Reflections: Surivor
1st in a series
By Silent Hero
One-Shot, Cyclops POV, set sometime between X1 and 2
StatusComplete
PG For brief mild language
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Summer. I hate the season, but I can't help but feel linked to the word.
I always used to think in sarcasm that it defined me beacuse most people hate Summer. Because it's the one season they can't stand to be out in, to be around. Now of course, I know that those comments were just a hurt, angry little kid spending empty hours wondering—or assuming he knew—how the world felt about him. I haven't bothered to reasess that viewpoint in a long time, and that probably shows through sometimes, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not thinking that right now. I was actually thinking that it was a summer day like this, many summers ago, that I last saw my parents. Literally, many 'Summers' ago. Ironic, huh?
I wonder why that wasn't the last summers day I ever saw, and if maybe it should have been. If my living while they died had been some sort of accident, one of fate's rare, haphazard goof-ups. Maybe I was meant to die... And somehow I didn't. Maybe things turning out wrong back then had set the stage for the rest of my life.
Survivor's guilt, they call this. Like it's some kind of disease or condition. Like they can stick in a bottle and say it's all figured out.
And of course, with this medical anomaly come the usual questions:
Why them? Why them and not me? Why did I live while they died? Why am I allowed life when they weren't?
All the usual stuff.
The Professor tried explaining it all to me once, back when I first came to the Acadamy. He said my tendency to take too much blame and feel guilty about things for too long comes from suriviving the plane crash when my parents didn't. All sorts of stuff like that I'm not going to bother to dredge back up now. In any case, it sounded like a bunch of emotional baloney to me back then, but I didn't argue. He was trying to help me. He usually knows what he's talking about, and he's always been right so far when he tries to guess what I'm feeling, so I automatically assumed he was right in this too.
Not that putting a label on feelings is going to dampen them at all. If anything, the tag made me angry. How can all those rich, snobby medical people come in and just psychologically asess people's feelings like they know anything about it? It seems almost disrespectful. Makes it sound demeaning.
Oh, he's just suffering from 'Surivivor's Guilt.' Nothing to worry about now that we have it all figured out. Drama over; go back to your life.
And they tell us to do that—to go get over it—and we do what they say. We go back to life and assume if we're still feeling sick, it's not a normal thing, because after all—we're just victims. Survivors. Condition asessed, facts faced, we're good to go.
And we hurt and bleed and eat ourselves from the inside out with this damn guilt, that after all, is still only guilt. But we've already fixed it, right? We've already dealt with the problem.
But the fact still remains that right now I hate myself for the simple reason that I'mbreathing. That I'm thinking at all, that I'm alive. It's not even the urge to trade places with them anymore so much as to join them, wherever they are.
And what brought on all these thoughts? Other than standing at the shore of the lake staring at the water, of course. Other than wondering where my parents' bodies are rotting somewhere in the Pacific. Other than wondering what it was like to drown to death, and if they really had drowned, or if the fire in the plane had killed them both before they hit the water. Other then the fact that it's fifteen years today since they died.
I relive it every year. Hell, I relive it every day, every night in every nightmare. I live it.
And sometimes, the pain gets so that I wish I could just stopthe cycle. Stop the hurting, stop the thinking, the reliving and living at all. That's gotta be a new one for those psychologists that have this mental condition all figured out. If it's surivivor's guilt now, what would it be if I didn't survive it after all? What if it keeps bleeding, stabbing, hurting—and it kills me? What would that be, I have to wonder?
But I know I'll never have to find out. I'm going to make it through this, I'm going keep up the cycle, living and reliving in my 'Surivor's Guilt'. I'm going to fight through the tangled jungle that looks suspiciously like the inside of my mind. I'm going to step up and forward and not stop for anything as trivial as pain. I will live. Because I've surived, I will continue to survive.
I am a surivior.
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Please R&R!