drifting

Dear diary,

Roscoe locked me out of the liquor cabinet today. Now I’m forced to deal with my demons with full sobriety. I’m forced to actually think about everything that’s happened and what I am and what that means and I don’t know if I can take it.

Ever since the embrace, I’ve wondered what could have been. If I had seen the signs and packed my sister up and fled to a caern, would things be different? Would she have been happy as just a kin? I doubt it, she’s the restless kind, always eager to make a difference to someone. But damn it, I would have tried to give her a greater purpose. Something she could excel at, something that would give her everything she ever wanted. I don’t think she would have made a good Garou, no… she would have made an amazing Camazotz, if the idiots of the Nation hadn’t killed them. If I knew any Shadow Lords, I would make it a point to make sure they knew what they did.

I would have gone to Hell and back to bring Bat back to Gaia to see it happen. To see her take to the sky with her own wings.

Consciously, I know she’s happy the way she is… “””happy”””, I guess is a more accurate term. She was always afraid of dying, but she only barely tolerates that society. Even the Anarchs who preach change are exactly the same as the rest. I know the individual can be a good person. I’ve surrounded myself with those, but… so many aren’t. So many just use it as an excuse to be cruel and callous.

I hate to say such selfish things, but I also wonder what that would have meant for me. I don’t know how much of the beginning it would have changed. We still never knew our father and I still grew up from a pup resenting him, whoever he is, for not being there. I still got the shittiest rite of passage out of any of the pups. I still had my first change lying helpless in a hospital bed.

But if she had never been embraced… I would have never been run from a city. I wouldn’t have reason to fear the name Silent Strider. I might be a hero, fighting to bring Bat, and a whole breed, back. I guess I would have never met Jackdaw, and she would have never met Roscoe, and neither of us would trade them for the world, but… maybe the butterfly effect is in play. Maybe Jackdaw is a kin in this hypothetical because the same events that led me to see what was going to happen to my sister led him to avoid embrace too. Maybe Roscoe is a lupus because something in the past was changed and led to his family line being wolf kin. I think about it more often than is healthy, but there are a lot of things that aren’t healthy about me.

If that had happened, maybe I would have a purpose.

I was taken in by the spirit of the Divine Fire. I remember waking up in the Umbra after sleepwalking, I remember the dream, I remember everything about that night. I remember seeing Zerah the next day and feeling nothing of the effects of the Disquiet that hang around his kind. But why would she take me? What is my purpose? What spirit would want to play totem to a ghoul like me? Aren’t I supposed to be tainted?

Why wasn’t I cast out of my tribe and forced to live as Ronin? Why did Cockroach hold onto me when I was cast away from that sept?

Do I even have a purpose?

Am I just lucky?

Some kind of luck I’ve got. Here I am, wandering aimlessly through a broken world, wondering where the hell the supposed love of Gaia is. I know that’s a line of thinking that leads straight to the Spiral, but fuck the Wyrm. I might be thinking that maybe She doesn’t care a damn thing for me, but I don’t want the world to end. If not for my sake, then for the sake of everyone I love.

What does She even want me to do? I don’t even have a proper pack, I just hang out with a bunch of other Garou I don’t even really trust. Except Aidan. I know Aidan’s got my back. The rest of them really haven’t given me any indication that they won’t chase me out the second a Strider rolls into town. I was never inducted into any packs, I’m just left here drifting on the wind.

Drifting without a purpose.

I wonder if Midnight will pick the liquor cabinet lock for me if I pay her enough. I can’t do this.