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Author Topic: Silhouette [A Sey Story][One-Shot][Solo]  (Read 325 times)

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Paladienne

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Silhouette [A Sey Story][One-Shot][Solo]
« on: March 29, 2018, 11:37:02 am »
His eyes opened to stare up at an unfamiliar ceiling, watching shadowy silhouettes dance across the surface. In his mind, in his ears, he could still hear the faint sound of Mother Superior’s voice, calling everyone to morning prayers. The sound and cadence of her voice, drifting along in the ancient notes of a long forgotten language, was enough to send him back to the days of his childhood, before he’d left the convent to strike out on his own as all adults had to, and make his way in the world by himself. So Sey stared as he drifted, remembering a time when things were certain, where his worries were limited to that of petty and childish things. When he didn’t have to worry about things like bills and business. But most of all he remembered the companionship Mother Superior had provided for him, a lost waif of a thing who didn’t know where he’d come from or where he was. Didn’t know where he was going or why he needed to get there.

When Lydea had tried to get information out of him, Sey could only give her his name and a vague description of his parents. He faintly remembered them, a strange pair of male and female, with pensive, drawn faces huddled close together as they spoke about... something... and would give him long glances when they thought he hadn’t been looking. His mother had been sad - he could tell because her hair had turned an odd shade of violet and had curled loosely about her face - but his father had been indifferent. He hadn’t been able to gauge his father’s mood because the man wasn’t like his mother, didn’t have the same qualities as she did. He was human. Human, like Sey was human. But not quite, either, for the man no longer looked like how he had when Sey had been younger than he’d been then. His face was ashen, his eyes sunken into his skull. His hair had thinned and had become patchy. Some instinct had told Sey his father was dying. That same instinct told him it wasn’t something to cry over.

But despite Sey having his mother’s blood in his veins, which made him half of something but not quite whole, he had cried, afraid that he was going to lose his father.

What he hadn’t realized was that he would lose his mother, too.

That being said, after Mother Superior had taken him in, Sey had never really felt like anything was missing in his life. The hole his parents had left in his soul had quickly been filled. He gained a loving family in the form of Mother Superior and the other sisters. There had even been siblings for a time, other orphans taken in by the nuns. Of course, they’d all gotten adopted or ran away to join some military organization - or the circus - or they’d simply vanished, never to be heard from again. No one asked after them, no one wondered where they’d gone, and Sey had felt no real loss even though he was certain he should have. Because of his parents, he’d learned that people left. It was what they did. It was what everyone did, one way or another. And though he’d cried then, the tears just wouldn’t come now. It was like something had settled into its place inside him and had fit just right that now he couldn’t bring himself to cry even if he felt sad.

And when others felt sad, Sey felt sad, and tried to do his best to make them feel better.

So when Sey had seen the sisters cry when one of their lost lambs went away, he’d gone to them to hug them and hold them and try to comfort them, even when they were supposed to be the ones to hug him and hold him and try to comfort him. He never asked them why they were sad that people were moving on. He’d tried that once with Mother Superior and she’d given him a long lecture that left him more confused than it had solved anything. For Sey, moving on, and leaving what was, was a natural function, and nothing to cry over. Crying didn’t solve anything. It didn’t bring anyone back.

Not that Sey didn’t feel sad himself - his hair turning that same strange shade of violet and curling around his face told him he was sad, after all - when someone he cared about went away, but he didn’t cry anymore. He simply accepted it.

Like he accepted that his parents had simply left him on strange streets, among strange people, with no idea how to find them. He’d accepted it because something inside told him that he could take care of himself, that he would be able to survive so long as he listened to that voice inside him and did as it commanded him to.

But Mother Superior had brought him into her home and into her heart and had broken into his heart, too. He loved her, perhaps more than he loved his own mother. Which was, probably, the real reason he had decided to leave and make his way through life on his own, finding the few things he was good at doing and monopolizing upon them. He’d left because he didn’t want to see Mother Superior leave first. He didn’t want to watch her die. Because he knew that he wouldn’t be able to accept that. That was probably the biggest irony of his life.

So he’d gone to Mother Superior and said, “I’m leaving.”

She’d looked at him, stood up from her desk and tottered over to him to grasp his face between her soft, wrinkly hands. That he was now taller than she didn’t matter to her or to him - Sey always felt small in her presence.

“Sey, little Seya,” Mother Superior had said, while stroking his hair, trying to tame the slight curl that had appeared at his pleasure of hearing her nickname for him, “no matter where you go, you will always have a home here.”

So he’d left and acquired ten meowing friends that replaced what family he’d left behind, and found a place that suited his needs and their needs, and he’d found another place that could sustain his other need, and so he’d opened Feline Phantasm to pay his bills and and Second Run to sustain the strange hunger that gnawed at him sometimes without him knowing exactly why.

It had started long before he could remember, that gnawing feeling, but it hadn’t become apparent to him until he’d been a little bit older and had gone to the sisters and hugged them and took into himself their sadness. That gnawing feeling had gone away for a time, but something else had happened in the meantime. Sey had realized, perhaps on an instinctual level, that those severe emotions woke something in him, something he didn’t understand but somehow knew had always been there, something he instinctively knew that he couldn’t talk about with anyone else, mostly because no one would understand it. It was something that settled once he’d talked to a person, listened to their problems, to their fears, their heartbreak, their anger, and he’d helped them through whatever intense emotion they were feeling. Even though he didn’t understand it, helping others made him feel better himself, and in it he’d found something that he, and only he, could do. His apparent “calling”, as Mother Superior said it was.

He thrived here, now, on Libra, where he’d chosen to settle and make his life. There was something comforting about being in a heavily populated place like this, something that he hadn’t known he’d been longing for until he’d arrived, bought his places, and settled in.

Second Run gave Sey the ability to be the shoulder to cry on, the ear to listen, the friend to the friendless. He accepted anyone into Second Run, knowing that there were a variety of reasons why someone would come to that particular doorstep. He never asked why the person was there, but just accepted that they were, and so long as they followed his rules, they could stay as long as they liked. And if they wanted to talk, his office door was always open.

Through talking, through the excising of their secret emotional demons, he made the tenants feel better, for their tears stopped, or their anger went away, or whatever they were feeling so intensely faded, and a smile appeared on their faces, the sign he knew as ‘crisis averted’. The person felt better, he felt satisfied, and that gnawing hunger inside him was sated.

But Feline Phantasm...

Sey blinked, the world going dark for a brief second before reigniting in colors and shadows. That unfamiliar ceiling became familiar, and he knew he was in his bedroom, in the apartment above the cafe, and not in the convent, not in the past, where he had been a moment before. Reality was back in full swing now. Which meant that, any second now, there would be a paw or ten pressing into his side and a chorus of voices demanding food. He needed to get up and get ready for the day. He needed to swing by Second Run before he opened Phantasm, too, because the last tenant that he’d allowed to stay there had dumped a whole lot of crap on him, and he needed to clean it out. Needed to find a place to take it all, too, but that could be done later.

Sey pushed the blankets away from his body and slowly rolled out of his bed. His feet touched the cold floor and a shiver ran through his body. He let out a strange vocalization then, nyahh-ing in response to the greetings that met him as soon as he’d started moving, and found himself surrounded by furballs all seeking attention.

So he stroked them and spoke to them and promised them breakfast as soon as he was done doing his human things.

Then he pushed himself upright and went to start his day.
« Last Edit: March 29, 2018, 11:47:06 am by Paladienne »

 

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