content warning : suicide

This was pathetic, and she knew it. Yet, she found herself here, standing on the ledge of a high place. There was a soft breeze on her pelt, ruffling her furs. It was gentle against her body in a way that nothing had been gentle to her as of late. She closed her eyes and let the wind tickle her body. It was almost enough to cause a smile to cross her face, almost. Of course, Xithymia didn't smile. She found smiling to be a fool's errand more often than not. A smile meant nothing, not even in this moment. Yet, there was a part of her that wanted to, even though it didn't mean anything. Maybe if she accepted that it meant nothing, it would hurt less.

She opened her eyes again. Her gaze traveled down to the rocks below. She would die upon impact, she knew. This time, she couldn't fight the urge for her lips to twitch. They did so because she knew just would happen. In a perfect situation, her spine would crack and she would land in a position that wouldn't destroy her head. However, if it did, it did. After all, if Xithymia wanted to go out cleanly, it was clear that she was completely able to. She was a mistress of medicine, after all, both good and bad. She knew what quantities of what would let her slip away painfully or painlessly, whatever she deserved. However, she was not interested in such a death, uninterested in feeling her lungs slowly lose the ability to take in air.

"Oh, Xithymia," she murmured to herself, taking one step closer to the edge, "however would you have guessed life would leave you here?" Her voice was almost sad, if it was possible for it to be sad. "Who would have guessed..." She leaned over the edge, but not far enough to push her over yet. It was not time. She would die that day, she had already decided, but she wanted a few more moments...

If one was to try to try to figure out what points led her to this one, it would have been unclear. She had never showed signs of depression. She had always been good at her job, adept, intelligent, distanced from everyone and anyone. How, then, did she manage to climb to this height, with only one expectation but to jump? Even she was unsure, but she knew deep within her very existence that her job had been completed. There were questions in this world that were not meant to be answered, and she no longer wished to live in such an existence. Perhaps, though, she had known this all along, known that one day, she would stumble on an unanswerable thought in her research. Maybe, had the move from the old lands been easier, her stumbling upon this question would not have been so distracting to her. She would have been able to work through it.

However, in the transfer from there to here, she had lost something, her last piece of humanity. A soul without humanity was nothing, and she had lost hers. Perhaps if she had never found it in the first place, she would not miss it so badly. Yet, she had stumbled across it, across him. And when he befell an experiment, died at her own paws, that piece of humanity, the part of her that had learned to exist in a realm of the living, it disappeared into smoke. She had been trying to identify the herbs around the area. It had been in all innocence. Yet, when he convulsed his final time, with him, a piece of her died. The last piece of her that figured life was worth living.

Had that moment where she shed her first and final tear never occurred, had picked anyone but him, perhaps she would have wanted to continue working through problems. She was a scientist, after all. Yet, when the one cat who understood her died, she found her unanswerable question: what was the point?

There was none.

There had never been one.

All of her science, all of her life's work, it had amounted to nothing. It had never mattered, nothing mattered. Dammit, nothing mattered. That alone was reason enough, the fact that life was meaningless and nothing mattered...

Xithymia inched forward. "Just do it, already, Xithymia," she muttered to herself, yet there she stood, one foot in this world, one in the next, her body dangerously leaning over the cliff.