sixthiterationlogs | Reason says I should have died three years ago...

WHO: Sam Moon
WHERE: The Inn's kitchen
WHEN: January 8 (Sam's birthday)
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Language, rumination on violence and death

When you didn't get older, birthdays kind of felt like a joke. At least, that had always been Sam's feeling on the matter. She wasn't really sure where she stood right now, considering the situation. But all she really wanted was to spend the entirety of her birthday in a blanket fort, watching all three of the original Space Wars movies on her iPad. Unfortunately, as so often seemed to be the case, the fates were conspiring against her. Actually, she had pretty much come to the conclusion that it was somehow her own fucking fault she'd been abducted and tossed into this Skinner Box, but Sam had a habit of passing off blame when she could. So it was obviously the fucking fates.

And Karen, of course. She loved blaming Karen for things. And visions of the night they met--her "other birthday," as Karen euphemistically called it--kept going through her head.

She rolled onto her back. The slight motion made her feel unreasonably sick. She narrowed her eyes, trying to make sense of the whirling colors above her, but she couldn't focus. It was like the whole world had been smudged with Vaseline. And something wet was starting to seep into her hair and the cotton of her tee shirt. Sam tried to lift a hand to touch her forehead, but she couldn't.

More sounds rang out above her, like a symphony of violence. But a face suddenly filled her vision, coming into sharp focus. It was the woman who she'd briefly made eye contact with, the one with the short hair. "Samantha?" Her voice echoed. "Samantha, can you hear me?"

"What's going on?" Sam mumbled, not entirely sure she'd actually spoken out loud.

"An excuse to air past grudges," the woman said. She brisky swept Sam's wig off of her head, freezing momentarily at the sight of her red hair beneath. Whatever surprised her, she shook it off quickly, probing at the damage to her forehead. Sam let out a yelp of pain as blackness flashed across her eyes. "Your cranium has been shattered," the woman said. "You're going to bleed into your brain."

To banish the thoughts--really, all of her thoughts, Sam wandered into the kitchen. In the last few weeks she'd become increasingly obsessed with trying to figure out how to build a still. They had potatoes after all. Potato vodka couldn't be that hard. Applied chemistry wasn't her area of expertise, but she figured the challenge would only help keep her mind off of...things.

So her birthday would be spent in the kitchen. Quietly humming It's My Party by Leslie Gore under her breath, she experimented with whatever glasses, tubes, and burners she could rig up. In between each attempt, she would pause to write up a full debrief in the little notebook Jude had given her. Occasionally, birthday cakes and balloons would sneak into the margins of her notes.

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Sam supposed that meant her aging had picked up too. But did that mean she'd somehow accelerated to the age her body was supposed to be? Or she'd just picked up from the moment she'd been frozen? There really wasn't much of a way to tell, seeing as she'd only been a vampire for three years.

Maybe her tits would still get a little bigger. That would be nice.

Either way, though, this was more of a birthday than the last few birthdays had actually been. And she wasn't really sure how to feel about that.

Then again, Sam was never really sure how to feel about most things. She was just too broken inside for that, she supposed.

"Well," she said, "my mother would say that the appropriate response is that you don't look a day over 29."

Helen laughed and shook her head. "Your mother is a wise woman, Sam. That's usually the appropriate response for anyone, normal aging or not. Still, it doesn't bother me. I gave up a long time ago on getting to have a natural span of years and now that I'm able to live out my life again like a normal person, I sort of like it."

She paused a bit, trying to decide how to phrase the rest. "When one is immortal, one finds themselves missing the ravages of age. Normal things come to be of more import than before."

Fuck, did she understand. And never once, not since arriving in this stupid clown rodeo, had Sam ever felt so painfully tempted to reveal her secret, to express that she understood the thirst for normal only too well.

But she couldn't. She barely even knew Helen. Something inside of her just...resisted it.

And Sam hated herself a little bit for it.

A lot.

"I...never thought someone would see a bright side...to all of this." She made a helpless gesture around the kitchen, as if trying to encompass the whole village.

"It's rare that one would. I've just lived a long time and seen a lot of things. This is hardly the first time I've found myself in a situation that I want, very desperately, to extricate myself from. I have to look to the advantages of it since escape does not seem to be forthcoming."

Helen knew that this village had a secret, had a way to escape that she simply hadn't stumbled upon yet. She would bide her time with making soap and experimenting with medicines to make their lives better but when she found a way home, she was going to take it.

"But I'll find a way out. Eventually."

Sam offered her a sad, lopsided smile. One that looked worn out and rusty from a severe lack of use. "Well, I hope that when you do, you'll take the rest of us with you."

Helen's world would be better than this place.

Any world would be.

Reason says I should have died three years ago... | OTA

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