Ashes.

Mood: 

Crushed

Who: Emma, works as a solo or an open scene. :)
When: Once people start working.
Where: Chapel storage room.

Emma was in shock. She knew that well enough. Once she realized the people she cared about were okay, it had all started to sink in. What had just happened. How bad it was. And even how much worse it could have been.

She felt sick, and like she needed to go find a place to be privately sick for five minutes, but that wasn't a possibility. There was work to be done. Still carrying her bundle of animals, she found the chapel storage room, and shut the door so she could let the animals walk around for a few minutes. Stacked against the walls were boxes and crates, some marked, some not. She started looking through them. She could do this quickly enough, and then join everyone outside that was looking for food.

The first she looked through was a large crate with a big red stamp marked HOLY WATER on the side. Sure enough, inside were a few dozen tiny vials of water. Emma heaved and struggled to push it aside to go on, and she realized her hands were shaking.

Every photo she'd ever taken in her life was gone. The pictures her grandmother had taken were gone, the pictures of her grandparents were gone. Pictures and tapes she and Jason had made together. The jewelry box Jason had given her. Her cameras were gone too, but the cameras could be replaced. Someday. The pictures couldn't. The memoris couldn't. She kept trying to tell herself that they were just things, and that as long as everyone was okay, they didn't matter. They didn't matter.

Dammit, they did matter. They weren't just things. They were pieces of her. And now they were gone. They mattered. For years, they had been the only thing that got her by. And now they were ashes.

She hated how much this bothered her. She hated the way her fucking heart ached from the loss. They all could have died, and the scientists didn't care, they did it on purpose. They were either laughing or making notes on clipboards that very moment.

I have what really matters. I still have Jason. I still have the babies. I still have my friends. We'll get through this. But as much as she hated that they were there, tears were still streaming down her face.