The afterlife wasn’t really all that everyone made it out to be. There was no fire, no bright light. Only remembrance of what happened before and a knowledge that there was something left for her to do. Maybe that’s not how it went for everyone. The voices told her it wasn’t, that hers was a special case, but not something rare. Sometimes, with these things, wires get crossed and timelines don’t match up. When that happens, people die, and stay in this state of being death and life. Intangible, invisible. Before this, though, Root - the name she’d chosen not only a year ago - had gotten shot, right through the stomach when she’d been trying to avenge Hanna’s death. It was stupid, she realized now, floating through this space of in between. She could have hired someone, hung back and watched as he was beaten to death by drug dealers and left him to rot. But no, Root had wanted to see it happen, had wanted to see the life leave his eyes, but before she’d even had a chance to pull her own trigger, he’d wrenched it out of her hands and took the shot with no hesitation. It was a small wonder that he didn’t take her as well, but as a seventeen year old, Root figured she was too old for his tastes.
Even now, even dead, the thought left a vile taste in her mouth and she tried to continue to remember his face, his name. Maybe she’d haunt him for what he’d done. That thought only brought laughter from the voices who didn’t want to explain what was going on, but rather implanted the knowledge in her and she’d known what her fate was supposed to be just like she was born knowing. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself bleed out, left on a dirt road and the dust swirling into the sticky red liquid that just didn’t seem to stop. And then the image was swirling away from her and warping into the sight of a young girl, tan skin and dark brown hair sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom. Those voices were gone, but Root knew who it was - the person she was supposed to meet down the line. Brief flashes of knowledge scalded her brain. A hot iron, deafness in one ear, several gunshot wounds that she survived, a knife pressed to her throat, needle after needle in her arms, and then a kiss. It racked a choking sob through her, at the pain of it all at once, flooding through her of what should have been. What was supposed to be. But instead, she’d been dropped into this bedroom of a younger girl. She was going to age with her, in this odd both dead and alive state, she knew that much.
A full length mirror was directly across the room from where she was standing? floating? but there was no reflection of her in it. Moving around, she tried to get a glimpse of herself but found her efforts falling flat. Trying to speak, she found that no sound came out, but she could hear someone moving around in another room in the house. Frustrated with not being able to communicate with this girl, she slams her hand against the wall, surprised when it actually connects and a shelf hanging up just above her drops its contents onto the floor, not without colliding with her head first. Whatever it was bounced off of her head first, then rolling over to where the girl was sitting. It didn’t hurt, just startled her into rubbing her head and let out a brief hiss of surprise. Except that was able to be heard, unlike the other noises she’d tried to make. Confused, Root turned and tried to touch the wall, and grumbled when her hand just passed straight on through.
A fourteen year-old Sameen Shaw wasn’t much different from when she was thirteen, nine, or even seven years old. A math textbook was open in her lap, but she wasn’t paying much attention. Not when her knuckles were bruised from getting into yet another fight with a prick who brought up her father. She didn’t know why it was that everything else in the world seemed to slip past her in a haze, but when her father was brought up, everything snapped into clear focus. One of her many child psychologists would probably speculate that it had something to do with the trauma of being with him when he died, but Sameen wasn’t sure. Not that it mattered much anyways. Just that it had happened and she had yet another in-school suspension to serve because some doucheface couldn’t handle the fact that a little brown girl had managed to knock him flat on his ass.
Sam glanced back down at her math textbook and grimaced. Geometry. Algebra and basic arithmetic was something she thrived at, but when she had started geometry, somehow her brain didn’t want to wrap around the concepts. Another way she was broken. Sameen wasn’t very used to not understanding things and she felt the familiar warmth of anger settle in the pit of her stomach. Instead of shoving it away, she attacked her homework again with a ferocity, pencil scratching across the paper as she tried to push away the thoughts of her father and the events that had happened at school. Then suddenly, there was a loud bang as a couple books and a picture frame came tumbling off of one of her shelves, followed by a sharp hiss.
Narrowing her eyes, Sameen stood and walked over to where her things had fallen. A couple of old books that had somehow managed to make the multiple moves with her. She grabbed them up off the floor and shoved them back onto the shelf before looking down at one of the only pictures she owned. It was one of her and her father. She couldn’t have been older than four years old in it, and she stared down at the photograph for a long moment, her face carefully drawn blank. Stooping down, she picked it up and set it back on the shelf, much more gently than she had handled the books. Sameen chalked the chill that ran up her spine as her stunted emotions trying to surface, but rather than let it in, she grabbed a hoodie from off the back of her desk chair and shrugged it on, throwing up the hood like it might protect her from memories she didn’t want.