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))