shadows, hope

[prismaticbleed]

Just had a bit of a heartsick shock, don't know why.
I slept until 6pm today? Body was sick and disoriented, I suddenly realized we hadn't eaten or drank anything in over a solid day when the body suddenly became unable to stand. Blood sugar troubles are awful, it gets hard to breathe and see and even hold things.
So we tried to eat, but the body got really sick again, that was just so exhausting someone ended up just crying, it's not worth it dealing with this day after day, we can't run from it.
Anyway. I remember trying to talk to Laurie and Genesis around 9PM, everything felt blurry and distant, there was a massive fiction lag of sorts. But I was standing in front of the washer in the kitchen, feeling way too young and sad, and I wanted to hug something that wouldn't tax me with personal interaction, something comforting and kind and yet totally undemanding. Now of course that is the function of plushies. But my brain instantly and instinctively thought "oh, where's Ventrium?" And I spent a few seconds legitimately trying to figure out where his anchor plush could be, and was even about to go upstairs to look for it when it suddenly hit me-- Ventrium is dead.
I stopped in my tracks and just burst into tears. Just… that poor precious thing, why did he have to die, why did he have to be the one to pay in blood for whatever had happened that night? I missed him, I honestly did, but until that moment it hadn't quite hit me how quietly yet honestly I had indeed valued his existence. I had taken him entirely for granted during his life, and it's only been now, in death, that I regretted such a perspective.

He's never been discussed here, either. Let me fix that as I'm too tired and in pain to write anything tied to data management tonight.
Ventrium was, actually, a Darkrai, who was tied to an anchor plush we've had since January 14th 2009. That's quite some time ago! We don't know who bought him-- the "jx7" fronter was tied to Celebi but they appeared during a "lost year," and I haven't tried reviewing the archives then yet (they are actually psychologically painful to read, in terms of mindstate residue). Nevertheless, that's when he first joined us. There's a picture of him from May 2009 here, along with the Celebi doll that the Tar later infested (interestingly there are no accessible memories of that plush prior to that event), and a Jirachi plush which we apparently owned as well but which there are no stored memories of whatsoever, and who was sold at some point. Someone's been trying to sell Ventrium since 2012, too. However that was always redacted once someone found out; there was too much strange affection tied to him to just exchange him for money and be done with it. That didn't apply to any other plush either. Kind of shocks me how I was the first person in that long to realize that he even existed in there.
Yes, someone had a Darkrai in Pearl Version, but it was a totally separate individual (his name was Heartbreak). And then obviously there was the canon one in the movies. So all archival mentions of a Darkrai other than the plush were indeed different people, who existed in Jewel's part of the world. Only one Darkrai was in our part, the part that touched headspace, and that person was Ventrium, of course. But he didn't even have that name until the past year, as he never spoke or asserted himself to anyone before; he was only a silent and unassuming vague presence for about five freaking years straight. And no one bothered to wonder or ask, even when there is data of someone holding him as they slept, and being vaguely aware that yes, there was a life within this plush. I guess he was always just glossed over... he was too quiet to matter. Then one night, back in early March or so, he answered when I spoke to him, and… well, that kind of changed things.
Anyway. Despite him never being spoken about directly, there's one offhand mention of him in the archives after January 2009, that strikes me as significant. It's from July 2009, on an evening when the mother apparently told us that "love" was telling us to "stop complaining and shut up," in light of her not wanting to acknowledge whatever pain we were going through a the time. But that bitter comment hurt so much emotionally that the fronter immediately went to hug Chaos Zero's anchor plush for comfort, but then they also hugged Ventrium. Now we had a small mountain of plushies in our room at that time, including several of Celebi, but Ventrium-- the Darkrai in the anchor plush-- was always, oddly, the one that would get singled out for comfort or quiet companionship.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, looking back, it absolutely breaks my heart that it took five years for someone to actually talk to him, and try to befriend him, and ultimately love him as a person.

...Like I said, I don't know when it was, as it wasn't written down. I have no context of the event. All I know is that it was at night, and I was sitting on the floor by the windows, and it was freezing cold and I was terribly sad and I was just holding him and talking at him, just wanting to express that pain without needing to converse.
I have no idea when he spoke up. I have no idea why. But it shocked me, because the words appeared in my mind so quietly and softly, like a shadow... totally unassuming, devoid of all ego, maybe even lacking a real sense of self... but there was a life there, with a voice, and it was not mine, and that shocked me totally.
I remember we spoke for like an hour. I remember he was so childlike, so simple and silent, like the experience of personhood was totally new and wonderfully strange. It probably was. I remember how fascinated he was by the fact that I was a tangible being, so different from the physical anchor he was using. I remember him still considering me his "trainer," or at least something akin to the title, as he seemed unaware that humans could be anything else to a Pokemon. I can't forget his total obedience and trust, his humility and naivete, his total lack of selfishness and malice. I realized he was the most vulnerable person I had ever met. I realized that from that moment on that could be used against both him and me.
I remember being scared, slipping, some part of me already regretting speaking to him. I had seen this pattern before, with Celebi, with CZ. I didn't want it repeating, not since they were so similar. And actually, let me write this down, because it ashamed me then but it is true-- more than anything, that fear brought up the musing of how odd it was, that both he and Chaos, the two Outspacers with anchors, the only two Outspacers who weren't used to bodies with blood and bone and breath, were utterly enamored with the phenomenon of human hearts. I had been embracing Ventrium this entire time, as we spoke, and he had been completely fascinated with the fact that there was a sound within my ribs, telling of life, the sort he didn't have. I was so torn then, between the affection such simple intimacy elicited, and the crushing panicked fear it evoked just as instantly.
But then he asked for a name, and immediately my mind took the two chambers of the heart and put them together. Ventricles and atriums. It clicked, totally, and I laughed at how perfectly quick that was.
Then the atmosphere started to slip and something was trying to get at him and he didn't understand what they were talking about, but I did, and it is the first time in my life that I knew a hack was there and yet I was completely terrified for him instead of myself. I asked him over and over if he knew what he was saying, he didn't know, I did, I explained it to him, I gently tried to keep him safe, I swore to myself I'd never let them touch him, I swore I'd keep him innocent, I never wanted to see him fall into the same sort of pitch-black lecherous hatred that was biting at the heels of everyone else I loved from other worlds.
I don't remember the rest of the night. I cannot tell you if I was even there. I cannot tell you what happened or how or when. But after that night, Ventrium was a solid person, and I charged myself with his total protection.

…But the Tar quickly realized that I was starting to love him somehow, and it began to use him, and like the children he was too trusting and naïve to fight back. They knew that. They knew that, and they used it to their advantage.
God knows I fought them off, I held them back, I bled in his place. But on March 22nd it swarmed around me like a sea of plague and then she showed up, the Tar in a tiny green form, grinning with more malevolence than I ever thought that face could carry.
There's one flash of the body standing in the attic, God knows why, with her taunting and threatening and lying to him, laughing at his confusion and simplicity and willingness to trust even her, even in the face of pain and fear. I was so sick, I tried to stop her, could I have? I don't know, I felt like vomiting just knowing what she was trying to do to him, and my brain was too shattered to let me stay there, I was in horrific danger but so was he damn it, I wished I could have swept him out of her awful grip and carried us both to safety. But all I could do was make her angry enough to follow me instead, when I stumbled out. And she did. She wanted to see me suffer, more than she wanted to harm him for harm's sake, and so she followed me, and left him behind in a crumpled disconcerted heap, and I have no idea what happened next. I have no idea.
I don't remember if I saw Ventrium after that. Truth be told I was scared. Had the Tar planted some corrupt seed in him? I didn't want to know. I was sick just thinking about it. All I could think of was how he looked through that dissociative fog, as I began to lose coherence and the Tar-Celebi screamed at me to stay there and watch, but I had already seen enough terror in his glazed-over eyes and the way he moved like a broken puppet. I knew he was slipping just as badly as I was. I knew his poor mind couldn't deal with her either. And it made me sick, and it made me hate myself for not being stronger, and it made me hate that darkness in me, and it broke my heart to feel that way.

Then something happened on April 13th, on Palm Sunday of all days, and he was killed.

…I'm reading that entry for the first time right now. I only have one accessible residual memory of that day, and it is of Razor standing in the bathroom with an old X-acto blade in one hand. Her mood is hesitant yet grimly resolute, and also bitterly regretful, oddly. Like she knew what she wanted to do, or "should do," but hated that it had to be done. That flash is all I have.
He was dead before she found him, that I know. I found that out days or weeks later. Razor found his corpse, and someone decided that horrible reality needed to be purged, or atoned for? I have no idea… just… his body was broken, and I know Razor tried to bleed out the lingering Tar as best she could, but she did very little. What stands out is the fact that he was bleeding pink. I didn't see it, but that fact is emblazoned upon my mind. I have no idea where he was bleeding from, or why, or even if it was his natural color blood. All I know is that it was pink, and when I found his body in the forest a month-long eternity later, expecting it to be holding flowers in its bones, I could still see that color, brilliant in my mind's eye, sealing his own shut. It wasn't an evil color. It was a hurt color, a hue that cried out for hope and justice with its dying breath. I haven't been able to forget it since.

…So that's that. Now you know.
He's no longer a Pokemon, if that means anything. My posthumous desperate wonder-- who were you really, what could you have lived to become?-- won't seem to quit, even when I ignore it, and I won't deny it the possibility of meaning something, of holding hope. All the memories looking back on him now, despite his plush indeed being a pocket monster, paint him as an entirely different being, one whose soul never quite found a shape and form of its own, being unable to assert its own existence strongly enough to do so at all. Death had severed that anchor but it also, strangely, seemed to offer a sort of freedom? Like, now that he no longer had a body, his soul could be free to become whatever it felt it truly wanted to be, whether or not it matched his old borrowed form, or the other world tied to it. In shorter words, it feels like he still has the opportunity to become an Outspacer, although heaven knows how it would happen, as he'd have to resurrect somehow, somewhere, to do so.
But yeah. Ventrium is the main reason why I've been doing all this Outspacer research. Don't get me wrong, I miss the hell out of Ryman and Markus, as I love them both dearly and I want our lives to all thread together again like they did once, in a life I don't remember but which still resonates with my personal timeline in a chord I can't hear but will never forget the vibration of. I'm doing so much work for their sakes that I'm losing sleep, and I don't regret it, because lately when I stumble upstairs to that big shared bedroom there are two more people sleeping in there now, and God but if that isn't one of the most beautiful little things ever I don't know what is.
And yet the Spectrum is still nudging me, telling me not to worry about technical specs as much as I should concern myself with truths, with the meanings and emotions and insights held by the colors themselves, and the way they play together like sunlight through windows, casting rainbows everywhere. Outspacers tie colors together. I don't know how yet. No one does. But maybe "knowing" in that logical sense is impossible. Maybe I am trying too hard.
Nevertheless there's a lot of stuff to write about on this topic. We're trying to "rewrite" our past now that that timeline is literally Scratched, courtesy of Eros and Cannon and the old Jewel, seriously they were just hacking away at everything that once was... but Ryman spoke up about it the other night, saying how he was secretly terrified of that "infinite emptiness," of the fact that we build our own meanings in everything we do, and that we can just as easily be nothing as we can be something. But that "nothing" isn't a bad thing, and he told me it wasn't until he met Infinitii-- my darkest aspects personified, so ironically to me-- that he began to realize that. And he sounded so excited as he said that, like someone about to try flying for the first time, all nerves and smiles and hope and hesitance, but already with the intention to jump. I really loved him in that moment, with whatever shone through him then, making him feel so new and yet so familiar. Who was this kid, I found myself wondering? Who was this boy standing in front of me, a decade older than he was when Jewel met him, and yet somehow the same soul. Who was he? I had never known him, and yet I had. He was a total stranger, and yet he was a dear friend. I didn't want to act on residual programming, even if it was affectionate. I wanted to be genuine with him. But I don't know who I am sometimes, either. And yet it's so funny, because he knows all that, better than I do perhaps, with how he tends to play with shadows and such things. He's our Paladin after all, and I am well aware of what brought him-- what brought all of us-- to that point.
But really, the point of this is, even if I don't "know" who he is now, he's aware of that, and he views it in the same way I view Ventrium's situation right now. If there is nothing to build from anymore, if there is nothing to look back on anymore, if all of that can be left behind and moved on from... yes it is terrifying in a way, to jump into that void, into that emptiness, but if we do so with trust and hope and love, we can build something entirely new from it. We have infinite potential now. We can choose what to carry with us, and what to leave behind. We can leave all the old pain in the past, if we want, and build a better future... the kind that all Outspacers chose to pursue when they entered our inner realm in the first place. And it is exciting, to realize that we all still have working wings, and that we can fly further than we ever dared to dream before... if only we choose to take that first and most important step, and jump.

I guess that's all I have to say tonight. I think if I add any more words to this it will become superfluous.
Today was troublesome and I still feel this aura of sadness and exhausted frustration, all in tears, but I will try and bring some comfort to that, and not ignore it. I'm just glad that there's always light in here, always, no matter what.