Dust to Dust: Misery Loves Company 1
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Travis didn't believe in the world.
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There was no single thing that seemed so unbelievable, but too many times had he seen something that stretched his trust in reality. Where did the animals go when killed? There was no discernable reason for them to burst into shards of light and vanish, only leaving random bits of their body behind. Why did the adults fling their hands at the air, tapping away at nothing? They seemed sane enough to him, but they were obviously interacting with something that didn't exist. Travis at 13 years old was far cleverer than the people of the small village gave him credit for.
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He had asked his parents about it once, but his father had simply laughed and clapped him on the back, and his mother had silently downed another bottle of wine.
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Wine didn't last long in this household.
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It hadn't always been like this, it used to be a warm and happy home. All it took was a hard winter and a bad hunting season, and they were sunk into poverty. His older brother took it the worst, spending his time dallying and gambling instead of properly helping out. Always looking for the quick fix and never having it pan out, that was Travis' only elder sibling. But thanks to their hard working parents and some very small portions of food, they were able to scrounge up enough grub until the harsh winter was over.
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But his older brother's bets had come up fruitless, and now the hounds were coming to collect their pound of flesh. It didn't take long for word to spread in the settlement of a few hundred, and the debt collectors found their way to the happy household. A fight broke out in the small log cabin, and the older brother ran out the back and into the forest, never looking back.
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Travis was sent out of the room while the debt collectors talked to his parents, and when he mustered the courage to walk back into the room, nobody was there. Terrified and alone, he curled up in some animal hides and fell into a restless slumber.
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He was woken up in the middle of the night by the door banging on its hinges, two haggard figures stumbling through. Reaching for the knife at his bedside, Travis prepared to defend his home. That is, until the figures turned his way and made themselves known.
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His parents stared at him with dead eyes and flushed faces, obviously intoxicated to levels of nonresponsiveness. He had never seen them like this before, they looked dead on their feet. They slumped to the ground and passed out on the ground in front of him as if their strings were cut, and Travis retreated to his bed once more.
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Travis' parents weren't the same after that day. His father acted joyful, always having a kind word to say to anyone that would listen, but his eyes were dead. The mother of the household couldn't function without a bottle of alcohol in her system, otherwise she would break down crying for the rest of the day.
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Travis wasn't stupid, unfortunately. In the six months since the incident he'd often looked out into the forest and wondered if there was any chance, in this crazy unreal world, that his brother would walk back out of the forest and wave at him. It was just another day of looking out at the forest that his brother wouldn't return from that it happened.
Something caught his eye, movement in the treeline.
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A black wolf pup, limping its way through the underbrush, stared back at him. It's leg was torn up, as if something had dug its teeth in and done a number on it. The small animal was weak, close to death.
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Travis acted. He ran back inside and took one of his mother's countless bottles of alcohol and tore off the bottom of one of his father's pant legs, gathering a strip of fabric. A slab of meat went missing off the counter as well. A quick bite to the cork as he ran back outside and the bottle of liquor was open. The wolf pup looked terrified of the figure running towards him, but was too weak and tired to do anything about it. He simply squinted his eyes and waited for the end to come.
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A burning sensation spread over his leg, worse than the original teeth that tore it. The pup looked down, and saw the large creature pouring something on his wound and wrapping it in hide. The burning began to subside, and the wound felt clean. A slab of meat was presented to him, and a careful sniff was all he needed to know that it was edible.
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Travis guided the black wolf pup, feeding him the remaining bits of rabbit meat. The world might not be real, everything could be for nothing. His parents, real or not, didn't care about him, and he no longer cared about them.
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But as he looked down at the pup quietly napping in his arms, for the first time since his brother's disappearance, he wanted to believe.
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The lives of those broken by tragedy come together!
I've wanted to write this chapter for awhile now, glad that I finally got the chance to.
This isn't the last we've seen of Travis and the pup, don't worry!
Will update the regular chapter of Dust to Dust later today.
-Beel