TJ stumbled through the rest of the day. He had someone bring him dinner outside of the firehouse. He couldn't remember who. The food tasted like ashes. A small part of his mind saw himself back in the hospital with Mari, but much more of him just hated his stupidity. He'd learned this lesson, supposedly. He'd already run into a wendigo and nearly died. Then why had he thought he'd be able to circumvent loss this time? Why had he been so assured of his own immortality?
The rush of leveling was intoxicating, but TJ realized he'd just been fully stupid. There wasn't any other way to put it, and Charlie had paid the price. Sarah was more than injured, and TJ couldn't be sure that she'd be able to pull out of this terrible Fear she'd been subjected to again. As he sat hating himself, Jeff's words from that morning filled his head, but TJ saw what they truly meant.
He's arrogant. How else to describe someone running into the apocalypse all by himself without any backup, with merely the thought that his new Skills would protect him.
He's a bad listener. That may have been all that Jeff had said, but TJ could have listened to his friends, to Stanton, but instead, he'd run out alone, and now Charlie's body was somewhere, cold and marred by the raven's putrescence.
The words were so simple, and TJ felt them rebounding in his head, reminding him of his failure. Did Charlie have a family? He and Zig were involved with each other, but that wasn't what TJ wanted and needed to know. What had Charlie left behind, what had he risked when he'd run out to save TJ? Whose heart would be broken because of TJ's pride?
Zig's was obvious. What of Charlie's parents, friends, pets, or anything else? The numbness that filled and cut at TJ's soul shifted to raw pain. Unfiltered agony. Unprocessed grief. Hunched over his styrofoam plate, TJ sobbed, his tears streaking down his face and dripping onto the plate.
"I'm sorry. I was…" TJ hiccuped, the emotions clogging his body. "I… I'm so…"
His attempted apology at nothing devolved into more, broken cries. Adding insult to injury, at that moment, TJ felt Divine Authority's passive activate, and his recovery doubled in speed. Snow fell and dusted him, the cold unable to even get him to shiver. The superhuman body TJ had acquired throughout the Integration now felt better and better as he sat under a tree and felt the snowflakes melt on his face.
"Such bullshit." TJ half laughed and half cried to himself. The darkness of the skies had, without him realizing it, slowly changed to a lighter color, the clouds lit by the moon and stars. There was a storm now, and he couldhave done so much more with its presence. He could have saved Charlie. Maybe he could have resisted the Chindi entirely. There was so much that it's presence could and would have done for him, but instead, the world wanted to laugh at him, to taunt him.
He let himself collapse into tears and sobbing laughter. He couldn't say how long he stayed there, broken and wet on the ground, but it was cold enough that the snow stuck. It had piled up to half an inch of powder, and finally, TJ stood up. His eyes were a little grainy, but that was the only physical thing that remained of his grief and remorse. He walked out of his little grove and went to find two people. A different one was the first to find him, though.
"TJ… I'm sorry." Molly said as she looked up at him. Her face was tear streaked and her eyes red. "Charlie was a good man. I'd, like, gotten to know him of these weeks, and…" Her face crumpled back into crying.
"I'm glad good people like you will remember him." TJ said, a lump in his throat, though he felt unworthy to mourn the man. "Where's Zig?"
"I… I don't think that's a good idea." Molly forced through her soft cries. "She blames you, for, you know, Charlie's death?"
"I know. She should. Now, do you know where I can find her?"
"She's in one of the few houses in the safe zone that didn't get levelled today." Molly pointed off in a vague direction. "But that's not a good idea!" She repeated.
"Maybe not, but it's the only idea I've got." TJ nodded his thanks and began his walk away. The grief-stricken teenager didn't know how to respond as he walked away. His steps crunched in gravel and snow alike, and TJ lost himself in deciding exactly how he was going to say what he needed to. Nothing specific came to mind, but he felt a driving need to say something. There wasn't a flash of inspiration that gave him magical words, and TJ found himself outside of the home.
"Go away." Zig sniffled before TJ could reach the door. She didn't say anything as he continued his path up the porch. He stood there in silence for a moment before his hoarse throat creaked out the words.
"You were right. There's no excuse. I wish I could fix it, and I can't. Charlie's dead and it's my fault."
He deliberately didn't apologize. It wouldn't do anything. Neither would the rest of these words, but he needed to acknowledge what he'd done wrong, how his actions had damaged another. The door whipped open and smashed into TJ's nose. Though the broken bone had healed after the past weeks and dozens of levels, it felt just like when he'd broken it at the time of Integration. TJ stumbled back, stars and tears filling his eyes as Zig stormed out of the house, her hair floating behind her in a supernatural way.
"Get the hell away from me." Zig hissed. "You almost killed me before, and now you get Charlie killed for no damn reason? I'd kill you if I thought it wouldn't fuck the rest of us over. Don't let me see you again unless I have to."
She ended her tirade with a wicked uppercut. He'd expected violence to this degree, and TJ didn't even try to dodge it, though he suspected he didn't have a snowball's chance in hell to get out of the way without Wind Manipulation or Divine Transformation. His teeth smashed together and TJ tasted blood. He fell in a heap on the ground, getting right back to his feet. That was just in time for Zig's reddened eyes, filled with tears, to meet his.
"Never again." She whispered as she slammed the door closed. TJ collected himself, checking his HP, which had only been reduced by 20 with the Acolyte's full-force blows. Worse than the physical pain, though, was of course the emotional whiplash, the familiarity he felt to Zig's suffering. Even so, he'd said what he'd intended, more or less, and TJ realized there was some part of him that welcomed the pain, the mistreatment. He was responsible for a death, and hedeserved to suffer.
"Never again. Maybe not wrong, but eh." Stanton trailed off as he fell in step beside TJ.
TJ didn't respond, instead focusing merely on continuing to walk. After walking in silence for several minutes, he asked, "Do you know where Sarah is?"
Stanton grunted in affirmation and TJ let him take the lead. They continued walking for a time, TJ wallowing in his misery and self-recrimination. He didn't mind the companionship, but he had no intention to find peace or solace in another. The Storm brought his spirits up without caring for his own thoughts, filling him with the feeling as if it were adrenaline and he were about to walk into a fight. He didn't expect the time with Sarah would end up as such, but he supposed it wasn't impossible.
"I'll tell you this and I'll do it for free." Stanton interrupted TJ's misery. "I think you're a bit dumb. You're confident, and probably rightly so. You're doing things that the rest of us just don't think of. Probably comes from your total focus on Junior, and I respect that. But you're so focused on the 'later' that you're forgetting the now. You were thinking about the later when you left like you did, not the now, and you nearly died for it. That said, the only thing you did was to be a bit stupid. I think your only crime was a bit of stupidity, and everyone deserves a fair amount of forgiveness for their stupidest moments.
"Charlie, Sarah, and I, and some others, knew you were up to some stupid shit. We let you go out alone, just thinking that you'd come back with some new story. That isn't what happened, and we all wanted to bail you out when we heard your struggles. We didn't think about how it was because of your stupid bonehead that you ended up in that situation. We just thought we wanted to help our friend live, so we went out and did that. Charlie paid the ultimate price for that, and I'm grieving him with everyone else.
"But all you did was make one decision for yourself. You didn't tell us to come bail you out, you didn't even let us know where you were going. We came to your support when and where we did because we care about you. You're a friend. Maybe the stupidest one I've got, but you're a friend. You've saved my life dozens of times, and Sarah isn't about to forget just what you've done for her neither.
"Zig's allowed to hate your for your stupid choice. Charlie was allowed to bail you out from it. Neither one of them were wrong. Got it?"
TJ nodded, still miserable but not quite as self-loathing as he did so.
"I think it's a good thing you're doing." Stanton said, and after looking the younger man in the eyes for a minute, Stanton nodded at TJ and stepped to the side while gesturing at the firehouse.
TJ immediately understood what Stanton was saying and walked in with his shoulders drawn tight against his neck. Even with the pep talk, TJ expected to be berated, hated, or something. Instead, he found Sarah, shivering in a bed, but with fierce determination in her eyes.
"You bastard. Couldn't even kill one of them?" She asked, partially joking and obviously partially genuinely upset.
"I killed some pukwudgies." TJ weakly defended by habit, but he immediately recoiled from joking back at her and changed the subject. "I wanted to check in on you."
"Those three together…" Sarah shuddered even more, her shivers obviously more than just the cold. "It's bad news. It was a miracle we never ran into them like that before."
"Have…" TJ swallowed down the lump in his throat. "Have you heard about Charlie?"
"Yeah." Sarah's face fell. "I think that raven is the worst of the three. We haven't paid as much attention to the others as we should have."
"I'm sorry." TJ mustered up the apology. "You wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for me."
"No?" Sarah responded. "The way I see it, the way it all shook out was almost as good as could have been expected. And don't look at me like that, TJ. Think about it for a second. They were laying a trap for someone. Maybe you. Probably you. But if someone else fell in that trap, do you think they'd live? Hell no. If you'd had just one person with you when it all happened, though I don't know what the trap was, I bet they would have died too. Instead, Charlie died and I'm more than pissed about that. However, if it'd been a party of 10 of our weaker people? They'd have died and the raven would still be around. We just need to figure out how to deal with that Chindi. Not my job, cause there's nothing I can do to it. I'll tell you that."
As soon as she spoke of the Chindi, Sarah's shivers grew even more powerful as she shook her head. "I'm sorry Charlie died too. Not your fault. Next time, go with someone, but I trust you. You're probably my best hope of surviving this. Now, I think I'll try to get some rest, because this Fear is still kicking my ass."
TJ stood, stunned and confused. Sarah, before rolling over, cracked a smile. "You know, people usually say 'sorry' when they should be saying 'thank you' instead."
"Thank you for risking your life for me, Sarah. You saved me."
"Good. See you in the morning, so we can kill the monsters."
TJ walked away before stopping and letting the snow continue to dust him. Then, redoubling his determination, he retired to a space where he could work on creating more equipment, because, dammit, Sarah was right. Tomorrow was the second to last chance for him to kill monsters before the end of the Tutorial.