daylight // open

I'M CARRYING YOUR LIGHT.

[attr="class","cupcakescroll"]Chase blinked a few times, breaking away from his thoughts for a moment when he heard footsteps nearby. He glanced in the direction of the sound, and he recognized the bright red hair of the girl standing too far away to notice him yet, but close enough for his sensitive ears to have picked up what little noise she made.

He didn't particularly like Anria. She was rude. She was closed off, to a point of being almost antagonistic, and she made it seem like she took pleasure in being the bane of everyone else's existence. Yet, Chase still felt compelled to try and comfort her anyway. He sometimes wondered if he was too soft. Anria wasn't a nice person. Maybe she had been, but she wasn't anymore, and she had made that abundantly clear. Chase shouldn't want to even be near her.

But she was here, like he was. Mourning, like he was. She'd lost people, too, like he had, and even if she made herself out to be a horrible person, Chase couldn't imagine letting her greive alone. She was human- or...half-blood, too. Nobody deserved that. Not even Anria.

He turned back towards his mother's grave. Chase had requested it himself, for closure. For her. Even if there wasn't any body in it, he had a feel that wherever she was, she'd find it, and him. And it would give him closure, too. It seemed a little more final when there was a tombstone. It seemed more like something he could start to put behind him. After weeks of wallowing in self-pity, he knew that he needed to start living his life again. She would want him to move on. She was gone from the world, but never from his heart.

It was that sort of sentiment that had always kept Chase going. He sighed, letting the weight on his shoulders slip off after so long, and placed the flowers he had brought with him on the grave. Orchids. Her favorite. He glanced at Anria, who still hadn't seemed to notice him yet, then back at the tombstone, and paused for a moment, before picking up few orchids from the bouquet again. "I'll be back in a bit," he promised, and he had a feeling that his mom wouldn't mind him borrowing a few of her flowers, given what he was going to do with them. "I'm helping a friend."

And maybe he and Anria weren't friends, not really, but in this case, he was willing to say they were. They had both lost someone. They knew what each other was going through, sort of. He considered them friends in that regard, at least. He turned and started walking toward the other half-blood, until he was standing next to her, looking down at the rock pile. It seemed like she was near tears. Maybe he shouldn't have come. Anria probably didn't want him there.

He couldn't imagine that she wanted to be alone, though, either. Nobody wanted to be alone, not really. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said, voice quiet. He offered her a knowing look, and a tiny, yet empathetic smile. It was more sincere than the forced ones he had given her last time. He held out his hand, which was still clutching four orchids, white with purple specks. He nodded to the rock piles, which were already decorated with the roses she had brought with her. "May I?" he asked, not wanting to overstep his boundaries and disrespect her.

I'M CARRYING YOUR LIGHT.

[attr="class","cupcakescroll"]Even after having decided to stay, Chase wondered if it had been the right decision for a while. Anria seemed so lost and broken, her face reflecting how he had felt not so long ago. It almost felt like he was looking in a mirror. He felt like he was intruding.

Yet, when he was feeling the way that he knew Anria was feeling now, he had wanted somebody to be there. A friend, or anyone, really, to talk to, and to be support him. That's why he stayed.

He waited for a moment after she gestured that it was okay before he knelt down and carefully placed one of his four orchids next to each rose. He paused before placing the third one, partly because Anria had started speaking and he wanted to listen, and partly because he wasn't sure what the third was four. He could guess the first two, but this one seemed like a little more of a mystery. Maybe a sibling? Yet Anria didn't seem like to type to have a brother or sister.

Chase stood again as Anria stopped speaking, and lowered his eyes for a while, twirling his last orchid absentmindedly between his fingers. He felt like he had the opposite problem- while he hadn't even met his father, he knew too much about his mom. That had been part of why it was so hard for him to let go. Everything he knew about her, her favorites, her smile, the warmth in her eyes- suddenly it all seemed irrelevant to the world, when she wasn't in it anymore.

He turned to Anria, meeting her gaze with his own of sympathy and somehow, understanding. Maybe he understood a different version of what she was going though,  but he understood what she was experiencing all the same. As chatty as he normally was, he couldn't pick the right words to say to that, so he offered a soft smile instead.

His eyes fell once more as she continued to speak, landing on the lone orchid in his hand. Without thinking, Chase stopped twirling it. Something in his chest ached when Anria mentioned being alone. He couldn't imagine thinking like that for so long, thinking that you had to do everything on your own, just to be strong.

"That's not the only way to be strong," he said, after remaining silent for a while. "Hiding away from everyone else? That's not strength...it's fear- the fear of getting hurt again if you let anyone else in. And...I get it." He'd only understood that fear after running away, but he still felt familiar with it. "You get hurt, and you fall down. You get better, and you keep going. I think you skipped the third part. You're trying to keep going without moving on. I think it's tripping you up."

"I don't know how to help with that. You might have noticed I'm not so great at it myself," he said.  "But I've always found strength in others. So, if you want me to," he began, offering her his last orchid, "...I'm willing to try." He paused for a moment, realizing that he might have worded that in a way that was a bit confusing. "To help, I mean. With all of this. I dunno, I guess I've always found that things are easier to deal with when I have a friend."

I'M CARRYING YOUR LIGHT.

[attr="class","cupcakescroll"]"I think it's okay to be different from the way you were before," Chase said, having heard what Anria had said, even if she hadn't meant for him to. "Things are different- it makes sense that you might be, too. And it's about accepting that it's not the same anymore, and that it won't be, and going on despite that, so being a little different is okay." Where these words were coming from, Chase wasn't entirely sure, but they sounded more confident than he felt about them, so he didn't mind it too much.

His eyes glowed when Anria accepted the flower, which had sort of become a kind of metaphor for him. It meant that she was going to consider taking his advice to heart, at least a little bit. In any case, it seemed like a step forward, and Chase was glad for that, even despite the depressing circumstances that had led them to that point.

He was confused for a moment as Anria reached down and picked up something that he hadn't noticed before she had brought his attention to it. He opened his mouth to ask, but she answered his question before he had the chance.

Oh. So she was a sister. She used to have one. He didn't need her to tell him in order to know that she was gone, too. No wonder Anria felt so alone, and like she had to stay that way. She'd lost everyone- not even just her parents, but her sister, her friends, anyone she could have turned to. Who would have wanted to risk losing everything all over again? "I'm so sorry..." Chase murmured, not entirely sure why he was apologizing.

It was different now, though. She was in Haven, a place that, so far, was safe. Her family was gone, and so was Chase's, as small as it had been to begin with. He was here for her now- and he silently vowed to himself that he would be, whenever he was needed, even if they really weren't all that close, yet. As she started to cry, Chase stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, hesitantly at first. He wasn't entirely sure why, but he felt like it was the right thing to do. After a while, he pulled away, glancing at the orchid that was now connected to the bracelet. Stupidly, he opened his mouth.

"I get that you're being poetic and all with that but...you might wanna move it before that flower dies," he said, half in an attempt to lighten the mood, but mostly out of concern that the orchid would stay there until it disintegrated. He couldn't imagine that Anria would appreciate an old flower still being stuck in her bracelet so long after it had passed.

I'M CARRYING YOUR LIGHT.

[attr="class","cupcakescroll"]Anria didn't stop him, but nonetheless Chase felt like there was something wrong. He felt like something darker was boiling underneath the surface, and that whatever was happening now was only a temporary setback to it exploding. She didn't say anything though, so Chase had kept on pretending that everything was fine.

When he tried to make it fine, everything fell apart.

He'd made a horrible mistake. A moment too late, he realized that, but he couldn't think of any way to fix it. Every word she spat sliced Chase like a knife, cutting too deep, too fast. He shouldn't have taken it all so personally- Anria was probably just lashing out, but it was too soon after he had tried to move past his own grief for him not to be so fragile. And this, like so many other horrible things, had been his fault.

He stumbled back from her, as though her words had physically pushed him back, and the hurt from it all was clear on his face. His eyes started to burn, and he tried his best to blink back tears. Chase didn't want to cry here, in front of Anria- she could try to use that against him. Any trust he'd placed in her fell apart in that moment, when he realized that he was still afraid to show any weakness to her.

He wondered if she really was a bully. He wondered whether she was using her own pain to justify hurting others.

"Memories don't die- they're forgotten," he said, quietly, his voice shaking, just as his hands were. He should have stopped there, but the words on the tip of his tongue spilled out anyway. "And you aren't supposed to forget the people you care about. If you have to keep coming here just to remember them, maybe you never cared at all." He immediately regretted saying that- he knew it wasn't true. Anria cared, otherwise she wouldn't have kept coming back in the first place. He tried to wipe away the tears that had started falling from his eyes, sniffling, and as much as he attempted to hide the fact that he was crying, it was painfully obvious. "Sorry, I'm-" He tried to breathe. "I'm so sorry. I-I didn't mean-" To hurt you. For this to happen. To say what I did. For Mom to die. There were too many ways to end the sentence, and Chase couldn't pick one.

He stepped back once more, then turned and started to stumble away, vision blurred by the saltwater in his eyes.