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Prelude: So many of you may know that I haven’t been very active on here lately. To be honest I kind of lost the writing spark a while ago and with all the other stuff I’ve been dealing with I’m not sure if it’s ever coming back. I wanted. I’m not sure why even wrote this. I think part of me just wanted to see if I could even still get a couple paragraphs out. Another part just needed to put some feelings down on e-paper. This one’s pretty damn bleak in tone although nothing too triggering. I will caution there is a brief self-harm reference towards the end. Honestly this is what I had in me, in away it actually feels less painful then to imagine a bright, happy, but ultimately unattainable future. Since this is getting almost as long as the actual vignette I’ll just close with this. Thank you so much to anyone who has ever read and liked my work. Sorry I could never deliver on the full potential. We pan across a blackened and charred landscape sliding lower and lower beneath the scorched earth. In halls of concrete painted with some faded color lost to time a woman in her mid-thirties walks. Her foot steps are heavy with fatigue and responsibility. She winces as a detonation of some large piece of ordnance resounds over her head. A few chips of concrete fall from the ceiling and the lights flicker. Stepping into a large room she surveys her charges sleeping fitfully despite the bombardment. Still she is extra careful not to wake them. She looks over Lukara their species once the owners of this planet before her people showed up. Like many across the ‘verse Lukara had been subject to drugs and conditioning their mind and spirit broken leaving them a helpless infant. Ready to order. All she could do was pick up the pieces…. She thinks to herself as she pulls the blanket back over the shivering Lukara. \ Tamara, a human nearing 70 who was abandoned by her owner when the anti-aging treatments got to be too expensive. Fifty years of being someone’s living doll only to be tossed aside when something more interesting came along. Then there was Lorrie. She didn’t necessarily want to play favorites but something about this girl pulled at her. She was actually willingly adopted from another dimension, only to be kidnapped in a home invasion that ended with the death of the couple who adopted her. Now she was here. Sobbing quietly in the oversized crib. These are her charges. The lost and the broken. The forgotten and the abandoned. Nothing could absolve her or her people’s collective sins. All she could do was trying to ease a little suffering….. She carries Lorrie into the bunker rec room and makes a warm bottle. A shell detonates overhead, the rumbling vibrations felt in the soles of her feet. Lorie starts balling and filling her diaper. Before she places the bottle to Lorrie’s lips. Flopping onto an old faded couch humming softly to herself and stroking Lorrie’s hair. A single tear slides down her face as she holds the unconscious woman. This is all she can do: be there with them. She looks down at the scars on her arms. In a way they saved her as much as she saved them. They’re the reason she get’s up in the morning. The reason she still stands against the darkness, telling it to get stuffed one day at a time. One person. A Caretaker of the forgotten. Still standing in the black….. And we fade out on two exhausted smiling faces, one sleeping, one almost. Staring at each other. As we pan out over smoke obscured night time sky. The stars maintaining vigil