The Path (game) - Tumblr Posts - Page 2
Chapters: 10/? Fandom: The Path (Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Robin (The Path), Rose (The Path), Ginger (The Path), Ruby (The Path), Carmen (The Path), Scarlet (The Path), The Girl in White (The Path), Girl in Red Wolf (The Path) Additional Tags: Anthology, Non-Linear Narrative, The Joys and Horrors of Growing Up, Fairy Tale Elements, Psychological Horror, Content Warnings for Individual Chapters, Queer Themes, Writing About An Obscure Art Game That Came Out in 2009 Because Why Not Summary:
A collection of short stories chronicling the lives of the Red siblings before, during, and after the events of the game.
@sulsulesbian Here is your second prompt! This chapter got heaver than I was expecting, so I apologize in advance. Sometimes the world is cruel, and you have to rely on people who can relate to your experience. Also, middle school sucks.
Nevertheless, enjoy?
The Path Assorted Headcanons
There’s an awful lot of them, so I put them under a readmore. Maybe at some point I’ll do post-game headcanons, if people would like that. Enjoy!
EDIT: A few of these were the result of chatting with @lilmisssammy, who has some fantastic (and often very funny) game headcanons as well!
Robin has a new best friend every time she meets someone. New tenant in their building? New best friend! Shy kid gets assigned to be her lab partner? New best friend! Scraggly, hissy, probably feral cat that hangs around their apartment building? New best friend!
Rose volunteers at the local retirement home and is a big hit with the residents. She’s spent a lot of time playing bridge and poker with them, and as a result is the undefeated champion of Red family board game night.
Ginger grew up on a steady diet of martial arts movies. They idolize Bruce Lee as someone who kicked a lot of tail despite being fairly short. On a related note, I think Ginger gets teased a lot at school for being small for their age (among plenty of other things, like their working-class family or lack of gender conformity—kids can be cruel), not that it stops them from picking fights with kids twice their size.
Ruby secretly still loves cartoons, despite feeling like she’s outgrown them. She likes to watch Saturday morning cartoons with Robin, and the two have bonded over this little ritual. Ruby claims she only hangs out with Robin to keep an eye on her, but in reality she just likes the kid, and is grateful that Robin never judges or teases her for her looks or interests.
Speaking of embarrassing hidden interests, Carmen has a hidden soft spot for TTRPGs. She “dated” (read: hung out with and occasionally said vaguely flirty things to) a guy who invited her to a D&D oneshot, and she had a lot more fun playing a bawdy, flirty bard than she’d care to admit.
Scarlet gets up before dawn most mornings to get a head start on chores and to steal away a rare moment of quiet for herself before her siblings wake up. Sometimes she’ll do some light exercise like yoga or a quick jog, sometimes she’ll curl up with a book, and sometimes she’ll just stand on the little balcony in their apartment and watch the sun rise over the city.
Their grandmother used to be a lot like Carmen in her youth. Carefree, charismatic, flirty, and full of life. She and Carmen have bonded over Grandma’s (probably exaggerated) stories of love affairs with dashing sailors and rakish gamblers.
Their apartment technically doesn’t allow pets, but Rose was able to puppy-dog-eyes her siblings into letting her sneak a rabbit into the apartment anyway. The rabbit is from the forest, and, as such, is just a little bit…off.
Robin holds surprise birthday parties for people months before their actual birthday (“it wouldn’t be a SURPRISE if it was actually their birthday, would it, Ruby?”).
Rose has an unfortunate tendency to bring sick or dying animals into the apartment to try and nurse them back to health. By some miracle Rose has never gotten sick doing this, but Scarlet has a recurring stress dream that one of these days Rose is going to get rabies and die.
Ginger and Carmen both love video games, but they have vastly different tastes. Ginger likes action games and platformers, while Carmen likes puzzle games and dating sims. The one thing they both like is Pokémon, though Carmen refuses to so much as look at any Pokémon that doesn’t meet her standards of cute.
Ruby has some “friends” at school who don’t exactly have her best interests at heart. They pressure her into drugs, petty theft, and other reckless behavior largely out of boredom, and Ruby’s more or less willing to do whatever they tell her to do because they’re the only people in school who don’t seem to completely hate her guts.
Scarlet is terrified of spiders. Even looking at one makes her feel physically ill. Part of it is just good old-fashioned arachnophobia. But a bigger part is the fact that she herself feels like a fly in a web, caught in the miserable situation of giving up her own personhood for the sake of everyone else around her and believing she’ll only make things worse the more she struggles.
Their dad walked out on them when they were young, and no one knows where he went. Carmen hopes he’ll come back one day. Scarlet hopes he rots in hell.
Their mom doesn’t have bad intentions, but she spends so much of her time working that she’s almost never around, and she’s a bit too willing to take her kids at their word that everything is fine, and she doesn’t have anything to worry about.
The forest isn’t good or evil, but more of a reflection of the mind of the people who go into it. It’s why there are so many items and locations specific to the siblings’ memories, aspirations, and fears. Visitors to the woods get back what they put in. Unfortunately, this also means that if someone is deeply troubled by something, the forest tends to make them confront it, whether they’re ready or not.
The Girl in White and the Girl in Red used to be one person, but something in the forest caused her to become so psychologically torn that she literally became of two minds: one trying to accept the nature of the world and people and trying to move on and heal; and the other in stubborn denial, refusing to learn and grow.
The Girl in White has some sort of history with the grandmother, but no one’s sure what, exactly, it is. When the siblings ask their grandmother about the strange girl in the pretty white dress, the grandmother becomes withdrawn and sad, only telling her grandchildren to stop going into the woods.
Once Again: Open Prompts
I'm starved for ideas again. Does anyone have any prompts for me? Thanks!
Chapters: 11/? Fandom: The Path (Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Robin (The Path), Rose (The Path), Ginger (The Path), Ruby (The Path), Carmen (The Path), Scarlet (The Path), The Girl in White (The Path), Girl in Red Wolf (The Path) Additional Tags: Anthology, Non-Linear Narrative, The Joys and Horrors of Growing Up, Fairy Tale Elements, Psychological Horror, Content Warnings for Individual Chapters, Queer Themes, Writing About An Obscure Art Game That Came Out in 2009 Because Why Not Summary:
A collection of short stories chronicling the lives of the Red siblings before, during, and after the events of the game.
Day One: The Girl in White
The girl in the woods was caught in the snare.
So she pulled herself free, and left her shadow bound.
In the forest she wandered, a splash of color between the slate gray trees. Her home was somewhere far behind her, so she made the woods her home. The forest sheltered her, offering herbs to cure her ills and fruit to fill her belly.
She saw her shadow, white dress stained red, watching her from a field of wildflowers. Petals and pollen drifted past hard black eyes. Accusatory. Fixed.
One day, wandering through brittle grasses, searching for the clues the forest had laid out for her, the road revealed itself to her.
A wide and unpretentious dirt path, lined on either side with dew-dappled wildflowers that glistened in the bright morning sun. Down one way, a small island cottage. Down the other, a city, vast and strange.
A city that had not been there when the girl first entered the woods.
How long had she been in the woods, wandering overgrown dales and fleeing her red-stained shadow? Was there anyone left, in the world beyond, who remembered her? Who would take her in their arms and kiss her hair and say I always knew I’d see you again?
Empires of steel and concrete had grown over the bones of villages, burying the memory of the cottages and farmlands of long-ago years.
She stood on the path and looked upon the unfamiliar city. She turned to look upon the cottage, the forest, the path.
Above, the sky was vast and cloudless.
Nervously, she stepped onto the path. The flowers seemed to beam at her. She stood there, picturing a crossroads. There lay the city, foreign to her. Full of fear, and possibility. There lay the cottage, charming and cozy, and yet something seemed to snarl and salivate within the white painted walls.
To her back, the forest. Beneath her feet, the path.
Her feet moved in no direction at all.
Where to wander? Where to seek? Where to run?
What did she hope to find? What did she hope to flee?
She moved, with slow and delicate steps, toward the city wondering about the people there.
But as she did, she pictured the shadow.
Hers.
Bound, and lost, and furious.
And scared.
She stopped, and turned back to the woods, where the echo of her, she knew, waited in the snare. Fashioning snares of her own, now.
She could leave the woods, flit like a firefly from place to place. But she wouldn't truly be gone from this place.
Not while her shadow remained.
She turned from the path, feeling the coolness of shadows on her back as she slipped between the trees. There was a teddy bear in the woods, two halves, each with a full, ragged head, clumsily stitched together.
She walked to the place where the snare still lay, wondering how a lost thing could be found.
Wondering how a broken thing could be made whole.
Day Two: Favorite Interpretation
Death takes a while.
The body doesn't surrender easily. It labors and struggles through blood spilling from wounds in rivulets; through age and infection and mutation; through ischemic cell damage and faltering brain tissue and the insurmountable armory of death—the body endures, until it can't anymore.
The mind endures as well. Or it tries.
People are stubborn. Bullheaded. Stupidly convinced that eventually, they'll push past the wall and find themselves in some transcendent tomorrow. She's stubborn too, she supposes. Clinging to false hope of some grand, sweeping change that will give her the life she wants, some karmic reward for—what exactly? Doing what was asked of her? Not throwing her own family to the wolves? Does she really think she deserves some splendid future of music and passion for doing the bare minimum?
A stupid hope. She clings to it still.
Her dreams of ancient concert halls, reverberating with symphonic majesty, have not yet been snuffed out. Not for lack of trying. She throws herself into her work, tries to make housework her art, redirect her passions to something sensible. Nevertheless, her mind always wanders, caught up in fantasies of keys beneath her fingers, handwritten sheet music before her, and a gentle hand upon her shoulder. A voice in her ear saying “look, dear, at what we have created together”.
When she crawls into bed after a long night of hand-scraping dishes and frowning over bills, her brain betrays her, casting her in the role of a talented up-and-coming musician, respected and liked by her peers. Living in a modest but cozy apartment, composing by day and playing to hushed crowds by night. She imagines herself in a larger, nicer bed than this one, still replaying the sonata she played that night, safe in the arms of a kindred spirit.
She tries to kill these dreams, but deep down she wonders if they're not, in turn, killing her.
Death takes a while.
Morning comes. She rises. Cooks. Drives her siblings to school. Works. Picks up her siblings. Comes home. Cleans. Cooks. Helps with homework. Works through the family's finances after the others have gone to bed (they don't need to worry, they don't need to know). Sleeps.
Rises.
Cooks.
Cleans.
Sleeps.
Rises.
Cooks.
Cleans.
Sleeps.
Rises.
Cooks—
A theater hidden away from the world, decked in red and black and green. Secluded and splendid. A place no one knows. No one but you. You could stay there, for a while. For as long as you wish. Stay, and create, alone in this perfect refuge. Stay, and retreat from the endless procession of identical days. Stay. Stay. Stay.
“Scarlet?”
She pulls herself free from the fantasy. In her distraction, she’d minced the vegetables they were supposed to have for dinner into an inedible dust. The knife, clean and sharp, gleams in the flickering fluorescence of the kitchen.
She turns away from the counter and looks down at her sister. Rose’s brow is furrowed. She hugs herself and grimaces as she looks up at her de-facto (distant, foolish, absent-minded, poor-excuse-for-a) guardian.
“What’s the matter, Rose?”
“Is everything okay? You seem a little…” Rose gestures absently, fumbling for the right word. “…Troubled.”
She considers, for a single insane moment, telling her the truth.
No, Rose, everything isn’t okay. Your siblings are acting out, I'm having to choose between rent and Ruby's medicine, and your grandmother is probably dying. Everything’s falling apart and I can’t even bring myself to care because the only thing that feels real anymore is the fantasy I can’t kill.
But she stops herself, and forces her face into a convincing smile.
“Everything’s fine. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all.”
Rose looks as unconvinced as Scarlet feels.
That night, she dreams of a duet. Of a lilting dance of harmonies so perfect, so sublime, that she wakes up in tears. It’s an odd sensation. She hasn’t properly cried since she was ten. Feeling childish, she goes to the bathroom to splash some water on her face and school her expression into its usual placid mask. As she’s heading into the kitchen and start breakfast, the phone rings.
Mother.
Someone needs to bring food and wine to their grandmother. She’s not feeling well, you see, and she would just be over the moon to get a visit from one of her lovely grandchildren.
Well.
She could use the exercise.
The drive to the path is uneventful. The soft morning sun and the cries of countless birds don’t even register as she walks the familiar path without straying.
Until.
Until, a stone’s throw away from her grandmother’s house.
She hears the music.
The duet from her dream.
In the woods. Close enough to taste.
Before she knows it, her feet are off the path, and her mind is a thousand miles away, wrapped up in sonatas and symphonies that promise to silence her every agony.
Into the forest she walks.
To a theater hidden away from the world, decked in red and black and green.
Day Three: Favorite Headcanon
Carmen pauses in the middle of modeling a shoplifted necklace as she feels beady red eyes burning into her back. Something bestial is staring at her with alien intent.
The rabbit.
The fucking rabbit.
Ever since Rose brought that demonic little rodent back from the forest she’s felt its eyes on her. Why Scarlet didn’t throw the mangy thing out the second Rose brought it into the living room, Carmen has no idea.
Maybe Carmen really is the only sane one of the family.
It never sleeps and rarely eats. It makes no sound; not even its feet on the floor of its oversized, over-decorated cage. Sometimes, when Rose starts stroking it, it reaches up to her ear, like it's whispering something to her.
It's the only non-bird animal any of them have ever seen in the forest. It acts more like a phantom than a pet. And yet they always take it to a vet, and not an exorcist.
Lately, there’s been little changes in the apartment. Accidents. Disappearances. Sabotage. Some of her lipstick tubes will vanish, only to turn up days later with little tooth marks in the casing. Her homework will be partially chewed or trampled. The charging cord for her phone will be gnawed clean through.
Granted, both Robin and Ginger enjoy biting and trampling. And Ginger especially enjoys messing up Carmen’s entire life for a laugh. But Carmen’s no fool: the bite marks are too small, the footprints decidedly leporine.
Leporine. What a word. Sleek and menacing. Utterly unfitting for a rabbit. Carmen picks up the strangest little details in the rare moments she pays attention in biology.
And yet, leporine, that strange and dark sounding word, fits this calculating little monster far more than any cute or harmless word.
Carmen turns away from her position at the window and turns. The rabbit is on the table, staring. Its nose twitches.
“I’m onto you,” Carmen hisses.
The rabbit scratches its ear with its hind leg.
Carmen flips it the bird and leaves the room.
Beady red eyes follow her.
Day Four: Past/Future
It’s tucked beneath dusty, moth-eaten layers of scarves and cardigans. Virtually intact, despite the poor material and clumsy stitchwork, after ten years of neglect.
Robin picks up the coat, and, in a fit of whimsy, puts it on.
It comes down to about her middle back, tight around the shoulders, the cheap clasp so worn and tired she can’t get it to close around her collar. Tufts of her short dark hair peek out under the hood. It’s a comical contrast to the rest of her outfit: a simple black dress without filigree or fanfare, the sort of thing you wear to fulfil an obligation and go home without a fuss.
The funeral had been a simple affair. Their grandmother was nominally religious, so they buried her in the small, tidy graveyard of Saint Charles’ and mumbled half-hearted prayers beneath the flat gray sky. Their mother (so thin and grey, face lined and eyes hollow—when had she changed?) gave a eulogy, and each one of the family mutely took a handful of grave dirt to toss into the open grave. Still makes her sick, those neat little pits, leading to the embrace of empty earth.
Not like flowers. People are put into the ground like something cursed. Buried forgetting-deep. Like something you never, ever want to see again.
Robin found herself staring into the hungry dark for a full minute before Ruby tapped her on the shoulder and led her back into the church for the wake.
There weren’t many people there. Strictly family, Grandmother had said. Robin looked at the pale, solemn faces of her siblings, and at the mildly uncomfortable faces of Ginger’ girlfriend and Carmen’s fiancé. Neither of them had ever met Grandmother, couldn’t understand the hole in their partners’ hearts. Still, they did what they could, offering small comforts and holding to their partners’ arms as if afraid they’d drift away like balloons.
Rose sat by a stained glass window depicting Salome and John the Baptist. She looked, as usual, far, far away. Her hair was even longer than it had been when they were kids; nearly down to her waist. She’s growing it out for some charity or another, Carmen had said.
Rose noticed Robin staring and smiled. She seemed so serene in this place of death. Being a hospice nurse would do that, Robin supposed. She nodded at Rose without a word.
Elsewhere, Ginger and Ruby were talking quietly over a plate of aggressively okay cold cuts. Ginger was still well and truly the shortest of the family, and even heavy-duty leather boots wouldn’t fix that.
Ginger shifted their weight from one foot to another, practically sparking with nervous energy. They’d told Robin once that they really only felt at ease on the park trails, cataloguing plants or saving hikers or whatever it was rangers did. Robin can believe it. Ginger was never made for cities and smog.
Ruby also looked out of place, face riddled with piercings, hair buzzed to nearly nothing. She and Robin haven't spoken in almost a year. Ruby just sort of vanished once she left high school, only popping into her siblings' lives for a handful of nights before heading back out for some alone time with her demons.
Robin isn't sure what Ruby does. Maybe Ruby isn't sure either. She looked healthy, at least. No signs of old habits.
"You okay there, space cadet?" Carmen asked. She looked weird without dye in her hair. Apparently her office wasn't a fan of hair dye, or piercings, or tattoos, or anything that might offend the faceless board of directors and their old fashioned values. Apparently not working unpaid overtime offended the higher-ups too, as did taking full lunches, talking too often, or existing too loudly.
It's good money, Carmen always said. Better than we ever had growing up. It's not the best job, but it'll help make sure my kids don't grow up like we did.
"All good," Robin said. "Well. Apart from the obvious."
"Yeah."
"She lived a long life."
"Could've been longer."
Robin wasn't sure what to say to that, so she said nothing at all, and waited by the pews as Carmen went back to talking to Scarlet by the door, where the latter had been watching the weather. Looked like it might rain. No good, trying to drive in that.
Ever sensible, Scarlet. Sensible classy loafers, sensible refined dress, sensible short hair. A sensible job; a music teacher, with occasional gigs on the side. A sensible compromise between reality and aspiration.
Robin looked around the room again. Her siblings went about the grim business of packing up a wake. No one was crying; no one was a stranger to tragedy.
At Grandmother's house, the siblings searched the rooms and halls (too many for such a small building) for belongings to put into storage. And here, Robin found the coat. One put away in a dark forgotten place ten years ago, hoping the dust of passing years would smother Robin's nightmares.
Ten years have passed. Robin still dreams of teeth.
She hugs the coat to her chest. In spite of all that coat has seen, she doesn't want to part with it now. Her grandmother's last and greatest gift. The last thing Robin has of her, now.
It'll look weird in her dorm room, she supposes. A hand-stitched children's coat amidst band tees and overpriced sweatshirts in the closet she shares with a perpetually exhausted chemistry major who never does her laundry.
Well. People put weirder things in dorms.
Robin sighs and hugs the coat to her chest, wondering if she can smell a hint of onions and wine, her grandmother's sharp but not unpleasant smell. Instead she just smells dust and fiber.
She stuffs the coat into her bag, and gets back to sorting the remnants of her grandmother's life.
Day Five: Wolf Swap
The Girl in Red cannot for the life of her figure out this strange little creature.
She can hardly believe that this absent-minded little fool shares genetic material with her sorrow-marked siblings, each of them utterly and irreparably bound to the earth.
And then there’s this walking balloon.
She drifts across the field the Girl in Red calls home, delicate fingers tracing the thin veins of wildflower petals. A faint smile on her pale face, like she’s in on some secret.
She doesn’t like when this girl looks at her. Like she understands something about her without either of them saying a word to each other. It reminds her all too much of her sister in white, wise beyond wisdom and distant from this world and every other.
“Hello,” the strange girl says. Her voice is soft, weak. “Are you exploring too?”
The Girl in Red turns up her nose.
“You’re not the fun one.”
“Ginger?” the strange girl asks with another little smile. “Sorry. It’s my turn to go to Grandmother’s house. But I had some time, so I thought I’d check on the flowers.”
Check on the flowers. The Girl in Red fights the urge to feed this little cretin to the Werewolf. She sighs, then cocks her head to one side. Considers. She’s not supposed to see this one. The thing in the lake has already marked this girl. So why is she here? And why can this child, who’s not yet started to truly grow, see her now?
“There’s another girl in the forest,” the strange girl adds after a moment of silence. “She looks a bit like you. Are you sisters?”
She’s all the good parts of me, running away and away and away and I can never catch her hand.
“Yeah. She’s my sister.”
The strange girl smiles even wider. A breeze catches in her hair, causing it to gently sway like weeds in water.
“That’s great! She’s really nice. Does your family have a cottage out here? Our grandmother lives just down the path, at the edge of the woods.”
“We’re here and there,” the Girl in Red replies. “Where we need to be.”
The strange girl frowns.
“I suppose that’s where everyone is,” she says. “Where they need to be. Even when they feel lost.” She looks at the Girl in Red curiously. “Do you ever feel lost?”
Yes.
“No.”
“Oh,” the strange girl says, then smiles sheepishly. “Because I feel pretty lost right now. Know how to get back to the path?”
Follow the light ‘till you find the lake. There’s someone very important there, waiting for you. They’ve been waiting for you for a long, long time.
“Find my sister. She’s got a good sense of direction.”
“I wish I knew this forest better,” the strange girl admits. “This place, it seems like it doesn’t want to be known. Maybe I should respect that.”
You aspire to know so much. That hunger, it’s almost as great as ours.
“It’s a big forest. People who don’t live out here find trouble more than they find anything else. It’s only when you belong here that you start to know everywhere interesting.”
The strange girl’s expression softens.
“If I go to find your sister,” she says, “will you come with me? Maybe we can all play together, or just spend some time. It would be nice.”
I can’t leave this place. None of us can. We just pace and fester and hunger and wait.
“No. I’m not done playing. Have fun with my sister. She likes gentle games.”
The strange girl looks somber for a moment. Then she nods, taking a moment to look up at the patch of sky above them, one of the only ones visible from the forest. Here the light is golden, the sky a deep, lonesome blue. The last of the light is being swallowed up by the long night to come.
“Oh, goodness, it’s almost dark! I need to hurry!” the strange girl says. “Are you sure you’ll be okay by yourself?”
The Girl in Red nods.
“Like I said. I know this place. Even in the dark I know every turn.” She picks a flower and pulls off the petals one by one. “Run along. I’m not yours anyway.”
The strange girl looks confused at her words, but finally relents, and walks away. She turns as the fading light catches in her hair, weaving gold into the black.
“I hope I see you again.”
You’ll be swallowed whole before you’ll ever get that chance, little thing.
The Girl in Red just waves.
Day Six: Black, White, Red
Black hair. White face. Red shirt.
A walking “keep out” sign.
That was the intention, anyway. The getup draws more eyes than it repels. She hears them in the hallways, the locker rooms, the courtyard. Carefully calculated whispers, just loud enough to be overheard, just quiet enough for deniability. Girls are so cunning in their cruelty.
Maybe the smart thing would be to disappear. Vanish, like prey, into the long grass. Tremble as the wolves stalk the wilds, hungry for her blood. Cower and whimper and wait.
She’d rather be their effigy.
So she takes their insults, their laughter, their sugar-coated exclusion. Keeps her expression stoic and grim. When a rare kid is stupid enough to mock her to her face, she mocks them right back, and makes sure the words burn them down.
There are whispers of concern, among the laughs. Pitying stares. Hands on her shoulders.
“Is something going on? Do you want to talk about it?”
As if they could help. As if anyone could help. They can’t staunch the venom of high school any more than they could evaporate the ocean.
It’s only in the foods that her lungs fill all the way when she breathes. Only under the cover of wide, dark leaves can she fully exist. Far from ravenous peers and well-meaning family. In the woods she can feel the weight of her feet on the earth, the world moving beneath her, and she knows she’s still alive.
She isn’t afraid when she loses sight of the path, when the light fades, and the only thing she can do is keep walking. She knows, eventually, she’ll end up right back where she was. Right where she needs to be.
So she walks. And walks. And walks.
The air gets cooler. It carries the heavy smell of wet leaves and old earth. The only sound is the occasional light landing of a falling leaf. There’s no birdsong, no skittering of frightened little rodents moving from shelter to shelter.
Just her.
It’s odd to be so utterly alone. She feels like there’s both more and less than her. Her mind feels larger than her body, and her body feels smaller than the world. She imagines her shadow stretching out from her body, forever and ever, wrapping around the world like Jörmungandr.
Eventually, she finds the playground. She always seems to. There’s countless other places in these woods, once-human settlements left to the claws of the natural world. Her siblings find those places with ease. But Ruby always seems to end up back here, again and again.
Here the sky is black. The red paint is peeling. The wood’s bleached white. Here the rusting bones of the playground call out to her. The rot invites her in. She could stay here, among the dead metal, until her bones join the wreck.
But her siblings would get annoyed with her for running off and missing dinner. And her teachers would get on her case for not turning in her homework. And of course her grandmother would worry—not like she has anything better to do in her claustrophobic little cottage than worry all day.
She sighs, feeling the air as it moves out of and into her lungs. Out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she can see someone watching her. Halfway swallowed by trees and shadow, haloed by smoke. Slouching slightly, hands in their pockets. The red light of a cigarette, sending white smoke against the black backdrop of their silhouette. She freezes, staring at this figure standing in the trees. But then a twig snaps behind her and she turns around to see a familiar girl in a white dress, smiling and holding out her hand.
Back to the path. Back to the city. Back to lights and whispers and counting down the days until her girlhood ends.
Day Seven: Free Day!
Ginger admires the bloody topography of their skinned kneecap. A worthy war wound, and it doesn’t even hurt. Well, it does, but only a little.
They stand back up, dust themselves up, and let out a glorious howl to the sky. The wind tousles their hair as they push their feathers back into place and prepare to run again. They bounce on their heels, taking in a gulp of earthy forest air.
And they run.
Trees and flowers rush past. The dirt presses into their feet as they laugh and roar against the rushing wind. They imagine the cold weight of a stolen crown in their hand, the fading cries of the palace guards trying and failing to keep up with them. A peerless thief, fleeing the scene of the crime with a priceless—possibly enchanted, possibly cured, possibly both—artifact.
They feel the endless freedom of the forest.
And then they slam head-on into a yelping, sister-shaped roadblock.
“Ginger!” Carmen gasps, and Ginger, prone again, feels an odd sense of pride that they clearly knocked the wind out of her. “Ginger, you little freak, what’re you doing out here?”
“What are you doing out here?” Ginger counters as they stand up. “It’s not even your turn to go to Grandma’s.”
Carmen doesn’t answer, becoming very interested in scrubbing the dirt out of one of her heels.
Heels. Honestly. Carmen’s not made for anywhere wild. She staggers to her feet and stares daggers at Ginger.
“Honestly, can’t a bitch get ten minutes out in the woods by herself? How small is this place that I run into you, of all people?”
Carmen runs a hand through her hair, pulling out a twig and snapping it between her fingers.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Ginger says. “Why are you out here? Why aren’t you shoplifting at some dumb mall or something like that?”
“Okay, first of all, that was one time,” Carmen says. “And second, who made you king of the woods? Why do you get to say who comes out here and who doesn’t? Maybe I like the quiet. You don’t know. You’ve never been quiet in your life.”
“Warriors aren’t quiet,” Ginger snaps. “Warriors make their presence known.”
“Do warriors also blunder into their sisters while running like maniacs through the woods?” Carmen sneers.
“It’s called a tackle, dummy. You shoulda been watching your six.”
“My six?”
“You know,” Ginger replies. “Your, like, back or whatever. It’s a military thing.”
Carmen laughs. Ginger flinches instinctively, but the look on Carmen’s face is more fond than dismissive.
“You’re so weird,” Carmen says, shaking your head. “Besides, you hit my side, not my back. So I should’ve been watching my nine.”
Now it’s Ginger’s turn to laugh.
"What?" Carmen asks, half defensive, half amused. "It's like a clock, right? So my back is my six and my side is my nine."
"Whatever, dummy," Ginger says. "I'm gonna go find more pebbles." They pause. "You can come. If you want."
Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Why'd they even say that?
But instead of laughing in their face and strutting off, Carmen just shrugs and says:
"Sure, why not? Got nothing better to do in this grubby place."
They go to an unfamiliar place, an odd little bend in the trees that leads to a long-dry creek bed. The stones are smooth, despite the long absence of the water that made them so. They shine dully in the late afternoon sun. Ginger fishes out the choicest river rocks while Carmen points out the ones that look like butts. Ginger finds one, a dark, almost purple rock in the rough shape of a heart, and finds themself shoving the rock into Carmen's hands.
"Aww, Ginger," Carmen says. "Ya big sap."
"Shut up," Ginger says, turning from Carmen to hide the smile on their face.
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