Seven drabbles, exactly one hundred words each.
It starts because they're drinking in the kitchen. Ka Anor is dead, hoo-fucking-ray. What better way to celebrate than to get pissed? They're on the top of the world, no worries. Maybe David can't quite pinpoint where their happy reminiscing turns to melancholic wishing, and he's totally clueless as to how that turned into Spill Your Deepest, Darkest Secrets, but he won't stop them. It takes a lot to get Jalil to talk. It doesn't take much to get Christopher to talk, but it is hard to get him to actually say something. And April… well, April's not herself lately.
Jalil – who is still enunciating quite well for someone so drunk – talks about his OCD and his fixation with the number seven, and how he'd wash his hands seven times, until they were raw and bloodied but clean. It was always seven times. Seven was the number.
"It's nothing real," Jalil says quietly. "Just something wired wrong in my head that I can't fix."
David thinks that's what really bothers Jalil. Not the problem. It's the fact that Jalil knows the solution to the problem, he just can't execute it. Jalil is the one who can fix anything, except himself.
April dreams of killing Senna. Padding across the mossy ground, Coo-Hatch steel in her hands. Their little Excalibur, sharp enough to pierce a witch's heart. Every night she watches Senna bleed onto the ground and every night she wishes she could take it back.
"Just for a second," April adds hurriedly. "She was my sister. My half sister, anyway." David notices her eyes are wild.
April wants absolution. They can't give it to her. David knows that April saved a lot of lives that day. He knows that she killed someone evil. He knows she killed her in cold blood.
"My whole life I've been fucked up," Christopher says bluntly. "My parents were alcoholics. Not abusive. Mostly just… there. Existing in the same space as me. I grew up thinking I wasn't worth anything. That nothing was worth anything. And when I saw Senna, I thought, 'This is it.' The end. I let her pull me in. I let her have everything. And she just left me spinning there. Empty. I gave it all because I thought it would kill me. Guess it wasn't that simple."
David knows if given the choice, the world will always end with a bang.
David is the last, and he knows that the others expect some rambling diatribe about Senna, and how he didn't really love her except maybe he did, but the truth is he doesn't care anymore. Senna's gone. Her story is written, no matter how many times they rehash it. That chapter of his life is closed. Senna fits into a little box of things that can't hurt him anymore. Things that don't matter.
"His name was Donny," David begins, because he has had other complications in his life besides Senna, and some of those monsters have yet to be banished.
No one is prepared for it. It's isn't possible to be prepared for it. They don't have any glib remarks or little proverbs or rambling reassurances. Christopher swears. April looks like she's going to puke and for a moment David feels like he might. Jalil just blinks, adding that new piece of information to the 'why David is fucked up' files.
"David…"
"I never told anyone before."
April opens and then shuts her mouth, caught somewhere between the supportive 'I'm glad you told us' and the truthful 'I wish you'd never told us.'
David excuses himself and goes to bed.
"Hey."
Christopher walks over to the bed and sits. For a long moment he says nothing. David barely breathes. Christopher is sure to ask questions. Questions David doesn't have the answers to. Questions he'll never have the answers to.
"You don't mind if I sneak into your cabin after dark, do you?"
David laughs until he cries. Christopher is always surprising him. "No, Christopher. I don't mind."
"Good," Christopher declares. "Now shove over and don't hog the blankets." He puts one arm around David's waist. David clings to him, grateful for the darkness for the first time in his life.