SMP Oneshots

The Wood [ lc ]

hey, it's spooky time!  so i wrote this in celebration! i really love how this turned out and it's probably now one of my favorite things i've written :) i hope you all like it as much as i do!

main focus: cooper

tw: a corpse is talked about, slight body horror at the end
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Cooper didn't know what he was for a long time. His parents just thought he was a weird kid, and for a long time he figured that was probably the case. It was only until his Senior year did he start to wonder if that wasn't the case.

He had been in class, upset about something the teacher had said. He wasn't paying attention, just wanting his teacher to shut up. That was when his teacher had stopped mid sentence, as blood started to freely flow from her nose. He didn't know he had done that at the time, in fact he just figured that it had just been a weird occurrence. Cooper forgot about it, and didn't think about it until one night when he was extremely overwhelmed.

The kind of overwhelmed that makes it hard to breath and your vision shake. The feeling kept building and building, and then suddenly it was gone as every single light in his house was shattered. It had rightfully freaked him out, making him feel just even worse than he already was. But it was growing increasingly clear that whatever that was, he did it. Days later, he tried channeling the same energy into a new light, one he had bought at a store when trying to replace all the others. The same results.

Cooper didn't have a name for himself until years later, when he moved out from his house. He was out of school and no longer in contact with his parents, so he no longer had any reason to stay. He didn't tell anyone where he moved, figuring it would be hard to justify why he had moved to literally shack in the woods. Even now it was hard to justify it, but everything in the city was loud, people moved too fast. Nothing lasted. He needed to get out.

Besides, don't most Witches live in the woods?

Making lights explode wasn't the only thing he could do, as he later discovered. He wasn't a healer by any means, but he knew how to make pain fade for a bit, until you were able to get actual help. He also knew where plants would best grow, though he found that ability to be more of a nuisance. He couldn't walk anywhere without his mind screaming that the spot he was standing would be perfect for marigolds.

There were others around him, living a few miles in any direction you chose to walk. Some were Witches, willing to swap stories and make the occasional trade. Cooper was probably closest to the two that lived on opposite sides of him, with him sitting in the middle. Names weren't something that you gave out in the Woods, so making "friends" really meant finding the people who lived closests and hoped they weren't assholes. Cooper supposed he got lucky.

The one living on Cooper's right specialized in 'growth'. Cooper had asked he would be so focused on plants, which caused him to laugh, a sound Cooper would compare to a goose. He told Cooper that he was thinking too small, that 'growth' could mean growing plants, but it also could mean getting taller, getting closer in a relationship, even helping a limb grow back if wanted. They didn't talk much, but Cooper did find himself enjoying the times they did.

The one on Cooper's left liked poisons, a strange thing to like for a Witch. In fact, Cooper wasn't even sure he was Witch, but with the amount of things he could use to kill him with, Cooper never asked. Despite the deadly hobby, he was quick to make jokes, almost always able to get at least a small chuckle out of Cooper. He was kind whenever Cooper came by, though Cooper tended to avoid his home. The reason being not because of poison or the threat of death, but because he couldn't stand sitting through an hour of kazoo 'music' every time.