wearing thin — open

[LUCERNE.]

[align=center][div style="width: 430px; text-align: justify; font-family: verdana; font-size: 6pt; letter-spacing: 2.5px; word-spacing: 0px; line-height: 12px; color: #000"]Lucerne was once well acquainted with nightmares — his childhood was teeming with them. Monsters and tragedies that would have him wake up in a cold sweat, a baleful sensation that penetrated his bones. He could never escape from the feeling, left alone and awake in his bed as he’d force himself not to cry from the paralysing fear. Whilst monsters and tragedies in other children’s minds were fictitious and absolutely absurd, Lucerne had to come to accept that the nightmares would persist into the day time. After all, bottles being smashed and his father aggressively micromanaging every aspect of his life was a day time reality as well; his nightmares and reality were never really mutually exclusive.

As his age eventually caught up to a mind far beyond his years, the nightmares slowly subsided. Perhaps his father’s eventual death to his addictive personality had been the best thing to have happened to Lucerne for many years. He’d never get to see Lucerne finish medical school, or watch him follow the typical timeline of any less than average individual that he expected of Lucerne — find a well paid job, settle down and marry a soft spoken woman, and start a family by thirty — father never really knew a thing about his own son, did he? An asexual man who was married to his work.

Nowadays, father rarely crossed his mind. It had been quite some years since he had to bury him and, with that, it seemed as if he buried most of the nightmares that day, too. Perhaps the trauma would linger for many years more, an understandable result of the warping of a young and naive mind, and his struggle with substances would only continue to act as the only coping mechanism he knew to turn to whenever things began to spiral again. For now, he was in a good place, he’d readily admit to himself. He enjoyed the challenge of working in the clinic and rationing supplies, instead choosing to construct homeopathic remedies to the best of his ability to treat less severe cases and save the medicine for those who really needed it. Whilst he believed it would never amount to the true miraculous nature of science, it gave him something intriguing to investigate.

After spending much of the evening wandering the district in search of his independent hound, Faline, Lucerne enjoyed his walk before he would eventually return home to rest for the night. Addy had long accepted Lucerne’s less than ideal sleeping schedule, a man who sometimes wouldn’t sleep if it meant he could be doing something more productive with his time. Tonight he was more interested in finding his free-spirited sighthound, his roommate as he’d often call her. She’d not come home for dinner, leaving Lucerne to wonder where she could possibly be in that case.

Slowing to a stop, Lucerne quietly observed as he spotted Mickey smoking a cigarette by the dock, looking out across the moonlit sea. Barely understanding what Mickey was going through, Lucerne didn’t know what to do to support him. Hell, he barely considered that to be a possibility. It wasn’t an act of being so self-obsessed that he failed to see other people’s misery as much as it was an innocent failure to acknowledge another person’s feelings. It was always Lucerne’s greatest downfall; not realising that he was capable of helping until it was much too late. ❝ I would ask what possessed you to be wandering the streets at this time of night, but that would be rather hypocritical of me, wouldn’t you say? ❞ Lucerne pointed out as he neared his colleague and best friend, stopping nearby to look out across the dock. He’d say nothing more, trying to gauge the situation silently.