Life, Death, and Time - A Books Of Beginning Collection

Oneshot: Death Doesn't Discriminate

Background: Canon TBR Compliant. Takes place during the lifespans of the Wibberly family afterwards and tells of the ends of their lives. 

Content: Pure Angst. Major Character Death. Mentions of self-destructive behaviors and suicidal thoughts. Kate-centric. Mentions of Kate x Rafe and Michael x Wilamena. Basically my headcanons for how the canon versions of the characters will die, with a focus on the Wibberly siblings. Also called; I have come to rip out your heartstrings and that is what I'll do.

Kate Wibberly was fifteen years old when that first, biggest piece of her broken heart was cut away with surgical precision. It was as if a void had been ripped open in her soul, the duct tape and resolve she had used to keep going turning to dust, turning to grave dirt. 

Was it possible for a person to become a living ghost? She was quite certain that it was; she felt as though she was both haunting and haunted. Even when she comforted Michael through his first break-up, held Emma through the funeral of her best friend (Gabriel had been Kate's friend too, and Michael's friend, but no one seemed to remember that), even when she watched with dead, world weary eyes as Wallace and Pym and everyone else who had died to save the world were mourned, she felt as though she were just going through the motions. 

Kate was forcing herself to live. She didn't want to live, but there were two reasons that held her up, that forced her to keep going even when she just wanted to sleep forever. The first was Michael and Emma, her beloved brother and sister, who were suffering and struggling, who she could never bring herself to hurt in any way, even if protecting them meant tearing herself apart. 

The second reason that she lived was, of course, because Rafe had asked her to. She loved him, so she would. 

***

Kate was twenty six years old when she held a screaming, sobbing Emma, twenty three and far too bitter for it, in her arms while the bloodied corpse of a hero lay out below them at an unnatural angle.

Later she would get the full story. A diseased sea serpent, usually docile but driven to violence by its rabies-like illness, had been terrorizing a coastal town. Dena, Emma's best friend, and the woman who had trained the youngest Wibberly as a warrior after Gabriel's death, had offered to put the poor creature out of its misery. Emma had accompanied her, looking for a little adventure and what should be an easy task. They had been full of high spirits and mischievous glee. Then everything went wrong. The serpent was bigger than they were expecting, and more vicious. It ripped Dena's arm off before Emma's eyes, and pushed the woman over the cliffside, where she fell onto the rocks below, her back breaking with a sickening crack. 

Emma had went into a rage, slaughtering the serpent with her sword, becoming drenched in its blood, before collapsing on the cliff. She wouldn't be able to recall what happened after that, she was too blinded by tears and deafened by shrieking for her friend. But somehow she managed to press the emergency contact button on her phone, calling her emergency contact - Kate. 

Later still, Kate would let Emma bury her face into her shoulder at Dena's funeral. She would rub her baby sister's back while Michael looked on with worry. Granny Peet would conduct the funeral service while Dena's fiancé, Frieda, bawled. Kate would avoid meeting the woman's eye, not wanting to see the all too familiar grief at losing a true love reflected back at her. Dena would be buried among the fallen warriors of the village, and treated with the highest honor. In the world that came next, she would be reunited with Gabriel. 

It should be Gabriel, Kate thought at the funeral, and in those first moments when she ignored Emma's struggling, flailing arms and tight fists, not caring when she got hit in the process, just wanting to take her sister into her embrace. It should have been Gabriel there, because he knew Dena, and he knew Emma, and he was a warrior who would have known what to say.