lost saints | twilight universe (ON HOLD INDEFINITELY)

1. DEEP BREATH.

ALIVE - PELORUS

"I WON'T SLEEP UNTIL DAWN / I JUST CAN'T HELP IT"

***

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS Soleil Jimenez was told after she arrived in Sitka, a "nugget of gold" supplied by a middle-aged waitress at her Aunt Luisa's favorite cafe, was to never go into the woods by herself. The woman had raised a pair of badly-drawn eyebrows dramatically, and had proclaimed that there were worse things than brown bears and cougars behind the hiking trails.

    But from her vantage point in the middle of a foggy muskeg clearing, sat cross-legged on a decrepit wooden stand and watching the early-morning storm clouds trace designs on the Three Sisters' jagged peaks, Sol couldn't imagine anything more peaceful than this. She'd long since decided that early mornings spent on Indian Run Trailhead, accompanied by a thick brown parka and a giant thermos of coffee, were the best way to prepare herself for what she considered to be the most dangerous aspect of her life: other people. I'd take lions and tigers and bears over humans any day, Sol thought somewhat acridly, checking the time on her phone to see if she could scrounge up a few more minutes before she was officially late. She had a solid seventeen minutes to hike back the ¾ of a mile to her car, unless Sol wanted to crack her bumper on a poorly-shoveled bank of dirty snow in one of the forgotten parking lot corners.

    With one last gaze at the pretty sight in front of her, Sol picked her way back to the dirt trail and began the hike down to Hell.

    If she was being honest, Sol was a bit melodramatic in her constant comparison of Sitka, Alaska, to purgatory. About ninety-two miles away from Juneau, with a total eighty-four days of meager sunshine, Sitka was about the opposite of Hell, appearance wise. It's 8500 people were either isolationists or long-time tourists, both only slightly nosey and almost always kind. Sitka High, populated with 356 teenagers all together, was bored and underfunded. It most definitely could have been worse; it had been much, much, worse, back in Austin. None of these factors would stop Sol from whining to herself, of course. Would she be a typical teenager if she weren't mad at life?

She emerged from the thick brush to the empty parking lot, occupied only by her chipped-cherry 1986 Rabbit. It'd been a fixer-upper when her mother had bought it in Washington, and had been passed first to her brother Gat and then to Sol. Needless to say, she was attached... she'd taken the time to haul it via ferry to Sitka's tiny ports, and had spent more than it was worth at the mechanics.

    Inside the car, Sol turned on the heat and sucked down the last few drops of caffeine she would need for her day. A combination of coffee and nature almost always stopped the nerves and jitters, but it was the first day back from winter break and she felt like she was scraped raw and starting afresh. They'd warned her that it would be like this, they really had, but Sol's insistence that everything could be normal prevented her from actually acknowledging anything, ever. So Sol had spent all of break holed up in her room, screwing up her sleep schedule and clawing her way through a thick stack of books and records to occupy her time, effectively erasing most of the progress she'd made. If four months in Sitka hadn't reverted her back into a social butterfly (or a normal human being at all), then she reassured herself that it wouldn't change anything anytime soon. Sol pumped the clutch and twisted her key in the ignition, the local college alternative station beginning to play softly in the background as she pulled out of the lonely parking lot.

    As much as Sol liked to imagine that her early-morning forays into the woods by Halibut Harbor were dangerous and adventurous, there quite frankly was no "danger" or "adventure" in Sitka-- one of the main reasons her mom had shipped her off. It was a mere two-minute drive to school from the trail, and everything else was within a five mile radius; her house, Sitka Community Hospital, and the studio. Her life was confined to a five mile radius. And the worst part was, Sol didn't know whether or not she preferred it that way.