Title: Runners
Prompt 3/10: Sea Foam
Updated: 8/17/2018
Somewhere along the ride you learn to stop caring about how to get the destination. Somewhere down the line you start to wonder if a different outcome would harbor different results. Somewhere down the ride you stop caring; somewhere in time you start running.
Sam was a runner. For the last twenty seven years of his life he'd done nothing except run from the one home that wanted to keep him rooted in place. Home wasn't a place, it was memory, an awful bitter memory for a little boy who deserved a little better than what he gave himself. Home was a memory for elderly couple who couldn't pull him out of the hole he'd dug for himself.
The Grid wasn't all that different, only instead of home, it was a place full of memories for his father. His forty year old father, who looked no different from when he last saw him at years old. The reunion wasn't at all how he could remember fantasizing about. In the embrace of his father there was something decidedly alien about the emotions being experienced.
He didn't know how to react. It was easy for Flynn, the level of raw emotion that poured from his father was immense. Every word eroded the his defense into sea foam, making physical contact a strange thing to experience. Sam wound himself up tighter than a old and dry rubber band. His mind locked down, refused to think, refused to feel. The most he could get out was "Is this real?" For too long he'd dreamed of this moment, dreamed of seeing his father again. Yet, here he was, a full grown man, nearing the precipice of thirty years and his father hadn't aged a day since he last saw him.
There was an explanation for that, and Dad, of course, provided it. "Time passes differently in our world. The mind ages the physical representation doesn't. It's just a facsimile, how the computer remembers you as."
"It's not real," Sam said.
"No realer than that suit'll be when we get you outta here, kiddo," Kevin grinned, hands flexing on his shoulders. He pulled Sam into another embrace, this one stronger than the last. Sam felt his arms inch around his father and his chin rest on his shoulder. The memory of old spice and French fries hit him, plunging him into the realm of nostalgia.
He saw Quorra watching them with a quizzical expression on her face. Her lips parted, as if to ask what was wrong but she said nothing. "I thought I'd never see you again," Flynn whispered.
Sam swallowed against the lack of feeling in his throat. Holding his father tighter he said, "Neither did I."