A Botched Arrest [Abalia, Mirja]

“I... I do apologize, Mirja.” Yes, that did make perfect sense to Abalia, and as she thought about it she realized that she had, indeed, been rather foolish to even assume that Mirja might take her all this way for something as minor as just enjoying coffee and cake. She bowed her head slightly, quite embarrassed at the silly nature of her question, but raised it once more at Mirja's guidance.

At the instruction Mirja gave, however, Abalia found herself both deeply puzzled and a tad frightened just at the notion of what she had been told. To let go of her closest memory..? What was her closest memory? That was something she needed to consider before anything else. She didn't much think about the past, only about the present and the future, about the people she needed to protect and those that would bring harm to the innocent. But what was it in her past that had brought her here..?

She closed her eyes, and focused deeply on her life. It was rare that Abalia ever reflected on these things, but now she had no other recourse. What had led her down this path? It had to be during her days as an officer, no doubt, when she had still been a naive young woman, and yet hadn't really been so different from now. She could smell smoke, burnt wood. A fire had come and gone, but more overwhelming than the smoke was the undeniable scent of burnt flesh. Abalia found herself nearly gagging at this, but pressed on regardless. Who was it? She saw two hands before anything else, not belonging to the same people, but which looked to have been desperately reaching out toward one another in their final moments. One was larger than the other, though not by much, and both clearly belonged to children.

Abalia's view of the scene widened, and the entirety of the memory came crashing into her like a brick wall. Two children, killed in what would have otherwise been, at worst, a minor arson charge. Not homeless, but undoubtedly from what one would call the wrong side of the tracks. From what they could gather, the children had been playing around in what had once been an abandoned home, which unbeknownst to them was the meeting place of choice for a wider crime syndicate in the area. Some evidence had needed to be destroyed, papers? No, something larger, but the burning had done its job well enough that they could never identify it. The doors had been barred to ensure a total burn, but the children... What had their names been? Abalia's grip on Mirja's hand tightened without her even realizing it, her other hand clenched so tightly as to draw blood from her palm.

Will le Blanc, 8 years old, and his sister Rachel, only 5. Those were the children that had sent Abalia down this road, down her desperate struggle to right the wrongs of a world far greater than she. As she remembered those names, two children she had never once met in life, and yet who had defined her so entirely as a person, she began to cry. Not any sobbing or open weeping, no, merely silent, unflinching tears. Her eyes still closed, and her grip on Mirja's hand no weaker than before, she managed to choke out a single question in a near-whisper. “How...how do I let go of this?”