The internet cafe is tiny and cramped, tucked into a side street along one of the smaller canals. It’s dirty and smells of cigarettes, but it’s cheap.
It feels strange to be here this early in the morning. Normally you’d be at the shipyard this time of day, getting your gloves and hardhat back on at the end of your lunch break. Or you’d be prepping a gondola, getting ready to start your 9 am shift. You’re almost never not working at this hour.
Turns out, getting fired really frees up your morning.
You know why it happened, this time -- you still haven’t fully recovered from your injuries, even though it’s been a few months now. Your arm is too weak to reliably lift the heavy cargo. Your limp makes you slow and unstable on the rolling deck of the ships. The crashing noises and large moving shapes in the half-light of dawn give you panic attacks that lead to mistakes that throw off the schedule.
As your former coworkers let you know in no uncertain terms, immigrants like you are ruining this country. Every one of your failures was proof you didn’t belong here. But you have nowhere else to go, and you still need to eat. So you’re here now, at the internet cafe, applying for every job you’re qualified for and even more that you aren’t.
Hopefully your next job will have fewer loud noises.
Today’s afternoon shift with the gondolas starts in just a few hours, but the constant practice of looking for work has made you fast at it, at least. You send out a few dozen applications before you need to think about heading out.
Before you go, you navigate to the online Survivor’s Registry, as you always do whenever you find yourself at a computer. It’s been a few months and fewer names are being added these days, and compared to the population of Insomnia, the list is hundreds of thousands too short. You added your name as soon as you could, back at the refugee camp, in case anyone out there is looking for you.
But nobody is.
You search for your friends and family one by one, hoping this time their names will have appeared on the list of survivors -- hoping they’re safe, that they escaped somehow.
Thorn’s name isn’t there, still.
Neither are your parents.
Your neighbors.
Anyone from school or work.
You search until you run out of names to look for.
Nothing, still.
On a news site, you find an article with new photos of the recovery efforts in what used to be downtown Insomnia. This photo depicts a skyline with gaps in it like missing teeth; this one shows a giant hole in the ground piercing several layers of city; this one’s a train station that looks relatively intact, but behind it is an ocean of gravel where a neighborhood used to be.
...You pause your scrolling.
You recognize the train station. It's intimately familiar -- a place you visited twice a day on your way to and from school; the place where you met up with friends to do things on the weekends; the place with the arcade and your favorite ramen shop.
From where this photo was taken, you used to be able to see a neighborhood, all tightly packed houses with tile roofs and little gardens around them. You know every detail of that neighborhood between the train station and your house.
But now all that’s left is a wasteland, flat and burned and twisted, crushed completely flat. There isn’t a single thing left.
You’d seen aerial shots of the damage, so you already knew, in an abstract sort of way. But this photo is personal to a degree you weren’t prepared for, and hits you all afresh.
-----
You keep it together, at first. But on the way back to the shelter, you duck into a narrow alley so you can lose it a little in private.
You thought you would run out of tears at some point, but you never do. The weight of the people you miss is crushing, so painful you feel like your insides are dying.
You weep, wiping at your face and trying to breathe. You don’t have time for this. You have to pull it together and go to work.
You can’t afford to get fired twice in one day.
Notes:
- The scenery outside, while he's walking through the streets, strongly resembles Venice.
- Cobalt walks with a limp, here.
- This memory is confirmation that his home was destroyed, and Thorn and his family are almost certainly dead.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Memory 8 - Search
The internet cafe is tiny and cramped, tucked into a side street along one of the smaller canals. It’s dirty and smells of cigarettes, but it’s cheap.
It feels strange to be here this early in the morning. Normally you’d be at the shipyard this time of day, getting your gloves and hardhat back on at the end of your lunch break. Or you’d be prepping a gondola, getting ready to start your 9 am shift. You’re almost never not working at this hour.
Turns out, getting fired really frees up your morning.
You know why it happened, this time -- you still haven’t fully recovered from your injuries, even though it’s been a few months now. Your arm is too weak to reliably lift the heavy cargo. Your limp makes you slow and unstable on the rolling deck of the ships. The crashing noises and large moving shapes in the half-light of dawn give you panic attacks that lead to mistakes that throw off the schedule.
As your former coworkers let you know in no uncertain terms, immigrants like you are ruining this country. Every one of your failures was proof you didn’t belong here. But you have nowhere else to go, and you still need to eat. So you’re here now, at the internet cafe, applying for every job you’re qualified for and even more that you aren’t.
Hopefully your next job will have fewer loud noises.
Today’s afternoon shift with the gondolas starts in just a few hours, but the constant practice of looking for work has made you fast at it, at least. You send out a few dozen applications before you need to think about heading out.
Before you go, you navigate to the online Survivor’s Registry, as you always do whenever you find yourself at a computer. It’s been a few months and fewer names are being added these days, and compared to the population of Insomnia, the list is hundreds of thousands too short. You added your name as soon as you could, back at the refugee camp, in case anyone out there is looking for you.
But nobody is.
You search for your friends and family one by one, hoping this time their names will have appeared on the list of survivors -- hoping they’re safe, that they escaped somehow.
Thorn’s name isn’t there, still.
Neither are your parents.
Your neighbors.
Anyone from school or work.
You search until you run out of names to look for.
Nothing, still.
On a news site, you find an article with new photos of the recovery efforts in what used to be downtown Insomnia. This photo depicts a skyline with gaps in it like missing teeth; this one shows a giant hole in the ground piercing several layers of city; this one’s a train station that looks relatively intact, but behind it is an ocean of gravel where a neighborhood used to be.
...You pause your scrolling.
You recognize the train station. It's intimately familiar -- a place you visited twice a day on your way to and from school; the place where you met up with friends to do things on the weekends; the place with the arcade and your favorite ramen shop.
From where this photo was taken, you used to be able to see a neighborhood, all tightly packed houses with tile roofs and little gardens around them. You know every detail of that neighborhood between the train station and your house.
But now all that’s left is a wasteland, flat and burned and twisted, crushed completely flat. There isn’t a single thing left.
You’d seen aerial shots of the damage, so you already knew, in an abstract sort of way. But this photo is personal to a degree you weren’t prepared for, and hits you all afresh.
-----
You keep it together, at first. But on the way back to the shelter, you duck into a narrow alley so you can lose it a little in private.
You thought you would run out of tears at some point, but you never do. The weight of the people you miss is crushing, so painful you feel like your insides are dying.
You weep, wiping at your face and trying to breathe. You don’t have time for this. You have to pull it together and go to work.
You can’t afford to get fired twice in one day.
Notes:
- The scenery outside, while he's walking through the streets, strongly resembles Venice.
- Cobalt walks with a limp, here.
- This memory is confirmation that his home was destroyed, and Thorn and his family are almost certainly dead.