For a moment there is a bizarre sort of comfort over knowing others have walked back and forth between life and death but it does not last long. In its wake comes a flood of sadness for this stranger, amplified by how easy it is to imagine her daughter going through those horrors. Fire rippling along his - her - purple skin as she screams. She inhales sharply against this grief, against how unfair it is that these quests can bring such terrible things.
She thinks of Garbage, forced to see the day he killed his mother. Thinks of the injustice of the broadcasting of that moment to anyone else that had slipped into the deserts that day as she had. It might have drawn them closer, that sliver of a shared piece of history, but she knew she had no right to those memories.
Agetta closes her eyes, as though that will help settle her thoughts. It doesn’t and eventually the only thing to interrupt them is the voice beside her. He offers his condolences for her daughter, and she thinks she nods but she’s at a loss for how to respond verbally. How to say she did not even know for sure whether her daughter was dead or not and how that uncertainty stretched for all of her children but for the very latest.
It wasn’t natural, wasn’t right, for her life to continue on while the bright stars that were her children flickered and faded into obscurity.
When she finds her voice again, she chooses to drown in his sadness rather than her own. “I’m sorry you had such violent deaths. Mine first was too.” Her memories of her encounter with Carnage were hazy now, that first taste of death, but there’s the lingering sensation of a crushed skull and a rotting corpse on the borders of the Gates.
Her eyes remain closed as she speaks again, making a quiet confession into the cool night air. “And now that I’m ready for my second, I can’t seem to make it happen no matter what I try.”
@[sleaze]