🏹👑 Rookvil Collection~

gone when i call your name (vdc - rook)

It’s early in the morning when he wakes up — a usual practice, even as he slips on his boots, and checks the time. The others might be sleeping right now, but it’s a good time for a workout, a quick run, as he sits on the edge of his bed and contemplates going out.

Non.

Non?

No; he’ll be responsible today, as he heads down the stairs, pressing his ear against every door he passes that remains closed to a supposedly occupied room. Except he hears no breaths, no quiet sighs of Jamil (even in slumber), no ramblings of faint Harveston accent, no Deuce wriggling in sleep or Ace almost complaining with each of his breaths.

More importantly, no sharp, evenly paced, quick breaths. No breaths of someone awake and panting from a morning run, or a nimble runthrough of their VDC dance, or faint audio he can hear and has been hearing, playing their piece from someone’s phone at minimal volume.

They must be downstairs, he concludes, when all he hears is the snoring of the cat-weasel monster and the human prefect, who sleeps quietly, peacefully, unmoving and unspeaking. Maybe they did something again last night, those poor first years, and Roi d’Or would have tried defending them, and what a sleepless night it must have been.

And…  

…He must not have slept well, either.

He creeps downstairs — a task proven difficult by the creaky floorboards the more he approaches the ground floor, weathered old wood barely holding together. The stairs might have betrayed him if he were not this careful, shifting his weight with each step, and this shall suffice as his morning workout, his muscles freshened as he stands in the so-called lounge of Ramshackle dorm, sitting onto a moth-eaten sofa.

It takes him two seconds to realise how easily he’d reached the furniture. Without stepping over immobilised bodies, without having eyes watched him as he made his way, unobstructed.

He realises, a little too slow, that the floor is empty. That the lounge is empty. That there are no punished stragglers shivering on the unheated floors in Ramshackle dorm, without a blanket or a rug. He realises he hears no grumbles as the curse wears off slowly, approaching the dawn hour, grumbles about this punishment they so loathe, so despise.

Did they sneak out? — His heart beats twice as fast for them. If they were found out, in any way, it would be dire for them. A whole day of relentless cleaning, on their knees as they wipe the floor and their sweat from it, as they force their backs straight wiping water off full-length panes of glass and windows. It’s a common punishment in Pomefiore, training muscles with the vigorous nature of scrubbing, and disciplining the mind with the mundane circumstances of the situation.

But dawn draws nearer, and he worries. A hunter does not worry, a hunter knows, but this he does not know: why the floor is empty and the dorm is empty and there's just no one else.  

A hunter hunts, but a hunter also waits, so he waits, every muscle tensed and every brain cell thinking of the outcome he's going to see, the situation he'll have to mitigate.