A Second Chance

Part 70 - My Fall and A Second Chance

"Coming back was harder than I expected. I was so forgetful, distracted, slower to process things than I used to be. I'd lose the thread of a conversation and not realize until three sentences later what was even going it. Everyone was cool about it which somehow made it worse."

"Ray was the most difficult, which I didn't expect. He tried so hard to just be normal with me, to treat me like it was before, and I understood why but I wasn't that person anymore and every time he acted like I was that person, it just highlighted the distance between the new me and the old me. We were awkward in a way we'd never been and neither of us knew what to do about it."

"Garmadon just disappeared. He'd see me coming and find somewhere else to be. I knew it was guilt and I didn't know how to tell him that his guilt wasn't helping either of us, and most importantly, it wasn't his fault. So, I just let him avoid me and we didn't talk anymore after that."

"Maya was the strangest one. She was supposed to be pissed or curse me out or whatever, but she didn't say anything. She just avoided contact with me."

"There was one night I fell apart completely. Full breakdown, just crying on the floor unable to stop. Maya found me. I don't know what got in her mind, but she sad down next to me and gave me a hug. We never talked about it, but it was exactly right,"

"It didn't take long for the war to end and for the Anacondrai generals to be banished. The Serpentine were all put into tombs, and I was given the honor of playing the flute to escort the Fangpyre into their tomb. It was a real honor and I knew it was, but I realy wanted the Hypnobrai so that I'd get the last laugh. I lost a year of my life to that general and I wanted just one moment."

...

"After the war I moved back in with Ice and life was pretty decent for a while. Started college for electrical engineering, which I loved, reconnected with Lilly properly, and made friends with this wonderfully chaotic kid in my program named Milton Dyer who was obsessed with game design. Really enthusiastic guy. Interesting path he ended up on, but that's a whole separate thing."

"I got hired to do electrical work on a movie set and some of the crew brought me to a party after filming wrapped and that's where I met Cliff. I fell in love with him at sight because of how charming he was, and he looked at me and winked! Ice and Lilly never liked him and tried to warn me, but I just ignored him and to me, he was the greatest thing I'd ever seen."

"I was twenty-one when we got married. Ice walked me down the aisle and kept his opinions completely to himself the whole day, which I only realize now was an enormous act of love on his part."

"Almost the second we got back from the ceremony those two losers, Acronix and Krux, betrayed us and threw everything sideways. By the time Wu and Garmadon sorted that out we'd basically skipped a year, so the honeymoon happened at twenty-two. Very romantic timing."

"The marriage was not good. I knew something was wrong the way you know something is wrong but you just kind of look away from it. He was always out, always had somewhere to be, and my memory was getting worse in ways I wasn't fully tracking. I started keeping a notebook because I couldn't trust my own head to hold onto things. I'd write down what he'd said or where he'd gone and then find my own handwriting later and not remember writing it."

"He was verbally awful to me, he made excuses 24/7, and he cheated. That guy was a bastard behind closed doors; that's who he truly was,"

"Ice told me around then that he was going to visit an old friend. He didn't say much else and I didn't push. I know now that he transferred his powers to someone and he knew the truth before he left. I didn't figure that out until many years later when I saw something on TV about a master of ice and things clicked into place. I never knew the person's name."