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+------ Thread: 5 1/2 Temple Meadow - Aftershock || Cassian Snaps [Closed] (/showthread.php?tid=1153)
5 1/2 Temple Meadow - Aftershock || Cassian Snaps [Closed] - Cassian McCormick - 07-12-2026
Monday, July 3, 1922
~ 8:00 AM
~ 8:00 AM
Shffft.
The curtain opened without ceremony, the same as it had done the day before and the day before that. Obtrusive rays of sunlight flooded the once shadowy room, filling every inch to chase away the darkness. It made no difference against the deeper and more terrifying darkness that had clung to Cassian since the night that Rosie left.
‘Close them,’ he wanted to say, but the boy couldn’t locate his lips to complete the gesture.
His mother wouldn’t listen even if he could.
As adamant as he was to withdraw from the world and hide himself where neither shame nor heartbreak could find him, Kari McCormick was determined to ensure her son did not simply lay there and rot. The woman brought him meals, forcing spoonfuls into his mouth when there was need. She forced him out of his room for showers. In the evenings, she brought her sewing supplies into his room, sitting by his bed to discuss the day’s market while she practiced her needlework.
He couldn’t hear her.
An impenetrable wall existed between mother and son. A box may have been more accurate. It locked Cassian within, muffling the noise of the outside world until his subconscious had nearly managed to convince him that he was under water.
Sometimes, his mother offered for them to take short walks; sometimes, she suggested they go downstairs to listen to the radio. She was looking for reasons for Cassian to leave his bed and face the world, but when Rosie had left, she’d taken every one of them with her.
He’d finally done it. Cassian had managed to drive the girl to the end of her rope. It snapped. The tether that had fastened them disappeared like the dew at dawn, leaving nothing more than a gaping hole where his heart used to be. She didn't think she could stay here with him. It had become more than she could bear, and he knew with every nerve that still dully fired that she was right.
That might have been the hardest part to reconcile. He’d done everything he could and had fought harder than he’d fought for anything else. He'd opened himself to the unpleasantness of confession because, for her, it felt worth it. Cassian hadn’t wanted to lose his wife—and certainly not the way he had. He believed love should conquer all; he believed that sincerity would serve as a sufficient balm and that caring about something meant never letting it go. Believing all that didn’t prevent him from understanding that only a selfish man would’ve tried to make her stay when she'd been so sure that she couldn't.
Rosie said she needed time—they needed time and distance to heal. The implication struck him, and he’d been reeling ever since. She didn’t think he could heal if she were around. She thought the only way to save him—save them—was to not be there.
What was left after that?
What did it say about him if the only way either of them could get better was for her to get away from him?
Was that it? The sum of all he’d accomplished as her husband? Cassian had driven her to a place from which the only way back was a road that diverted from his. And what was better? How did he know when either of them had arrived at that condition? Was it no more cravings? Was it never feeling like the world was too big?
Perhaps he could’ve lived with such a harrowing failure if it had sat quietly in the background while he’d been allowed to continue trying. Instead, in one night, his entire world had been upended. Rosie had told him that she didn't know when she could return. The next morning, there was no sun to rise in his sky, plunging his entire world in a darkness so thick that it pressed him into his bed.
“Coming down for breakfast?”
He didn’t answer.
How could he eat? Was there a point? Cassian could no longer envision a world where such things mattered.
He rolled onto his side, turning his back to the abrasive light that failed to warm him.
From somewhere across the room, his mother sighed. “Cassian…you can’t go on like this.” It wasn’t a reprimand but the plea of a woman who’d watched her child sink beneath the covers days ago and hadn’t been able to locate the will to get back out on his own.
His body and mind had crumbled together, falling into a full-system collapse.
She was gone. It was the only thought that occupied his mind, playing over and over on a loop as if it worried he might otherwise forget. Gone. They’d flirted with the idea of separation before…at least…Rosie had, but they’d never…it had never…there had always been a solution—a Hail Mary, a saving grace—seconds from disaster something always managed to pull them back together.
Where had that thing gone now, when he needed it the most? Why hadn’t it swooped in at the 11th hour to rescue them—rescue him—from this devastation? Was it even fair to ask for rescue? Knowing what he did, seeing the hurt that he had, did he have a right to wish she could stay for the sake of his own restoration? Rosie deserved to be better. She deserved the world. That was no longer compatible with remaining.
Each time the loop circled back to that conclusion, another dagger plunged itself deep inside his chest. He hadn’t cried since the night she left, but only because he’d poured himself dry. What remained was an emptiness he hadn’t felt since the ‘death’ of his mother. Cassian couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so lost and uncertain. The terror he’d felt in the clearing when her family had come to break up their happy home didn’t hold a candle to the ominous presence that saturated his limbs now.
He wasn’t afraid in the traditional sense. Rather, he was filled with a kind of dread that told him nothing would ever be okay again. There would never be another sunrise, never another sky littered with whimsical constellations that spoke of impossible love that dared to defy the cosmos.
If all those were gone, what was left?
RE: 5 1/2 Temple Meadow - Aftershock || Cassian Snaps [Closed] - Cassian McCormick - 07-12-2026
Friday, July 7, 1922
~ 6:15 AM
~ 6:15 AM
He could hear them long before he saw them.
The arguments had become more frequent. In and out of consciousness, his parents’ voices accompanied him through each transition. From behind his locked room door, Cassian couldn’t determine what they were arguing about or why the spats seemed to be becoming more aggressive. There was a lot he didn’t know, like what day it happened to be or the time he couldn’t read on the clock in such low lighting.
Time itself had lost all meaning. Night, day, late, early, those were no longer words that held meaning to him. They were for productive members of society who had places to be and goals to accomplish.
His goal had already been crushed. His future as the sort of husband that could be a benefit to Rosie—to any woman for that matter—had already been shattered. There had been a part of him that believed desperately that Rosie had simply needed a few days. Before leaving, she’d told him it would only be ‘a little while’. She’d asked him to believe her and to believe in them. Ten days had already passed without any words shared between them. Rosie was well and truly gone and this time, he knew better than to follow.
It was hard for the boy who’d learned not to sit still. Pursuit was the language he knew, the one he was most fluent with when it came to Rosalie. Forsaking it left him no other tools in his toolkit.
How long was enough time for her to have space before he should write? Should he have already written and missed his window? Was there still a little time left before it appeared like desperate pursuit? How much was enough space before he could be let back in?
BANG!
His door crashed open with a force that managed to startle him. Cassian pulled himself into a sitting position as both parents barrelled into the room.
“Julian! Julian, you’re not even listening!” Kari yelled, reaching out to hold onto her husband.
He threw her off with a sharp shrug of his shoulders.
“No! I’m done!” The man turned his dark eyes to his son, a new fire and something Cassian couldn’t quite read smouldering inside them. “Get up.”
“…what?” His voice was small and hoarse from disuse, distorted further by the confusion his parents had brought in with them.
“That’s enough of this. How much longer do you plan to mope and lay about in bed like a woman consumed by her own tempers?”
The words were too sharp, too rapid for Cassian to follow. His mouth fell open, his expression blank while the circuits inside his mind struggled to come back on.
“Lovely! Because that’s going to help—”
“What you’re doing isn’t helping!” the man retorted, spinning momentarily to face his wife. “Day in and day out, you have him locked up in here, wallowing in his feelings. He’s not a girl, Kari. He’s a man and it’s time he started acting like one. You can’t keep making it comfortable for him to disappear.”
Julian turned to face his son again, his expression growing particularly stern. “Get. Up. Now. A week! A week of work you’ve missed—your supervisor asking me where you’ve gone. Do you know the files that’ve piled up waiting for you to be done feeling sorry for yourself?”
He…work…?
The word sounded foreign to the boy whose entire world had already turned to ash. Work? Files? A week in bed? Had so much time already passed? The moment he began thinking too hard about it, a pain shot through his temples, warning him that he was still not back to full functioning order.
“Is this how you plan to live the rest of your life? Slumped in a pathetic heap while your mother fawns over you?”
“How does this help—”
“You haven’t help! You never helped all those years ago and you’re not helping now! You weren’t here, Kari! You haven’t had to pick him up before. You never had to teach him how to keep moving. You left when it got hard—you did that. You weren’t here for what that did to him. You come back and suddenly you think you know this boy you didn’t raise—Cassian, get up!”
Cassian found the feeling in his limbs. Adrenaline pushed through the haze. It forced its way through the melancholy, the uncertainty, the ache.
He recognised this man, the one who’d grown frustrated by his crying. He was the man who’d been drowning in his own grief, suddenly left with three devastated children, too much work to do and not enough understanding of how to raise them. Old—ancient—neural pathways came back online, sparking against the dullness that had crippled him.
“That’s not fair,” his mother said.
“Life isn’t fair, Kari! Jesus, does any of this seem fair to you? Does anything you did seem fair? If the world ended every time a woman did something that wasn’t fair, we wouldn’t get a fucking thing done. She’s gone, said she needs some space, and that’s that. Maybe she’ll come back, maybe she won’t. What good will it do having him wallow until there’s nothing of use left in him?”
“He needs time—”
“He needs to go to work! You’re crippling him. He has responsibilities! People counting on him and a life to live! The world doesn’t stop just because his mother wants to hold him! This isn’t my son, not this.”
Julian turned to Cassian, his expression brokering no room for discussion. “Don’t let your mother fool you; I’ve only got one daughter, and you’ll do well to remember that. Get dressed. We’re leaving here at 7.”
RE: 5 1/2 Temple Meadow - Aftershock || Cassian Snaps [Closed] - Cassian McCormick - 07-13-2026
Sunday, July 9, 1922
~ 7:13 PM
~ 7:13 PM
“Here.”
Cassian jumped at the voice. He hadn’t heard his father climb his way onto the roof, unaware of the man’s presence until the brown bottle of Bass Pale Ale appeared at the corner of his eye. Twisting, he turned his gaze upward to take him in. After a silent moment, he accepted the bottle. Satisfied, Julian sank onto the open space beside him with his own bottle in hand.
“I get the feeling I’m the only one in my own house who didn’t know the infamous secret passage to the roof through Justine’s room,” he said lightly, popping the crown cover off his bottle.
Cassian returned his gaze to the housetops on the opposite side of the street and the sunset that had begun to dip beneath their horizon.
“There was one through Adam’s room, too,” he replied quietly, absently. “Before you cut the tree down to let more light into the living room. He’d been mad at you for months, but never wanted to say it.”
“I know.”
Silence.
Cassian’s fingers fussed at his bottle cap, but he applied no real pressure that might see it open. His father knew? Knew what? Not about the passage, but his brother’s anger? He hadn’t acknowledged it at all. While his brother had seethed, their father had walked around like a man unbothered by the weather surrounding his eldest child. Collectively, he and his siblings had come to the conclusion that the man simply didn’t care that he’d cut down something of deep sentiment. They didn’t think he had it in him to care about anything that didn’t directly affect his work.
So long as they remained clothed and fed, he remained unconcerned with the ‘smaller’ things.
The condensation from the bottle fell against his fingers before creating small damp patches by his thigh. He made patterns with the moisture, regulating himself while he braced for what he suspected would come next.
He hadn’t come home after work on Friday. He hadn’t come home on Saturday either. Without so much as a word to either the father he’d spent the day working alongside or the mother who’d waited restlessly by the front window for him to return, Cassian had simply decided to be somewhere else. Most of it was a blur. People, places, substances. Had he had a good time? Had he been miserable? He didn’t know. What he did know was that neither parent was likely to let it slide.
In the span of a day, their son had gone from being catatonic to difficult to pin down, and a fact like that wouldn’t have escaped either of their notice.
It was hard to accept the beer while he braced for another onslaught. Would he be breaking his mother’s heart again? Embarrassing him with his wild, vagabond behaviour? Was this where he reminded him of whose roof he was under and whose rules he was subjected to?
“I shouldn’t have cut down the bloody thing.”
Cassian hesitated. “…You shouldn’t have.”
They’d spent the better part of spring begging their father to build them a treehouse. By summer, the tree had fallen, taking along with it any hope they’d had. It was the first time he’d heard his father express any form of remorse for the action, and that, in and of itself, had taken him aback, but Cass couldn’t understand what that had to do with his little disappearing act.
His father sighed. It was as heavy as it always was and every bit as devastating.
“What’re you doing, Cassian?”
He didn’t answer because he couldn’t answer.
The boy didn’t know what he was doing anymore. He only knew that he didn’t want to feel the way he was feeling and that, for the weekend that had passed, he hadn’t. It had been glorious…hadn’t it? The headache he sported tried to suggest otherwise, but he knew with all certainty that in all that time, not once did the name ‘Rosalie’ cross his mind. For the first time since she’d left, he hadn’t been counting days and using them as evidence of crimes he didn’t truly believe she’d committed. He didn’t worry about what ‘better’ meant, except to admit briefly that he still wasn’t.
What a fantastic time he must’ve had.
“Is this what you want? All you want for yourself?”
He didn’t answer those questions either but not because he didn’t have an answer. Of course, this wasn’t what he wanted. If given the choice, he’d have his wife sitting between his legs, watching the sunset with him. He’d share a bottle of beer with her and lament the fact that he would have to return to work in the morning. He wanted to not feel broken. He wanted Rosie to not think he was so broken that she needed to get away. He wanted to not be so afraid.
Did he want to be blacked out for days at a time? Did he want to hide on the roof when he returned home because he wasn’t prepared to face the music?
Would anyone want that?
“I don’t know what else to do,” Julian confessed when it became clear that he would be the only participant in their little conversation. “I don’t know how else to make you stop trying to destroy your life at every turn, like it’s all some kind of game you can reset when you’ve had enough. I’ve tried being there, I’ve tried giving you space. I’ve tried guiding your interests, I’ve tried leaving you to your interests.” He paused to sip his drink. “I’ve been hard on you, I know.” He looked to his son, his expression softening with what looked almost like…defeat.
“I don’t know that it’s done you much good. You’ve always been stubborn, you know that?” A ghost of a smile passed over his lips, there then gone as nostalgia gave way to the remorse it brought with it. “Always wanting your own way. Too busy dreaming to accept anything else. Your mother taught you that.”
Cass looked down at his still unopened bottle.
He knew he hadn’t made it easy for his father. Until recently, he couldn’t even view the man’s decisions as human. Cassian had always loved his father, but after his mother left, it was difficult to ignore the way the man had changed. But that wasn’t the full truth. He’d changed, too. He wasn’t the perfect son who’d made his father’s grief more bearable.
He ran, he hid, he put himself in danger without ever stopping to ask his advice or get his help. He ran away, he buried himself in his vices. Every action took him further from the man he knew his father intended him to be.
Cass had arrived at a place where he could be genuinely sorry for his role in the chasm that had formed between them over the years.
“I wasn’t trying to have my own way,” he said. His shoulders sagged as he leaned forward to hug his knees. For a moment, he held his breath, conscious of the fact his father might criticise such a posture. “I just wanted to be…good.” He shrugged helplessly. “Good enough that people wouldn’t keep leaving.”
But ‘good’ was subjective and meant different things to different people. It was hard to keep everyone happy—a fool’s errand, some would say.
His father’s glass clinked as it rested against the roof’s panelling. Julian reached across the small distance to take his son’s beer. Using his key, he popped the cap off before handing it back to him. Cassian wordlessly took it, unsure where to go after the admission he’d made. It was the first time he’d ever said it out loud, but it had weighed on him heavily following Rosie’s departure. There was sadness, yes, but there was also…a frustration.
Why wasn’t he good enough?
Horrid as the thought was, it didn’t compare to the one that asked, ‘if others insisted that he was good enough, then why did people still leave?’
What made them stay?
“Your mother didn’t leave because you and your siblings weren’t good enough. She didn’t even leave because I wasn’t, not really. She left because it was what she wanted, despite the love she held for you three. I don’t think Rosie left because she doesn’t think you’re good enough either. Can’t say I know her well enough, and her reasons are hers. What I know is if you keep trying to be good enough for everyone, you won’t be any good for yourself. You can wanna be good—you should want to be, but you can’t keep doing it because you’re afraid people will leave otherwise. You hear me?”
Silence.
“Cassian.”
“I hear you.”
His father nudged his shoulder, coaxing his gaze to him. “People are gonna leave, kiddo, whether we want them to or not. It doesn’t always feel good. I’d say it rarely does. But life doesn’t stop, and you can’t either. Truth is, Rosie might never come back. You both came out the tail-end of some nasty stuff, and not everything survives that.”
It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
Rosie said she’d be back, and there was a desperate longing in him to believe her and to believe that it wasn’t over. After everything they’d been through, didn’t they deserve to survive?
“I asked you earlier if this is what you want, and I need you to really think about it. If Rosie never comes back, if things never get better, do you wanna be some aimless soul, haggard and moving from place to place? Is that the story of Cassian McCormick?”
For the first time, Cassian took a sip of his beer. Dark eyes found their way back to the sun.
“Is that what you want?”
“It’s not.”
RE: 5 1/2 Temple Meadow - Aftershock || Cassian Snaps [Closed] - Cassian McCormick - 07-13-2026
Monday, July 10, 1922
~ 5:20 PM
~ 5:20 PM
A shower, some dinner, his bed.
After the day Cassian had, it was all he’d wanted. His father, while abrasive, hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d mentioned all the work that had piled up when he’d taken his weeklong hiatus from the Minister’s Office. Day in and day out, he’d sat at his desk, watching documents enter and leave the office. It had been mind-numbing, tedious work—nothing he’d have considered important, nothing he thought made a difference.
Until he wasn’t there.
Suddenly, everything was due. Departments were waiting on correspondence from the Minister’s Office. Approvals had been sitting there, waiting. Appointments hadn’t been set. That he had a job at all when he’d returned on Friday likely had more to do with the goodwill the office held toward his father and the fact that having him there to get it done was better than hiring someone else and catching them up.
He wasn’t done, but the workday was done, and that would have to be enough.
His steps slowed as he approached his front door. Sitting on the steps was a certain redhead with a familiar, shit-eating grin.
“Dump your shit, we’re going out.”
Cassian came to a stop by his friend, looking down at him with a curiosity that was tempered only by his fatigue.
“Where to?”
“Dropped by the theatre last week, lured in by the nostalgia demon. Imagine my surprise to hear their prodigal star fucked off again.”
His expression fell.
After France and Mrs. Rousseau, Cassian had gone chasing the stage lights again. While his father had found him work at the ministry to keep him out of trouble, on many evenings, he’d found his way back to The Rosebridge Little Theatre. It had felt good walking down the aisles again, glancing up at the high ceiling and standing on the stage, even if it was to nothing more than empty seats. He’d been told that his mates had fallen off one by one, but it had been nice to catch up with his old Director.
Patrick told him he was welcome back at any time. They’d already done their auditions for the end-of-summer production, but the troupe always needed extra hands behind the stage.
In the last week, he hadn’t been able to drag himself out of bed, let alone down to the theatre grinning.
“I’ve been busy.”
“Heard that, too. Your mum tells me you’ve been hiding in your room feeling sorry for yourself.”
Cassian’s jaw set.
Freddie rose to his feet with a lazy, deliberate stretch. He shoved Cass lightly by his shoulder, urging him to hurry up with his getting home routine. “You’ve got five minutes. Tell your mum we’ll be late for dinner. Patrick’s got a ton of props and nothing more than a bunch of children. Not a good combination for getting things done. Peter Pan—but you already knew that.”
He did. Cassian had thought the title ironic. A boy who never wanted to grow up, who’d run away from his problems and had phenomenal adventures rather than return to the real world. The whimsy and the mirror it held up to his desires were…uncanny.
“You’re the poster child for unemployed behaviour. Some of us are exhausted after a long day.”
Freddie cracked a grin. “I work. Nothing as fancy as the Minister’s Office,” he said, his grin growing sheepish. “But it’s good, honest, boring work and I’m ready to start painting a pirate ship while Andrew’s voice cracks in the background.”
Cassian rolled his eyes, a faint warmth rising high in his chest at how…achingly normal it felt.
He nudged the door open and dropped his briefcase on the other side. “Let’s go,” he said, heading back down the steps. Freddie followed along, the pair leaving the front yard and striking out for the sidewalk.
This had always been his summer. The theatre, his friends, and a distinct lack of care in the world. It was different now. They all had jobs or were finishing up with their schooling. Freddie no longer lived five houses down, but here he was coming to collect him so they could go together, as they’d always taken turns doing.
A group of children zipped by them on bicycles, screaming and giggling as they went. That used to be them, he thought. Two wheels and the freedom that came with a break from school. A band of friends returning from whatever merriment they’d found and taking back with them the glee they’d gained along the way.
“So, she’s gone, huh?” Freddie asked when he caught him staring.
“Hm?” It took him a second to process the question and when he did, Cassian turned his head to take in his friend. “How much did she tell you?”
His mother, bless her, could be a horrible gossip.
“Enough to know we might have to become roommates if you can’t knock this shit off. Justine’s room’s still got those frilly curtains?”
“I’m fine, really.”
“And I’m auditioning for Cinderella in the fall. Cut the bull, mate. I won’t smother you in my apron like your mother. I just wanna make sure you don’t go for a permanent swim in the lake on the other side of the neighbourhood.”
“Burning lungs and all that undignified panic-flailing aren’t my style. Can’t say I’d be much a fan of choking in half the diphtheria-infested lake water either.”
“Are you ever serious?”
“Are you? The lake, Freddie? Bloody hell. It’s the potions and flashing lights for me.”
The mirth in his friend’s eyes didn’t leave, but it dimmed some. “How much?”
“Too much,” Cassian admitted.
For a moment, the fluting evening songs of the blackbirds, the softening sounds of laughing children and clanging bike chains and the chirping of crickets filled the street. It wasn’t shame that quieted him, not really, not in the same way it did with others. Freddie had been there the first time he’d tried potions. As the years went on, they occasionally partook of them together. It wasn’t a secret; it wasn’t a private shame, not with Freddie. But he knew the proportions had gotten out of hand even by their standards.
Out of nowhere, he felt an arm drape itself loosely around his shoulder. Freddie didn’t make a grand show of the gesture, and Cassian, for his part, didn’t fuss over it either. The pair simply continued down the street.
There was no need for words. He understood the meaning for what it was.
Freddie, without the flowery speeches they typically reserved for the girls they ran into, had quietly reminded him that he wasn’t alone.