THE KIDS AREN'T OKAY , applyfic

001. tell me a story about how it ends

When Alia Dean entered the forest behind her house, the sun had not long since crept below the horizon as if it could hide away on the other side of the world, turn its face from the evening. Light faded away with the sun's passage, trailing from its shoulders like a gossamer cloak, pulled after it in its sudden escape. The days were stretching, like sleepers throwing off the fog of dreams, but they hadn't quite freed themselves from winter just yet, leaving early sunsets and precious hours of light.

The twilight haze was twice as dark between the trees, where the shadows loomed so long that they were almost all that was left, blackness stretching across the ground, long fingers of it reaching upwards along trunks, grabbing for slender branches. There was something even more beautiful about the woods in the dark, hills and trees blackened, winds fallen, dew beginning to settle on the ground, stars beginning to attempt to peek through the trees at happenings barred from even their sight. The daytime creatures fell asleep, their places taken by those of the night: owls and bats, badgers and foxes. There were even stories of wolves in the woods, though Alia had never seen one.

The air was crisp and cool, but had lost the biting edge of the true cold that had permeated the last few months. To Alia, the world felt like it had the expecting feeling often found in these moments caught between seasons, like it was shaking off the remnants of the previous one, not quite ready to burst into the next. A collective holding of breath. A not-quite-a-caterpillar not-quite-a-butterfly curled up tight, fresh new wings pressed up against the green stained glass of its chrysalis. A transformation, followed by an emerging when the spring could finally shake free, become the truest version of itself in all its glory. Alia loves her woods in spring — birdsong and young animals, wildflowers and new green leaves, everything reborn anew.

Now, as ever, the first breath she took as she stepped inside the forest is like her first. The air forever tastes pure, clean, scented by pine needles and rain, all the good, growing, living things intrinsic to forests, to places largely untouched by humans. The trees that had shed their leaves in autumn were beginning to wake from their winter sleep, sprouts peeked out shyly from bare branches, evergreen pines with their bristling needles and coarse bark also that much brighter with the lifting of winter. Beautiful.

When she was younger, before responsibilities — school and family and everything in between — stacked up like a tower of toy blocks built by a particularly malicious child, Alia had spent as much time as she could in between the trees. That hadn't changed, but as much time as she could was no longer as great a measure as it had once been. But back then, the forest had been a place of wonders — that was, once again, something that had not changed, of elaborate imagined adventures where the trees became castles, Alia a valiant knight perched high within their branches to watch for enemies, or princesses in need of saving. She'd collected dozens of treasures from within, piles of interesting pebbles still stacked high on the window ledges in her room, wildflowers pressed between the pages of books and the fragile, lacey skeletons of decayed leaves carefully propped up on shelves. The woods had not changed since then, preserved for eternity in more or less the same form, in the same way as sickly-sweet packaged treats that had no real expiration date, or mathematics teachers. Except far more pleasant and far less human. Alia, in contrast, had changed quite a bit since those early days.

Still, both then and now, it was the same thing she was looking for.

Normalcy, traded for mossy roots and lichen-speckled boughs, for symphonies of birdsong and the comforting hum of cicadas. A fairytale bargain, fitting, because to Alia, the forest had always felt like it had been ripped from a storybook. Within, time seemed to stretch out into long, still moments where everything and nothing happened at once, minutes suspended in amber, polished by time, for Alia to take out and admire later, turning them over in her mind as she would turn over treasured mementos in her hands.