(Tangentially related to day 2: Crack in the Mirror)

By the end of the investigation, Emma had long run out of tears.

She wasn’t allowed to meet her brother’s murderer, but even without seeing she could easily remember the face she’d seen countless times at university.

Professor Rogers, a brilliant alchemist and talented lecturer.

Margaret, the woman who killed Oscar.

It was hard to reconcile the two. Emma spent long nights remembering the night after the explosion, being called in by the police commissioner to learn it was Oscar who’d died, seeing Professor Rogers by the site and accepting her gentle sympathy.

All a lie.

The whole case was covered in them – and Emma, despite feeling there were things she was missing, had little desire to dig further.

Getting too involved was what had killed Oscar.

A part of her that kept growing smaller with each passing day wanted to scream at him for being too kind, too meticulous, too caring. It wanted to go to the cemetery and rage and cry at his tombstone until she found relief, until she stopped missing him, and hating him for leaving her all alone.

She never went. Instead, she dismissed her aunt’s worrying and locked herself in her room, sitting down on the window sill and staring into the city for hours on end.

Before, she’d never realized how dull Wreving was. Autumn rains painted the whole city in gray, but even without them, the monotony of dirty stone pavement and buildings had little excitement to offer.

Emma went to classes. She came back to her aunt’s house, ate dinner and locked herself in again, day after day colored in mourning. A month in, and it still hadn’t fully settled in.

The world around kept moving on in tiny steps that felt like unfair, hurried leaps. The blown up laboratory was being repaired. The trial was scheduled. The funeral passed by her like a delusion, the ornate tombstone yet another reminder of the world letting go of Oscar.

Emma didn’t want to let go, and yet had no strength to keep holding on. He was dead, after all – she could no longer turn to him for support or a distraction, no matter how much she wanted to.

He wasn’t her whole life, not even close, but his death still broke it in its entirety. He wasn’t everything to her, but memories of him accompanied all she did. It was as if he was the keystone without which the entire intricate arch of her life fell apart.

She slept – badly, and ate – sometimes, and kept living more or less the same as she had before the murder. Her world had become devoid of color, but it was still there, and so she put one foot in front of the other indifferently and pretended she was fine even as she was drowning in the monochrome of her grief.

(The color would come back to her in the form of a bright orange kitten, and later of a malnourished and tortured brother coming back from the dead with even more secrets sealed behind his lips. But that’s an entirely different story.)

—–

This shit did not want to get written. This was attempt no.3, I think, and you can see where I’d given up on ending it properly, lol.