AN: This is something of an awkward chapter for me. It came to me in a dream and was much more poetic and beautiful there than it is here. But anyway, I'd like to remind people requests are always open and thank everyone for their reviews and encouragement.
She lived life in a haze of gray.
As someone whose interests had always skewed towards the paranormal, it was hard to give it up for the sake of a normal job, a nine to five regular chunk of life. Doing so was giving up her passion, what she loved and treasured, but then she found her other love, a love that involved the unknown. She needed the unknown, needed to be the first person to uncover things, discover them, hold secrets in her heart that she could carry around. Valerie's mother was a woman with a child's wonder in her mind, keeping a sense of awe and amazement for the universe and the wonders of the world long after other people quit caring.
Gray was the night that she went out into as a little girl, scaring her parents every time, exploring the dark moon-lit alleys of the world. She came back with things, a drum set, a fish toy, a length of sparkling glitter cloth, and called them her treasures. She was treasure hunting. As a child she got bored with her birth name and began working on changing it, going through books and writing things down. These, too, were discoveries, to be presented to a largely uncaring world with the same enthusiasm as if the news was being applauded. You could not break her self esteem, for it was based in the beauty of life, and when people are that disconnected from the mundane side of reality they might as well be speaking Swahili and you only English.
Pitch black was her hair, which she experimented with in high school, putting it up in myriad styles, imagining herself as a great paranormal investigator. When the Quttinirpaaq files were leaked to the public, she read them and went out into cold winter nights with her hair in practical buns and in stark but warm gray clothing, imagining herself in that desolate far flung nowhere, alone amongst the ice, working to save lives. Just as every living survivor of the Incident at Quttinirpaaq had taken their names off the record, she would, too, slinking away into civilian life like a gray shadow in the mist. Her world of imagination was overwhelming, blinding her to the horrors of things, but it was this same charm that drew her husband to her.
His last name was Gray.
She met him in a coffee house where she was working her way through college, hair done up into a side bun with real flowers stuck in it, bright green eyes shining. When she handed him his coffee she'd written her number on the side of it, blunt and forward and smiling. He had gaped at her but called her a week later, shy and stammering but brought forward by her vivid nature. This same vivid nature would eventually lead to her death, even though she tried everything she could to be normal. She went to a normal college, she got married, and had a baby girl she loved more than life itself, but the urge to explore, to go out into the vast great gray areas, was deeply embedded in her.
So she dove into a degree in linguistics, learning how to decode languages without clues or keys, and went off with a small corporation to reach out to the most remote parts of Africa. In her mind the entire human race was one big family, and it was her job to go out and help her brothers and sisters. And what better way to help them than to make their voices heard? She didn't want to preach religion or shove food at them, she wanted to go beyond that, make them able to stand up and voice their complaints and grievances, teach their values and speak to the world as a whole. They were the great unknown only because more people hadn't reached out to them. When she graduated she was out of the States by the end of the week, enthusiasm radiating from her, keeping the darkness and fear of the unknown away from her mind, keeping her under the delusion the world was made of grays and whites, with no evil to be found in her fellow humans.
That was her last great discovery, which came as a shock after three months of solid work abroad. She was living her dream. She saw the sun set in a cool toned red over the gray glory of lakes, she saw the paleness of dewdrops on fields of vast wilderness, she held in her heart a love for the world so profound it sometimes made her cry. In her tears she was smiling, and would wave off confused and concerned people, explaining only sometimes how profound the vast perfection of life was. These were the thoughts that still stayed in her mind while she lay dying – she was in shock from blood loss, and couldn't deny that the red soaking through her gray tank top was preciously beautiful, as loud as a flare, warm and wonderful.
The fact that she was one of the victims of the opening shots of a political upheaval never occurred to her. She was too busy staring in amazement at the gray dots dancing through her vision, which then overcame her in a gray glow so familiar it could only be called home.