Gone

Author: Seth

"Isn't it just typical that you never truly realize how much you cherish something until it's gone?"

Given the amount of time he'd spent around the odd panthryan, it wasn't a big surprise that whenever Shadow was out of his sight, Rai started to worry. One could only spend so much time around the impulsive girl before they too learned that an unsupervised Shadow was a disaster waiting to happen, and that there was a reason everyone at the Jericho Base always referred to the explosives cache in the past tense.

So, when Rai woke up only to find that Shadow was not in her room, he started to feel understandably edgy. The days in which he didn't have to spend half an hour convincing the girl to emerge from her strange tube of blankets could be counted on one hand, and he'd been given good reason to remember two of those days in particular, neither of which could have been termed 'positive'. 'Interesting' fit the bill much better, in a wonderfully euphemistic fashion, and he felt no compulsion whatsoever to label this day as such.

That nervousness increased steadily as he systematically made his way through the base and found that no one else had seen the cheerful dunce either. As his search continued to turn up no sign of Shadow, Rai's apprehension turned bit by bit to genuine worry for his constant companion.

As his fruitless hunt continued, Rai started to hear the distant murmur of Fate caressing the back of his mind, and he began to panic as that damnably relentless voice grew louder and louder with each passing moment. So caught up in his quest was he that Rai didn't notice the effect he was having on the other soldiers around him, his slight hysteria drawing them all into his frenzied wild-goose chase until the entire base was in an uproar.

Back in Shadow's room, away from the hubbub that enveloped the majority of the military garrison, a small spitz slept restlessly under the bed, unremarkable save for the blue that tinged its white coat. Yipping fitfully, it rolled over, oblivious to the world as it was jerked from dream to fractured dream, each one saturated with a lambent green.

The yelps increased in frequency as the clamoring multitude started to draw near, the small pup's reverie growing increasingly hectic until one voice, hidden in the thick of the maelstrom of words and sounds, reached her.

In the midst of the small dog's dreams that were as much hallucination as memory, a phantom hand descended on its head, giving her fur an affectionate ruffle, and the emerald tinged vision melted to soft, velvet black. Moments later a contented rumble permeated the room, drowned out by the ruckus just outside the steel door.