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Adaine would never admit it. As much as she loved her friends, loved Jawbone, they wouldn’t understand, not really. Her friends might try and sympathize with her and Jawbone might try and talk her through it but it wouldn’t be understanding. She couldn’t not have somebody understand. Not for this. So she would never admit it. But sometimes, when the apartment was quiet and it was only her, awake in her thoughts, she missed it. She couldn’t even admit it to herself, but she missed it.
It was stupid, she knew. To miss a place that always felt empty, to miss people who never cared, to miss a life that hurt her far far more than it ever helped, and yet she did. Sometimes it was missing these people who raised her, these people who she yearned for their love, their approval for so long. Sometimes it was missing the homes she grew up in, the manor back in Fallinel, the pile of rubble just across town. And sometimes, she could admit these thoughts. These ones she knew were normal for people who moved out of the home they’ve known all their lives.
It was the other ones that crept up on her despite all her efforts (and boy did she make a lot of effort) that she couldn’t admit. It was the ones that whispered in her ear, filled her mind when her mind had nothing else to fill it, that she couldn’t accept. The ones that reminded her how simple it felt when all she had to do was please her never-pleased parents. The ones that told her how easy it was to know her place there. The ones that slithered up as she silently shook because this new home was so different and that was scary .
She would never know why it seemed easier to live in a home where she walked on eggshells than to enter this new one that welcomed her with open arms (and maybe her therapist would but that would require admitting these thoughts and she had already established how much of Not an option that was) but she knew she should feel bad about these thoughts. How selfish does she have to be to miss her old home when this new one was so kind, letting her in without another thought? How shameful does she have to be to take all this kindness and still let these thoughts appear?
(And something that her therapist said about the trauma of an emotionally abusive or neglectful home pops up into her mind but that thought stays buried too because abusive is still a hard word for her, even in her thoughts)
So these thoughts stay buried and she goes about her day not thinking about them, which is easy when you are a student at Aguefort’s Adventuring Academy with some of the most wild people as your best friends and the most insane events as your teenage life. And eventually her sophomore year is starting and she has her own tower and even if the thoughts still like to whisper at night, she’s gotta a metaphorical shovel ready to old fashioned bury them with.
And maybe the Nightmare King’s forest brought up a million other fears but it also brought her Aelwyn which is… strange. But that’s okay because she’s got her sister back and her sister wants to be her sister and now she’s got a roomie! A roomie, who she soon realizes, also understands. A roomie, who she notices has The Thoughts too (which is weird because she’s never ever been able to recognize what Aelwyn is thinking but it’s a look in her eye that somehow Adaine knows exactly what it is). A roomie who isn’t going to pity, or try to talk her through it, or do anything but understand. And so the next time the house is silent and it’s just her and her thoughts, a simple message cantrip makes it her, Aelwyn, her thoughts and Aelwyn’s thoughts which is. Specifically less lonely
So maybe she’s still burying some things, and maybe things like this will never fully go away, but she has a sister now. And together, maybe they can help the other a little bit farther than they were able to go on their own.