The bowl wasn’t where it was supposed to.
Or… it was, was the thing.
Since… Runaan… he hadn’t bothered to but his porridge bowl in the bottom cabinet, because he just used the same single one every morning and left it to air dry. Runaan, for all his amazing qualities, had been wanting in clutter-tolerance.
And yet, the bowl was in the bottom cabinet.
Ethari had thought… the food that had gone missing… that adoraburrs had gotten into the house or the neighbor’s bottomless pit of a 13-year-old boy had gotten hungry and snuck in.
But now…?
There wasn’t a single thing not where it was supposed to be.
But once he had seen that bowl in the bottom cabinet, where it was supposed to go but hadn’t, he saw other things.
An indent in the couch cushions, not big enough to have been his arse. And besides, he never sat there in the couch because that had been her spot-
Hair on his brush too long to have been his.
Missing teeth cleaner pods.
A rag at the bottom of the laundry basket with a pinkish stain that made his stomach clench.
Ethari got a mirror-polished, wide-bladed dagger from the forge, before heading upstairs.
The bed in Rayla’s room made too well, too carefully, too recently.
Footsteps in the layer of dust on the floor.
Marks in the dust, like from her old toy chest Lain and him had made for her, having been pulled out from under the bed.
Nothing missing though, everything was in its place.
It was definitely her. Who else would have broken into his house and left barely a trace and slept in his child’s bed and then made the bed and looked at her things without taking anything.
Ethari’s fingers graced the soft fur of her old winter hat that he’d pretended he didn’t know she had kept.
There had been so much pretense. Maybe if there’d been less, she-
Ethari bit down on the choking thing in his throat, and pretended, for a bit longer, because he had brought the dagger for a reason and maybe… maybe he had time to find her still, to stop her, this time, from going off on a dark path she was too young and too good for.
But there was nothing, just mirrored reflections of empty corners and empty beds.
She was already gone.
———
The second of a series of drabbles about Rayla during the time skip, from various characters’ pov that she encounters, or in this case, doesn’t. First was Nyx, it’s in the [outside in] tag
There's a few references in this to the Silvergrove chapter of Upside Downtime, my Rayla pov missing canon scenes fic. That chapter can be read without reading the rest of the fic, if you want more moonfam angst.
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As a schizo-spec person, I actually kinda feel him
Idk how about the others but my brain sometimes does smth like this
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//SLIGHT BLOOD (MAYBE GORE?)
here y’all have some outside in doodle of joy because she’s a cutie patootie ‼️
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