my name is blue canary

It was something along the lines of an existential crisis. Salem didn’t know how to handle the fact that she felt so many things and at the same time nothing at all, she didn’t know how to handle the fact that she’d lost herself to the shuffle of everyday mundanity and she couldn’t figure out what on earth she had done to this freaking brain of hers. It was all so strange, and how she longed for things were never easy. Things were only easy when she was around what she knew and what she was comfortable with. What Salem knew and was comfortable with… well that was all right here. That was here in this world that had been hers for a little while and then not again, the world that had been created while she stood upon it.

The world that had tried to take her back that day and the world that she had turned away from. Salem sits beside Pan for the longest moments, trying to figure out what he’s saying. It’s now that she tries not to laugh again, because the sound would be bitter and unbecoming and all around awful. No, she’s not going to laugh or scoff or anything else. The ghost has always known that he’s weird and she doesn’t know what else to expect from him. And maybe that’s just it. Salem has never expected anything of him, anything at all. Maybe that’s why things are the way things are, and maybe that’s why he doesn’t find her… loathsome. Right.

She quivers slightly, sighing hard. “Damn it, Pan, of course I get it. The question is, do you?” The ghost turns her head, hiding her pale gaze for a short moment. “Since we were kids. I’ve loved you since we were hardly more than kids, I’d been there a long damn time just hoping you’d use all your smarts to figure that one out, and then I got tired of waiting, and then I ran off and now I’m back and all you can say is—nevermind.” Salem takes two big steps back, head tossing. She can’t face him, not right now. No. Right now things were different and her head was spinning and she couldn’t figure out what she wanted to feel.

With a few powerful strides to kick her off good and hard, the ghost fades away at a dead run. How could she be so stupid? Of course he wouldn’t want her, not like that. Not like that at all. Salem was nearly sick with all the things she could feel in her guts. All the things that had to be going wrong.