𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒅𝒐𝒐𝒓 ✘ 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐇𝐀 𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐅𝐅

{6⁴} {THE FALLEN}

∆ {6⁴} {THE FALLEN} ∆

Five Months Later

ROXI RYDER SAT on her hill, utterly silent, utterly still. The last slab set of slabs was going up today. The government had waited for three months before they began to build a memorial to all of the American lives taken during the blip. Some countries had done it earlier, like England, Scotland, and New Zealand. Others had waited even longer; Wakanda, Sokovia, Spain, Russia.

She had been here every day since they'd started building the memorial, for the first slab erected, and for each in the middle until now, where they raised the last few. She'd sat on this hill, under this tree, and had watched in her silence. The silence that followed.

It had been going on for far longer than normal. Usually a moment, quite literally a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, rarely a few weeks, with the world taking its breath to recuperate from whatever had happened. But no, this time, it was months, and the world didn't seem to be preparing to draw in air again. The world around her seemed to be lagging just as much as her brain.

Her goddamn mind seemed incapable of moving from the image of Wanda's pained, frightened eyes, the feeling of the sudden lightness where weight had once been, the way that everything had reversed, and that quiet stretch where she'd been useless, almost senseless apart from the monochrome that had stolen the colour from her vision. Since their journey to space, another image had been added, another feeling. The image was of the wall of stars, sprawled across a green sky that reminded her of Natasha's eyes, that she had tried to memorise so that she could draw it, share it with Wanda, seemed determined to never go away, and for that, Roxi was grateful. She didn't want to lose that image, that one last bit of Wanda that she still held in her mind, that one spark of hope she'd had as she had stared across the icy ocean of nothing but stars and dark and cold.

The feeling was that bubble of nothing that had crept into her so quickly, swallowing her hope so swiftly that she hadn't even noticed until the Mad Titan lay dead near her feet. It hadn't gone away, and the ocean had barely stirred since. She figured that it must soon. After all, it'd been half a year - something had to be giving, the trapped depths of her emotions had to start stirring in those trenches that she'd inadvertently dug so deep when her skull had been split by pain.

At least, Roxi could only hope it would be soon, because despite her sudden lack of emotion and turmoil, her mind still worked, and she knew what she should be feeling, even if she wasn't feeling it. She knew that she should be in touch with her feelings, starting to process her grief, be in denial, be delusional, or angry, or anything; or maybe she could even be glad for the memorial that had been built, if she hadn't been so selfish, as she had been so often lately. In her own mind, at least, which had nothing but time to think nowadays.

A scoff echoed through her silence, one that had not come from her own mouth, and Roxi's head snapped to a person sat, a little way down the hill. A woman, her light brown hair puffy and dead with the strength of the fading blue dye, her fingers wrapped harshly around the neck of a bottle of alcohol. As soon as she saw it, the memory of the smell filled her senses and sent her mind reeling, spinning, and bile suddenly burned her throat. There was no way that she actually could've smelt the liquid from her location - even the wind had dwindled into almost nothing these past few months - but it seemed her memory was strong enough to provide it for her. A flash of hard wooden floors; of broken bottles and blood and darkness and him.

Roxi twisted her face into a scowl, semi-consciously. For a moment, if only a few seconds, she doubted that that smile was genuine, that it was real, and wondered if maybe her mind had conjured the image on purpose, the smell, if maybe she'd made herself force her face into the scowl to keep up some pretence that she was still feeling things as she could. She still wasn't sure of the truth when she heard the woman in front of her mumble something in slurred words, that she could just about make out a few words of.