Rising Shards

I sat at our computer, deep in thought as I analyzed the twelve blurry seconds of footage shown of Tower of Hate and Love from Towerbration: AB: 810. It was a hybrid mix of cartoon and live action and promised to be just as mysterious as mainline Tower, even if it toned down the racier aspects of the show.

“Stella, I think I see Arlit’s gauntlets in this!” I called out. I had sent it to Kalei, but she wasn’t online. For Oka, I wanted to show her in person, and she had told me she was busy on our week off, so I didn’t want to bug her with my barely visible footage. “Do you think Raina Starlight would have been in this?”

“She’d maybe voice the cartoon version of her younger self,” Stella said. “But they did get that kid that looked just like her for that flashback.”

“That’s true!” I said. “I was talking to Kalei on Fang Moon Web about it, and she said she thinks it’d be all original characters.”

“Uh huh,” Stella said.

“And then I said…” I said. Tears welled in my eyes suddenly. I felt a pit in my stomach. I tried to hide it and shut it down, but it was too late.

“Zeta?” Stella asked. “You good?”

My shoulders were rising and falling with each breath as I started to cry.

The entire post-seeing-Jeans-again-then-fighting-her mood became less of me hitting the ground running in a good way, and more everything catching up with me at the same time despite me running as hard as I could. I saw my horrible ex again, she was even more horrible than before, she tried to seriously hurt Oka (or worse, something that made my legs lock up and made my stomach immediately upset to even start to think about), I had to fight her, I had to fight a big giant monster that stomped on me, and lots more. Some of the lots more was really good, like making out with Oka or her giving me a flower mid-defeat of a void monster drone that was probably the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me, but those were also a lot even if they were good. There was also a hefty chunk of the lots more that was very bad, like Oka’s aunt Kitty Kilander revealing herself to be one of the teachers at Wildfire Hearts and bringing some of us back with her, including Aira and Laenie. All the feelings, the terrible ones and the great ones, were too much, and no matter how fast I’d run from them to give an appearance of normal, they were faster than me.

Thankfully Stella was there, and she wasn’t being in buttly, jerk big sister mode, she was being in cool, supportive big sister mode.

“Here,” Stella said as she led me to the couch. She rushed to my room to grab my blankets. She wrapped me in them. “And there’s that…” Then she got the TV on, put her favorite sitcom on, and gave me the remote for whenever I wanted something else on.

It was her tried and true method for sick days, setting me on the couch in front of the TV, wrapping me up in blankets and getting me all the food and drinks I needed. 

"It'll all be OK," Stella said, lightly rubbing my shoulders as my vision became like a waterfall. "Just go real easy, alright?"

I didn't know how to take it easy after the void trip. I thought I did. Stella knew what I was trying to say through my nasty, crying heaves, so she sat next to me and held my face in her hands to make sure I was looking at her, wiping my tears away with her thumbs.

“It hits everyone differently," Stella said. "But when it hits, you have to let yourself recover.”

I nodded before letting her hold me for a while, with my head on her shoulder. I felt like I was a little kid again, when I'd trip and fall or someone said something mean to me and I couldn't stop sobbing. Stella always dropped whatever she was doing and held me like that. She'd sometimes just rub my back, or pat my head. This felt like a deeper wound than a scrape or an offhand mean comment, but the start of recovery was the same. She even hummed the song she used to sing to me when I was really sad, or had a nightmare and couldn't sleep.

"Getting through it isn't a straight line," Stella said. "Sometimes it's easier, like sometimes you'll be laughing like it's not there. Sometimes everything will feel normal even when it's there. And sometimes it'll be like today. And it's alright if you need this time to just feel it, you know?"

It. I thought it was interesting she just called what I was going through "it." Umbrella-terming it like that meant that it could apply to a lot of things, but deep down all of that "it" meant something hurting. A wound deep down, in the heart, mind, that sort of thing. "It" also applied to "I got raided in the void by my terrible ex Jeans who I was seeing for the first time after we split and after I found out I was just basically her mistress as she cheated on her real girlfriend, and an ex who I had to fight and she tried to seriously hurt my new girlfriend and also maybe probably enslave my class excluding the friends that got forcibly transferred to another school and I was feeling a lot from all that."

Even though she was in the middle of getting ready for her new job at Rising Shards, as well as the big move to the new apartment in Sky Clay I hadn’t yet seen, she still put priority on taking care of me. Even if I was a little miffed she limited my phone and computer time. She even yanked my phone away from me for a second to make her point.

"I'll give it back in a sec, but I want to say this," Stella said as my grubby hands reached to her. She was behind the couch, so my reach was awkward. "You can text Oka on it, text friends, same for messaging on the comptuer, but any other website I don't want you on long. I don't want you to have easy access to website and app loops designed to make you anxious and miserable. And I will keep an eye on this."

"Alright..." I said.

"And I highly recommend only comfort food shows and movies right now," Stella said. "That might sound dumb, but an easy way to you getting a stress tail next to your regular tail is to watch a bunch of junk that brings you down. We Faleurs have extra empathy in our bloods, so times like this when we're already extra sensitive we shouldn't consume media that will further unsettle us."

"What do you mean? What does empathy have to do with watching a show when I'm sad?" I asked.

"Hmm," Stella said, leaning on the top of the couch. "Here's an example. A few years ago, I was going through it."

I tried to think of a time I'd seen Stella rattled enough to be in a state like I was in. She must've kept it from me, because outside of some tense nights before bills were due, I couldn't remember her ever being that off.

"So to cope with it," Stella continued. "I read a lot. And ended up reading a book that had a vaguely similar situation to the one I was going through. So I tore through the book, and I was feeling the character's situation a bit too much, even when it veered from a simple 'longterm sweethearts can't make it work anymore' breakup story into a really depressing 'space colony is steadily wiped out by an invisible alien force' story. And it just...stuck with me. It didn't take me away from my problems, it just made me feel sick and unbalanced even way after I put the book down. So if you're deep in the muck, you gotta make choices to keep yourself stable, even if that means simple things like avoiding the critically acclaimed space opera novel Cheddar Colony because it makes you feel worse."

"That...makes sense?" I said. I didn't really have the energy to willingly watch much else than the sitcoms Stella left on, but I did make a mental note to avoid anything that was a real downer. Even Tower of Hate and Love had some really sad arcs, so I wouldn't be rewatching those any time soon. Stella did collect me a pile of books I liked (mostly Raina Starlight, whose literary masterpieces never depressed me) which I figured pretty much made up for her media strictness.

In a way, they were like sick days even outside of Stella taking care of me like she did when I had a cold. I cried for about two days straight. I felt sick and exhausted and sore. When the tears would chill for a bit, Stella said that same thing each time.

“It hits everyone differently. But when it hits, you have to let yourself recover.”

Most of day four was spent sleeping, waking up to eat and cry a bit, then sleep more. I didn’t even do my brush, double brush, brush, double brush, triple brush, double brush routine that day. It rained that day, melting a lot of the fresh, early winter snow.