Talk about a conversation when what you said was not what you were thinking.

Somewhere along the way, it all went wrong. Not anything that hadn't been said or done before, Fred knew. After all, everyone messed up, or more than a little mauled by life. Sometimes it didn't leave a mark, but more than often it did. Pylea had taught her that. But unlike Pylea, this wasn't a single, sudden even where the right shifted into wrong in a blink of an eye. This was -- septic. A slow sort of poisoning that was eating away at them all, working up along the lines of their limbs. Attacking the people that made this place, this wonderful, amazing place she'd first fallen in love with. That'd made her want to be a hundred thousand different things all at once.

But at slow and messy as the poisoning was? So unlike Pylea? Fred could still trace it back to a single, lingering event.

Wesley leaving.

You telling him not to come back.

He was back now, she supposed. But it was only shadows, it sometimes seemed. Ghosty shadows. Grey shadows. That dangerous blend of black and white that made it so hard to tell up from down, much less right from wrong. The whole lot of them were in a fog so thick, sometimes she didn't think it even matter the sun went missing for as long as it did. It wasn't as if they could see otherwise.

Even her words were wrong.

Fred wasn't so far gone as to not hear her own ramblings, but even they were shorter now. Anf it seemed to her that for all that they used to run a lot longer back -- when? The truths in them used to hit a lot harder too. She was just as grey as they rest of them now. She felt it and she talked like it, no matter how hard she tried.

She looked down at the gun in her hand. It wasn't meant to killing of course, just sleeping. The her from five years ago wondered briefly at the point of it all. The her of bodies and gullies and doing whatever it took to survive was not impressed with this softer, greyer version of herself.

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