my sweet love

code by spacexual

standing in the shallow tide, water washing up past her elbows, the girl's eyes fixed on the faraway horizon, her prideful posture drooped and defeated, her ears laid down to her skull. she was feeling a lot of things a young girl like her didn't know how to handle. but the most stark feeling of them all was the great gaping maw of guilt snapping up her throat, breaking her bones in brittle cracks, burning her eyes with tears she didn't know if she could shed. second was the bright absence of her family, as bright as the setting sun reflecting thrice upon the water rippling just out of her reach. it reached deep down into her belly, making it ache and feel so hollow as if she starved, and it filled her mind with a ringing silence that she could not stand. third was the grief. the grief split open her heart, accentuating the loneliness gripping her gut. she knew things that she wished not to know, but words could not be taken back just as actions could not be reversed.

wading a little further into the lapping tide, she fixed her eyes on the beach where she had made sand lumps roughly in the shapes of her mama, papa, cosette, fin, uncle ezekiel, uncle vinicius, uncle sunday, and her grandma, finnloch. sitting a bit farther away was a lonely figure made to be her, another stunted figure at her side, but even in sand clumps there was a coldness and empty lack of space. tearing her gaze away to look up at the sun setting before her, casting her body in it's cold unloving glow. she felt the tide pick up strength around her legs and she felt the tears fall, knowing with a certainty just how much she hurt.

she felt guilt about the albatross' attack on her groupmare, mistrim, and it had been her fault. if only she was good at reading situations like her sister, if only she was strong like cosette. then she could have saved herself before mistrim had to save her. she felt guilt that she wasn't a grown up, that others still felt inclined to look out for her. she hated that she was sometimes the kind of youth that made people think they had to protect her, just as much as she hated being underestimated. the guilt tore at her, and she knew instinctively that she was at fault. she had been naive. and it nearly costed her groupmates a friendly face, a someone who would have been more missed. mistrim was a kind and beautiful soul and she wished the other a swift recovery. just as much as she wished health, she wished that she had been the one to be taken. her mama and papa would be happy to have cosette. cosette grew up with mama and papa. she grew up far away and was raised by her mama's mom.

maybe that was part of the hollow emptiness that filled where her family had once been. she had seen papa's shield in finnloch's home, and she had known that mama had not been by.

she knew that her family was gone, watching as she turned her back to the tides, watching the rising waters wash away each figurine except for her own. she knew her father was dead, she knew fin was dead, and she knew her family had disappeared. she was one of the last few left. alone. like normal.

waves crashed over her own head, making her gasp and choke on salt water, her legs beginning the fight for shore before she remembered to remain calm and think. angling her body in the current just the slightest, she let the waves push her closer to shore, her head ducking under to try and close her jaws around the tangles of seaweed or to catch her paws on some of the rocks. her paws made contact with something solid but jagged, her paws getting tangled in the seaweeds growing about it. pain shot through her and she realized as she gasped air into her lungs above the waters surface, that maybe this was for the best.

struggling still, she kicked her paws, the seaweed sawing apart on the jagged edges of what she had stood on, and gave one last push, launching towards shore or the docks, not caring. forepaws closing around a piece of the leg of the dock, she growled and pulled herself forward, trying to find the strength to leap up the pole and dig her canine claws in, snarling in pain as her hind paws screamed and ached, blood streaming from the cuts on her legs. finally collapsing on top of the dock she gasped for breath and laid her head against the wood, shaking as she tried to pull herself up right and lick at the injuries with all sorts of phrases and exclamations under her breath. panting as she looked at the roiling sea, she closed her eyes and mumbled a quiet, "i just want to sail away."

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