Reminiscence || Adrian & Nadia
When she was finally finished with her story, Adrian’s gaze dropped to the floor. Her sentences kept on repeating themselves in his head even though she was not speaking anymore. He could not help but slowly construct them into images. All these times, he had always thought that Nadia was one of the few lucky people there at the Base to still have her family whole. She had both her parents and the three of them had each other. Surely she could not possibly be familiar with the loss that he had had to go through.
But she was—and now he knew. Adrian leaned back against the wall as the even progressed. Every so often he would tune his attention back to anyone who was speaking, but after a while his thoughts would always wander off. His mind carried him to memories of his mother, of home, of what it could feel like to lose a sibling. He wrapped himself in his own silence the whole time, and before he knew it, the story-telling was over.
The people started gathering in smaller groups, talking amongst themselves with warm smiles stretching their lips and fresh tears moistening their cheeks. While taking the surrounding in, he felt a tap on his shoulder. Adrian smiled at his friend and stood up. “Great job,” he told Nadia, sincerety marking his voice. For a moment he forgot about the protesting that he had planned to do once the event was over. “You never… mentioned you had a brother.” His words came out hesitant.
Adrian was curious, but did not think it wise to ask questions after her heartfelt revelation to pretty much the whole Base. Organising the gathering had got to be difficult enough, but to speak first took immense courage. He certainly would not have been able to do it. He admired her for that, and though he could not put it into words, he hoped his expression could convey it.
She didn't really know how it came to be so, but Nadia realized that she actually really valued Adrian's opinions. As she had once said before, he was smarter than most fifteen year old boys she knew—not that she knew a lot of them. But he was definitely intelligent and mature for someone who was three years younger than her. Heck, he was probably even more mature than she was. She figured that growing up fast came with having to survive alone, though, and in terms of experiences, he was older than she was, in a sense. Nadia felt a pang of sadness when she realized that surviving along probably resulted in losing a part of his childhood, but nonetheless, she was glad that she had the honor to call someone like him a friend. His views were things that she very highly took into consideration.
Returning Adrian's smile when he turned around to face her, she attempted on giving him a modest shrug of her shoulders. But the smile she wore was too wide to cover her pride of being able to pull off such an event. "Thank you," she said, beaming from ear to ear. Though as soon as Adrian brought up the topic of her brother, the smile slowly slipped from her face, until only a small and somewhat forced one remained. She inhaled deeply before regarding his comment. "Well, now you know that I had a brother," Nadia responded in a soft voice. She knew that she shouldn't be surprised to have him bring this up, but considering that she had never truly spoken to him about all the sorts of misfortunes that they had experienced in the past, she didn't think that he would let their somewhat lighthearted friendship turned into a deeper one. Not that she was unhappy about it or anything, though. And besides, perhaps it was time for her to open up to him.
"Remember that first time we talked? When I walked down the hallway from the Bunk room and found you doing the same?" she went on, letting the words fly out of her mouth before she could stop them. "I told you that I had a nightmare. It was about my brother."
