Author's Note:

Wrote this monologue for my English class. I'm rather proud of it and got full marks so I thought I'd might as well post it here as well. Set between Rose discovering her mother's death and going grimdark.

When I was younger, I had a cat. His name was Jaspers, and I was slightly more attached to him than I should have been. He was about this big and covered in fluffy black fur, with eyes that had seen things, terrible, wonderful things. I'd always known he hid some kind of secret, something that could change the world, and I was determined to find out what.

I started bringing him in for therapy once a week. I would ask him various questions, and he would sit there is silence, swishing his tail, licking his lips. He rarely answered me, and yet I persisted. I had to know, I had to know whatever it was he was hiding. So I endured his silence. And then, one day, he finally deemed me worthy of his knowledge, of what he was hiding from me. It was like all our previous sessions had been some form of test, and he had finally found me worthy of this glorious secret he had burdened himself with. I still shiver slightly now, with the memory of his words. He beckoned me closer, and closer in I leant, before he finally bestowed upon me one word. One beautiful word made from four mysterious letters; "MEOW."

He disappeared not long after that. Since that day, I've spent long nights staring at my ceiling, wondering. M-E-O-W. That was it. That was his secret. Meow. I wanted so desperately to understand what was clearly not intended for my ears, something so precious it was beyond my comprehension. I searched high and low for my cat. I had to know what it meant. The need pushed me further than I could have ever pushed myself, the longing not so much a desire, but more a constant ache, a steady throbbing of want that nothing but knowledge could satisfy.

Jaspers died before I could find him. He washed up on a river bed, his cause of death unknown. I was never really good at making friends, and, though he was a cat, he was the only companion I'd even known. The sorrow from his death mingled with the disappointment that came with knowing his secret would remain a mystery. I asked my mother if we could bury him, give him a proper funeral, and so she, being the cruel mistress of irony that she was, built him his own private crypt.

That was my relationship with my mother in a nutshell. When I was younger, around the age of five, I drew a picture of Jaspers, the cat. She bought an extremely expensive and ostentatious frame for it, and had it welded to the fridge. I can't tell if she was even aware of half of the things she did in attempt to provoke me; she was so often intoxicated I don't know if I knew the real her, or just what alcohol caused her to become. Our relationship was not like that of other mother's and daughters. I once spelt out the word "Shrew" on our fridge in those plastic magnetic letters, but we didn't have any W's, so I used two Vs. The next day she went out and bought an entire pack of Ws. I left her a letter thanking her, and pinned it to the fridge, but, low-and-behold! It slipped, and the bottom of the letter touched my kitchen floor. What did my mother do? She bought a velvet cushion, and let the letter rest on that, so it didn't have to touch the tiling.

This form of passive-aggressive strifing was our only real contact. I shut myself away, lost myself to books, music, and eventually that damned game.

I'd been such an idiot. I was so consumed by my desire, by my need to understand Jaspers' message that I didn't think about the consequences. They say curiosity killed the cat, but they're wrong. Curiosity resurrected the cat when it was already dead and buried, but sent billions of people to their graves in it's place.

This game, you see, was meant to resurrect the dead. I leapt at the opportunity to play, to bring my cat back, but I didn't realise that the game was playing me, playing all of us. We were never meant to win! We were always meant to lose.

It was a game with the ability to alter reality, a game that ended the world. A game that I forced my friends to play with me because I was so full of my selfish thirst for knowledge I lost all rational thought regarding the game's actual purpose. Seven billion people lost their lives because of me. And one of them was my mother.

I was wrong about her. She wasn't just some drunken broad with no morals. She was lonely. She was lonely and alone her own daughter resented her. It was only natural for her to turn to alcohol. I understand that now. She was lonely and I forgive her; after all, I'd likely do the same thing in her place.

She's gone now; dead because of my own foolishness, killed by a demon of my own creation. I can feel the darkness creeping into my soul; every dark thought, every grim emotion, all of it stealing over me with enough intensity to turn my skin and soul grey. My mother is gone, but the beast that killed her isn't. This is a game, and as one of it's four players, I have three lives; three chances to die and respawn, to come back again, to win. Selfish and foolish I may be, I will avenge her. I don't care if I die three or three thousand times, my mother will be avenged.

If I couldn't make her proud while she was alive, I will at least bring honour to her memory.