Common

(cw for drug mentions, as well as references to/depictions of drug addiction)

Nearly a year ago, Valentina's sire had spirited her away, along with whatever fistfuls of his many scattered children he could snatch up after her, and at first she had seen nothing wrong with it. This was an adventure, and she was a lanky, half-grown filly perched right at the sweet spot between old enough to find her mother's embrace uncomfortably tight where it had once been warm and young enough to leap blindly for the first path out of it without considering the consequences. Khajiit was always interesting, always gallivanting off to some great, unknown place at a moment's notice, coming back sun-warmed and smelling of new, exciting things.

She wanted so badly to be a part of it. Catalina would tease her with stories of her own travels with the pale Marwari stallion, dangling that closeness with their shared father over her head, and Tina burned with bitter jealousy every time. Going from Atlantis to Salem, following him around the Hills... it wasn't the same. Her older sister had gotten to have her Daddy all to herself, while she'd only ever had to share him. And if there was one thing she hated, it was sharing.

She had been the first of his children to gather, and she thought it meant she was the most important. But then he brought on more half-siblings, some of them as old as Cat, and he gave them authority over the rest of the group, not her. No longer was she his bravest warrior, his compass rose, his sole light in the ever-encroaching darkness. Now she was "too young," "inexperienced," "foolish." The days turned into weeks, which turned slowly into months, and as her second birthday came and went and the glimmer of her childhood admiration faded into cold, hard truth, she saw him for what he was: a silver-tongued narcissist on a drug bender, nothing more.

Well, she was tired of it. Tired of spending her days scrounging for food and her nights standing guard while Khajiit dozed in a chemically-induced stupor. Tired of watching her siblings fall away, one by one, as budding realization or poor, cruel luck threw them to the winds, and being unable to do anything to corral them, or even to make him notice their absence. Tired of being a side character in her father's story when she was meant to be the protagonist of her own.

So she left, striding off from the green-smudged creature's side one early autumn day. She didn't yell; she didn't say a word. That thing she was abandoning, whatever it was, was not the Daddy who'd promised to take her to the moon, and it deserved neither the fire in her heart, nor the comfort of its warmth. Valentina breached the shores of the Crossing, feeling like she'd fallen back down to earth, and when the light of dawn broke the horizon she rose with it, moving due south at a brisk, determined clip.

She knew exactly where she wanted to go, and that was Salem, the red hard-packed dirt of the Hills in particular. It was where she'd left her mother, and where she hoped to find her still. Valentina needed to see her; to feel her dark gaze burning her flesh. To hear her sharp Spanish words of reprimand flowing like lava in her curved ears. To melt into her embrace once more, awash in the clove-scented, barb-filled sort of love only Switch knew how to give, and to tell her that she was right, and that Valentina was sorry.

Nothing would steer her from her destination, so sure was she of the path ahead - nothing, that is, except for an interestingly-colored butterfly... or an easily-eavesdroppable argument between nearby strangers... or the rules of the lands on which she now made trespass, slipping out into the frost-laced grasses of the Common with reckless abandon, blissfully ignorant of the ease in which it all could change.