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Tricia is quick to accept it.
Death, she means. She’s always been among the first to start moving on with her life whenever things like that happen.
She thinks it’s because some unexpectedly rational part of her understands that it’s too late to regret. Whoever it is has already died. It’s over. You can’t go back. There’s no point in wasted tears. Or maybe it's because she's not human, just a werewolf long lost from her pack, and there's just something inherently messed up about how she sees the world because of it.
Yeah, that's probably it. She's a whole lot of things but rational and level-headed aren't any of them.
But anyway, the point is she doesn’t cry. Not usually.
So, when Tricia gets the phone call late one night, her dad speaking in heartbroken tones, hushed no doubt so as to not wake Jordan, telling her that her mom had died, had been murdered, all she can bring herself to say is a simple “okay”. She doesn’t know what else to say. She’s not sure if there’s anything she could.
As for emotions? Well, she feels... something. She’s not sure what it is though. Some kind of numbness, perhaps. A sort of resigned ache. Too dull to serve as a distraction.
Don't get her wrong, Tricia loves (loved?) her mom plenty— in fact she was one of the few people she can honestly claim to truly respect— but still, she can't do something she doesn't understand. Can't act the part of a grieving daughter when she's never really experienced it before. Not like this. Especially not when she's pretty sure the full weight of the loss hasn't even hit her yet.
In time (sooner or later cannot be told), cracks will start to form and those cracks will collapse into valleys and sinkholes of grief and she will feel her mom's absence more keenly than ever, as though someone has gone and cut off one of her limbs, and when that times comes, she'll have to try and stand up and put herself back together. But that time isn't now. Right now, the wound is so new she hasn't even started to bleed yet.
Right now, her mom's absence just feels wrong. In that confusing, more complicated than it should be way she’s never quite had the words to explain. Just like every other feeling she's felt, physical and emotional.
She blurts out a response to her dad's ill news without stopping to think, without stopping to second-guess what she's saying: “Th-That’s awful, but at least you're alive. If you'd both died, poor Jordan would have been stuck with me.” In her stupid, mixed-up state she tries to keep her tone light, teasing even, when she says that last sentence. Though whether it's supposed to be for her dad's sake or her own, she doesn't know. Either way, the words sound stiff and lifeless even to her, the letters tasting like a whole lot of nothing on her tongue.
The other end of the line is silent when she says this. The air feels palpable with hurt even from a hundred miles away.
She stops herself before she can say anything else wrong. Contemplates just running away from this conversation entirely and returning to whatever it was that she was doing. Sewing, she thinks. She's been wanting to make something for Volg for a little while now and it's only recently she's had any inspiration.
For someone who smiles so often and so brightly, she can be far too cold.
After he hangs up, she’s struck by the urge to go and see Volg. To lean on him, to ask how do you react, what are you supposed to do when one moment someone you love is there and then the next they’re not? Because, as terribly selfish as it sounds, even to her, Volg would know what to do. Volg knows what to do when your mother is suddenly dead and you’re never going to see her again outside of photographs, outside of your own and others’ memories.
Volg knows the heart-wrenching agony of leaving and being left.
They have that in common, at least. It's been a long while since her pack left her behind because she couldn't act properly but she still remembers. The pain has dulled but it's not gone. She's not sure if she'll ever forget.
In the end, she decides not to call him. Figures she'd be better off waiting for him to get home rather than worry him whilst he's away and unable to do anything about it. Instead, she busies herself doing this and that, half-trapped between avoiding thinking about the phone call and the dreadful news it brought and obsessively thinking over every little detail she can manage to remember and rehearsing what she'll tell him when he comes home.
During this period, she finds herself wondering, perhaps selfishly, perhaps self-centredly, whether she could have helped if she had tried. She had seen the news reports, she'd already planned to ask her family to visit way before everything went to hell. Maybe if she had went ahead with that plan rather than letting herself get distracted, all three of them would have been alive and safe.
It isn't until almost two hours later that she thinks of Jordan, rendered motherless by circumstances she had no power over. A small child stuck in the cataclysmic, far too big plans of much larger adults. Plans that had ended tragically, fatally. A robbery of a precious person without so much as a why.
The realisation causes a stab of guilt to shoot through her. How didn't it occur to her? Why didn't it? Jordan's her sister, her only little sibling in the whole wide world. What the hell kind of older sister is Tricia to allow herself to let her pain slip her mind?
Forgetting is just like her though, isn't it? She always gets distracted. Always sets one task down to deal with another only to leave the original lying in the metaphorical dust, entirely forgotten. Always starts making a list of something or other only to realise later that she's missed this or that detail.
She resolves to call back in the morning. To find out how she's coping with, well... everything. To ask her and their dad how they'd feel about her coming over to visit soon.
Jordan would like that, wouldn't she? She hopes she would.
As for the trip itself, it shouldn't be much of a problem, if at all. Not now since everything has cooled down and people are allowed back in the area again. She's pretty sure she just has to sort something out with Volg. Whether he's staying home or coming with her.
She's not sure if the latter is likely though. He's been busy lately, like mixing up words kind of busy-tired because he's so focused on what he's doing everything else is a little blurry and out of view, so there's not much of a chance of him being free to run off halfway across the country just to visit his roommate (and now, as of recently, girlfriend)'s family for a couple weeks. Especially since he'll probably want to be free to take part in matches when they come.
She thinks he'd enjoy it though. She talks about her family a lot and their dad has even on a couple of occasions let Jordan, after she'd asked politely, to chatter to him over the phone for a little while whenever he calls her. Tricia knows he gets on with them both and, to be honest, maybe meeting someone new might be a good distraction for them.
(Besides, like she pointed out to herself earlier, he can empathise with their grief. He gets it.)
Either way though, those sorts of thoughts can wait until the morning. Until Volg gets back at the absolute earliest.