Title: Shock
Author: Am-Chau Yarkona
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: These characters are not mine.
Summary: Reply to mash100th challenge "Write what a character was doing
before the war." Slightly strange interpretation, possibly Sidney POV,
possibly not.
Shock. That’s the first thing I felt, at the end of Before, though I knew it was coming. Why not fear? Maybe even anger?
Those came later. Later I was afraid, and I was angry: who wouldn’t be? But even then, the thing I felt first and foremost was shock. The shock of leaving, the shock of reality, the shock every time someone coped anyway.
Before, I had ignored the possibility, because it wouldn’t happen to me.
Eventually, it did, and Before was over. War—courtesy of that brown envelope—plunged me into the Now, and it was a shock.