Another Way

Chapter 32: Purgation

"^Then maybe we should try just that.^"

Sundance's words echoed in Sue's head as she recovered from the blinding pain she'd spent her entire adult life trying to keep hidden. It took a while until her surroundings had turned from an indistinct blur, only dotted by her sixth sense pointing people out to her, back to the vixen's dwelling. And, of course, all the little people present in it. The edges sharpened, and the colors saturated by the moment, until Sue finally felt normal enough to consider Sundance's idea in earnest.

Grieving was something she never cared much for, even when it was just her mom who had tragically left her life. She may have prayed a lot for her to come back, shed mute tears at glimpsing her in the photos around the house before dad took them down, but she never sat down to just... let herself cry over the loss. There was always something else she could do, or that dad wanted her to do, something more active and yet more hopeless. Anything but truly acknowledging what happened.

Because the one person she had left to look up to never truly acknowledged it, either.

It was an awful thing, it happened, and then normalcy resumed, even more pretend than before. On one hand, Sue had a hard time rationally imagining why her dad never did anything like that. Why he never made peace with his wife's loss, why he never noticed that it was eroding the family he still had left, why he never noticed that it was tearing him apart, too. On the other... Sue already knew why. Because she was no better.

Because it hurt so much. Because running away from that pain hurt less in the moment than confronting it, even if not that much less. Because that momentary agony felt so much more imposing than an incomparably larger plateau of suffering, built one distraction at a time. The world could never wait for them, could never wait for her dad. And so, avoiding it became a survival tactic. If it was the only way to keep their family afloat, then it was what had to be done.

And with each passing day, the wound they tried to run away from only festered.

Sue shuddered as she clenched her fist tight, and gritted her teeth at feeling a wave of anger crash against her mind. Anger for what her dad's actions had taken away from her, for every unseen scrape his neglect had left on her psyche until it had accumulated into a goring wound. She wanted to punch and shriek, to scream in fury about all the ways in which he had hurt her, for nobody to understand. For everything he had done,

And which she had inevitably ended up repeating.

The bitter reality delivered another gut punch to Sue's brittle psyche, forcing a stifled cry out of her as tears resumed irrigating her cheeks. They had ended up so much alike, in good and bad. And with that insight, the awareness of how badly all this hurt her inevitably cooled her emotions towards him, too. Worse yet, he didn't even have anyone to help him with it all. Didn't have anyone to step in and give him a hand before all the anguish could metastasize into shame at itself, at one's coping mechanisms becoming so painful it was impossible to even examine them, let alone the wound they obfuscated. Sue looked up at Sundance through blurry vision, smiling weakly as she wordlessly thanked anyone who'd listen for having her around to listen to her...

...

...

I wanted to say 'nonsense' again, didn't I? Is this just another way I've been burying all this for so long?

The split-second realization sobered Sue up just enough to let her wipe the excess tears off her face, and give calming down another attempt. Ultimately, the very thing she'd been running away from for so long had come to pass.

All this hurt! Like an absolute motherfucker! And yet, beyond wanting to lash out at the pain, beyond the subconscious desire to shield her wounds from all sight even as they festered, she felt this pain would be good for her. It wouldn't be pleasant—for anyone—but at last it'd help in closing that entire chapter of her life. Sue could only hope for that, of course. For once, however, doing so was... almost surprisingly easy. She had swum down to the very bottom of her mind, after all.