Livia Kious : D4 : FIN

My uncle has a little shop right by the shore. There's a billion and one shops by the shore, and his is nothing special. But it's where I spend all my time. If you walk in through the peeling white wood door, you'll see me right behind the counter with my feet kicked up. Sometimes, I'll ring a customer up, if I can find the energy to. Most of the time, I just yell for my uncle to come do it.

I really don't do much. Sometimes, I even forget to eat, leading to me being so skinny. Although I'm skinny, there aren't any bones jutting out or anything. I'm a softer sort of thin. My pale skin is splattered with freckles from head to toe. Even on the eyelids guarding my icy blue eyes, you can find clumps of freckles. They start to disappear past my forehead as my hairline begins.

Everything about me is pale, more pale, and even more so pale. My skin, my eyes, even my hair. It's near platinum, waving down right onto my collarbone. It's not the most...well kept, shall I say. It's sort of a mess. I find myself accidentally catching strands in my mouth from time to time. Sometimes my hair even sheds, down onto my clothes (that are not so clean either). Appearance has never been something I really care about.

I can't remember the last time I recently really cared about anything, really. I'm apathetic about most anything. I should really be in school, but I haven't been in... maybe three years? I was offered career training, but I didn't care about that either. My uncle technically has me working in his shop, but I don't do anything besides "watch the counter" (which I barely even do). There isn't anything that I consider valuable or important in my life.

I suppose I'm just a 'go with the flow' kind of person. Like, whatever happens happens. I can't change the course of my life, and I won't even try to. People who think they can change their story are just plain delusional. There's a big government building that controls how each of our lives go, and I'm not going to make any move to go against it. I've seen what happens to the people who do.

My brain probably wasn't screwed on right. I forget things constantly, even while I'm in the middle of doing them. Like, say I'm writing a letter. I'll just drop my pen in the middle of writing and forget what I'm even doing. Why am I writing a letter? Who is this supposed to be addressed to? I suppose this is why my uncle can't trust me with much besides watching the counter. But let's face it- if he entrusted me with anything else, I probably wouldn't do it.

This part of the shore has been my home for my whole life. It was our own little triangular neighborhood. My parents had the house on the first corner. When my sister, Gwendolyn, was old enough, she moved into the house on the point. My uncle's always had his shop on the other corner, and his little apartment on the second story. There was a courtyard in the middle where we had a few wilting plants, and a fountain that my father installed. My sister was 10 years older, but she always stuck around to play with me.

Once upon a time, baby Livia Kious cared about things. She really did. She cared about the sunset and the fish by the shore and her parents and sister and uncle. When her sister got a girlfriend, baby Livia cared about her too. She thought everything would always be safe and happy, and nothing would ever change. Well, she was wrong. I was wrong.

My sister turned 18 and moved into the point house with her girlfriend, Rae. By then, I was 8, and my parents had taken to fighting more often than kind words. Gwen always welcomed me into her house when things were hard to take. While I laid in the spare room trying to sleep, I always heard them discussing things in hushed tones. It all seemed so urgent, but I never understood why.

By the time I was 10, my mother was gone. She ran off with a much younger man to a different part of the district. I wish she'd told me where she'd gone. I liked her much better than my father, who'd turned cruel since she left. Gwen and Rae helped me completely move into their house. Even though it wasn't but 20 feet from the house where my father was, I felt a thousand times safer. But my sister and her now wife's hushed whispers had turned into actual plans, with scattered papers and occasional meetings with strange people. They told me it was nothing to worry about, and since I was 10, I believed them.

This went on for another 2 years. A few months after turning 12, I woke to find Gwen and Rae gone. Their clothes and half the food supply had disappeared along with them. As I frantically searched the house for them, I found a note they'd tucked underneath their bed mattress. It was short and sweet- "Dear dear Livvy, we've sailed into the ocean."

After my father and uncle investigated, the Peacekeepers came. The note was ripped from my hand, and then they left. They just...left. I don't know what happened to Gwen or Rae. That day, every care that I'd worked up got up and walked away. Just like them. They left me.

My father left as well, shortly after. That, I was glad for. Of all the losses I'd dealt with in the past 2 years, this was finally one I could rejoice in. My uncle sold all the furniture from the other two homes before he burnt them down, and let me move into his apartment. I didn't leave the apartment for a good year. Once I finally emerged, my uncle tried to get me involved in his shop. If getting involved means sitting around at the counter forgetting my own name, I've done a damn good job.

codeword: odair
faceclaim: chanelle peloso