Work Text:
William Wisp was never very good at grieving.
Not in the sense that he cried for days and fell into deep depressions or was never the same, quite the opposite in fact. He had a tendency to, for lack of a better word, forget the people he had lost. He thought maybe it had to do with dissociating, or maybe he was just a monster.
He’d been thinking about grieving more lately, with all the loss he’d been experiencing. Ashe being taken by the Trickster, Dakota disappearing to god-knows where, Tide getting depowered- it was all a lot. He felt selfish for this, but he was also grieving himself, in a way. Or at least the girl he used to be.
He saw her sometimes, late at night. Probably in a dream, but he was never sure. She would sit there, an oversized hoodie swallowing her whole, and stare at the wall. It was how she calmed herself, among other means. Occasionally he would call out to her, sometimes silently, sometimes not.
“Hey.”
She would look at him, a twinge of curiosity in her empty eyes, asking a silent question.
“Did we make it out okay?”
The question always hurt him. The thing that pushed him through his worst days, the days when he wanted nothing more than to lock himself in his bathroom and never come out, was the idea he would one day be able to tell that girl that they made it out. That they were happy.
But he couldn’t.
They hadn’t made it out. They had died. He wasn’t even sure if he was happy anymore.
Instead of saying that, he pulled his mouth into a fake warm smile he knew she recognized as her own, and said
“We did it.”
It technically wasn’t a lie if he didn’t specify what he had done.