I don’t think any of you should be listening to what I have to say. My ideas are always terrible.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Family Values
Current Date: June 29, 2024

Character: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 36
Current residence: Prescott, Arizona
 

---

I don’t understand people who seem to love their little pity parties. As someone with severe PTSD, though it is now being handled in a better way than when I first came back, the last thing I want from anyone is pity. I know that it’s not because I have PTSD that I don’t care for the idea of pity parties, I think that even before I went off overseas while I was enlisted, I wanted nothing to do with that.

I mean, what’s the point? Woe is me, please pat me on the back and tell me it’s not so bad but I’m still going to tack on some more woe is me because I need to indulge in being sorry for myself. Maybe it’s just the way I was raised, maybe it’s something else.

There haven’t been all that many people I’ve met in my life, especially since coming back home, who seemed to allow themselves to fall into the whole thing of feeling sorry for themselves and all. Maybe I’ve just been lucky. I don’t know what else it could really be.

We had one hire last summer—not quite an intern, though it wasn’t far from, and they were being paid to work with us—who had themselves a pity party at least once a week. When it was time to review their summer with us and they asked us if they could come back the following year, we told them it depended on our government grants. That wasn’t a full truth but, also, not a lie.

We didn’t hire them again this summer.

Dirt under their fingernails? Woe is them. What will they ever do? This was a slightly messy job, they were helping in the enclosures though always while supervised.

Couldn’t get one of the big cats to do what they were asking? Woe is them, the big cats hate them and they’ll never get the animal’s love. Those animals weren’t around for them to go gaga over. They were, and still are with us because we’re a sanctuary. We’re here to give these animals a second chance at life and we release the ones we manage to rehab to the best of our abilities.

At one point, near the end of the summer, the not-quite-intern was telling the person they’d been paired with for the summer—a sweet young woman who’s been with us for a couple of years at that point—that she shouldn’t have been listening to what they—the intern—had to say. Their ideas were always terrible. We didn’t witness that one ourselves, but it was on the camera feed and Serafina handled the situation with grace.

I wish I could understand what goes through the mind of particular people, I really do. Not that I think it would do me a whole lot of good.

Now, other than the pity party they had going on, the intern wasn’t a bad person. They were a fairly hard worker, but even with guests around, they would say things that seemed to come right out of left field and that the guests didn’t really need to hear. It didn’t look great for us in a general sense and made it seem as though we weren’t treating said not-quite intern right.

Unlike with some of the other summer programs we’ve worked with, this particular soul came up to us out of the blue. We’d posted the offer for the open job on a few different sites because we hadn’t had any contact with the usual programs at that point. It made me think that they hadn’t had anyone register for anything that would have been helpful for us, in the long run. So, by the end, there was no one for me to reach out to, to fill in a sort of report card.

The programs seem to appreciate being able to know whether or not the people to send out to places like ours—and other places, I’m sure—are fit for the jobs. We hadn’t really had issues with interns from programs before but seeing as this one had come to us due to the open job offer, I suppose it’s just one of those things.

They weren’t the first candidate we’d seen or spoken to, either. We’d had a handful and yet, during the interview process, they were the one who seemed to best fit what we needed. Mostly due to their student status. We weren’t looking to fill a full-time spot, this was just a summer job with no chances of longer-term sticking around. At least, not unless someone walked out or retired but that hasn’t happened in the years since we’ve turned the sanctuary into what it is and our oldest worker is only in his early fifties, so not quite ready to retire just quite yet.

I don’t know that we’re going to hire someone for this summer, I still need to talk to Shaile about it.

Final Word Count: 831

I aim to be as confusing as possible.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City
Current Date: April 6, 2024

Character: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 37
Current residence: New York City Ruins, New York
 

---

It’s been almost three years without any sight of Darrick and I’m grateful about it. No one seems to know what happened to him and, I’m not going to lie, I don’t want, nor do I really need to know where he’s gone off to. There was a lot of speculation going around during those first few months that he’d either tripped into one of the still-plenty lava tubes presents, or that he’d gotten eaten by either the fauna or the flora. Both can gobble up a full-grown man.

I have enough memories of him harassing me to last myself a lifetime without him in it. I try my absolute best to not think about him unless I need to—and I don’t need to think about him, I really don’t—but I guess that there are times when the thought of him pops up. It’s most common when I see something move just barely out of my sight, from the corner of my eyes and, when I do turn to look that way to see whatever it was that I think I saw, there’s nothing there.

This isn’t a common happening, not really. It does still happen once in a blue moon, and I think I’ve somehow managed to convince myself that his ghost is haunting me when it gets bored with roaming whatever area it is free to roam.

The thing, though, is that I don’t even believe in ghosts. I’ve heard plenty of stories about them, though. I know that some people believe ghosts are tied to the area where they died, or at times they’re possibly tied to an object that had something to do with their lives or their deaths. Some think that there are different levels of things in the ghost world, like poltergeists or whatever else they’re called. Then there’s the whole possession thing and just, it’s too much for me.

It’s all just too much for me. The rare times I was listening to someone talk to me about something like that, I fully expected them to eventually tell me that they were just aiming to be as confusing as possible towards others because it was just how they wanted to be or something else of the sorts, it’s all I could think to myself. Some would just ramble on and on, as though not even needing to take a breath and none of what they were telling me made any sense.

A lot of the people who were on the team that I left behind for nearly a year have changed. It was six months before Dick-Arse disappeared, but I found myself stretching out my mock sabbatical for another six months, just to get my mind used to the idea that he wasn’t around and, clearly—or so it seemed—he wasn’t coming back.

After all that time away, and all of the changes in the rota, it took me a good bit of time to get used to things again and it took quite a bit of time for any of the new people—and some of the still-present older ones—to open up to me at all. I get that, to most of the new faces, I was as much a stranger to them as they were to me and not everyone likes to open up to everyone else on that first meeting.

Is everything perfect, wonderful, dandy and without any issues? Of course not, but I think that things are going about as good as they might ever. No, I don’t get along with everyone on the team, but not a single one of them is giving me—or anyone else, in a way—issues the way that Dick-Arse used to. I’m not the only one he harassed and I’m sure that I’m not the only one who’s glad—to not say happy—that he seems to have very simply just vanished.

Do I still catch glimpses of things from the corner of my eye, and does my mind nearly immediately think that it might be him? Yeah, I wish it wasn’t so, and I’ve even talked to one of the doctors about it, but I think it’s just a bit of left-over mental scarring from all I’ve had to deal with while I was with him. Time will do what it can with that but there are chances that I might remain with that little spark of discomfort and mild fear at the sight of whatever it is until the end of all times.

I don’t let it run my life; I startle for a moment, I look around closely, and I can feel my heartbeat spiking up but after a few minutes, when I realize that there’s nothing anywhere that shouldn’t be there, I do manage to calm down and move on. It’s all I can do about it. I refuse to live in fear. If it was much more common than it is now, I’d do something more about it but, for now, I guess that this is just fine.

Final Word Count: 845

Did I ever give you the impression that I’m someone who knows what to do in these situations?

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Family Values
Characters: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 34
Current residence: Prescott, Arizona
Final Word Count: 763 words
 

---

The hiring process is a team effort. In no way at all am I interested in overseeing everything about the sanctuary. Five, almost six years ago, when my name made it onto the paperwork and I made sure Shaile’s own was on there too, things changed. The sanctuary went from being well taken care of, to being in the very best hands it could ever have been.

Over time, since that day, the teams have changed. Little by little. Not drastically. Most who already worked for the zoological sanctuary were good and hard workers, but some still walked out when the place changed hands but, honestly, it was for the best.

I wish I could claim that the hiring process always happened without a hitch but that would be a lie. After my time out there in the sands, dealing with war, bombs and things that have pushed me into a nightmarish PTSD world, coming back here wasn’t easy. It was much safer but there were just so many triggers that for a while, I was more focused on trying to survive than having any potential direction in my life.

With Shaile at my side, and darling Isoba with us, I’ve slowly made my way back into the normal world of the living and running this place has helped me find my own place, in the long run.

With all that being said, I’m not perfect. I will never be perfect. Neither one of us is actually in, any way, perfect and we make mistakes.

One such mistake was when we hired the not-so-delightful Tanya to work for us. Her resume was rather spectacular, and she was answering all the questions quite well. She seemed as though she knew her stuff and we both had high hopes for her. Her first week was spent shadowing the man she would be working side-by-side with and, eventually, replacing.

At the end of that first day, when he came to give us a bit of an update on how the day went, the way I saw Tanya changed somewhat but I still waited, I told myself that first-day jitters were a possibility, but it wasn’t looking exactly good.

According to him, she stared at him blankly every time he would ask her to help him with something that she had claimed to know all about. That went on for every single day of the week and we did get to see a bit of that interaction through the camera feeds that we have everywhere in the sanctuary. Call it a need to make sure that everything is safe and, honestly, it’s mostly about keeping track of the visitors more than the workers but, in some cases, it turns out to be a necessity. A sad and frustrating one.

By the end of the week, we had heard more than enough, and we brought her into the office to ask her how she was settling in and she just… blew up. She started gesticulating, hands in the air, telling us that we’d lied to her about what she was going to do, how she’d never given us the impression that she would even know what the hell—her words—to do in the situations she’d been placed in. According to her, she had been expecting a job that would have required just petting pretty animals all day.

In no way, and in no words, was that anywhere in our job offer. I don’t even know where she got it from. It isn’t because the job was for a spot in a zoological sanctuary that it means, in any way, shape or form, that you would get to pet animals for a living. I don’t know what kind of fantasy make-believe world she lived in, but it was a very strange one, to say the least.

We didn’t keep her. It was moot to want to, one way or the other. During the week of her presence there, her main concern, whenever she couldn’t manage a simple enough task, was to ask when she would get to the cute animals so she could start petting them. I was baffled and honestly, I made sure to keep Isoba away from her. I’m pretty sure she would have loved to get her hands on him but for one, he’s a service animal, for two, he doesn’t care to be pet by anyone other than myself or Shaile.

Thankfully, we were able to find someone else within a couple weeks following her departure and I believe we’ve been doing all right, since.

Did you call me ‘my love’? Why have I only noticed now?

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City
Characters: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 34
Current residence: New York City Ruins, New York
Final Word Count: 735 words
 

---

So about six months ago, I finally caved in and told this one team lead I’ve worked with on and off since this all started that I was taking a while off. She didn’t even ask me why. She just made me sign this little document thing, mostly so we had the date on ‘file’ in case I just dropped off of the face of the earth and that was that. I told her that I’d check in with her every month, see if she needed anything, see if my not being there was still okay on the team and it wasn’t a strain on potential resources—or lack thereof.

So, I did check in every month, everything was still fine though I was told that a certain particular Dick-Arse had started bothering others on the team and I could only shrug. I’d had a feeling that once I no longer was on his radar—so to speak—he’d try to bother someone else. It wasn’t as though I was the only person he was ‘helping’ in his own unasked-for ways but, somehow, I think I might have been the only guy.

Not that he didn’t try to approach me during the few times I’d be out and about, but I always had Shaile with me during these trips. That didn’t stop him. It actually seemed to make him try harder and I honestly never noticed him calling me ‘my love’ whenever he spoke with me up until that point and, honestly, I’m fairly sure that he didn’t use to. He’s been doing it to try and get to Shaile and it only makes this more pitiful.

I really don’t know what angle this guy is playing at. I don’t. No amount of looking at it from any and all angle makes any sense to me. I just don’t get it and I don’t know what to do to ‘get it’. Even Shaile got in his face last time and it didn’t help. This guy feels like a leech.

At least, up until last week when he wasn’t around as we stepped out and went on our usual walk. Normally, he’d have been by the end of the street, acting as though he was there just relaxing because it was a good spot but it’s clear that he’s just there to be there and to be an annoying presence.

He wasn’t there last week. I didn’t ask around; I didn’t want to know. I’m due to check in with my team lead in a few more days and I might ask then if she’s heard anything about him but, on that same note, I don’t know that I will. I can’t begin to explain how good it feels to not have to worry about him just randomly popping up, just because he can.

With him around, I’ve started to think that I know what women feel like when pushy men don’t understand that no means no. I also know that it’s not just centred around women and that certain men get to deal with that sort of thing too—from both other men and women—but it’s just a generalization at this point.

The thing is, I’m not completely heartless and I suppose I might want to know if something happened to him. Not that I’ll rejoice, I’m not that kind of person but at least I’d know that my relief at him not being around wouldn’t be born of him being incapacitated or something. It’s just confusing. I don’t want to somehow end up thinking that I might be worrying about a guy that’s been nothing but a pain in my arse for months, you know.

I don’t like the way my brain works, at times. It’s like… I was that way a bit with my father, no matter that he treated me like absolute shit. I still worried a bit about him being out there when the snow really started falling but he didn’t really deserve that from me. He’d never really been a father to me, always treating me like I was an inconvenience in his life. It had always been my sister who’d looked out for me but after her death, I’d had to adapt otherwise.

Maybe I’m just too soft inside, the snow certainly hasn’t changed that part of me, there’s not much I can do about it.

Playing this game with you was fun and all, but I really should be going now. You know, before you try to arrest me again. Maybe next time, hero.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Family Values
Characters: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 33
Final Word Count: 726 words
 

---

One thing I’ve learned is that certain people will go very far out of their way to not pay for things. It’s nearly impossible to enter the zoo without paying but once or twice in the years since I’ve come home, it has happened. Normally, we leave it be but in this particular case, it wasn’t something that could be let go of.

Why?

Well, for one thing, it happened just about as we were closing for the day. The booths had been closed as we tend to close the booths about an hour before we’re closed for the day so that our last visitors had time to roam about and come back out to leave and this guy just somehow managed to slip through. I saw him sneak in as I was walking by to get to the office, Isoba just happy to trot at my side. I took in whatever detail of the guy I could but he’d been wearing an outfit that seemed to be all the rage recently, he looked like a lot of the other guys around the age I thought him to be.

For the time being, I let it be. I figured that if need be I’d get a few guys to chase him down, so to speak. One thing that Isoba is really good at, is finding people. We also have cameras along every pathway and I could always ask Shaile to locate the guy down to a grid area if need be.

I headed to the office, dropped what I needed to, checked the camera and spotted the guy. He was pulling things out of his bags and when I spotted the first spray can, I walked out. No one was going to spray anything in this zoo. We’ve worked too hard to keep the animals as happy and healthy as possible and the place as clean as can be for some idiot to think they can deface the place because they’re idiots.

It wasn’t hard to find him, but the moment he spotted me, he took off running. I radioed the issue in and every time someone in the zoo spotted him and he saw them in turn, he’d run off again. Eventually, I managed to near corner him, we were close to the exits again and most people had left by that point. The night lights were beginning to come on and all.

He looked me up and down, then he mostly stared at Isoba in disdain as though having a serval on a leash—service animal for the win, not that he needed that leash—was the worst thing in the world, and then he told me, in a haughty tone, as he shoved his spray cans back in his bag, that, ‘playing this game with me had been fun, but he really should have been on his way. At least, you know, before I try to arrest him.’ It made me roll my eyes a bit, mostly because I’d spotted our security team behind him and the moment he turned, possibly to flee because I imagine that somehow he thought he could just run through the exit, he ran straight into the chest of one of the two guys just waiting for him there.

He flailed, man. He screamed and kicked out and acted as though we were torturing him while the guys were only each hanging onto one of his arms they were walking him back to the exit. He wasn’t harmed. We didn’t even touch a single hair on his head, no. The guys dropped him out, beyond the gates. Not before one had snapped a photo and sent it to our printer. He’d be going up on our walls of do-not-let-inside and it would be on the wall of each of the booths.

In the years since I’ve been back, I think we’ve had to put at most like six photos up there. Not all males. I believe he was male number 4 and we have two females. Most are adults in my age group, one in their early twenties and, weirdly enough, one of the women was what the youngsters are calling ‘Karens’ nowadays, an older woman, though. Her story is for another day and it’s a story that still makes me shake my head in disbelief.

Your compliments always sound like insults to me. At least I’m starting to see through them.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City
Characters: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 33
Final Word Count: 681 words
 

---

So, as it turns out, the arsehole’s name is Darick. Why do I know this when I wish I didn’t have to? He’s still on the hunting team but, a few weeks after ‘the incident’, I asked to be moved back to a gathering team and I haven’t had as many issues since. He still bothers me, though. For some reason, it’s like he gets a kick of being in my personal space. Maybe he’ll think that by constantly ‘helping’ me, I’ll eventually return the favour and help him in less than savoury way. I don’t know. I do know he’s done it to a fair few other women out there but since none of them have screamed ‘rape’, nothing’s been done about. I guess that so long as it’s consensual—he has a weird way of making things consensual as I’ve heard it—there’s nothing to be done about it.

Anyway.

A week or three after I was thankfully transferred back to gathering—a year ago nearly to this day—Dick-Arse still was making a pest of himself around me. He’d drop by around the beginning of my shifts—which was creepy that he’d know when I started and finished my work rotation—and ‘help’ me in some way. He’d take my basket and carry it for a while without asking me if I needed him to or not. He’d hoist me higher up to a tree to reach things that, while I hadn’t been able to reach, at that point, I would have been able to once I’d gotten the short ladder. Small things that, I suppose to most anyone else, would have been very useful but, to me, they’re pretty invasive and I’ve told him as much. His glaring doesn’t bother me anymore.

I’ve told Shaile about this, I’m not going to hide the guy’s behaviour from my significant other, I’m not that stupid. For now, Darick hasn’t really done anything that I could consider to be a ‘problem’ or ‘dangerous’ beyond the fact that he’s in my personal space and he’s frustrating the hell out of me.

The cherry on top is that he somehow keeps complimenting me, or so he says, but all of his compliments just sound like insults to me, like he’s forcing them out. I don’t know what his angle is but I’m getting tired of having to deal with the guy. I’m about to ask for a sabbatical, I swear. It’s not like we get paid for our work but it helps the community. I’ve been around long enough that I’m sure I’ve more than done my part but I need to get away from this guy’s near-constant presence in my working space and if I have to stop working for a month, two, or even six, I will.

I’ve brought the idea up to Shaile; he seemed to not be against it. I just need to figure out some finer details since I’ll still need to head out every so often but if I do that with Shaile at my side—which I’ve been doing for everything that isn’t work-related—Darick might just get the hint and try to Dick-Arse woo someone else with his weird-arse methods.

It’s just exhausting to always have to be on my toes about these things. I used to like gathering because, while I had to be careful of what I picked up and mindful of my surroundings, I still didn’t have to worry about people potentially coming around to help me when I clearly don’t need any of their help. I’m aware that it possibly makes me sound entitled or something but I just don’t care at this point.

All I ask is to be able to do what I like doing without having to constantly look over my shoulder because I expect him to crop up and offer his unhelpful help. I wish he’d go back to the hunting party or let his knotted up nickers knot back up for someone else. Is that too much to ask for?

If anything, I was doing you a favour.

 
Timeline/World: New York City – Surviving Earth
Characters: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 32
Final Word Count: 659 words
 

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A lot of people assume that because of my small build and height, they’re doing me favours when they’re helping me with something I don’t need help with. They assume that because I’m so short—being sickly and chair bound up until Doctor Flynn took care of things will do that to you—and still pretty skinny since I never could bulk up, not even now, that somehow, I need help for everything.

Just last week, I was on the hunting party—can you imagine that? Me, on the hunting party!—and we were out, stalking this thing that’s been roaming around the place for a little while. In a way, I suppose it might not so much have been a hunting party as a find-the-beast and maybe-slay-the-beast party? Maybe. I’m not sure. As is, we didn’t find the beast, only its tracks and we lost those tracks in the water of the nearby running river.

Now, I was doing fine, though I had a few issues getting over some of the fallen over trunks because my legs aren’t all that long and all compared to some of the others in the little hunting group and, as I was climbing over one of the trunks, I guess the guy behind me—I think his name is Damian or Dominique or something, all I know is that it starts with a D and should end with ‘ick’—just literally swept me off my feet and dropped me off on the other side.

Now, if he’d just boosted me or something, I guess I might not have minded as much? I still would have minded. I wasn’t slowing the group down and I hadn’t asked for any help yet. I didn’t need him touching me to dump me over the trunk. I was doing just fine on my own and when I turned to ask him to not touch me again, he just glared at me and told me to just shut up and keep moving. That, if anything, he’d done me a favour.

I shut my mouth and I kept moving. I even actually stepped aside at one point and let him and another step in front of me. The woman behind him gave me an odd, pinched look, as though she had a fair idea as to why I’d done what I did and I stepped back into the ranks after her. The rest of my day was painless after that and only dick-arse there was a problem.

I get it, though, I do. I’m not even five-four, I’m short, I’m sure that if my hair were longer and I’d put on a stuffed bra and a skirt, I might even pass for a girl because even my features are sort of soft and a little androgynous but get your facts straight. I don’t need your help. If I need your help, I’m going to ask for your help and even then, it’s highly unlikely that unless I’m comfortable around you, I might not even ask you. I’ll go further off to ask someone else to help me.

I know my own limits. I know I can only push so far. I might be able to walk and I can walk pretty good distances but there still are days when I go to bed at night and my legs go a little numb. The doc told me that it was normal for that to happen after especially hard days but if it lasted more than a little while, to bring it up to her so she could do something about it and so far it hasn’t been a problem.

So fuck you, Dick-Arse. I hope you sit on a cactus and enjoy every spiky moment of it for even thinking you were doing me a favour. You were being an arsehole and no one likes arseholes. You smell like one too.

What am I supposed to do to fix this?

 
Timeline/World: Alternate Earth – Birds of a Feather
Characters: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 31
Final Word Count: 581 words
 

---

I still remember Martha.

I don’t know what my father was thinking when he hired her. Then again, I’m not sure he’s the one who did the hiring, probably someone in his HR team but still. Maybe they were thinking that she was pretty and she’d be good in bed but I digress. Then again, I was twelve when I first met her. I already had an inkling, at that point, that women wouldn’t really do anything for me but I wasn’t certain, not quite yet. I admit rather willingly that it’s when I started my military training that things shifted into proper perspective for me.

As is, that’s completely beside the point.

I don’t think Shaile ever met Martha. She was still around when I started my training but in the year or so before I came back permanently, I visited and she no longer was around, so I guess that’s a no. Maybe it’s for the best.

That thing they say about blonds being airheads? I know it’s just a figure of speech but it applied to her and it applies thoroughly. I think she was supposed to be a sort of receptionist-slash-secretary of sorts but she had a hard time understanding the filing system—that I understood, even at twelve—and her bedside manners lacked.

What stands out the most in my memory is a steaming August day when you could almost imagine that everything was trying to melt, even the phones, the desk, the chairs. Everything. I was spending all the time outside I could because I didn’t really mind the heat, it meant that most everywhere was quiet and we had few visitors. Bad for the budget, but good for me, I didn’t really like being around too many others. That’s something I worked on while in the army. I still don’t like large groups but I can handle being surrounded by people for the most part.

So I’d just finished my rounds, looking in on this and that animal and I come back to the main office and Martha is outside, her blouse partially unbuttoned, fanning herself with a few sheets of paper while she’s arguing with… I guess he must have been a repair guy. There was a lot of gesticulating going on and looking back, it almost seems like she was trying to entice him or something, the way she had herself on display with her blouse opened up as it was. The guy was telling her something about how he couldn’t fix the issue and Martha was pouting and asking him if he couldn’t just try again because she had no idea how she was supposed to fix it herself and just… all in all it was a sad sight. At least to my twelve-year-old mind.

I zoned out after a few moments but she must have seen me standing there, just waiting because I remember her buttoning herself back up, at least a couple of buttons and giving me this charming little smile of hers to let me know that she adored kids or something-other and that she’d probably eat me up if she could. Thinking about that now makes me want to gag, gross.

I hadn’t thought about her in years but seeing the obituary brought those memories back up. Maybe I’ll go. Probably not. It’s been so long, I don’t really know what I’d do there and I didn’t know her that well, not really.

You’re not the only one who is scared. Stop acting like it.

Timeline/World: New York City – Surviving Earth
Characters: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 31
Final Word Count: 556 words

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I still remember the bus ride to the bunker. We were bundled up but I still felt frozen. I’m pretty sure I was frozen by fear more than the cold that surrounded us. I felt something that wasn’t far from terror. I was sure I’d been hiding it as best as I could but the woman next to us on the vehicle, a girl more than a woman, she kept on giving me ugly looks all throughout the ride, those ugly looks instantly turning to sweet, precious little smiles whenever Shaile looked in her direction.

I didn’t know what her problem was and I wasn’t really interested in finding out. Of course, as situations like these go, I did end up finding out what was her problem because the moment we made it to the bunker, the moment we were told to file out and I was up in Shaile’s arms—desperately wishing I wasn’t a burden and I could walk myself out of there, we’d had to leave my chair behind—the ugly look returned full force. I heard her mutter something about how I should have been taking myself down the truck and into the bunker myself but I ignored her to the best of my ability.

I thought that by the time we’d be gone inside and we were sent off to rooms after being told that we’d need a once over, it would be the end of that but tough luck, the prissy princess was one room down from ours and she so often tried to charm her way into Shaile’s good graces, even while I was there, that I had a hard time not laughing it up every time she stepped around. She tried to corner me a few times. Told me to stop acting like I was the only one who mattered, like I was the only one who’d been scared and still was scared of what was happening, that I should pull my weight and stop being useless.

Not having much of a fighting spirit, I let her take that pathetic anger out on me, what could I do, really? It wasn’t as though I could get up and be stop being ‘useless.’ Until we’d secured me a chair, there wasn’t much I could do and I didn’t want Shaile to have to carry me around, that wouldn’t have been fair. I was more than a little grateful by the time we’d gotten me back into a chair, not that it lasted long. I’m still not sure about what it is exactly the doc did to me. All I know is that I could walk again, I hadn’t been able to stand on my own two feet in what felt like a lifetime and it was close to that, in a way.

It would have been easy to go to her after that, gloat about everything but I didn’t. I was more focused on being able to get back to my own feet, being able to actually get some muscle mass in my legs because I’d never really had any. It was hard work and even now, years later, there are days when I can only walk short distances before wearing out but I can walk and I love every second of it, so I’m not going to complain.

Don’t you dare let go of my hand. You hear me?

Timeline/World: Alternate Earth – Birds of a Feather
Characters: Shadei Morgan
Race: Human
Age: 30
Final Word Count: 592 words

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I have nightmares. They’re not frequent, I’m grateful for that but I have nightmares and I’m sure that everyone on my old team has them. What we went through was and still is nothing short of hellish and I don’t actually like to talk about these things. I’m doing this for Shaile because the look on his face in the night when I wake up from a nightmare to him just trying to calm me down breaks my heart. Isoba has helped a lot in easing those nightmares away, I rarely have them anymore but I still do and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to talk about them at all. Shaile’s presence at my side has also done wonders to help the nightmares fade somewhat.

So second best options, I write some of it down, little by little, get it off my chest. I don’t know that it really will help me but I’m willing to try. Considering how long ago all of this was, though I suppose that three and a half years might not seem so long to some, I should already be mostly over it but most doctors are right, you don’t ‘get over’ your PTSD, you just learn to adapt to it and find things that help you move on.

This one recurring nightmare is more than just three and a half years old, that was when I was honourably discharged but I’d been paired with the same team for almost ten years before that, almost.

I lost one particular teammate to a trigger-happy asshole who got to live another day. For a long while, I wished he hadn’t but what could I really do? It wasn’t my decision to make to kill the guy because he was shooting everything within his line of sight. I think we could have saved Tyler if we hadn’t been lost in the middle of nowhere. He didn’t bleed out; he bled in if you would. Whatever the shot really had hit, it was inside that most of the damage occurred and our transport made it to us just ten minutes too late.

While we were waiting, I was hanging onto his hand, just telling him to hang on, that he’d be all right, that no, I wasn’t going to be telling his wife and kid that he was loved them because he wasn’t going to die and we were going home and he’d tell them himself. I could see the light slowly fading from his eyes as he begged me to tell his wife just how much she meant to him. I was still clinging to him when the transport came and I refused to leave his side. I was on the plane with him when he was brought back home. I was the one who did tell his wife about how brave a man her husband was.

I would have done this for any member of my team if I had had to lose any one of them but Tyler was the only one I lost that way. Others, myself included, have been wounded in the line of duty, these are inevitable, but I’m at least glad that I haven’t lost anyone else. Tyler’s death was hard enough to deal with; I’d known him for most of my life.

There. One entry, I don’t know how I feel about it, I didn’t go into details at least but it still is one of the recurring nightmares I have, so that has to count for something, right?