seventeen [written/action]

[imatreenow]

[Yesterday, he had woken up to overwhelming silence. No soft bustling sounds from down the hall, the sizzling and bubbling of breakfast, quiet murmuring and chiding. There was no smile to greet him. There was an empty table. An empty cupboard. An empty room that used to be filled with a weaving loom and towering stacks of blankets.

Sayo was gone. He had no one anymore.

Solitude was not an unfamiliar place. He'd lived most of his life inside loneliness, the place where the only shoulder to cry on is your own and the only ears who will listen are trapped inside memories. He had hoped that he would never have to go back.

Hoping always was for fools.

He had no choice but to leave. The collection of gutted rooms was no longer his home, like he had begun to think of it as. He belonged nowhere, another familiar place. When his eyes stung dryly, when he faded into numbness, when everything left behind with him was upended, thrown against the wall, broken, he dressed. He gathered what he would need most - Martel's panpipes, Kaori's daffodil and knife, a thick robe and quilt Sayo had given him last spring, a stack of yellow sticky notes religiously plucked from the walls - before he concerned himself with more practical tools for carving out survival. He wasn't going to wait for Raine or Freyjadour to find him.

He still remembered how to do this from the days when it was just him and his sister, and that was enough but he convinced himelf that they deserved better. He found a niche in the rocks at the foot of the mountain - facing west to absorb the afternoon sun, deep enough for protection from wind and rain, equipped with an escape route for smoke. The river cut through nearby. The farmlands were not far away. With the cold settling in, he knew he wouldn't be able to stay out here forever, but he was alright with ignoring safety precautions for as long as he could. He needed space to breathe. Space to fall apart. Entropy was the natural trend of his life.]


[In the afternoon, he opens his journal for the first time since he fled from the village. In the emptiness left by a chain of disappearances, the questions that have rung dissonantly in his ears for more than a year seem more urgent than ever. He's turned these questions over and over in his mind and found no answers. He's touched on some of the barbed facets, but backed out before too many ugly implications could gleam.

With no one to confide in, he's desperate enough, unhinged from himself enough, to resort to the general masses, although he doubts they have anything worthwhile to say. Maybe he just wants to argue to have something to do that isn't mourning, obsessing, wishing. Before he starts writing, he'll block the journal's camera to black out his image.]

[WRITTEN - ANONYMOUS]

Happiness. What does it mean to you? How would you define it?

What if something you thought would make you happy doesn't? What if the things that will make you happy turn out to be impossibilities? [He pauses. His pen lingers over the next thought for a few moments.]

When is it no longer worth it?

[ACTION???]

[Should anyone for any reason find themselves at the base of the mountains stretching above the farmlands, they might run into an elusive WILD MITHOS as he travels to the stream at regular intervals to collect water. Or maybe they stumble across his Mithos cave, drawn in by the smoky smell of burning wood. Maybe he isn't even there when they come by, and boy, will they regret stopping to poke around.]

[EDIT: I really want to apologize for my glacial tagging speed, even though I've already done so a few times. School is really busy and stressful so 1. I have little time to tag and 2. when I do have time, I have no energy and my brain is one big fart. I hope you can all be patient with me...things should be a little better in about 2 weeks (November 21st ish)!]