Restart.

[eternity_dreams]

Title: Restart.
Fandom: Original (the Shapes Reality Takes series)
Warnings: Nope.
Word Count: 442.
Characters: Arianna's mother.
Notes: This is a response to the project currently over at toxic-reveries (which will be added here once complete), and does the briefest of backstories as a prelude to the original series. It also serves to point out similarities between two characters from different canons. Cough, Alan and Arianna, cough.

Summary: Change does not happen instantly, and heroes of the day still have to make it through the night.

There once was a perfect love. There once existed red and gold.

It had taken her a while, longer than it should have, to heat food and create it. For her stomach’s hunger that was gnawing, for another’s hunger that existed as more important. She struggled to create, and ignored the irony of that. She ate the basic amount, and once that settled, wanted nothing more. Could not will her body into accepting any more. The plate was taken back, and for a moment, she paused. It was the simple things. Like this. That provided the highest degree of difficulty. It was when you once could do everything, that the simplest tasks gave you the most trouble.

She could put the food away, eat it later, but she scraped it out. She wouldn’t touch it again, regardless of intention.

And it echoed her life too much this way. Something broken in two at the height of it, then fallen to pieces and thrown out.

It was sick.

She was not gone. It was not a storybook in which she broke and shattered at the moment of conception, at the creation of a new world. At the shift and shudder of a change born anew. It was not it at all. For she remained herself as she was, but decaying and slipping, from the self she had been to a self she could no longer recognize. It was certainly easier to forget, though only those scraped clean were able to gain that purity.

Therefore, none were to speak of what had happened.

Therefore, all were to live and grow as simply as possible.

Therefore, her daughter would never know of what had transpired.

Of red torn and gone as if he had never existed. Of gold fading to a point where it was questioned whether she had existed as was remembered. There was a purity in forgetting. In the chance to start anew.

But she would remember. Quietly, behind the facades of absence and methods of loss, of bright decay and daring ignorance, she would remember. All of it. For each one that forgot.

There was some grace in madness. In the way of survival given only by that method.

There once was a perfect love. There once existed red and gold. But it was now gone, and could no longer be reclaimed.

She hummed, continued to live, and would love her daughter as well as was able. She would continue to live for that reason alone.

There were shackles that existed on blood. It remained sharp and clear, until even that aspect faded into obscurity.

-

Her mother sang to her, in a language unknown, and Ann Marie slept, dreaming of gray.