FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Forgetting someone is killing them twice."

Fran had kept having a harder and harder time dealing with her best friend's coma alone, while her roommate had kept having a harder and harder time dealing with living in a graveyard full of dead memories they'd shared with her when she'd been with them. The jackal's roommate had been ace, but not aro. While Fran had struggled to sort out her emotions after they'd snuggled through their grief that one time, her roommate had fallen in love with someone from online and, with time, she'd decided to move out of their apartment altogether. They hadn't made any commitment like that to each other, so she didn't owe the jackal anything as such. Still, Fran had always pictured them growing old together in some form or another.

They'd told each other that they'd stay friends and that they'd keep hanging out and meant it, but they'd just always known each other as roommates. That had been how their dynamic had been established and sustained for over a decade. Having had it suddenly removed had proven weird and painful for the jackal to deal with, but she hadn't wanted to make her ex-roommate feel bad for pursuing something that had made her happy and helped her heal from her loss either. Fran's ex-roommate's girlfriend had already shared her apartment with other people and, being the way she'd been, her ex-roommate had naturally taken on the role of cleaning everything around the house for them all the time.

There had been no big fight that had driven the jackal and her ex-roommate apart. Her ex-roommate had started having to spend more time dealing with her other responsibilities, so they just hadn't talked as often as they'd used to at first, bit by bit. More and more of the time they'd spent talking had started becoming about Fran's ex-roommate talking about problems she'd had to deal with with other people around her house, and less and less about the jackal or the friend they'd used to share. Fran's ex-roommate had developed a heart condition, and the jackal had become even more skittish about bringing up her own problems to her. She'd remembered their conversation about activist burnout, and hadn't wanted to make it worse.

By the time Fran's best friend had actually died in her coma, the jackal and her ex-roommate had already fully stopped talking, and she'd had no one to turn to about it, at all.

***

"You can't be serious!" Jackie and Fran had never had a fight before.

"How can I not?" Sure, they'd had disagreements over how to do this or that now and then, but never a fight fight, and never like this.

"But that's crazy!" When the roach had gone her own way after the Jamboree attack, it'd taken the jackal completely by surprise.

"The Commission never asked any of us whether we even wanted them to bring us back or not in the first place." This fight was a new experience for them, and a very unpleasant one, at that.

"I know you're still carrying a lot from that time they kept having to bring you back over and over," Fran acknowledged.

"It's got nothing to do with that!" Jackie insisted. "Why is the onus on us to be better about it than they were?" the roach asked.

"I'm not talking about whether or not it's fair," the jackal answered.

"No one's been talking about what's fair in the System for a long time," Jackie shot back, "for a lot longer than you've been here." That one stung.

"So just because I'm an alien, you think I can't understand what the stakes even are here?" The stakes had never been so high.

"I'm not saying that," the roach rolled her eyes.

"What do you think will happen if a few of us break all the Commission's chambers?"

Jackie was undeterred. "Our chambers work."

"Oh yeah, most of the time!" Fran shrugged.

"Do you really understand what the stakes are here?" The roach had to ask.

"Everyone's not cut out to be a Free Radical, Jackie!" the jackal shook her head. "Just because we can do something doesn't mean everyone can do it." Fran had enjoyed being a Renegade and Free Radical so far, but she did have the personality and skill set for it. "Everyone can't do everything," the jackal persisted, "isn't that what the Commission also doesn't get?" Wouldn't it have been better to give people a choice about where to be brought back?

"The Commission's gotten everything it's gotten since the System's inception through its control over the Revival chambers," Jackie retorted. "If it controls the chambers, it controls the System, it's as simple as that."

Fran still wasn't convinced. "What happens when the Commission finds our chambers, and starts destroying them too?"

The roach frowned. "That's why we should probably destroy theirs first." Jackie was speaking from a place of profound hurt, the jackal got that.

"Jackie, if we don't work out some kind of truce with the Commission somehow, we're going to end up with no chambers at all, and the whole System will die." It did hurt the roach to see Fran so crestfallen, but Jackie just wished the jackal would've understood. "You can't want that." Fran had been looking up to the roach for such a long time by then. "Even now, even with everything you've been through, you can't..." She'd become the jackal's role-model.

"We've been trying to work things out with the Commission peacefully for such a long time." Jackie was just so tired. "What's it gotten us so far, can you tell me that?" She had lived too many lifetimes. "How much longer are we supposed to wait for things to get better?"

Fran sighed. "I'm not telling you to wait for them to get better on their own, but there has to be a betterway." Kacey had sure been working overtime trying to find it.

"The mind-wipes don't destroy someone's body," the roach specified, "they don't destroy someone's personality either, you know?" The jackal cringed. "I mean, if you put 'em in the same situation they were in, they'll do the same thing they would've done the first time." Something told Jackie this argument wasn't connecting all that well.

"What about all the times you've done something differently in your life because of someone you've known, something they told you, something that happened to you with them?" People's decisions and personalities were influenced by a myriad different things.

"Sometimes I wish I could start from scratch like that myself, you know," the roach admitted. "Forget everything that ever hurt me." It's not that Fran didn't see the appeal to it.

"What if it happened to someone you cared about, like Dex?" That touched a nerve.

"Oh, so now this is about me and Dex!" the roach snapped.

"Of course it's not about you and Dex, for fuck's sake Jackie!" Blood thundering in her ears.

"I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!" Heat rising through her body, taking over.

"OH YEAH? WELL, FUCK YOU!" The jackal flipped her the bird.

"WELL, FUCK YOU TOO, ALIEN!" And they stormed off their own way into the night.

***

Fran had realized that she'd mostly buried her memories of what had happened to her when she'd been mugged and shot working at her convenience store night shift job that one time. With time, they'd been replaced with the more positive memories that she'd made of the night she'd spent awake with her best friend and her roommate to recover from it after it, just watching TV and talking as they'd done. Now that her best friend and roommate had both been gone, it'd been like a patch in a dam had come off, and those memories had started coming back to her, often while she'd been at her job for hours on end with no distractions on hand to speak of.

The jackal had used to make up little stories in her mind around customers who'd come in at night as she'd worked. Now, whenever a customer would come in, she'd flinch inwardly, and wonder if this would be it, if this would be the time when one of them would mug and shoot her again. What if it'd killed her this time? What if Fran had survived physically, but had had no one else to fall back on to help her heal from it emotionally this time around? That would've been almost even worse, she'd been almost embarrassed to admit to herself. Without anyone to turn to, how badly would she have even wanted to go on living if it had? These had been the thoughts going through the jackal's mind when another customer had pulled a knife on her.

So she'd reached behind the cash register, pulled out a baseball bat, and hit the mugger in the face with it.

***

"Ghost!" Jackie looked like she'd seen a ghost, fittingly, one might say. "I..." The roach wanted to say something, but the words caught in her throat. "Why are you here?" It couldn't bode well, could it? "You're not supposed to be here." But then Ghost already knew that. "Are you here to arrest me?" It said something about their dynamic that Jackie asked the question more with simple exasperation in her voice than anything else by that point. Really, arrest her? She was already having such a bad day.

"I'm not here to arrest you." The mantis had always seen herself as way more patient with the roach than she'd had any right to be. "I'm here to warn you." She was just going to have to be patient a little bit longer.

"About what?" Jackie blinked.

"There's someone among you who wants you all to fail." The roach tried to determine whether the Tracker was lying or not. "Corsair sabotaged your Revival chambers. She's been working with Grades from the start." For some reason, Jackie, even though she didn't expect she would, did get the impression that Ghost was telling the truth about this for some reason. "If you stop her, you can probably figure out how to make it so they stop messing with people's heads the way they do."

The roach frowned. "Why aren't you arresting me?" It did beg the question. "Isn't that your job?" Jackie raised an eyebrow at the mantis.

"Oh, I'm on vacation," the Tracker shrugged, her trenchcoat fluttering behind her as she walked away.

***

Fran had become completely unable to work at her job after what had happened to her there. Even though she hadn't been hurt physically that time, the psychological damage of having been put in the danger she'd been put in and, especially, of having been forced to do what she'd done to save herself from it had just proven too triggering for her to have been able to deal with anymore. So she'd taken a leave of absence, she'd gone on assistance, and she'd tightened her belt as much as possible, resolving to live as frugally as possible until she'd be able to think of another solution to her problem somehow. The jackal hadn't been sure of how long that would take, but she'd cross that bridge when she'd come to it, she'd told herself.

Well, she'd come to that bridge sooner than she'd expected. When her pets got a medical condition that required a lot of money for medicine and operations to get under control, Fran had been presented with a dilemma. Backed into a corner, she'd started grudgingly selling first her own possessions, then what she'd had left of the possessions that her best friend had left them with, anything that hadn't been absolutely necessary for their immediate survival. She'd had all of those positive memories associated with these objects, with the experiences she'd shared with her best friend around them. It'd been excruciating for the jackal to let them go, just not as excruciating as not saving her pets or going back to work for it would've been.

So she'd picked her poison and, ironically, by the end of it, the apartment probably wouldn't have reminded her ex-roommate of her best friend nearly as much as it'd used to, but it hadn't mattered anymore.

***

"Oh gosh!" Fran had clearly stopped expecting Orchid to check in with her about their investigation by then. "Orchid!" The mantis clearly hadn't forgotten that the jackal had promised to help them on their quest to catch the serial killer who was still on the loose. "I..." Was it too late for Fran to still pretend that she'd just been infiltrating the Free Radicals the whole time? "What's up?" Maybe if she just acted innocent enough the Tracker would simply go away?

"You wouldn't happen to have gone off to join the Free Radicals, would you?"

The jackal panicked."What? No!"

Orchid looked at her matter-of-factly. "I'm kidding, Ghost told me." That was more deadpan than the mantis usually was, to be fair. "You still care about our investigation at all, though, by any chance?" There was no real reason Fran shouldn't, come to think of it.

"Yeah!" Free Radicals didn't want serial killers roaming the System wreaking havoc any more than Trackers did, did they?

"Well, I've got good news and bad news, then," the mantis had continued. "We've finally figured out who the other Earthling on the loose is, right down to where she is, at that."

The jackal furrowed her brow. "But you haven't apprehended her yet, though?"

The Tracker shook her head. "That's the thing," she explained. "What we've learned about her made it clear she's a much more serious threat than we thought, and we..." Orchid was trying to get better at admitting when she needed to ask for help, even though she'd never found it easy to do. "As a fellow Earthling, I guess, we thought you may have thoughts on what her weaknesses could be, on how we might be able to take her down, maybe...?"

"Tell me what you know," Fran responded. "I'll see what I can do."

***

The few rays of sunlight that made it from the peaks to the ground of the bamboo grove ran across Dex's body as she'd walked through it like golden fingers going over her shape. Dex's heat pits didn't see the discrepancy where the shadows on her no longer matched the bamboo peaks as exactly as they just had, but they did tell her where it came from. Before she could say anything, her assailant dropped upside-down in front of her, righting herself as she'd swung her bamboo staff in an arc on her way down hitting right where Dex would've been if she hadn't moved out of the way in time by a hair's width. "What'd I do to earn your displeasure, Pangaea?"

Pangaea looked at her unswervingly. "You shouldn't have killed Corsair." So that's what this was about.

"Corsair shouldn't have killed and mind-wiped Grassroots." Dex would've shaken her head if she'd had a head to shake. "She knew what she was doing."

"Grassroots was talking to an Arbitrator!"

"She was talking to Kacey about fixing our chambers."

"Our chambers don't need fixing, Dex," the panda proclaimed. "The System will never change unless everyone's mind-wiped, unless we all start from scratch."

Dex would've frowned, if she'd had eyes to frown with. "Everyone but you, Corsair, Grades, and whoever else you happen to have cut a deal with provided you all keep your word, isn't it?" It hadn't mattered why Corsair and Grades had wanted the chambers not to work, only that they'd wanted the same thing. "What gives you the right to make this decision for everyone else for them?" The jackal would probably have called that Horseshoe Theory, but she wasn't around.

"I have every right," Pangaea countered. "I was an Arbitrator, did you know that? I was there at the start when the others decided that we wouldn't have one crinoid and one flamingo, that it wasn't efficient enough. If they hadn't overruled me then, you wouldn't even exist."

"Who'd they overrule to have one black bear and one white bear merged into you?" Dex asked matter-of-factly.

"I'll make you eat those words." The panda was still struggling not to take a bite right out of her bamboo staff as she spoke. "I don't care about Grades, Corsair, Kacey, Grassroots, or any of you losers. When your mind's wiped, you'll call me leader, just like everyone else." And if someone was frozen, misplaced, then everyone forgot she'd ever even existed, well, how much would she be missed, how much of an investigation would there be?

"It's still time to..." But Dex's pleas for peace fell on deaf ears.

With Dex's four crinoid tendrils, no head, lamprey maw, heat pits, and two flamingo legs, Dex had a fighting style unlike anything that had ever been seen anywhere else in the System, let alone on Earth. She could sense where her opponent was anywhere around her all the time and move in three dimensions in completely unpredictable ways. A lot of people had hired her to teach them how to fight, but no one had ever learned to fight the way she did. Dex's fighting style had been cobbled together from new stuff she'd had to come up with against all the different opponents she'd had over the course of her many lifetimes. It was a set of desperate improvisations that had somehow worked that one time and been recategorized as a good idea.

If you subscribed to the idea of the culture of one that sometimes came through at Jamborees, Dex's fighting style would've been a national treasure. It was so impressive it'd even begrudgingly impressed the people she'd killed with it themselves. She'd often look like she'd been going to fall down, but her flamingo leg balance would always come through in the end, even if she'd only balance on one toe. She'd used tendrils as legs and legs as tendrils interchangeably, moving upside-down as easily as she'd move rightside-up. Dex's cartwheels, splits, jumps, flips, rolls, sweeps, and hand-spins dodged and attacked seamlessly. Watching her fight felt like glimpsing a deeper truth about existence than you'd ever fully understand.

And she made mistakes.

Not often, mind you. This particular mistake, she hadn't made in well over ten thousand years. Had it been fifteen? Oh, Dex had gotten it good that time. She'd told herself, I'm never making that mistake again. To be fair, it'd taken her a really long time. Why did Dex have to make it then and there, as such? Who knew? She'd always been the sort of person who'd tell people it was okay to make mistakes. You could always learn from them. That had been one of the things that Jackie had liked so much about her. In the System, it'd felt so rare. This time, it was a costly mistake. Dex slipped and fell on her back, and Pangaea followed her bamboo staff sweep at the hybrid's flamingo legs with one final, downward thrust right through Dex's chest.

***

Had it been months, maybe even years? She'd lost all sense of time by then.

"Let's go down to the lobby..."

Fran had been ashamed of it at first but, with time, even with how hard her fear of loss had hit her when it'd materialized so hard, she'd found her own small ways to survive and adapt to what had happened to her until then as well as she'd been able to, buffers against the void.

"Let's go down to the lobby..."

Her pets had become her rock and her light, even more than they'd always been. She'd wondered sometimes if people with kids would ever be able to understand she'd loved them as much as she'd have loved her own kids, if not more. That's what her heart had been wired for.

"Let's go down to the lobby..."

She'd sang to them as she'd brought them food three times a day, sharing their excitement and hunger for life as she'd moved through her apartment like cheerful, well-oiled machinery. They'd eaten each time like it'd been the first time they'd discovered what food was.

"And get ourselves some snacks!"

What nobler purpose could the jackal have served than to have been there for her chosen family when they'd needed her the most, after all? They'd always been there for her.

***

"I should've been there for her," Jackie shook her head. "I should..." Fran could've told the roach 'I told you so' but she just couldn't.

"It wasn't your fault, Jackie." The jackal just held Jackie in her arms as she sobbed.

"See, with a lot of..." The roach kept having to pause because she cried so much she couldn't breathe. "A lot of things you share with people from the Commission, if you try to dig back for it, they have like..." Jackie's mind was scrambled, she kept struggling to come up with the right words. "They keep track of things, they can afford to, it's like, their whole thing, you know?" Fran nodded.

"But you can't afford to write down a whole bunch of things you shared as Renegades like that because they could use it to catch you, couldn't they?" By necessity, the history of Renegades had always been a history of stealth, an oral tradition that they could only afford to keep in their own minds, and nowhere else.

"That's... That's the thing," the roach sniffled. "Stories like we told you at the Jamboree that time." She dissolved into sobs thinking back on what a good time they'd had.

"I remember them." The jackal's mind went back to the first time she'd held Jackie in her arms as she'd cried, when the roach had first found out that she'd lost the quantum translocator all that time ago. "We should... We should tell them to her sometime, maybe, so she'll at least know they happened to her." It wasn't the same thing as remembering having had them happen by herself, but it would still be better than nothing, wouldn't it?

"You were right, okay?" It hurt to admit it, but she had to. "What do you want me to say?" It was clear from Fran's face she took no satisfaction in it. "When I saw Dex looking back at me with a confused look on her face, when I heard her ask me 'Who are you?' like that..." Jackie was falling apart at the seams. "It was the worst thing I've ever experienced, okay!" And she cried and cried and cried and cried. "It was worse than all the thousand ways I've died put together." The jackal missed Dex too. "No one should have to go through that." Even though Fran had only known Dex for a shorter time, she'd also gotten attached to her, not as much as to the roach, but not by much. "It shouldn't have taken this to make me realize that, but it did."

"Orchid finally got back to me about that serial killer from Earth," the jackal said quietly.

"I know who killed and mind-wiped Dex," Jackie nodded, "it's Pangaea." It was an answer even though it wasn't one, Fran got that.

"Hey, Jackie?" Their hug turned into one of mutual support and encouragement.

"Yeah, what?" They pulled back from each other a bit, looked into each other's eyes.

"Be careful."

The roach chuckled. "I'm always careful."

***

It'd looked like it'd been time for Fran to go back into the fray after all.

She'd told herself that she'd never be able to go back to her old job after the baseball bat incident. The effect it'd had on her mental health had left her unable to hold down another job either. But when time had come for her to have to be able to afford yet another operation and medicine for her pets to survive, the jackal had gone right back to her old job after all. She'd have kept her hand on a hot stove element forever for them if that's what it'd taken to save their lives with all they'd meant to her. The cruel irony had been that even the medicine and operation she'd gone back to work to be able to afford hadn't been enough to help them make it in the end. All she'd ultimately been able to do for them had been to be there for them all the way.

Fran had always hated needles.