Work Text:
[ CLICK ]
[ The tape recorder rattles slightly. A woman breathes out. ]
ARCHIVIST
Whenever you’re ready.
JAIDEN
…Right.
[ A shuddering breath. ]
Sorry, give me a moment.
[ A few beats where there is nothing but the sound of steady breathing and the tape recorder. ]
Okay. Okay, you can start it.
ARCHIVIST
Alright.
Statement of Jaiden N.E. Mason, regarding a cabin in a field of red roses. Statement recorded direct from subject, 1st August, 2023.
Statement begins.
JAIDEN
I just… talk into this, right?
ARCHIVIST
Yes. Just start from the beginning.
JAIDEN (STATEMENT)
[ A deep breath. ]
Do you know what it’s like to outlive your child?
Everyone around you just loves to give you their condolences - it’s the only thing that ever leaves their mouth the moment they learn about the tragedy. And they’ll call it a tragedy, not always to your face, but behind your back.
And it sucks. It just… sucks.
I don’t tell people he’s… he’s dead anymore. Anyone close enough to me already knows, and they’ve said their piece. Anyone else who asks… I just… lie. Sometimes I imply a messy divorce. Sometimes it’s a close friend’s child. It’s all lies anyway, anything to keep them from giving me their empty condolences.
I raised Bobby with a close friend of mine, Roier. It wasn’t planned or anything, but he was our son and we were his parents and Roier and I were best friends. We lived together, split the chores and took care of our son the best we could. It wasn’t perfect and we weren’t perfect because no parent ever is, but we did our best.
We all do- did art. I do animations, Roier does photography, and, often, all three of us would sit down together to paint. Bobby loved painting. We were each other’s favourite muse. At one point, Bobby’s room was covered head to toe in photographs and paintings of us.
Roier liked taking us out to take photos. He always said they were better in natural lighting.
One day, Roier came home, absolutely bursting with excitement. He said he’d found the perfect place for a picnic and his next photoshoot.
We went the next day.
And Roier was right; it was beautiful. The fields were covered in red rose bushes, and we were careful to keep a distance away when setting up our picnic. Roier took a couple of candids of me and Bobby playing around, then took a couple of posed pictures under a tree. I offered to swap around so Roier would have some pictures of himself with Bobby, then Bobby wanted to take pictures of me and Roier together and-
Well. We had fun that day. I remember thinking that it was the best day of my life.
And then the unimaginable happened.
After Bobby… Well. After Bobby died, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
It was an empty sort of grief, the kind that left me grasping for straws in the air - for something, anything to hold on to. It felt like the world was moving on too quickly for me.
There was one other person who was supposed to be in the same situation as me but Roier seemed to be doing… fine. As fine as anyone can be after losing a child. He has other people, other friends that care about him and I couldn’t impose. So I moved out.
I think it boiled down to this: He wanted to move on. I couldn’t.
I only realised after I moved into my new apartment that I hadn’t lived alone for years, not since college. Even then, it didn’t take long for me to fall back into old habits.
It was so easy to just… stop. To stop going out unless absolutely necessary, to stop talking to people altogether, to stop… everything. At one point, even to stop leaving my bed. I found myself lying in bed and, the next thing I knew, a week had gone past. I still couldn’t bring myself to go out, though.
Then, one day, I woke up in a field of red roses.
It wasn’t a dream. It can’t have been a dream. I thought it was at first, so I pinched myself and tried to wake myself up. It didn’t work.
I know I didn’t leave my room. That’s why I know it should be impossible for any of that to have happened.
The field reached out for miles and miles and I couldn’t find the end. I tried. I tried walking in a straight line until I found the end but no matter how far I walked, or how much I pushed through the thorny rose bushes, I never seemed to get anywhere.
It was just… red roses, everywhere, forever.
I was walking for days in that straight line. It had to be days.
Eventually, when I squinted, I could just barely make out the outline of a mountain. It was the only landmark I had, so I changed courses and started heading there instead. A part of me was convinced that I wouldn’t be able to reach there, that it was futile to even try, but I managed to get closer to the mountain. It wasn’t an impossible task, not like leaving the rose field.
And the closer I got, I managed to see something else too.
There was a small cabin at the base of the mountain, smoke wafting out through the chimney. It seemed cozy. Comforting. I didn’t feel up to talking to whoever lived there, but I couldn’t keep walking. I’d been pushing on for so long that my legs were shaky and my mouth was parched. So I got to the cabin and knocked.
I think I knew it, somewhere deep down, that no one would answer the door, ever. And no one did. I sat on the porch to rest my legs for a bit, then knocked a couple more times. No one ever answered.
I tried the door and it slipped open.
And on the inside of the cabin, it was filled with everything Bobby.
Pictures of our little family and paintings that we all made of each other - they decorated the place from wall to wall, broken up only by the occasional red rose. Some of his toys were on a shelf and the closet was full of his clothes. The bed was his bed, made to the same level and style of haphazard that he would have made his bed with. The fridge was stocked full of his favourite food.
It was familiar.
It was home.
It was the memory of the happiest day of my life, stretched into infinity.
I didn’t want to leave, so I… didn’t leave.
It took me months to be comfortable with even stepping out of the cabin and, even then, it took even longer for me to just check out the top of the mountain. I only went up because I swore I saw something up there, and I was right. It was Bobby’s old treehouse, set in a near identical jacaranda tree and everything.
Look, in that field of red roses, I had everything I ever wanted. Most of the time, I didn’t even remember that Bobby had… …Passed. It was a perfect, infinite paradise and I was alone but I was happy to be alone because being alone meant I had everything I wanted anyway. Roier had moved on with his life and good for him! But moving on wasn’t an option for me because I had nothing if not for Bobby.
There are three seats at the top of the treehouse, one for each of us. When I first went up, there was a potted cyan rose in the middle seat. In Bobby’s seat.
I left it up there at first, but I kept going back up to take care of it, to make sure it was alive. I don’t know why it took me so long to decide it would be easier to bring the rose down to the cabin with me, but eventually, I did.
I picked up the pot and cradled it carefully. And then I headed down the mountain.
By then, I had to have walked that path hundreds of times. I’d been going up to the mountain for months - I knew that path like the back of my hand but somehow-
Somehow, I slipped.
All it took was a slip. One split second of momentary weightlessness before I slammed the back of my head against something hard and everything went black.
And then I woke up in the hospital.
Through all of that, I hadn’t changed Roier from being my emergency contact or anything, so he was there when I woke up. He said I had passed out from dehydration in the middle of the supermarket, knocked my head on a shelf and became properly unconscious.
He asked me what happened, so I told him about the field.
He was silent for a while, then he told me that he didn’t know too much, but he figured the Ordo might help.
So I came here.
[ A pause, before it’s clear that Jaiden has nothing more to add. ]
ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.
How are you feeling?
JAIDEN
I want to go back home.
[ A very silent pause. It’s clear she does not mean her apartment. ]
…Are we done here?
ARCHIVIST
If you have nothing else, then give me one moment-
[ CLICK ]
[ CLICK ]
CELLBIT
-d on. Was that Jaiden?
ARCHIVIST
…Yes. You know her?
CELLBIT
Yeah, she is Roier’s partner. I haven’t seen her in months, but Roier told me she was coming in to make a statement. [ Thoughtfully ] I didn’t expect her to actually show up.
ARCHIVIST
Why not?
CELLBIT
Well, you see-
[ CLICK ]
[ CLICK ]
ARCHIVIST
We tried doing some follow-ups on Jaiden’s statement, but there was not much to be found. She was found to have been living together with Roier for a good eight years, but moved out ten months ago following the death of Bobby - who she and Roier had joint guardianship of.
We reached out to Roier, who corroborated as much of Jaiden’s statement as he could and admitted to encouraging her to give us a statement, even breaking her out of the hospital and driving her all the way to the Ordo.
I talked to Cellbit. He said that they lost contact with Jaiden almost immediately after she moved out. He said that calls were left unanswered and that she never read or returned any messages.
Her new neighbours do not seem to recognise her or realise that she exists, but they do know that her apartment has been rented out. There are no records that we can find of her living in a house by a mountain in a field of red roses. There are no records that we can find of a house by a mountain in a field of red roses.
I would have thought it was all just a result of trauma or something, if it weren’t for the medical records. When she was picked up from the supermarket, there was a red rose tucked behind her ear. Baghera managed to get her x-ray scans and… they showed vines in place of her veins.
I know Roier referred her to us because he thought we could help, but…
I don’t really know what to make of any of this.
Recording ends.
[ CLICK ]