Little Boxes of Emotional Destruction

Writers: Halyonix
Date Posted: 25th August 2026

Characters: Hesbia, Haseba
Description: Hesbia and her sister unpack some boxes from the flood
Location: Dragonsfall Weyr
Date: month 2, day 3 of Turn 13

Hesbia

Mentioned:
Notes:
~*~

"I still can't believe that this is all _ours_," Haseba for the umpteenth time since they had moved in a few days ago. "What are we going to do with that shelf? It's still empty." If Hesbia had been slightly overwhelmed with the amount of bare space presented, her sister had happily seen it as a creative challenge and was embracing it with an energy that Hesbia was starting to find exhausting.

"We'll figure it out," she assured her sister blandly. She was in the little kitchen space, trying to mix klah with one of the sweeteners so that it had a mint flavor to it but it wasn't thickening properly. She growled to herself. She was losing those kitchen skills she had worked so hard on before becoming a dragonrider!

Oriveth's rich voice chuckled in her mind. }: Look what you gained though. :{

Okay, yeah, that was a good point. Hesbia couldn't argue that. "Okay, give this a sip," she told her sister as she handed over one of the steaming mugs. She sat on the couch. Her eyes immediately went to the bright blue throw blankets that Haseba had dug out. The weyr had, mostly, a color palette going: basic blue against sunrise orange with accents of avian yellow. It livened up the neutral stone. Hesbia was starting to like it.

It sure beat living in dank caves.

“Does Ori like that pillow I found him?” Haseba asked. Hesbia wasn’t sure if she liked her little sister calling Oriveth by the same nickname Hesbia also used but she didn’t say anything that time.

“I think so,” Hesbia answered as she took another sip and tried to figure out how to make the mint klah better for next time. “I saw him using it yesterday.” Mostly using it. He had been trying to figure out where to place it so that it was useful. Dragons had a different sense of comfort than humans did, Hesbia was learning, but Haseba still hadn’t caught on to that.

Her little sister brightened. “Great! I’ll try to find him more things. They had some reaaaaalllly big blankets in the stores. I bet he could burrow under one!”

}: I do not like that idea, :{ Oriveth remarked, his shoulder twinging at the idea of some weird textile brushing against his hide.

“Let’s stick with pillows,” Hesbia told her sister. Her chin nodded towards a few crates in the corner. “What are we doing with those?”

“Oh, the D.O.O.M. boxes. Uhhh….”

Hesbia’s eyebrow arched. “The what boxes?”

“D.O.O.M. It stands for ‘don’t organize, only move.’ You haven’t heard that phrase?”

“Has,” Hesbia said as she jerked a thumb towards Oriveth, “I’ve been a little busy raising a dragon for the last few months.”

Haseba giggled. “Okay, fair. I heard it from the drudges. They were complaining that sometimes they’d get orders to organize the store rooms and there were always these boxes that never got organized, just moved to a new place, and they started calling them that.” She paused to take a sip, then wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, it needs _something_,” she remarked unhelpfully. “Anyway, they even started singing this little silly song whenever they had to move them. ‘Doom, d-doom doom, doom doom!”

Hesbia let her sing the whimsical song for a moment more before asking, “Okay, so what’s in those boxes?”

The song stopped abruptly. Haseba’s form shrunk a little. “Stuff from…from the flood.”

Hesbia paused. “Okay, so almost literal doom boxes.”

“Yeah…”

Hesbia blew out a breath. “We should probably go through them. I can’t imagine it’ll take us long.” Yet both of them knew, without a word, that it wasn’t the length of task time that was the problem. It was the emotional connection, the pain that would have to be faced.

Oriveth rose from his couch, pressing lovingly against his rider’s mind, ready to be her shield and comfort like always. “Come on,” Hesbia said with a little prodding poke at Haseba’s side. “Grab a box, bring it over to Ori. We’ll go through it together.”

Oriveth arranged himself into a semicircle of midnight blue protection as the two teenagers each grabbed a box and then joined him. Hesbia, at least, had the mental bolstering from her dragon, though right as she realized how grateful she was for that, unasked, Oriveth curled the tip of his tail against Haseba, offering quiet physical support.

He really was the best.

Digging into some puddle of courage, Hesbia asked, “Okay, what’s in yours?” She watched as Haseba withdrew a few tattered but clean shirts, a left shoe (who knew where the right one was), and then, with her heart skipping a beat, a small ragdoll. “Hey…I thought we lost that,” she said softly.

“Me too,” her sister said with equal quietness. She carefully ran her fingers over the uneven stitching, the worn fabric, the torn strips that made the hair. “Dad made this. For my birthingday that one Turn.”

Somewhere deep within Hesbia, a wail of grief bubbled up. It lodged against her throat, pummeling wildly to break free, until it finally resolved itself to escape via the tears silently streaming down her cheeks. They had spent so many Turns having to survive after their mother had died. Their father had done everything he could to try to give them a good life but… Hesbia had grown up too fast, hadn’t had any time to really process her mother’s death aside from turning into a hard, bitter seed of fury that she constantly directed at her uncle.

Haseba was crying too, a little less quietly than Hesbia was. Hes pulled her into a hug, letting her sob, while she cursed both everything that had brought them along this path and grieved everything that was no longer with them now that they were okay. A mother that should have seen her girls grow up. A father that should be safe in the home they now had.

“We’ll put it on that shelf,” Hesbia eventually said in a cracked voice. “The empty one. That’ll be our family shelf, okay?” She felt Haseba nod. “Whatever else we find in the doom boxes, we’ll put there.” Whatever was worth keeping anyway.

When the tears had stopped enough to continue, they carefully dug back into the crate. A careworn book. A small pouch of semiprecious stones. “We can make these into pendants for us,” Haseba suggested in a watery voice. Hesbia nodded. A few more articles of clothing. Tools for repairing various items: a chisel, an awl, twine, a whetstone, oil.

For the second time, Hesbia’s heart clenched but this time less so. Maybe she was more prepared. When she withdrew the tarnished silver wedding band, all that came out of her was a sorrowful sigh. “Dad kept this hidden,” she said, remembering. “It was all he had left of…”

It was all their father had left of their mother and now that it rested in Hesbia’s palm, she knew it couldn’t stay with them, collecting dust on a shelf. It wasn't right.

“What are you going to do with it?” Haseba asked in a concerned voice as she watched her sister stuff the ring into her pocket.

“I don’t know,” Hesbia lied, because an idea was forming in her head but it would have to wait. “I’ll figure it out. But it’s not going on the shelf. A flit will steal it or something. I’ll put it in one of the drawers.” That seemed to mollify Haseba, who went back to unpacking the last few things.

The clothes they tossed on the table to figure out later. But the family heirlooms -- they carried those with a quiet reverence to their new home, arranging them just perfectly. “One more thing!” Haseba said as she dashed off. Her older sister shot her a puzzled look as Haseba came up, something cupped carefully between both hands.

A piece of dragon’s egg shell.

“I…I’ve been saving it,” Haseba explained. “After you Impressed, I went back on the Sands and found it. I remembered where Oriveth had hatched from and I went back and I got it for you because…because…well, I thought you would like it and we can--oomph!”

Whatever she was about to say was cut off as Hesbia threw her arms around her sister and held her tight. “Thank you,” came the muffled, watery words.

“He’s family too,” Haseba pointed out quietly. “We…we can put it on the shelf too.”

}: How incredibly thoughtful of her, :{ Oriveth remarked. Sticking his head into their space, he let out a trilling croon of approval.

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll add it to the shelf, Has,” Hesbia said between sniffles. Shit, this was a lot of emotion for the day. “Okay, no more D.O.O.M. boxes. We’re agreed to that, right?” Haseba nodded, smiled, and went to add Oriveth’s egg to the shelf next to the ragdoll. “Well, now it doesn’t look so empty,” Hesbia noted as she wiped her eyes. “I think we deserve something more than messed up mint klah after all of this.”

Haseba perked up. “Bubbly pies? Berry tarts?”

Hesbia ruffled her little sister’s hair. “Sure. Whatever you want from the kitchens. We’ll steal the whole tray.”

Haseba giggled. “We have to keep up the tradition of Holdless being thieves, right?”

Last updated on the October 28th 2026

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Little Boxes of Emotional Destruction