Nita never used to hate Halloween. She'd spent so many times dressed as something else, loving that she was anonymous, wishing sometimes that she'd have a better costume, or that she'd get more candy. She remembered dressing like a witch and a ghost and a zombie. One great year, she'd actually been a princess
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Comments 66
With all this guilt, it was a wonder I hadn't been raised Catholic.
I was pretty sure that Nita's current outburst hadn't been about me. I'd just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I sensed that it could very well _become_ about me if I wasn't careful. I took a step back, and raised my hands. "I have no problem," I said, soothingly.
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Sick of all this inertia, oh, won't you mend me?
She felt vaguely sick, and shook her head as she took a step back. "I hate this place," she murmured, more to herself then to anyone else in the rec room.
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So, I stayed where I was. Which was near the middle of the rec room, out of her personal space. But I didn't move. Instead, I said, "I know."
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Really, it wasn't even something Nita knew about. "To say you know is a lie."
She pulled herself into a towering rage of 5'6" in bare feet, her hands in fists by her sides.
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Sick of all this inertia, oh, won't you mend me? "I hate this place." She looked back at Serena. God. She's going to think you're nuts. "This-" She reached down, and grabbed the comic, shoving it into Serena's hand. "This is the guy who- on Halloween- it's everywhere."
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She laughed - an absurd sound, one that was teetering between actual humor and something far far worse. "I've watched the sun go out, I've helped stop the universe from ripping itself apart, and he nearly beat me to death."
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George heard the crashing of books as he walked past, and thought that he should have been more surprised to see who it was. Still, her erratic behaviour worried him, and George approached her from behind, making as much noise with his sandals as he could so as not to startle her and end up with the corner of a book in his eye. It was only when he cleared his throat that she whirled around.
George took a step back, hands rising with palms forward as if defending himself from an errant book or magazine, just in case. "Much debate on that over the years," he said quickly, the wry humour his normal defense against uncomfortable situations. "But I think the consensus is that it's not just the one thing." He took another step back. Maybe she needed to be alone, George thought.
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Inertia.
"It's everything. It's this place, it's everything," she said, and she was teetering between leaving and just losing it.
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George tilted his head, unconsciously trying to size her up from a different angle, just in case it would make a difference. He thought back to the last time he'd seen her this upset, over Bart's disappearance, and he took another step forward. "Did you lose someone else?" he asked, the worry that it was the case clear across his face. He didn't touch her, but he thought of it and clenched his fist at the last moment instead.
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"All of this. All of it, is about that."
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"Cry your pardon, Nita," he said, taken aback. He hadn't meant to startle her and had in no way snuck up behind her, but her reaction accused him of both things.
In any case, he was quick enough and close enough to her to know that something was amiss. It wasn't like her to be so on edge, at least not in this way.
He noted the surprised look on her face and the death grip her fingers had on the bookshelf and decided to tread carefully. "I didn't mean to disturb you, but I forget sometimes not to walk soft," he said, and it was an absurd thing to say for a man of his size, but he hoped that it would call a smile from her.
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She didn't let go of the bookshelf, and hadn't looked down at the cluster of forgotten, crumpled comic books and books in disarray on the floor. The joke- a tiny one even in the best of times- flew right over her head. "I just-"
She glanced over at the bookshelf, which had filled itself with something new - science books. Oh, God. Why is this doing this to me? The book in front of her fingers was Origin of Inertia: Extended Mach's Principle and Cosmological Consequences, and for all that she wished that she could take it and burn it, that she could just pull it off the shelf and never see it again, she didn't take it off the shelf ( ... )
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"Nita," he said softly, but with a hint of command in his voice. He wanted her to look at him. "Calm down. And when you're calm, tell me," he said.
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"I was trying not to think about it," she said, her voice as tight as everything else. "It was two years ago yesterday, so I was trying not to think about it, and everything here- it's like I'm not allowed to forget." Like you would have been able to forget, anyway. Not really your area of expertise."This," Nita said, grabbing one of the half crumpled comics by her feet. "This is him. His name's Inertia or something, and-" and the jukebox was playing and the bookshelf was a sea of the word, again and again and again ( ... )
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Hate was a powerful thing. One that she knew was in herself, and that even the thought of that made her sick. She knew that realising that no, things weren't alright was a good step, but that if she went home tomorrow she would need to have a long, long talk with Tom and Carl.
Long.
The bookshelf was populating itself with Physics texts, with theoretical papers on the aspects of inertia even as the jukebox started paying Black Heart Inertia.
"I get it, okay?!" Nita snapped - not to Dairine, but to the room in general. Which, of course, makes you seem even more nuts.
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