Welfare and Warfare

Chapter 25

"Have you tried..." Kai hesitated. "Talking about it instead?"

"What, therapy?" Sumit scoffed.

Kai shrugged. "There might be someone down here who is a licensed professional. Or maybe a yoga instructor, a masseuse," he joked, seeing a slight smile finally emerge on Sumit's lips and wanting to see more, so he continued, "knitting? Fishing?"

Sumit smiled for a moment but then soon returned back to his serious and sombre state from earlier.

"Have you joined any of those mediation sessions?" asked Kai. "The ones they hold after blood moons?"

"It's mandatory for me after the whole thing with the underground fight club. I need to show up for a few more weeks to prove that I'm safe and calm otherwise I'll be kicked out of the Warren."

"Oh." Kai paused. "Has it helped at all?"

"What? Sitting in silence amongst strangers and trapped with my own thoughts for half an hour? Definitely not!" Sumit sighed and looked up at the sky. "I just sometimes wish we could go back to before when there was just a small group of us. When everything felt simpler. Selfish thought, isn't it? Since all this wouldn't have existed." He motioned to the city, where so many other prisoners' lives had changed for the better by living here.

"No, I don't think its selfish," said Kai, thinking about the years before The Warren, though he thought back much further than Sumit, to when they had first built the little village in the desert, when the whole group was there; when Klei and Wendy were with them. Though it wasn't always an easy life, since they were slowly losing food every drop-off, eventually going to starve due to their refusal to fight each other, it was... less complicated and perhaps the best days of Kai's imprisonment in the Abyss. Kai didn't have to worry about the festering guilt he would have whenever he looked over the city walls, to learn to be patient in order to help everyone. And back then he could see all of his friends every day. He could see Dex...

"Do you miss him?" asked Sumit.

Kai swallowed, knowing who Sumit was referring to. "Dex is in a better place now. He'll be back with his family and friends, get to return to his life."

Sumit nodded, and then there was a moment of silence before he continued, "I don't know if I would want to return to my old life before the Abyss. I suppose I won't have a choice to have that since I lost my memories, but Rin sort of hinted that it wasn't great, best to remain blissfully ignorant." He paused. "I'd want a fresh start when I'm free. Live somewhere where no one knows me," he said this so quietly as if it was painful to say.

And it was painful to hear, that Sumit had been suffering this much after losing his memories, his identity and idea of self, breaking up with Oscar, that he would rather just have a reset of his life rather than endure it or fix it. Kai had never been particularly close to Sumit, before and after his memory loss. Whilst Sumit was quite sociably, trying to connect with everyone in the village when he could, the man still mostly interacted with Rin, Ivette, Corinna, Calixte, and Harmony. After their memory loss, Sumit and Oscar were inseparable, likely due to their shared trauma, but perhaps Kai should have made more of an effort to befriend the new Sumit at that time. Maybe it would have helped if Sumit had a friend who hadn't known him so well before the memory loss, someone who wouldn't compare him, even subconsciously, to his old self.

"I'm sorry," was all Kai could say in response to that. Though it was of course not Kai's responsibility to have stopped any of this, nor could it have been predicted nor blamed on anyone in particular, there was still that guilt of an inactive bystander to Sumit's decline.

"Why are you apologising?" Sumit forced a smile, though it was wobbly. "Or was that pity?" He swallowed, and rubbed his eyes. "No, I'm sorry for just dumping all of this on you. I seem to be doing that a lot these days, just making my own problems and issues someone else's."