red room
1/30/23 - im getting a bit sleepy so i can't write good descriptions anymore lol. but here was the image prompt-- this was actually one i submitted lol!
julian is caught in endless cycle again, it isnt a time loop this time, more at 12
It has been months since the corporation fell, yet even after all this time, Julian still found himself gravitating back to its corpse, trying to make heads or tails of the situation.
It was a rainy Friday night, and the lights in the house were all dimmed. Eva had left earlier to enjoy one of his music ensembles at the pricey theater in the art district, leaving Julian behind to inevitably fester in the light of an 8 o’clock news report.
“We are still on the search for any missing persons previously recorded to have been employed by the fallen Wing,” spoke the news reporter on the tiny screen, “however as the situation stands right now, there seems to be little to no way to access the ruins below the surface debris…”
The glow of his laptop screen and the flashing red lights from the TV were the main source of light illuminating his makeshift work space. In the course of an hour he had already overtaken the bedroom in his mess. Pinned photographs, news cut-outs, and other scraps of amassed clues pertaining to the fallen Wing lined the walls, and above his desk he had crafted a tiny clothesline of string and board, hanging up little photographs for proper inspection. He sat almost perched on the desk chair, frantically typing away at a document he had agonized over for almost the entire day straight now. With a shaky hand he plucked one of the photos from its place on the clothesline to take a closer look.
On its glossy surface was the visage of a young man in his early twenties with short, neat light hair and a warm smile. It was like facing a ghost. It was the face of his former coworker, Luis, who had been left behind to die beneath the facility’s collapsing form. He let out a sigh. He was supposed to be the Captain of the team, keeping his friends safe. If he had been so worthy of such a title, how could he have let it get this bad, as to where their faces had to be plastered on evening television for all to see? How could it have gotten so bad that he was returning to his old habits and losing sleep over something he could never go back to fix?
But he had to try. He was powerless in every aspect except in that of the written word. He was a journalist now. Not a very good one, in his own regard, but he had at least been accepted in a few local publications and papers—surely, if he could do anything, he could write their memory. He could keep them alive and breathing through the written word, a memoir. And with luck, perhaps he could find an answer to the ongoing mystery of the dead Wing and its missing employees, and provide the families (and himself) the closure they needed.
But for now, he typed away alone in his room, weighed down with the guilt of his past sins even months after they had been buried in rubble. How would their family ever forgive him if they found out he was directly responsible for him being lost in the debris? How could he ever forgive himself?
To him, perhaps the Corporation was to blame, but the Corporation had died, and left him alive to blame. He couldn’t blame a corpse for the death of another. So he’d blame himself.