ghost party!

The meaning of it hadn’t hit Puck quite yet as he sat there, boredly thumbing through his welcoming gift. It’d been a good few months since he had arrived here and the book about technologies and the like had barely been touched, only getting a few pages in each time he picked through them. Usually, he’d just get confused, tired, or distracted, his mind wandering towards other activities within minutes.

Today it was a headache that stole his attention. 

A fog filling his focus and vision as the words before him blurred and twisted away from his understanding. That was fine, the headache sucked but it was fine! The book was abandoned on the floor as he slumped backward, the palms of his hands pressing into his eyes in a feeble attempt to soothe the rolling pain boiling through his skull. The lack of feeling, physical anyways, was what he missed most out of everything since his arrival. Sure, sure, it was nice being kind of alive again, to walk and dance and have a weight and be able to press his hands against something and have it push him back. In the oddest way… he missed being dead.

The swelling ache in his head took over his thoughts again, a sharp stab earning an annoyed groan in response. And then came that click. After smashing it against every other possible entry, that block finally found the right hole.

The bitter taste in his mouth hit before it all fell into place.

Dinner at home, he’d promised to hang out with his friends that day… maybe skip town for the weekend? Puck could see her, blurry in his mind, blocking the door and calmly asking him to at least stay for dinner. The quietness in her voice, in her attitude, wasn’t scary, it was the last warning to stop pushing back before the horror show began, so he’d relented. Dinner, a meal with his family for the first time since he was in middle school, Lucy, the somber smile on his mother’s face as his father began coughing, running. It was a blur before his eyes. The final moments, hands clutching the gate as he begged whatever was out there that someone would see him, that he would get up and open the gate and get help.

That he wouldn’t die here alone.

A wet warmth began to spread across his palms as everything crumbled around him, leaving only the churning horror and illness in his stomach. It’d been so long since he’d thought about the constant unease in his gut, the tightness that would cover his throat like a soggy blanket when he wasn’t thinking about it during trips into town, watching others eat.  The feeling was one of the last reminders of what he was here, working body or no. Sickness was his only clue to how he’d passed, his one hint to the mystery that he never bothered to solve.  

The world outside him was burning, crumbling, places where he’d visited now reduced to rubble. Who cared about any of that anyway? Pucks world had ended decades ago, and it was buried right next to where he should be in a grave he’d never see again. A grave on a planet he probably wasn’t on anymore, and no amount of wishing would let him go back there to cry and cry and cry.

So he’d have to make do, on this couch, in this home that never felt like home.