The Meaning of Survival

It's decently fitting that I'm writing this blog post for the fourth anniversary of Chiara's passing, and it comes after changes to my Patreon page that very conveniently become more vague about it. It's guess it's also fitting that most out there reading this have... zero idea what they are about to read.

It's time for me to confess, and take the opportunity I have to share my stories before someone else takes the opportunity from me. It's time to come clean about the past few months, and the parts of my life that I declined to share outside of close circles, for years. And it's time to give my community a better understanding of why there's a member of my server whose continued presence directly contradicts the very fabric of my being in this public space.

This is where I explain why Chiara is still alive.

2014.

Chiara heard rustling in her back deck, and went outside to look. An orphaned girl named Rose, a few years older than the both of us, was out there picking at the bushes for food. This night started a bond that would last years, and another life that still haunts the both of us to this day.

Rose was a good friend of ours for a whole, assuming the "guardian" role over us as we all fucked around and found out. She had many skills that she had to learn on her own, since her parents died due to their way of living, one that transferred down to her and eventually into Chiara and I.

That way of living is what we call "fixing" (mainly because we took the terminology from Watch Dogs, we were kinda stupid and wanted a better way to explain it.) - taking illicit jobs that don't always have the best solutions, but pay pretty well.

2016.

Technically late, late 2015. Rose told Chiara and I that she wanted to enlist our help in a specific job - using our skills as developers/"hackers" to get her into places faster. This ended up sparking our involvement in that scene, where we'd take jobs that would only have "greater good" outcomes, and not result in any of us getting hurt. Small game with big rewards.

That one specific job that she invited us to work on, though... it was not small game. And looking back on it, we should have refused. But we were stupid, and very young... a bit rebellious too.

This job lasted until 2019. At least, that's what we thought.

2020.

Chiara dies. Or again, that's what we thought. I stopped talking to Rose because of the pain from Chiara's passing, but she still watched my back. Made sure I was safe even when I didn't know there was a threat. Kept tabs on me from afar, and inevitably stopped doing so when I was old enough...

2023.

Not completely sure on the timeline for Rose moving to Michigan, but I think it was in 2023. And coincidentally, that's also when Stella and I moved there too. And that's when Rose and a few others spilled the beans to be about how Chiara was still alive... and the hospital stay was a set up... and it's because of the 2016 job... and she was actively being held in captivity, being treated in ways that I never thought I would see in person.

The whole thing was... so fucking complicated. It stretched from us being idiots in California, to my tenure in New York, to Michigan, and parts of it have followed me here. The legal system failed us, so we had to take matters into our own hands and save her ourselves. Rose failed me on multiple occasions, so I was ready to go it alone.

2024.

I still have PTSD from seeing what had happened to Chiara, and from the night that we actually managed to get her out. Legally, I did no wrong, as I was protecting us. But I can't shake how it feels to take someone's life... even when giving them a few more seconds would have ended both of ours.

After that night, I made it quite clear to Rose that I was done. I wanted out of this life so that I could have a normal one with Stella, and none of the stress or pain of the one I tried so hard to bury and forget. That was her dying job, since she didn't live long after she completed it. She contracted something that ended up making things miserable for her, and asked Chiara to deliver the final blow to end it.

Her death, Chiara's situation, and that one night in Michigan all fucked me up royally. Even though I kept it to myself for so long, those all came together to be the major reasons why I was on the edge of ending my own life again.

2025.

Now Chiara and I are just dealing with the aftermath, and keeping our heads low. She came out to where we moved to see me and help with my PTSD, as well as give me one last job: protecting her ass since it's very likely that those people were not the only ones.

She ended up going back to Michigan to do some digging on Rose, and I've (luckily) not had a gun pointed to my head in a while. Well, other than this one.

Been needing to get it off of my chest, since again I don't want someone else to do it for me. I like saying I'm an open book, and this is something that's written in it. And my method of therapy is talking about it - not to one person, but to many. That's why I have this blog, where I can rant and discuss things I know with everyone else. It just... took a while to even vaguely describe any of this because of how sensitive it all was.

Holding it all together
- Eva