((This is just a story about Seed, taken one chapter at a time, with not a whole lot of planning, I have to admit. Enjoy my overly-vague, short prologue.))

All stories begin, in some way or another, with “once upon a time.” That time is simply subject to variance. Everything has a time, even stories like this, which happened not entirely in time. There are flowers that grew, blossomed, and died; their seeds are now beginning to grow. A new ring has been added, expanding out last year's ring. Last year’s hatchlings build their nests. That is when this story happened.

“Are you happy?” They asked him. They had asked him it all the time, since fawnhood: he had stopped listening, because he couldn’t stand to be asked it. He knew, at times, he could answer it. And, more often than not, he couldn’t.

He could watch his friends assembled, each with their beloved, and he with his own, each inside their own little microcosm, each bound by laws of attraction as they ran, looping back on one another, connected as the tiny balls of juice that made up a blue berry…How could he say that he wasn’t happy, when he was wanting, as he was, to take that moment and stretch it out like a silk cocoon being unraveled.

When he was sitting on his favorite rock, with nothing but the birds for the company he wanted, with a spot next to him left hollow, with the moments between when she – or anyone else – was with him seeming to stretch out as wide and empty as the space between the stars...how could he give an answer, feeling as he felt, when it was better if he didn’t answer that way?

The best choice, though, was to clamp his ears down tight and stop listening to those voices, dreamed or real or half-remembered.