Arrow Lake the sprinklers came on and doused me

this is technically a RO, but others are welcome to put a one-post reply in acknowledging. i'll archive in a week or so. <3

Little Stag had gone through changes.

These were not the changes typical of a four month old cub, an pre-pubescent, a child. They were not the changes typical of growth or development, either. They were the changes typical of formulative trauma, of early childhood traumatic stress; Stag had lost his father.

He was just a child. He had no experiences to draw back on, no support to knowingly turn to. He knew his father had died, and was not coming back... and that was just about all Stag knew at the present.

He did not cope well.

Stag had been the first of his kin to come to the scene, serving witness to a harrowing visual no child should ever lay eyes upon. His father, the gaping hole of his throat, the baptismal of endless and scattering blood. That image, of Stigmata -- gums transfixed in an eternal grimace of death, throat black and bloody, body marinating in its own produce -- that image seared permanently in the young child's brain.

REGRESS.

He could not escape it.

First to come in a long list of inept coping mechanisms was Stag's voice. God only knew -- Diasporans only knew -- the child was capable of speaking; yet, in the days that followed the wells that formed his throat ran dry.

REGRESS.

He lost his appetite.

REGRESS.

Stereotypies as they are called, have a strange way of manifesting -- often they are behavioral quirks meant to help the victim cope -- and often enough, they permanently install themselves in the way the victim behaves; they lay the foundation down for future interactions cable by cable, synapse by synapse, neural pathway by neural pathway. Until at last the user's brain is permanently rewired, and that behavior becomes their eternal default.

Stag knew none of this. He knew only his father was dead (how could a figure so permanent, so mainstay in his life, be there one day and the next gone forever?). How could the fundament, the sole pillar of his early existence, be suddenly taken from him -- and Ego too? What was he to do, with nearly half his family plucked from him, his routine shaken up and dumped upside down, his life in total disarray?

REGRESS.

And would he always feel this way?

He was sullen with his mother. He would snap easily; particularly at @Monarch or @Mesa. Any intrusion to his suddenly ever-widening space bubble was met with a show of teeth that often followed all-out total warfare. If Stag, first of Stigmata's litter, still lurked in the corridors behind those drawn and dark eyes, it was not immediately apparent.

He also scarcely knew how suddenly his claws had been bitten to nubs, the quick often exposed and raw; (had i done that?), nor how the callouses of his paws had been chewed back to pinkish-mauve speckles.

REGRESS.

Then came the compulsive visitations to Stigmata's grave, as if by dragging his wounded feet to the altar of his deceased father he would somehow bring the blood back into Stigmata's veins. As if, if he stood a moment longer, gazed sorrowfully a minute more -- maybe the basilisk's features would break from the mist to Stag's relief, and prove to him this was all a vile nasty dream..

Yet the form of his father did not materialize, either from the rolling fog nor the quiet, indifferent earth.. and Stag was left staring as the fog rolled by, a soul adrift without the guidance of his father. He thought of running, running until maybe it was all different -- running until his troubles and demons were all far behind.

((EGRESS))

How do you deal with loss when you've never lost anything before? Mesa had lost some things before; spars, games, his favorite stick. He could always go out and find a new one to replace the old, or challenge a sibling to a new game, goad someone in to a tussle if his energy needed to be burned off. Nothing compared to the loss of someone like Stigmata.

Stigmata. The thought of him summoned a mix of emotions to the back of his throat, sort of like indigestion. The reality of the situation had not settled in the boy's mind yet, but he knew that something had changed. Stag had become despondent - he refused to participate in any games, and kept to himself, and didn't even fight over the bones Mesa often touted. At first this was fine. At first, it made the boy feel like top dog. If only dad could see him now! So fierce that nobody would dare look his way!

That, of course, brought the feeling back. The twisting gut, the thick bile at the back of his throat that felt like it would burn right through him. The hollow feeling in his chest - a yearning. Mesa tried to make things right again: he acted as if nothing had changed, because for the boy nothing had. He convinced himself that their warlord of a father wasn't gone gone. Just around the bend - or over a ledge - he was around here somewhere. He had to be.

Mesa tried to make things right again. Make them normal. He hoarded toys, trailed his siblings. Tried to entice Stag in to a fight if it would help at all, but was only met with teeth; it didn't feel like a game. It felt like the last straw. Mesa had lost a father too, and didn't know how to deal with it yet - but he was also losing a brother, and... Was it something he could prevent? Something he could fix?

The boy trailed his brother after that. He wasn't a subtle boy, but managed well enough. Everyone being distracted by their sorrow as they mourned the loss of their leader - it was easy for Mesa to focus himself on to this new task. He bore witness to the changes in his brother; the lack of an appetite, the gradual lessening of energy, a look so lost that Mesa thought, more than once, that he didn't recognize his sibling at all.

But he couldn't always follow him. Sometimes, when Stag visited a particular part of the mountain, Mesa could go no further. He wanted to be present for his brother. They were a unit - the entire litter, formed together, born together, trained together with Stigmata as their commanding officer. Diaspora was calm but the members of his family were facing their own internalized battles, and Mesa... he wasn't trained for this. He was afraid to touch the ground where his father had landed.

So he hung back.

He waited. He gave his brother space, when maybe he should have done more.

She was unprepared for this. Taki was no stranger to great loss; she had lost family before—had lost an entire home to the visciousness of mother nature. But this was different. Her despair was deepened exponentially by the fact that she had to watch her children suffer from something she couldn't shelter them from. How could she possibly replace their father? She couldn't, and she wouldn't want to. But how could she fill that void in their life? She would do literally anything to turn back time, would give her own life in exchange for the life of their father, but that was impossible no matter how many times she offered it to whatever powers governed their fates. 

She felt helpless as she watched her children deal with a grief they were far too young to process. Stag seemed to be a completely different child. He wasn't playing or speaking or eating, no matter how hard she tried to get him to do anything. He seemed lost in his desolation, and she didn't know how to pull him from the depths of his dark and poisonous anguish.

And Monarch was so very angry. She accepted no offers of comfort or distraction, lashing out at anyone who tried to interact with her. And when she wasn't consumed with rage, she seemed to be in the grips of a deep depression, sleeping for long periods of time in the place where her father had met his gruesome end.

She worried about Mesa just as much even though he appeared to be going on as normal. But that was what had her concerned. He acted as if nothing had changed, and she feared he was just choosing not to deal with his feelings regarding the untimely and traumatic loss of his father. Whether or not it was conscious on his part, she wasn't sure, but it didn't seem like a healthy way to deal with things.

Ego's disappearance had been an additional blow. Once again, she found herself endlessly searching for missing family, constantly wondering if they were even alive. But this time, it was her son, her child that she was supposed to protect. She felt like part of her was missing right along with him, and she knew that hole would remain until the day she saw him again. 

And after all of that, there was hardly anything left in her to deal with her own grief. Sometimes, she was overcome with anger that fate had dealt her family such a hand, but mostly she was just overwhelmingly and hopelessly sad. She was so tired of losing her loved ones.

She visited Stigmata's grave often, partly because she was searching for some way to still feel his presence and partly because she knew she might find at least one of her children there. As always, she was assaulted with flashes of memory when she first arrived. Particularly, she was forced to recount Stigmata's bloody lifeless form and the way her daughter clung desperately to it. And whatever child she found there, she would sit quietly next them for as long as they would allow, hoping to at least make it known that she was here and understood how they felt. She didn't know if it was helpful or right, but it was all she could think to do.