altimit | [Closed] misteaks' mistakes (catchall)

What is what?

[ There's a slight hint of panic in Hector's voice. But that will be the last of Misteaks's worries.

When Hector turns to look at the mirror—he sees nothing—the door swings open.

A strange sensation overcomes you. There's a weight on your body; you feel parched, exhausted. You hurt in places you've likely never felt ache before. But it's good, you decide. It's a marker of your youth. Your 21st birthday is only three days away. You've been telling everyone at the bars and the clubs for the past few days that it's your birthday, and they've been giving you free drinks. You look old enough. People don't ask.

The bender has taken a lot out of you, though. The door shuts loudly behind you as you trudge into the neatly-kept hallway of your parents' townhouse. You clearly come from means.

But now, to rest up. Your sister has promised to take you to her favorite bar on your birthday proper. You want to be fully present when she takes you out. Not hungover.

As you come to the bottom of the stairs, you realize your parents aren't in their usual spots in the living room. You crane your neck down the hall and realize there's an odd stillness to the air. Tension fills the rooms to the brim. Something about the quiet of the house settles oddly in your chest, and it sets you on edge.

For a moment, you want to chalk it up to the hangover. Maybe your parents got in a fight again. Maybe you should sleep, so you can deal with it properly later.

Something compels you to step off the stairs and trudge down the hall, to the kitchen.

You stand in the doorway. Your mother—a woman you have only ever known to stand proud, her face elegantly sculped like a statue, the padded shoulders of her work suits making her seem all the more imposing—nestles scared in the crook of the counters. Her shoulders are drawn up, her eyes are wide, glassy, and puffy, and her fists are folded tightly over her mouth. Your father—a kindly man whose voice and laughter always fills the room, whose wrinkles come solely from a lifetime of jokes—stands perfectly still with the phone receiver pressed tightly to his ear. His face is twisted in a scowl of the likes you have never seen, decorated in frown lines and wrinkles that you do not recognize.

Your mother gasps when she sees you, dislodging herself from her safe corner as she takes quick steps towards you. She pulls you into a hug. The hold is tight, desperate. She has never hugged you like this before. Something is scaring her, and that scares you.

"Anneciğim—" There is pain in her voice. She hasn't called you this since you were a child. "Where have you been? I was—"

"Shh." Your father holds up a hand, and silence returns to the room. You turn your head to watch him, and you can hear a faint voice coming from the receiver. It's low, solemn. When it stops, time seems to freeze.

Whatever was said seems not to be the news your father wants to hear.

The silence is shattered when your father whirls around and slams the receiver back into the holder.

"Nothing," he mutters.

Your mother wails.

You pull from her embrace; you have never heard her make that sound before. Alarm slowly colors your expression as you realize something is deeply, deeply wrong.

"Mom," you croak, your voice hoarse from yelling and cheering at the clubs last night. That feels so long ago, now that you're here. "What's going on?"

But your mother is in no state to answer. She sways away from you and crumples over the island counter in a fit of tears. She sobs, her agonizing cries embed themselves into the small cracks of your being. These sounds are going to haunt you.

Your father, instead, approaches you. He takes you by the shoulders and turns you around, his steely eyes piercing you. "Mehmet," he says, his voice solemn. "Have you heard from your sister?"

You stare at him. An unease twists inside of you. It clenches at your throat. You swallow.

"...No. Not since last week." You feel your heart pound in your chest. You feel beads of sweat form on your forehead. "Why?" Your voice rises in panic. "What happened? Where is she?"

Silence.

"She's missing."

You feel the fabric of your own reality tearing at the seams. You stand at the precipice of a turning point in your life. You will never be able to go back.

Demet is everything to you. She is a shining beacon of inspiration for you, of what a person should be like. She has been there for you since your very beginning, and you had so naively assumed that she would be there forever.

And now she's...gone? Just like that? No word, no warning?

What happened to her?

Your father's words will echo in your mind for days and days to come, along with the questions, the disbelief that plague you in the agonizing hours and days that follow. A small part of you is optimistic she'll be home for your birthday, but she never shows. Your father hands you a pack of Efes and calls it a day. Your mother buys you a cake. You never learn what your sister's favorite bar was.

You don't leave your bed for weeks. Your life falls apart. You watch your grades suffer. You watch your long-term girlfriend break up with you. You watch as you continually seek the comfort of booze to fill the void your sister left behind.

Weeks turn into months, turn into a year. They never find trace of her. They stop showing her face on TV. The police declare the case cold, and you never hear anything of this again.

You dream constantly of finding her. You hear her voice, both in and out of sleep. You see her peeking through doorways, looking at you from a distance, with that warm smile you've always known her to wear. But when you approach her, you always find her gone. You never make it in time. You create elaborate scenarios in your mind of finding her, bringing her home. You see shadows in the corners of your vision of whatever—whoever took her away, and you chase them. You'll kill whoever did this to her one day. You swear it. You're a hero in your own mind.

But not in reality.

She never comes home. Demet as you know her is gone for good. ]

Edited (MEAT) 2023-08-21 10:38 (UTC)

[It's not the brutal punch of dread that Lily's passing had been. The adrenaline instead creeps in, and the cold settles, long and heavy and never ending.

To lose someone so dear and to not even have a place for it... for them to just vanish...

He hates it. There's a horrifying depth to the loneliness and the despair, the emptiness that fills with liquor and stupor and the fragments left of a life without her. Even the forced bravery that parades around under delusion feels horrifying. A coping born from desperation.

...

His face has gone pale by the time the memory drifts, a hand out to steady himself against one of the mirror frames as he stumbles back a step.]

I... Okay. Okay, I think I... I get it. [A hand lifts to press against his own throat, against the lingering burn left from the ghost of far too much alcohol.] That was...

[A glance is cast towards Hector.]

Mehmet. Right?

I'm sorry. I should have believed you

Edited 2023-08-21 16:43 (UTC)

[ Hector jumps, startled by the sudden sound of his own name. It was only a second for him, and the sudden shift in demeanor in Misteaks is strange to him.

He's skeptical at first. He doesn't like the thought of someone knowing his real name, and part of him wants to say that it isn't it. Except if he experienced anything like what he just did, then...

It takes a while for him to actually say something, though. His voice is low when he talks, but the alarm is written all over his posture. ]

What did you see?

...The night your sister went missing. You were... drunk. You hadn't heard from her in... a week?

You... were in bed a lot after. Broke up with your girlfriend. Drank a lot. You wanted to find her and save her.

...

[It feels better, to be transparent. He knows how scared he felt when Hector had just mentioned his own memory, how the vague discussion had just been hard to swallow.

He deliberately turns his back from the glass. Something's seriously wrong with this place.]

I'm sorry. That... was really personal for you.

[ At the word sister, Hector's head snaps away. That memory is vivid, even now, even after all these years and how dearly he's paid for never seeking treatment. He lets Misteaks speak, frozen, hearing the details of a time he thought he'd left behind. ]

...It's all right.

[ It's kind of fair, isn't it? He saw a terribly traumatic moment in Misteaks's life. It's only fair he do the same.

Hector suddenly snaps to life and he whirls on his heel, facing the way they came. ]

Let's get out of here. I think I'd rather stand in the heat than spend another second in this place.

...Right. Yeah.

[A hand gently claps to Hector's shoulder for a second as Barrett follows suit to leave the building.]

First the armor, now this... [A shaking exhale.] What's going on with this place???

[He doesn't bother saying anything else until the two of them are back out into the heat, clear of the shimmering shine of the glass.]

You really saw it, then? What... what happened with Lily?

[ Hector would never think of the heat as a relief, but it kind of is.

The dark was oppressive, in the end. Seeing himself from all angles is going to haunt him for a little while to come. But the tension leaves his shoulders as he lets the light wash away the imagery. ]

...I did.

[ He looks up at Misteaks—Barrett, sympathy in his eyes. ]

I'm so sorry. I know I shouldn't have...said anything, really. [ A beat. ] It was personal.

...I know. It's okay. It's not like it was your fault. I'm glad you didn't just hold onto that.

[God forbid a stranger have to let that hurt fester like it did with his family.]

I should be apologizing to you, though. I really didn't believe you at first... that wasn't fair to you.

[ If there's one thing he's good at, it's compartmentalizing these things, squaring them away and pretending they don't exist. It's not like the image of the little girl being taken away in an ambulance won't haunt him later, or anything. ]

No. You had every right not to believe me. Seeing personal memories in a video game shouldn't be possible.

[ His eyes dart to look at the building again, the sympathy in them clouding over. He doesn't like that... ]

It shouldn't. [A shaky exhale.] It really shouldn't. But I'm still sorry.

[He wrings one hand against the other, watching Hector's gaze focus with distaste at the building behind them.]

Would you tell me more about her? Demet, I mean. What kind of person she was.

[ Hector stiffens a bit, holding his breath. He's tense—from the encounter, the sudden whiplash of old memories and old wounds. In all honesty, he doesn't want to talk about her. He's angry that the game won't let her memory rest. He's angry that someone in CC Corp decided it'd be a fun idea to program these scenes in. And for what? Why?

But not answering feels a little unfair to Misteaks. ]

...She was a good person. [ He still doesn't look at him, though. ] Better than I could ever be.

That much I figured. You felt really fond of her. [His chuckle is light.]

I just didn't really get to see her at all. What she looked like, how she acted. What sort of weird things she did that made her special to you.

[It's a lot to ask, though. So he puts up a hand to wave it off gently.]

...Those are the kind of things I like to remember about Lily. I always wonder if, maybe, it can help things not... hurt so bad, when certain dates come up.

[It doesn't always work. Sometimes it spirals into guilt. But it's nicer, in the moment, to remember the good.]

[ Hector drops his gaze at that. It's been more than ten years at this point; sometimes, he can't remember what she sounded like, what her laugh was like. But some days, he'll get a whiff of her shampoo on the wind and it hurts all over again.

He doesn't want to talk about her. When Misteaks moves on to Lily, he quickly bottles that all up while he's not looking, locks it tight, buries it deep. Where Demet's memories belong, lest he forget the smell of her shampoo.

His eyes turn to Misteaks, and the rest of his body follows. The sympathy is back. There's a little smile on his lips, partially forced, barely there. ]

You should tell me the weirdest thing Lily ever did. She seemed like a fun kid.

[He watches that gaze fall away, how distant it looks when Hector finally looks back at him. He stays silent, an apologetic pain to his eyes. A line's been crossed, and he can't really take it back.

Talking about Lily... he could do that.]

...She was really stubborn. One time, she saw my brother Matthew bragging about how many push-ups he could do, and she got all red and yelled at him until he did push-ups with her, just so she could try and be as good as him.

She was so little that she couldn't really do it, you know? [Toddler age and all that, just starting to grow into her limbs.] But she'd prop herself on her elbows and wiggle up and down the best she could until she was all red... and any time Matt would try to get her to stop, she's just call him a chicken. [He chuckles brightly.] Which would just make him mad.

So he would get all worked up and try to do push-ups faster, but he was-- geeze, twelve, maybe? Thirteen? Trying to out-do this little girl that was just laughing at him and having fun.

They just did that until they both got exhausted, and she insisted all the time that she won. We have pictures of them on the floor. They look like tomatoes.

[ Hector listens quietly, the tension in his smile evaporating as Misteaks tells the story.

Kids are so pure. He chuckles a bit at mention of the ages, picturing the brief moment of happiness the boy's family shared. No one can take things like that away from them—those memories are precious, and untouched. ]

She sounded like a powerhouse. Whole family wrapped around her finger. [ His smile grows wider and he shifts his weight. He's relaxed now, not having to think about himself. ]

I'm glad you have pictures. Things like that are precious.

...Yeah. She could have run the whole country someday if she wanted, I'm sure.

[Being the only girl surrounded by a ton of boys would do that, he thinks. They all adored her. She would have had the world in her hands.

...]

I don't think many of us would have bothered at the time. But Aiden, the brother right before me? He was always taking pictures of everything so he could show them off to friends later. And he loved showing Lilith off.

So most of what we have now of Lily... I think he's a big part of that.

[ Hector believes it. His mind starts leaping at what-ifs, but he knows that's a dangerous path to go down. Maybe not for him, personally, in this situation—no. But in general. So he shoves those aside.

He reaches to clap a hand on Misteaks's arm and gives him a little shake. It's a gesture of comfort more than anything. ]

You should thank Aiden next time you talk to him. It might've been a little thing at the time, but that's irreplaceable now.

[ Because, well... Maybe that's a talk he'll have with Misteaks one day, maybe not. If Hector refuses to talk about his sister, then... ]

I know wherever she is now, she knows you still love her.

...

[This is where he goes quiet - less out of pain and more something else. A reminder, something that eases his expression even if he doesn't speak up right away.

Lily still loved him.]

...

Same with yours. If now is anything close to what I felt...

I think Demet knows for you, too. Wherever she is.

[ Hector keeps his eyes on Misteaks for a little while, his expression sobering.

He never thought of her watching over him. It always toed too dangerously close to his delusions and hallucinations that, once they stopped, he never bothered entertaining the idea.

Who knows where she is. She could've run away. She might be dead. He'll never know.

But...the look on Misteaks's face tells him that it's not worth arguing. Take the sentiment and go. ]

Yeah.

[ His eyes drop to the side, contemplative. ]

...Thanks.

[He hums a gentle affirmative, before a hand goes to clap against Hector's shoulder.]

I know a good stand nearby with slushies the size of your head. I think that's probably better than this heat.

You want to come get one?

[ Hector smiles a little at the clap. Misteaks—Barrett is a good kid. He doesn't deserve this trauma.

He steps back and gestures with a sweeping motion back towards the fair, glimpses of a more genuine Hector quickly boarded up and blocked from view. ]

Of course. After you.

[ Maybe things can be more light-hearted from now on. ]

[Closed] misteaks' mistakes (catchall)

cw mild psychosis, depression, alcoholism

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject