"How long are you going to sit out here?"
She didn't know how long it had been already. She didn't really care. The misery was strong enough to drown out every other pain — the pain in her stomach from the lack of food, the pain in her head from lack of sleep.
"Koto, you can't keep doing this."
She wasn't doing anything but what she had to. She was just trying to find some way to rebuild herself from the inside out.
She could only stay inside listening to her siblings weep for so long. Eventually she left the house, wandering to her father's favorite perch, an old log that he had kept alive for a long time. Every day he'd put a little bit of his energy into it, reviving its core, practicing his "life magic" like all the demons of their breed were apt to do every now and then.
As she sat on it now, she could feel it rotting beneath her, darkening from the inside out without her father's own life breathing into it.
She didn't know if Taro had been standing there the whole time or if he had gone and come back, but he stepped in front of her, holding out the torn-off leg of a chicken. "I had to sneak this to you. Mom's telling us not to give you anything until you come back yourself, that you're being foolish. And … Well, I think you are too. She says people die all the time—"
"'People die all the time'?" she repeated incredulously, and Taro stared in shock at the first words she had spoken in days. "This isn't people, you idiot. This is Dad. He's gone. I'm glad you can all play and eat and go on with your lives but he — he actually meant something to me!"
"Koto, he—"
"I don't want to fucking hear it!" she screeched, smacking the food out of her brother's hand and burying her face in her knees.
She heard the crunch of footsteps on leaves as they slowly faded away, then the wind through the trees. It was all she heard for quite some time as the last of the life bled away in that log beneath her until, finally, she could feel nothing left anymore.
She rose then, staring at the fly-encircled chicken leg and the increasingly maggot-infested piece of wood, and then she looked to the direction of her home.
It was time to move on. The last vestiges of what he had left behind of him were gone, and she had nothing more to stay for.