A/N: set before the game

Genre - ?

Jesse - F3rd / Third Female / Blue Jesse

It was just a late night walk. That's all it was- a late night walk.

Jesse strolled around the village. It was quiet and empty, as it should be at an hour like this. Although there was always that one house that never seemed to sleep, its occupants having what Jesse could only guess to be a party- she's thankful they were polite enough to keep their voices and the volume of their jukebox low enough to not wake anyone up.

She lingered just past the house, staring at it. The lights inside were on, and the people inside it seemed to be playing some sort of game around the table. They didn't seem to notice her.

She turned away and moved on, instead focusing on her feet and the ground beneath her.

There really weren't any roads in this place- it was all just undisturbed grass. Jesse paused as she took another step, stopping her movements once her foot touched the ground. She felt the grass and dirt beneath her shoes, digging the soles into it. She knelt down to take a closer look.

She could see all the individual blades of grass, the sight of them strongly tempting her to pluck one out of the ground. She reached out to hold one of them, fiddling with the strand. She twirled it in her fingers for a while, and pulled to pluck it.. Then stopped.

Sinkholes.

She'd heard about them in passing once, but she barely knew anything about them. All she knew was that they were holes in the ground that opened up at random. Axel said that they even led to the core of the Earth. Petra had refuted this, but..

She could imagine it- the feeling of the ground falling apart beneath her. Then Axel's saying of the holes leading to the core caused her to freeze up. The feeling of falling down the hole, all the way to the hottest thing in the world... And what if the hole had closed up? What if she didn't make it all the way to the core?

She imagined the feel of it. The feel of being crushed by the Earth.

I should go, she thought. She quickly let go of the grass, stood back up, and ran back to her house. Before any of them open up.

She knew she was being irrational, that there probably wasn't any chance of it happening at all, but she couldn't help it. These thoughts just came back to her at random. Memories of little things that shouldn't mean anything just come back without warning and make her worry. What did they think? Should I have done that? Why did I do that? What if it happened again?

Jesse rushed inside and slammed the door shut behind her, whispering an apology as she locked it. She glanced down at the floor, then looked back up, screwing her eyes shut. Nope, nope, don't think about it, don't think about it.

She opened them slowly as she took deep breaths.

I should just go to sleep.