[Milliways: Fred's Room]
It had been a while.
Fred didn't even know what that meant. Why she'd been keeping to herself so much more of late, why she'd been so oddly quiet since (and during, if she was honest with herself) Faith's wedding.
Getting out had been a relief, even if it was getting out to some place that was equally strange as this one. And this place had never stopped being strange. Even after so many months - over half a year, and she still hadn't started to regard this place as home. This room whose walls she'd never written on, the downstairs full of strange people and strange not-people... it shouldn't have been so different from home. Shouldn't have been that much stranger than the Hyperion had been when she'd arrived there. It had taken her months to start considering that place home, too. But it was different there. There she'd had a purpose, and a center, and ...
Something this place lacked.
Plenty of people found happiness here. Plenty of people she knew, people from her own world, had found something to make this place click.
And she hadn't.
All she'd found were myriad impossibilities. She felt a pang of guilt at thinking that, of counting that as a negative when she was one such impossibility and Wesley was another. But that was part of the problem. Words like death had so little meaning here. How was she supposed to reconcile the fact that back in their own world, Wesley was dead, and so was she? That latter part was a little easier, except how could it be? What was dead when the so-called proof was walking around and occasionally looking and acting just like her?
So many questions, and no answers forthcoming, not in all the months she'd spent going through every book she could get her hands on to try to explain the physics of it all.
And in all that time she'd never really talked about it, not in the kind of depth she needed to to understand. Partially because she didn't want to burden people with the difficult questions, and partially because the one person who might have given her answers wasn't someone she could bring herself to ask. Not when they both worked so hard at pretending to be normal, at ignoring the facts because the facts didn't make sense.
So if she hadn't seen Wesley much since they'd gotten back from Faith's wedding, if she'd been purposefully distant, it was no different than how willfully distant he'd been all along.
All the same, she finds herself contemplating the door, wondering if maybe tonight she should just go upstairs and knock on his door and ask some of the difficult questions after all.
Fred didn't even know what that meant. Why she'd been keeping to herself so much more of late, why she'd been so oddly quiet since (and during, if she was honest with herself) Faith's wedding.
Getting out had been a relief, even if it was getting out to some place that was equally strange as this one. And this place had never stopped being strange. Even after so many months - over half a year, and she still hadn't started to regard this place as home. This room whose walls she'd never written on, the downstairs full of strange people and strange not-people... it shouldn't have been so different from home. Shouldn't have been that much stranger than the Hyperion had been when she'd arrived there. It had taken her months to start considering that place home, too. But it was different there. There she'd had a purpose, and a center, and ...
Something this place lacked.
Plenty of people found happiness here. Plenty of people she knew, people from her own world, had found something to make this place click.
And she hadn't.
All she'd found were myriad impossibilities. She felt a pang of guilt at thinking that, of counting that as a negative when she was one such impossibility and Wesley was another. But that was part of the problem. Words like death had so little meaning here. How was she supposed to reconcile the fact that back in their own world, Wesley was dead, and so was she? That latter part was a little easier, except how could it be? What was dead when the so-called proof was walking around and occasionally looking and acting just like her?
So many questions, and no answers forthcoming, not in all the months she'd spent going through every book she could get her hands on to try to explain the physics of it all.
And in all that time she'd never really talked about it, not in the kind of depth she needed to to understand. Partially because she didn't want to burden people with the difficult questions, and partially because the one person who might have given her answers wasn't someone she could bring herself to ask. Not when they both worked so hard at pretending to be normal, at ignoring the facts because the facts didn't make sense.
So if she hadn't seen Wesley much since they'd gotten back from Faith's wedding, if she'd been purposefully distant, it was no different than how willfully distant he'd been all along.
All the same, she finds herself contemplating the door, wondering if maybe tonight she should just go upstairs and knock on his door and ask some of the difficult questions after all.