Above it All

[K-Robe]

The Space Needle was pretty tall. And if you were impressed with tall stuff, you probably would've been impressed by the Space Needle. Bradley Edwards, however, stared down at the Seattle cityscape underneath him and the only thing that was running through his mind was, "If I fell down from this high up, I wonder what my body would look like once it hit the ground." Would it splatter around with big gory chunks? Or would he just disappear in a haze of red mist? He probably wouldn't even be conscious by the time he hit the ground. He kept staring a bit more before yawning. It was way too damn early in the morning to be thinking about this sort of shit. But it was the only sort of shit that he could think about. SOTF had ended something like a few days back. He kept himself in the dark about the whole thing and acted like he didn't care about it at all, which surprised no one at Aurora. Naturally, despite his outwardly blase ambivalence towards the entire situation, he couldn't help but think, "What if I were on that trip?" And that's all he'd been thinking about ever since the whole affair began.

It was fairly morose and unnecessary thinking, of course. There was no point in devoting much time to thinking about any of this; he should've just thanked his lucky stars that he wasn't on that trip. He bristled a little, internally. Bradley wasn't even sure who'd won the damn thing. He leaned against one of the Needle's many railings before pulling out his phone. He checked Reddit; it was almost a reflex at this point. He'd unsubscribed from /r/news, though, because he knew the only thing that he'd be seeing were reminders about how he'd probably be dead right now. But he checked /r/news for the first time in a long while that day. Scrolling down for a bit, he finally found a name.

Amanda Montalvo. No clue who that was. There was a picture. Oh, it was that one person he'd never bothered to talk to. He checked the comments. There was one particularly dedicated Redditor that had decided to list every single one of the 151 dead, along with links to pictures and whatnot. And, sure as can be, Bradley recognized a lot of the names - not that he didn't already know they were on the trip to begin with. He stopped at one name. Jessica Murphy. He desperately wanted to stop himself, but he couldn't.... couldn't help it. He looked. Suicide; killed herself by drowning.

He put his phone back in his pocket.

At least he could subscribe to /r/news again.