Chapter Text
Twilight Town had been your home for years. You knew the entire town like the back of your hand, since the day you could toddle you were exploring. Nestled into a corner of the tram common was the Twilight Town Clinic, owned and operated by your parents since before you were born. The day you turned thirteen, you were deemed old enough to help out around the front desk - which wasn’t much, since there was your older brother who actually did all the work then.
But that was before your brother moved out, going off to adventure elsewhere, and then it all fell onto you. Now you were fifteen, almost sixteen, and you sat at the front desk of your family’s clinic to help anyone get checked in and work with their paperwork and do anything and everything your parents wanted you to do.
That’s when you realized how lucky your brother was for getting out to do whatever . This was boring .
Life in Twilight Town was often quiet most of the time, and you were often holed up in the clinic during summers - summers where you could be out making friends and having everyday adventures with them. Your back would always end up aching from the uncomfortable office chair, and then by the time the clinic closed - there wasn’t much to do in terms of travel.
There was the Sandlot, where you could always Seifer and his little gang; there was Market Street, which - if you knew how to skateboard or how to ride a scooter or something - could be ridden down; there was the Tram Common, where the clinic was nestled in a safe corner and you honestly didn’t care to stay there for too long; and then there was Sunset Terrace, where you could sit on Sunset Hill and watch the trains go to and fro, or if the day was nice enough, you could read.
And that was everything you could really do for free, because as a fifteen year old kid, you didn’t get that much munny for your allowance; and as a kid who worked in a clinic all summer, you didn’t get that much time to go out and enjoy things. The trains for the beach had tickets that cost eight hundred munny a person, and snacks when you got there were more munny. Sure, you could save up - but then there was the problem of the fact that the last train to the beach often left right as the clinic closed.
So you resigned yourself to your work. You would spend your days filing papers and notifying your parents of patients and sometimes reading in between all of it. On sundays, you would wander the town and maybe bump into Hayner (who, you noticed one day, you tend to bump into a lot, as if destiny decided to put align your paths over and over), or you’d take the town line and go watch the trains come and go when you weren’t reading. This was your life. You didn’t have the power to change it - not at fifteen, not when you were dependent on your parents. When your brother had left, he’d been old enough to go out and do whatever he wanted.
So it appeared that you, in every form that you were, had resigned to this fate. Work, eat, sleep became your daily mantra, and sometimes ‘read’ or ‘paint’ or even the simple command of ‘breathe’ would slip in between and break up the schedule a little.
And then, as they always do in life, things changed. And oh, how they changed . For better or for worse… you could never be sure. But there was a single thing you were sure of:
Destiny had other plans for you.