Unedited thing about Monet after the Game under the cut.
But after that first week, the questions started coming. After her father took her to the hospital and the nurses asked about her scars, her healing frostbite, the bite mark on her leg, the scratches on her head. What had happened to her, they asked. Where did you get these?
She couldn't answer, of course. She said she didn't remember. They sent her to a councillor. They said that her scars were healing, but they whispered about abuse and abandonment. Didnt she run away with a boy? They whispered. He ought to be locked up. He ought to answer for this.
That was why small towns were bad. Because one of the first questions the counsellor asked was 'where is Torez?'
She got asked that a lot. By her father. By torez's mother. By the police. She had no answer for any of them. Even when she tried to say that he was dead, her throat closed up. She couldn't do it. She couldn't say it out loud. That would make it all too real.
There were so many questions. Some she could answer. Some she couldn't.
"Where were you, Mona?"
It was weird hearing that name. It wasn't her anymore. She hated it. She hated it because she didn't know who Mona was anymore.
"I went to America." Not a lie.
"Why did you go to America?"
"Wanted to." Not really a lie. She remembered when she had been excited to play the game, and stopped time to cry. Crying in real time was too exhausting. It made everyone look concerned. Better to cry in peace.
"And you went with Malcolm?"
Malcolm Torez. Her shadow. Her hero. Her own personal skeleton.
All that got was a nod.
"Where did he take you?"
"He didnt take me anywhere. It was my idea."
The counsellor frowned, and wrote something into her notebook. Monet hated when she did that. It meant she didn't believe her story.
"Did Malcolm ever hurt you?"
"He'd never hurt me."
More writing.
"I want you to see me once a week, Mona. At least for now."
Stockholm syndrome was a phrase she heard a lot. One police officer had the smart idea of saying it to her face. She had to be restrained. She wanted to freeze time and punch him til he bled, but she couldn't focus enough to do it. She screamed at him even after he had left, even after she had been brought home. She screamed until her voice gave out. She screamed about everything and anything she could, even with no voice, as she tore up everything she could.
Her father took one look at her room, at the flurry of shredded paper and broken things, and called the station. You've got all you can, he said. It's time to leave my daughter alone.
She hadn't smiled in a long time, but she smiled at that.
She never gave an interview, even though she's pretty sure every paper in the country asked for one. Was I the only one to go home, She wondered? There were no other news stories about missing kids suddenly reappearing after a year, although maybe she just looked for such stories in the wrong places. She didn't even know where most of the survivors had come from.
Not long after she had started to refuse to come out of her room, her grandparents came over. While her grandmother talked to her son in hushed tones that Monet could still catch, her grandfather came to speak with her.
"May I come in," he asked. She said yes, most out of surprise than anything. He rarely talked to her. He rarely talked to anyone, really.
He sat in the rocking chair in the corner of her room; the one that had belonged to her mother. He eyed her for a long time, and she stared back at him, unsure why he had come.
"They say you look like some kind of victim."
She blinked, then scowled down at her blankets. "...and what do you think?"
"I disagree." And this surprised her, made her look up again, wide eyed.
"You... You do?"
"I have seen many victims in my life, Mona." He was a retired cop, she had forgotten that. "You have never looked like one."
"Then what do I look like?" She meant it to be sharp, but it came out more like desperate.
"You look like a veteran," he said, very softly. There was no pity in his voice, only fact. "You look like my friends' older brothers, or my father, when they came back from the war."
She couldn't find words. She wanted to freeze this moment and run away. She wanted to replay it again and again.
Her grandfather nodded once. "That's what I thought."
After that, her grandfather came over three times a week. He didn't expect her to talk much, and most of the time she didn't. But she said enough that, while her grandfather didn't know why or who they had fought, he knew the results.
She had been home three months when he asked her "so, when are you going back?"
She dropped the scarf she was knitting. Knitting was an old skill she'd slowly forced herself to relearn. It was slow, and she messed up a lot, but she liked it.
"Ex...cuse me?"
"It seems to me," her grandfather said, "that you have left much unfinished." He stood up, stretching, and reached for his cane. "I can deal with the police, if they ask where you've gone again, although I don't think they will. But you must be the one to talk to your father."
She froze time. She stared at her knitting. She picked apart her last stitch. She wanted to tell her grandfather to never come back again. Then she realized the scarf she was knitting was grey and green. Like her and Cody. Like things left undone.
Time returned. She told her father. They had their first screaming match ever. Afterwards, she cried into her unfinished scarf, while grandfather talked to him.
He was angry. He was scared. She understood that, better than he knew, perhaps. But he still came to see her off at the airport. She had a phone with a new international plan. She had a promise, to call once a day. She had a hostel booked, even, although she didn't know if she would use it, yet.
She finished her scarf on the flight. She didn't wear it, though. It wasn't for her, after all.
