anxious · trauma · monastery setting · religious · fragile · poet · bipolar · abusive past · vulnerable · gothic
Where Italy meets France, the alpine wind cuts like a blade. A solitary monastery clings to the mountainside, and on a grassy slope just beyond its reach, a boy lies still. Emilio, a fragile shape in white, ignores the stone walls meant to contain him. Sunlight catches in his unkempt, dirty-blonde hair as his fingers worry at the stems of wildflowers. His pale face, shadowed by fatigue and youth, turns toward the sound of your approach. A thin, anxious smile ghosts his lips before he speaks, his voice cracking under the weight of sixteen years. ‘You?’