#send me more asks like this tho y'all i like being unnecessarily poetic

[sangfearmoved]

how does soda respond to the death of a stranger vs the death of a loved one?

if she’s not the one that killed the stranger, she doesn’t care. she doesn’t even put up much of an act, not really — she’s busy, everyone knows that, she’s got better things to do than mourn some random coworker or a dude who showed up to her class a couple times or the eccentric old gal who donated to shellendorf and gawked at the scrolls soda brought in   ( past the passing validation those people gave her ).   she’ll give a perfunctory “oh, that’s so sad” then make an excuse and move on with her day.

no one questions it, either. “she’s agent three, you know,” they’ll mutter; “she’s seen a lot of death, she must’ve just gotten numbed.” or “pardon them,” maybe, “they have a hard time dealing with grief. our deepest sympathies.”

even the death of a loved one lacks a hard-and-fast sense of grief for her: she wanted to see her brother dead for a good while, and he still doesn’t mean much to her. her definition of “family” is skin-deep at best and as far as she knows, all her relatives are dead or gone. she’ll refuse to admit people mean a lot to her long after she realizes she couldn’t live without them, and she doesn’t believe in the permanence of anything, so she’s more than inclined to bottle up the feelings and throw them out to sea.

soda sturmaz doesn’t understand death. for as much as she’s seen, caused, feared, the concept of someone being gone forever just does not compute. she never saw her dad die, her brother was never actually gone. her mom’s just missing. the octarians weren’t that hurt; the respawn pads were right there, after all.

she’d be in denial as long as she lives — the feelings would numb, fade, be forgotten. whoever it was just was never there all along. they never meant that much to her. she didn’t open up just to get hurt, nothing was taken from her, she never made a fool of herself over something like love. she hadn’t been naive; she hadn’t hoped that maybe, just this once, something would’ve stayed put.

one half of soda’s a hopeless romantic — she puts her whole heart and soul into whatever she does, puts a whole lot of hope into people, and rushes headlong into emotion. the other half’s pragmatic, critical, the part that knows hurt’s coming and tells her run for cover, that she knows that nothing good ever stays and a killer — a disappointment — like her doesn’t even deserve it. so she’s stuck between the lines — between wanting to feel sad but believing emotion is a barrier to efficiency, and so she doesn’t choose, she never picks a side, never ends up disappointed, and never believes anything’s for real.