He'd want you to look at them."
"He should be here to tell us everything he wants us to know, instead of-" I paused, afraid to confirm the reality by saying the words that almost fell through.
"Instead of dying."
"...yeah... that."
I continued. "Besides, soon I won't even be able to access those memories anymore."
A look of incredulity flashed across David's face. "What do you-"
I nodded.
"Why would you do that, Shiloh?" He asked, "He was your friend!"
"I don't even know who you're talking about," I responded in a matter-of-fact tone.
He made a face like he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"That's it!" He shouted. "Look at this place!" David gestured at the various messes all around the room.
I wrapped myself tighter into the comforter.
"This place is even more disgusting than Howin's house! When was the last time that you got out of bed? When's the last time you opened the windows... or even so much as the curtains!?"
"Fuck off, David."
He got up from the chair. "I used to hate your clean freak thing, but this entire house literally smells like death!" He walked around the room, kicking piles of clothes around to expose the food stains that they were covering.
"I was gonna finish that."
There was a moment of silence.
"That's a sock."
I shrugged weakly. Maybe I was going to finish the sock. He didn't know me like that. I was hungry enough to think about it, at least. How long had it been since I had last eaten?
"mmm, sock."
"That's not funny."
"It's kind of funny."
"... it is kind of funny" He tried to hold himself together so he wouldn't break his momentum, but couldn't stop himself from doing that nose exhale thing. "...but it's still disgusting!"
"Alright, that's enough, David." I declared.
Still laughing at my own comedic genius, I tried to push him out the door. "I'll try to get out of bed tomorrow, I promise."
He was much bigger than I was, so the little resistance he offered was unbreakable to me. "David, I said that you can go now, please." Before I knew it, I was pleading with him to leave.
Maybe the joke was more disgusting than funny. That thought made me want to be alone again: I didn't want him to see me like this.
"How much of him do you remember?"
"I don't know, man..." I thought for a moment, hoping he would leave me alone after I satisfied his curiosity. "I know his name and some other meaningless stuff. All the big things are gone now ...all I know is that I hate him."
"You don't mean that."
I looked David dead in the eyes and spoke slowly and deliberately. "Yes. I. Do." I said it with such certainty that there was no way for him to doubt my words, and his gaze finally shifted from certainty to sadness.
"You don't mean that."
"Wrong," I said coldly. "Do you really think he cared about us, David?" He might have acted differently sometimes, but he was an awful person at the core. "Why do you think he did what he did, David?" I asked. "It wasn't because he loved us. I'll tell you that much."
"Why are you making him sound like some master manipulator?"
"He. Lied. To. Me."
"He did it for your good."
"Fine. When I die from starvation or exhaustion because I can't eat or sleep, I'll tell him thanks." I said, with the most venom I've ever heard in my voice. "That enough for you now, or are you gonna continue playing therapist?"
I said that intending to hurt him, but wanting to hurt someone and seeing them hurt were two different things. I saw his eyes become wet with tears as soon as the phrase "playing therapist" left my mouth.
David inhaled deeply as if preparing to do something that required more willpower than he had. "Fine." He said, but he didn't leave. Instead, he asked me a question. "Can you still heal people?"
Hesitantly, I nodded my head, saying, "I have the memories in the orb, so I can't do it."
"Good."
Before I could understand what he meant, he summoned something from thin air. A blaster appeared in each hand. One was pure white, and had a soothing glow, while the other was pitch black, with a feeling of malice.
Bonnie and Clyde.
Those were the names that Wynn suggested for them.
"One thing that I always liked about Lith was that he didn't do much talking when things got bad: he acted." David pointed the black blaster, Bonnie, at his liver. "I'm done trying to reason with you. I'm going to force you to make a change."
"David, sto-"
BANG!!
The sound of the blaster going off brought ringing to my ears as I moved to catch his falling body. I tried to block out that disgusting smell of smoke from the blaster, but it had already made an impression on me, causing me to feel uneasy.
"David, you dumbass!" I exclaimed. Panic tried to settle in my heart, but my experience took over.
I focused on the transparent sphere in the middle of the doorway, breathing life into my soulbond. Gradually, the orb emitted a pure white light. It was dim at first, but it became so bright that the room was now completely illuminated, meaning that everything in the area was under my control.
I hadn't used it in months, but the orb's connection had not faded a bit. There was a surge of energy throughout my body - fulfilling, like finishing a poem just in time for an event. I could sense everything in this room.
Responding to my every thought, it whizzed around the room, clearing the garbage off of the bed, then opening the curtains so I could see better.
I used the orb's abilities to lift David from the ground, and place him onto our-...
"my bed. It's your bed, Shiloh." I muttered.
The wound had already turned into an infection. Thankfully, it was spreading slowly, but that was only because he was the one who shot himself. David's body wasn't meant to handle this disgusting essence.
I cursed. "I should just let you die." It was funny to think about. He'd look pretty stupid if I just chose not to heal his dumb ass.
The orb stopped in front of me. It was buzzing with excitement that I was finally using it again, but I was the opposite. All I felt was dread. I couldn't believe that David would do something so manipulative. Now I had to...
I screamed in frustration.
I didn't have much time to think. David would be dead in a few hours, and who knew how much I had to go through to find those memories?
The orb, knowing my every thought, fell into my open hand. It vibrated lightly and grew warm as it tried to restore my memories. "Fine," I said resolutely. "But I'm only doing this once." If I can't find it, don't blame me for your death."
I don't know why I said that. It wasn't like he could respond, but it felt like it needed to be said. Soon, an unpleasant voice spoke to me from inside the orb.
RESTORING MEMORIES - 0%