prompt me  - no longer accepting.

Nimble fingers return the bottom polished button to its rightful place. She is pristine still into the midnight hour. Orange light filters in from the windows. Night has settled over Wentworth, and its Governor intends to retire for the remainder.

Though, one other soul remains in the administrative offices, keyboard clicking a distant echo throughout the halls.

She knocks, lets herself in, closes the door.

Unleash your wanton crisis, Deborah.

You don’t think to ask what she means. You already know she speaks in riddles.

She talks to you in a way that uproots your sensibilities, prying just enough to dig up feelings you’ve managed to bury under deadlines and your own blood. It’s the way she rests her chin on her fingers and sits poised, one leg crossed over the other, the way she reflectively listens to you (like an interrogator, like you do to her because old habits die hard). She listens to you with her tired eyes and guarded answers and you respond in kind.

By the end of your nights, she politely dismisses herself with your secrets close to her heart. In her absence, you hold the weight of a trauma that belongs to a woman who wishes to be a ghost. 

For this, you begrudgingly trust her. You hate that you do. You also hate that you hate her because she’s the first person you instinctively understand that you can trust. You have the feeling that she does, too -- maybe you’ve got her convinced that you’re already dead. 

There’s a de facto agreement between you two that you never talk about each other when you part ways from your spot at the bar, at the cafe, underneath the neon vacancy sign before it gets too light. You exist as her little white lie and it suits you fine because she does the same. 

She unfolds your secret fears, the ones that wake you up at night and make you realize that outside of your work, you don’t know yourself. You don’t know what it means to live outside of the concepts of duty and justice. You don’t know what those words mean anymore, painted whiter shades of grey the more time passes between a former life ended with the smell of burning flesh and pillars of smoke. That at the end of the day, you still wonder if there’s value in your valor and your wrongdoings. That you still feel the hands of the past grab at you and it wakes you up in a cold sweat that you can only run to burn away. 

There’s not a day where the questions don’t come back to haunt you and she brings those into her folded hands. For a woman who so desperately chases the desire to be forgotten, she’s particularly good at haunting. She haunts you, her presence and her words linger long after she leaves, in the empty spaces where her lips used to be.

At 3:42 AM, she’s chosen the stale air of an elaborate mausoleum to entertain you. Two dead people in a place where they’re supposed to be reminded of the blessing of life. 

Instead, you both stare at withering flowers and the fading face of Jesus when she asks you.

“I wonder who we were before we found the crossroads.”

You look at the candles flicker and look at the weeds that are beginning to flourish in the cracks of the concrete, nourished by the bones that lie behind the walls. You smile and it makes the room colder.

You’ve stopped asking what she means long ago. So you don’t ask what she means.

                    ‘ you’ve gotten good at being a ghost. ’  practise makes perfect. practise, and a strong dose of fear to motivate. graham tilts his head in suspect of that familiar lethargy; yet when he steps closer, it’s not to take the glass that seems a moment from slipping through her fingers to shatter on the floor, but to fill it. he sits on the edge of the coffee table with the neck of the bottle loose in his grip. it feels light.  ‘ i’m sure i could stand to learn something from you, doctor. ’

   David’s fingers intertwined between themselves, connecting both his arms as he pushed them down onto his lap. He was uncomfortable and that much was obvious from the way he was positioning himself on the edge of the seat to the way his shoulders tensed. The detective didn’t like psychologist. He didn’t like to be talking to them for whatever reason it had to be. He felt filthy and over scrutinized in their eyes. He was just some fucked up poster boy to them. 

I used to be very intrigued by time travel when I was younger, and as a result I came across the Butterfly Effect and Chaos Theory. The idea that one small change can cause a largely different effect is... fascinating, even if it’s hard to believe the flap of a butterfly can affect the wind enough to cause a tornado in the world somewhere. It’s putting this concept into other situations. 

What if a person who’s waited ten years at the seaside for their lover’s ship to return finally retires for the day, because their feet are sore and they stood for two hours yesterday. They miss the sight of a rusting ship on the horizon because they turn their back one second too soon. What if they waited one second more? What if they didn’t stand for two hours yesterday, but one hour and fifty-five minutes? One hour and fifty-nine minutes?

And then, what do you think happened to cause the ship to arrive one second too late? Was it because of the wind? Was it because of the flap of a butterfly?

I think it’s... romantic. The idea of a small, tiny thing bringing on great changes. It can affect the world, or at least, it can affect one person’s world forever. And that person’s world can affect another’s. And so on.

I’d also enjoy associating the Butterfly Effect with Ada, not only because her known insignia is a red butterfly, but because it’s what she does. She’s a small, unexpected variable changing the course of outcomes. 

Take Lanshiang, for example. Maybe if Ada didn’t decide to help Sherry and Jake, they wouldn’t have survived. Maybe, because Ada didn’t decide to snipe one J’avo, they would run out of bullets in a fight that mattered. Maybe if Ada didn’t grab Sherry away from the Ubistvo, Sherry wouldn’t have been able to help Jake, Jake would not survive to give his blood for the antivirus, and the world would burn. Thanks Carla.

The funny thing is, Ada never chose the butterfly for that reason (she sees it as an animal of freedom, something she decided when she was young and frantic and still new at being Ada Wong). She’ll probably never realize how fitting it is either.