Light of May ::: an original roleplay

Who: Sam and Jo.
Where: The Summers House.
When: Early afternoon.

Sam had never gotten in the habit of locking his door. It had never been something that was allowed in Montana, if his door was going to be locked it would be locked for him, and from the outside. Never from within. There were never any locks on the inside of the doors to the rooms in which he slept in Montana. It was something of an alien concept to him, locking a door behind him, and even when he used the bathroom in the Summers house he had to pause once he was inside and remind himself to do so. With his bedroom, though, it was another matter. There was a lock on the inside of the door, he had noticed it not long after he had been shown to the room for the first time but not once had he touched it. There had been times in the middle of the night when he had thought about it but a tight and knotted sense of anxiety had settled in so quickly in the wake of such thoughts that he had dismissed them almost immediately. Locking his door was bad. Wrong. He wasn’t supposed to do that.

So it was that the door was unlocked, even when he went through the process of changing from the clothes he wore for bed. It was early afternoon, a little past lunch he suspected from the scents drifting up from the first floor of the house, and he’d overslept. That made him feel uneasy as well, just one more thing that wouldn’t have been permitted with his birth pack. Some mornings they would jump up and down on the floor above where he slept to wake him with the thumping and rattling and the shower of dust that would rain down from the ceiling of the basement. Those had been the gentler awakenings, the ones in which the pack had kept their distance. Not all mornings had been like that.

Sam’s night had been a rough one and the tangled sheets on the bed were evidence enough of that, twisted and rumpled from the kind of motions one might associate with nightmares. He’d had them, he knew, he’d woken with a tight fear in his chest and a sense of dread that had, at one point, chased him right out of the bed and into the corner of the room, watching the door in the dark, waiting for danger to storm right through it. He’d fallen asleep that way for a while, only crawling back into the bed when he’d dozed off sitting upright and startled himself awake when he almost lost his balance. The rest of the night had passed just as fitfully and all through the morning he’d tried to catch up on lost sleep only to be denied the rest that would have kept him from feeling as groggy and disoriented as he did then.

For some reason he couldn’t figure out which way his shirt was supposed to go. Standing in the middle of the room at the foot of the unmade bed with his pants pulled on and fastened and his upper torso uncharacteristically bare he struggled to solve the unexpected puzzle he held in his hands. Was it inside out? Twisted? His brain was so fogged up that he couldn’t tell, so clouded by the lack of sleep that he didn’t hear footsteps approaching his room from outside in the hall.

Who: Kiley and her brother Corwin (NPC’d)
Where: SOHS → their house
When: A couple hours before sunset


( Stranger than your sympathy, take these things so I don't feel. )