No one knew how it ended up there, that naive little doe, placed at the center of the flames.
But call it fate, call it destiny—darling Bambi would burn, no matter how far from the fire she wandered. It would always find her, licking up her tracks, inching ever closer. And every time, without fail, the little doe would cry. Her wide, innocent eyes would brim with tears, her soft hooves scratching at the harsh, unkind earth below. She would scream, again and again, and then once more, a final wail before she collapsed, before her fragile legs gave out and she sank into ash, just like the forest around her.
Mama? Papa? Where were they? Had they left her to burn alone? Or had they been long gone, taken by the fire themselves? But it didn't matter now—nothing did, not in a world reduced to cinders. All's fair when everyone's dead.
Tomorrow, the sun will rise, and then it will fall. But Bambi will neither rise nor rest again, forever bound to the scorched earth where the flames found her.
♡₊˚ ・₊✧⋆⭒˚｡⋆
Fawn Osborne was a peculiar girl, with pale, curious eyes that seemed to see more than they should and a quietness about her that others found unnerving. Peculiar enough that Mr. and Mrs. Osborne, never seemed to know quite what to make of her. They would look at her across the dining room table or down from their leather-clad lounge chairs with a mixture of mild confusion and restrained disdain, as if wondering how she'd ended up there at all, sitting across from them with her odd little smile.
So they left.
At first, it was just a few trips, short ones they didn't think to explain to her—long weekends in Rome, holidays in Paris, occasional jaunts to Athens, then Delhi, then Kenya. They collected cities like others collect trinkets, postcards arriving weeks after they'd returned, if they remembered to send them at all. Fawn was an afterthought, wedged somewhere between flights and hotel suites, a brief interruption to be dealt with before they went off again. Even when they returned, it was only to unpack, to change, to leave again as quickly as they'd come. When they were home, they moved like ghosts, drifting through the house in languid boredom, as though waiting for something more exciting to take them away from her again. Once, they returned with a small gift—a tiny Eiffel Tower keychain they'd picked up from a street vendor. They tossed it her way without ceremony, not even looking to see if she caught it.
And Fawn, strange as she was, didn't mind. She watched them leave each time with a kind of distant curiosity, like watching a movie in slow motion, the characters never saying goodbye and never explaining where they were going. Sometimes she'd imagine what it must be like in those places, the wild colors of the Kenyan savannas, the sprawling domes of Istanbul. But more often, she would go about her days quietly, slipping through the empty rooms, filling the spaces they left behind with her dolls. Cinderella, and Ariel, then Cinderella dressed as Ariel, and then Cinderella, Ariel and Snow White all together at a tea party, and then Ariel dressed as Prince Charming.
Then, eventually, the Osbornes left one final time. They moved through Tokyo's gleaming towers, Seoul's sprawling streets, Barcelona's crowded plazas, and finally, they arrived in Sicily. Perhaps Sicily was a mistake. Mr. Osborne, as it turned out, had a problem, one that only seemed to grow with distance, an insidious anger that fermented with each drink he poured. Each city added another layer, a sharper bitterness, and with every glass of wine, every tumbler of whiskey, he seemed to drink himself deeper into something darker, something unreachable even to his own wife.
He drank and drank, filling himself with fury and beer and half-forgotten resentments that bubbled to the surface like something vile. Mrs. Osborne, for her part, was too weary to care. She had become an expert at slipping away when his eyes glazed over and the words turned sharp, at melting into the shadows while he ranted at the walls, the furniture, anything that might hold his attention long enough for her to vanish from sight. She abandoned him to the bottom of yet another bottle, each one heavier than the last.
The evenings in Sicily were warm, balmy even, with a sea breeze that swept in through the open hotel windows, carrying salt and the faint scent of citrus. But each night, their suite felt colder, darker, filled with words that would linger in the corners long after the echoes of his voice had died away. She would sit on the balcony, watching the stars blur into the inky horizon, leaving him inside to argue with shadows and slur through slurred words.
But on this particular night, she didn't have to.
For that night, as fate—or perhaps the simple recklessness of a man on his last drink—would have it, Mr. Osborne steered them off a bridge, right into the black, unyielding waters of the Sicilian channel. The fall was a short one, the splash quick, swallowed up by the silence that followed, a single moment folding into nothingness. There was no spectacle, no final words gasped into the void. Just the grind of metal, the brief gasp of air, and then darkness, pulling them down, down, down.
It was, Fawn would later think with a strange, hollow disappointment, an unsatisfactory death. If ever there had been a couple to merit a tragic, sweeping finale, it was surely the Osbornes. They had lived in bold brushstrokes, in packed bags and glossed-over goodbyes, in smoke-drenched rooms and heady nightcaps; they had never felt destined for something so still, so entirely indifferent. Yet, here it was—a final end delivered not with grandeur but with quiet inevitability. It wasn't even dramatic enough to make the news.
Somehow, the lack of theatrics made it worse. It was too clean, too forgettable—a small, unimpressive tragedy in an unmarked channel, claimed by water, swallowed by night.
One thing led to another after their death, a series of transactions, signatures, phone calls exchanged. With no one to dispute the matter, her uncle, whom she barely knew and who had visited their home only twice in her memory, claimed the entire Osborne estate without hesitation. It all flowed to him, the inheritance, the family home, the shares and bonds that Fawn had only vaguely heard her parents discuss in passing. And with her parents out of the way, he turned his attention to her, the peculiar girl who didn't quite fit into the family picture. He made arrangements to send her off, packing her away to a boarding school on the other side of the country, perhaps thinking that would be the end of her odd little presence in the family's affairs.
And then, that was it. She packed her life into two large suitcases, each one a mismatched collection of worn books, too-big sweaters, and trinkets she couldn't quite leave behind. When everything she owned was neatly folded and zipped away, she strolled to the kitchen and plucked two pink marshmallows from the jar on the counter, savoring the sticky sweetness despite the reprimanding looks from the maids, who reminded her it was far past supper.
She only half-listened to their scolding, drifting through the empty rooms until she found her father's, no now, her uncle's, record player, sitting silent and forgotten beneath a thin layer of dust. She set a single disk on the turntable, an instrumental of Tale as Old as Time, and let the familiar melody fill the room. She listened to it once, twice, and then a third time. It played for half a spin more, and then she reached over and switched it off, letting silence flood back into the room.
Fawn slipped the disk into her bag, took one last look around, and left, the soft click of the door closing behind her the only disturbance in the silent house.
♡₊˚ ・₊✧⋆⭒˚｡⋆
