Authors note: Hey I know I haven't written in a really long time, and if anyone actually missed me, then I'm sorry. And I apologise in advance this is definitely not my best story ever, but please please please review anyways!
It's funny how everyones heard the quote "you never know what you had 'till it's gone" everyone acknowledges the aphorism, everyone understands it, everyone agrees with it, but no one really understands the truth behind it until it happens to them. In the before there were so many things that I took for granted, and worse so many people. I had never really thought of myself as selfish, I always thought I was down to earth, empathetic, I thought I acknowledged all the wonderful things I had in my life. I didn't. I was selfish, I was whiny, I took things for granted, I took loved ones for granted, I was vane, I was terrible. Yet I was better than most around me, but now, in the after, it all seems so insignificant, so trifling, so trivial. The things I used to spend time worrying about, how my blonde hair looked, what my outfit needed, the amount of time I spent arguing with friends and family when I should have been cherishing all the precious time I had with them, because back then, in the before, I felt invincible and that meant everyone around me must be as well, right? I guess that was the biggest revelation of the after, nothing lasts forever. The only really good thing about the after is that I don't take things for granted anymore, I spend way to much time meditating over what I could have done, what I could have said, what would have happened if I hadn't waisted the precious moments I had with everyone, but I did and it's that thought that haunts me. Well that and their deaths, I could still see it, every time I closed my eyes I saw them. Sometimes they were accusing, their eyes staring back at me with hatred, because I had killed them, I had killed them all. Maybe not directly, and maybe not on purpose, but in the end I had killed them all. Valentina, Jasmine... Brian. I had killed them all, whether anyone else thought so or not, I knew the truth. It was my fault, it was always going to be my fault. All the deaths, they were always going to be my fault, I could prevent them if I could just figure out a way to decimate the Order sooner, but I can't. So the mai, my people are dying, dying everyday, to protect me. He almost died protecting me, I guess he's a good thing in the after, or he would be, if he weren't just as broken and destroyed as me. Because he blames himself for this too. If only he would have gotten there sooner, if only he would have seen through Zane's act, if only... But that's the thing about the after you still have ghosts from the before, and they haunt you, taunting you with images and what ifs. Making you wonder, making you wish, making you nothing more than a living skeleton, a zombie of sorts, going through the actions, doing the work, smiling laughing, but not feeling, never really feeling. And it's Ironic really that in the before you where all human or mai I guess, but now in the after you're just a zombie, a zombie that's haunted by ghosts.