Somehow Mendson …. Err Rose expected laughter to erupt the second he heard his name, but he was left waiting. As he was ushered off the stage with all the chaos of people desperately trying to secure their place in the world.
Rose was just left there more confused more than anything.
Walking out of the stone dome was when Rose would’ve discussed what name he got with his friends… if he had any.
Lost, he wandered back into the busy atrium, as if trying to find some answers to the question he couldn't verbalise.
However, the air, alive with hubbub and chatter and excitement seemed refute Rose’s existence and his question.
As he stood feeling blank, he noticed, there was a boy going up to the pedestal. Rose recognised him, it was the same one that had called Rose a ‘loser’ a while back. They put their left hand on the naming stone.
“[Prisoner]”
He shakily walked down just in time to catch Rose’s blank stare with viscous glare right before Rose averted his gaze. Rose, not wanting to stand in the sights of a laser, promptly left.
Rose briskly walked back home, trying not to be buffeted by the sand blowing on him with an arm in front of his eyes, till a little ugly shack stood before him. He immediately started knocking on the door rapidly, but before he could get to his tertiary knock, the door opened.
“Did you get your name” It was his mother. She spoke in a tone spoken soft so that one could reasonably imagine she actually empathised with him.
Upon seeing him nod reluctantly, she turned around, a bit too quickly, to shout.
“MEND, HE GOT HIS NAME, COME OVER HERE”
It seemed that both his mother and his father weren’t at work…but he guessed his brother was.
“What is it” She eagerly asked, unable to prevent her own excitement from showing.
“Rose”
She smiled at him.
Rose nearly let out a sigh at that point. He had known his mother for his whole life, but he didn’t need 15 years of familiarity to see the face behind her botched look of encouragement.
In the silence that followed, the only sound Rose could hear was the whistling of the wind and the sound of thunderous footsteps so loud and excited they that only made Rose wince.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The footsteps stopped and Rose's father appeared behind his mother.
“what’s the name” His father
“…It’s [Rose]” she said abruptly like a cold wind that snuck under your windbreaker to give you a paper cut.
It took a minute before Rose’s father finally started laughing.
He was laughing at him, and she just stood there looking bitter or maybe she was looking at him with a bit of facsimile pity, either way it did nothing to soften the growing chorus of blades that ate at him in that loud cacophony of laughter.
His face felt hot.
“What… don’t look at me like that, what did you expect? Playing around with the dirt like a bloody beggar. Did you expect to get a surname?”
Rose looked yet somehow his mother still missed his eyes.
Rose turned around and left out the doorway.
He had ran away.
The weather was degenerating outside.
Sandy wind gripped and pulled at Rose’s short brown hair.
Before he could even collect his thoughts he found himself walking in a specific direction.
Rose was walking southward towards the desolate parts of the city, a part of the city which when actually looked at made could remind one how pretty much everything south of Darrowtown was just village and everything south of that was just ruin.
Vague lumps that once consisted of slum houses passed by Rose, becoming less and less likely to be inhabited as time went and as Rose strayed further from city.
He was going into the abandoned slums.
An almost archeological stretch of empty land that used to consist of an enormous slum almost an age ago.
Well, such things had nothing to do with Rose anyway...
Upon reaching the fourth bighest house from the southmost inhabited house Rose suddenly turned left and walked the house in front of him.
It wasn’t just any house, though, the house was green, at least from the inside, it was Rose's green house.
Rose didn’t know what people made this hut but there was something about the scraps that made up the roof and walls of that kept the sand out and protected the soil just right; all that despite it barely even having a roof and it just essentially being four walls of bricks (something still a miracle for a house found in the slums).
He moved aside the plank of wood he kept to cover the doorway, thanking it hadn’t been blown away again; a skeleton of a house was revealed. Parts the walls appeared to be made from actual real bricks, but majority of the four walls was fashioned from strips of plank wood and some corrugated light metal roofing nailed into the planks. Not very robust especially with the hole that Rose had patched up unsuccessfully with scavenged plywood. Regardless, the place was his.
Initially, however, the thing that attracted Rose was the thing he found there when he was loitering around the empty houses during a sandstorm- a lone plant growing on a seemingly random patch of dirt. Among the dusty grey and orange sandstorm the plant stood tall and heroic as if defiant to the ruin around him. A drab green shrub that seemed to have branches that seemed to curl and multiply infinitely the closer one looked at it. Maybe he just found it beautiful, but that was how he started to grow plants.
He walked to Darrowtown and bought seeds and initially all he could grow were those tiny succulents that he found in plant pots. That was a while ago and before he knew it, a garden sprouted from a patch of dirt in an abandoned house.
But as Rose stood there all he could see was the rose that he had just managed to bloom a few weeks ago.
“Damm”
He kicked it, it just swayed back as if nothing happened.