[for Layla] Item Post

[howmanylives]

They say our youth has become desensitized to violence. That the media, in its infinite wisdom, has blown the door on death wide open. By the time a child has reached their eighteenth birthday, he or she will have witnessed, on television alone, over 200,000 acts of violence, of which 40,000 murders are included. It's a big number. The kind of big

Comments

[butterflyfactor]

Something stinks. I was ambling along, which... not my favorite thing, but options on the island are limited, looking to run into Jamie, knowing which way he'd be coming back from walking the dog. So there's the dog, but where's Jamie?

Layla knelt to catch Richards around his scruffy terrier neck and shoulders. He was whining and distressed. She wrapped her hand in his leash and looked past him, frowning, at the place he'd been running from.

"C'mon, mister fantastic," she murmured, and started forward. He resisted, but she tugged him along with coaxing, and then she saw Jamie half in the water, cradling what looked to be his younger self.

So that was where the smell was coming from, then.

"Jamie," Layla said, and the strength of her own voice surprised her. She felt sick, she felt... She didn't want to believe what was plainly before her. She wasn't loud, but she wasn't shaking. The words came out.

"Jamie," she said again, dropping Richards' leash and walking over.

[howmanylives]

He didn't start, because he didn't hear her. His heart was pounding in his ears, his face stricken with long-buried grief. There was nothing, for him, beyond the body, beyond the memories, beyond the certainty of knowing that there was no danger of infection, because this particular strain of the Legacy Virus was for mutants only, and he no longer qualified. His fingers traced over the wet, sunken contours of the dupe's face, his eyes following their trajectory, and he didn't dare look away.

He'd been robbed of his grief too many times in the past, forced to move on before he was well and truly ready, and for once in his many lives, he was going to take a moment to appreciate the loss as it happened, instead of later, holed up in a dark room.

[butterflyfactor]

Layla swallowed and knelt to scoot Richards back toward the trees, then started forward to Jamie.

He was wasted, more of a wreck than she'd ever seen him. Braving herself against the stench and the gut-roiling horror of watching him cradle the dupe and all but weep.

She knew about this Dupe. Even if the Legacy Virus was null and void on sunny Tabula Rasa, everything else corpses had after they'd spent time hanging out in tropical lagoons- even very brief amounts of it- were not.

"Jamie," she said again after a long moment.

"Jamie, please."

[howmanylives]

Another moment passed wherein Jamie didn't move, but then Layla's voice finally broke through his focus, and his head snapped up in her direction, his red-rimmed eyes immediately searching for hers. His expression was pain, grief stricken, his face wet with unnoticed tears.

"Layla," he said, his voice sounding strange to his own ears, strained, and yet forceful, too. "You shouldn't--" he started, and all at once, he started to get up, still trying to hold on to the corpse even as he made to stand. "You should get back."