The door to the quaint little hut swings open without care or concern, slamming against the hard wall on the left and shattering a few more splinters off of it. The door itself already has noticeable cracks in it, enough to see the inside from out and the outside from in. Stitches steps in after abusing the wooden panel, soaked in rainwater and carrying a bottle in one hand. He hiccups and closes the door the other way. His eyes cleared the room then, seeing if anyone was squatting here in his squatting place. That would be wrong and rude of them, after all, and he doesn’t bother to lock this piece of real estate that he owns. Until now it was kept as his personal storage place for furniture he didn’t have space for in the large manor on the other end of the neighborhood.
He would be trashing his true home if he hadn’t loaned it to a friend for the time being. That friend had brought a woman there he had cared for, and when Stitches nearly walked in on them together, he decided to distance himself and simply reside here instead. Therefore, he only just started ‘living’ here, furniture that once was simply stacked in piles with boxes around them in the first room have been rearranged to assemble a partially sensicle room. It doesn’t make any sense, a dresser, a bookshelf, a chair and bench, but no table or bed. He smacks his lips and keenly observes the dust gathering on the different pieces of misplaced furniture. A woman, a man, a child, in fact anyone could do better than this at interior decoration. It’s not like he’s trying though, as he lifts the empty bottle in his hand up, flipping it upside down over his open mouth to try and get even a drop left of whatever was in it. He must’ve forgotten in his stupor the four or five times he did this on the way over. To be fair, it was difficult to tell with the rain.
Upon realizing finally that the bottle is truly empty, he angrily hucks it at the wall across from him, shattering it and adding more glass shards to the clutter around the entrance of the abode. Truly, this has happened before. He mumbles something that he doesn’t even understand and staggers towards the other room, the back room of the ‘house’, if one were to be kind enough to call this place such a thing anymore. As he stumbles drunkenly to the next room, a parchment blows out of it, and the sound of rain fills the air as he gets closer. He must’ve left the window open, causing the papers within to rustle and move, or even get drenched. He groans and rounds the corner to see the previously poorly stacked pile of parchments on the dresser to the right had since blown out into the room, lying everywhere. It looks worse than it likely is, but he doesn’t truly look at it yet, moving to close the window first, a wet spot covering the floor beneath it at that point, and plastering a few of those parchments to the floor at that spot.
Stitches looks around then at the paper coating the room, each with a face drawn on them. Some of them look childish, some middling, and some have gotten better in terms of portrait drawing skill. He doesn’t really remember drawing many of them, but he did all of them. He catches glimpses of these varying levels of skill that outline, detail, and define old friends of his as he nearly trips on his way over to the nightstand, which has a deep vase and a cup on it. As he lifts the vase full of dark red liquid to fill his cup, he spots a long legged spider with a tiny head struggling within the vat of alcohol. He sighs and dips his finger in it, rescuing the little thing, then struggling to set it gently on the nightstand without killing it, “Get…out…” He slurs before filling his cup and setting the vase down. Within a split second he devours the wine and slams the cup back down on the end table, narrowly avoiding ending the little life he just saved.
After this he flops onto the bed, the crinkling of paper can be heard beneath him. It seems as though the resting place was not saved from the flapping and stretched wrath of the pile of papers. He lifts his feet up and curls onto the bed, getting ready for what comes next, the inevitable sadness. As he ignores the pillows, the blanket, everything, he wraps his cloak around himself in a fetal position, and reaches his hands to grab a few of the parchments laying on his bed. There he looks at them, from one face to another, faces he doesn’t remember drawing, but certainly did. People he cared about, his friends, the people he harbored feelings for at one point or another, perhaps people he still does. He sniffs as his eyes start to water again. The alcohol actually doesn’t make it easier, but as he flips through each drawing he begins to weep. It starts with small, stunted sobs, and grows to a choking wail. In the moments he finds reprieve from his sorrow, he clears his throat enough to whisper, “There’s…something wrong with me…isn’t there?” He asks them pointlessly, before wiping his eyes with the other hand gently, “I hope whatever it is…it ends me before it ever becomes…of concern to any of you again…”
His whispers fall on deaf ears, ears that aren’t there. There in the dusty, messy, parchment ridden bed, he sobs himself to sleep, like he did the night before, and the night before that, and the nights before that. Countless nights before that and countless more to come.
