@tcxastough : 🕆 / send 🕆 to catch Nick praying
‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒ This building used to be a house. Once upon a time, there were two people that came together & decided they’d have a family, & this was the house that they chose to live in while they raised their kids & dreamed of the future they were all gonna have together. It was a home, shared by those people, those lives.
There are traces still, centuries later. The ruined shell of the house, emptied of life but not of the traces of life, shows the touch of its last owners in abandoned furniture & dusty possessions, all where they would have been on that day. That fateful day.
An entire wall missing now, it’s easy to get inside, to sit on the edge of what was a floor while deep in contemplation about things that aren’t spoken aloud, looking from the ancient home to the bay sparkling down the street with unchanging ease, keeping all its secret knowledge about the broken neighborhood to itself.
Who got out, & who didn’t ? Did the family evacuate ? Do their descendants still walk the earth ? The water never tells. The detective can only piece together so much. There are no skeletons. There are no graves. These things happened a long, long time ago.
Valentine curls forward, his posture reverent. The ruins nonetheless feel holy to him, inspiring him ; not the same way he feels on entering the ancient churches but not dissimilar, either. Something unique, something deep, something intrinsic to the questions he has about himself & his very existence
It’s in such holy places he finds himself closer to God, spiritual in ways that are hard to articulate without careful thought. A feeling that taps into something innately human, or at the very least something that is by no means artificial, even though he & his body are..
He closes his eyes & clasps his hands together, fingers aligned. His lips move slightly, but the only sound to be heard is that of the waves, gently lapping at the rocks just the briefest of walks away.
