((Backdated to Jan 2nd))

It was quiet. Empty. Each footfall echoed in the bare loft where not a single piece of furniture or decor could be found. If it wasn’t built into the space or considered something of absolute necessity it did not exist. Nothing excessive. Absolutely bare minimum. Some people would find it thrilling maybe even refreshing to live bare minimum but this was beyond that and the young man standing in the middle of living space was anything but pleased.

Arms crossed over his chest, Rowan Cameron now known as Aelius Drayson, stood alone.

His life had been a whirlwind since the day of his corruption. Since then he’d been taken from one person to another to get his ‘new life’ all situated and set up. It had been difficult to be told that his life as he knew it was no more; That the people who knew him his entire life wouldn’t even recognize him. His mother and brother would never know what happened to him. His career, friends, belongings, money, all of it was completely out of reach now. Rowan Cameron was, in all intents and purposes, dead. That was a hard pill to swallow, but a pill that the negaverse had all but essentially shoved down his throat and told him to choke on.

Choke he did.

Everything about this was terrible. There hadn’t been a single silver lining on this black cloud. He lost everything he had loved and known and was given an empty loft with nothing but a thin mat for a bed and told he had to earn anything he wanted to have. Not an ounce of remorse, sympathy, or...humanity. It was so hard to cope with all at once. Being born with a silver spoon in his mouth had not prepared him for this.

In an effort to try and rid his mind of depressing thoughts the young man began to move through a few easy routines to warm his body up. Each step in bare feet was calculated, planned, precise, or it should have been. Each lunge, plie, extension just...didn’t feel right. It didn’t flow the way it should despite each effort to focus on what the muscles in his body were doing.

He collapsed to the floor one leg out in front of him the other bent to his chest as he leaned forward on knee with his arms and head. Frustration was abound.

His mind wandered as he sat there. It bounced and clung to different things. His mother, brother, friends, ballet, piano playing, random memories and then….the gap. The gap he couldn’t remember. How he ended up like this. What had happened? Why him of all people? And why was his last memories of Elex so shakey. What had they talked about that night on the pier? He remembered snippets of the conversation the most important being Elex confessing he’d been part of the negaverse. Had that meant anything to me then? Was it the lead up to my situation now? If so, where is Elex? What had he just dropped off the face of the Earth?

A hand hit the floor in an expression of his anger and frustration. He didn’t understand it and the missing puzzle pieces distressed him. Why was he forgetting? Was there something important there he needed to remember?

He wasn’t going to find that answer. Not sitting in an empty loft by himself,.
Standing abruptly he walked towards the door. A hand reached out for the knob and rested upon the fixture with no movement past that. Eyes stared at the front door as his hand remained statue-esque upon the knob. Where am I possibly going to go? Who am I going to run to? No one I trusted knows me anymore. Aelius Drayson is nothing more than a stranger to them all. I have no one.

The hand clutching the doorknob rose to brace himself against the door as forehead pushed against it. Grief of loss overwhelmed him as he cried for the death of the man he once was.

Happy Birthday to me.


WC: 690