"Huh..." Y/n uttered beneath her breath. Her eyes flickered to the sky before down again. Raindrops began painting the floor, the grass beneath her feet damp with dark green dew.

In front of her, a dark purple wolf plush dirtied with soil and leaves.

She doesn't recall ever owning a wolf plush, nor did she remember if anybody else in town was interested in collecting plushies besides her. Maybe Abby or Leah, but this one was cutesy and chubby. Its legs were stubby and short and its nose was small when its head was large. It had no neck, just its head connecting to its round, chubby body.

"Y/n!" Calls Y/n's grandfather. She hums back, not aware it's too quiet for him to hear as she is too immersed in the cute little wolf plush. She bends down and picks it up, tossing it in between her hands. She brushes the debris away and gives it a squish, her cheeks tinting red with excitement as a ghost of a smile begins to paint her face.

Squishing it and shaking it as if choking and strangling someone, Y/n giggles as she stops and gives it a tight hug. How cute ur was for somebody to lose it.

"Welp, finders keepers." She breathes out as she stands with it held in between her waist and her arm, handling it like a basketball.

"Y/n L/n." Y/n's grandfather says as she is finally in his sight. She's grinning from ear to ear, tossing the wolf plush in the air and catching it as she waves it around for her grandpa to see. "You are a child." He sighs, rubbing his temples as a headache forms. "Look, Grandpa! Look at him! I'm gonna name him..."

Y/n pauses as she wonders for a moment. She then stuffs her face against the plush and inhales its specific scent. Cigarette smoke..?

"So? What're you callin' em'?" Grandpa says as he sticks his sword into the ground and uses it as an armrest.

"Cigarettes!" She exclaims, her hair messy from rubbing her face against the plush. "You are a piece of work for somebody graduating this year." Chuckles Grandpa. "Now come help me out with these bastards. Wizard made a mistake with his prisoning spell and now the monsters from deep in the forest have escaped the barrier Rasmo made and if we don't ward them off now right here they'll head to town." He pulls his sword from the ground and stands guard with it, a low groaning noise was followed by others behind some trees and Y/n glanced over.

She watches with concern as a skeleton trudges through a bush, a group of bats flying past her.

She sighs with irritation and quickly runs back to the farmhouse to place Cigarettes down on the porch and takes her sword from the steps as she left it there for a moment when seeing the plush in the corner of her eye previously.

"Stay safe. Gotta help out the old man first- Woah!" Y/n yelps as a haunted skull comes flying at her, its red aura around it burning to the touch. She ducks and backs away as it turns to look at her, angry.

Y/n certainly hated those things... especially when the flying skulls were human-shaped. Sort of creepy if she thought about it carefully.

When it came running towards her, she simply aimed her sword through its eye, its jaw-dropping as she forces it to the ground and digs her sword into the sockets till it blew up into dust.

"Ugh..." she sneers with disgust, studying the juice it left from the eye socket painted against the top of her sword. She shakes it off when her grandfather calls again.

"Y/n! Little help!?" He scolds as he's fighting off a hoard of skeletons.

Y/n cringes in return and stabs at the ice slime hopping over to her. "Man there's a whole lot of them." She exhales, coming to a stop next to her grandpa to help him with the crowd.

They continue to fight them off, almost overtaken until Rasmodius appears, a beam of light shooting from a staff he's holding and killing off all the skeletons at once.

"I am so sorry about this sir L/n. I did not mean to make your evening so difficult..." the wizard apologizes, bowing his head. The farmer simply shakes his head with a chuckle. "This is nothing. But it'd also be a lot easier if somebody here quit being so distracted and helped me out..." Grandpa sighed as he pointed towards the farmhouse, stabbing at a rock crab on the floor about to swipe at him.

"Get back! You stay away from him!" Y/n was back at Cigarette's side and fighting off a group of bats trying to nip at the plushies' ears. She was yelling warningly and swinging her sword at them, not even caring if she killed them or not. She just wanted her new plushie safe as it was being carried in her arm, shielded from danger.

When she finally notices the wizard, Y/n gasps and brings Cigarette's over alongside her to greet him.

Rasmodius can't help but chuckle, watching as she single-handedly used her sword to slice through a ghost with no hesitation or attention to it. "Magnus!" Y/n cheers. He braces himself for impact as she crashes into him, huffing him tightly. She snickers when he ruffles her hair.

"You know I haven't seen you since you left Pelican Town, and yet you're still as reckless as ever." Rasmodius chuckles. "You think I can help you out at the tower again? I wanna learn some spells!" Y/n exclaims. She raises her sword to kill off a squid kid and Rasmodius does the same with his staff to ward off the group of bats flying their way.

The two are chatting while they fight, simply moving their arms to get things done as Y/n's grandfather was practically killing everything else with effort.

Not that he was less fit than them, he was just dedicated. Unlike some people.

"You know, you're quite reckless yourself, Magnus."

The two look over, realizing everything was gone and dead already and the farmer's breathing was laboured with exhaustion. "Oh... they're gone now!" Says Y/n with a smile. She glances down at Cigarette's and smiles, forgetting her sword on the floor to rush into the farmhouse. She needed to get him all washed up. That way he was all clean!

"Y/n- your sword!" Grandpa calls but she's already inside. Rasmodius can't help but chuckle again and he picks it up for her and tosses it to the farmer. "I cannot believe that girl is in senior year of high school." He muses. "Tell me about it. Finds a plushie and suddenly it's her new prized possession. She gets so easily attached to things. Just like her mother, I suppose..."

The world goes silent at the words that left the farmer's mouth.

Y/n's mother was dead. But a little bit of her was left within her. How identical they were, the eye shape, the lips, the nose, the hair, skin, voice and face; all of her was just like her mother.

Rasmodius looks to where the farmer was looking and sees Y/n through the kitchen window, dancing and yelling lyrics to a song she liked as she bathed Cigarette's in the kitchen sink filled with soap and water. Nodding briefly, Rasmodius whispers an agreement with his old friend, recalling how free and bright Y/n's mother always was.

"Yup, just like her mother..."

____

Y/n snuck from her bedroom in the upstairs portion of the house to the laundry machines in the room next to hers to the right. She was careful not to make any noise for the room connected to her grandfathers and she didn't wanna wake him up considering how tired he seemed.

She passed by the sewing machine and telephone, afraid of the sleeping dog in between the doorframe of her bedroom door all the way by the lounge room on the other side of the house just above the kitchen. One sound and she could wake her grandpa's dog. He was always so territorial, if he heard a floorboard creek, he'd think it was an intruder and start barking.

When reaching the dryer, Y/n exhaled silently with relief and opened it carefully. The light turned on to show Cigarette's all dry with his grumpy-looking face. Y/n smiled and shut the door, tip-toeing through the room and back into hers before jumping into bed with Cigarette's in her arms.

She raises him over her head, taking a good look at him.

"You are so cute." She smiles. Silence fills the room and she lets him drop onto her chest as she hugs it close and turns to her side. "You smell kind of familiar. Honestly, you don't only smell like cigarettes."

Closing her eyes, Y/n inhales through her nose to take in the scent.

"You kinda smell like..."

Pulling away, Y/n takes a good look at him.

"You smell like Sebastian."