Everything was building up, coming to an infectious head, white puss and rot and death and even though she hasn't been here long at all, all Hollandaise wants is to go home. Home to her forest and the things she knows and understands. Even the architecture here is off, full of a thousand different eras spliced together without rhyme or reason. It unnerves her. She wants to go home. But can she even call it a home when they don't want her to return? The years seem to stretch in front of her, their spindly forms strong as spider's silk, less tangible, but not near as white. It was forbidden, out of reach. The greenery she had surrounded herself with for half a century wasn't hers anymore and Hollandaise didn't know she could be so damn possessive, but she wants it back. She wants it all back. They've said she is too quick to think, to speak, to move, to anger and grudge and messy emotions that twist around her like poisonous vines. Warders aren't like that - not her warders, not the elders that take hours to sigh out wisdom between the creaking of tree branches. "Not good enough," they always seem to whisper, the sounds a sibilant hiss that's somehow still devoid of disapproval. Monotone. And it's a voice she can't get out of her head - she's young and she's drowning. It's her fault somehow. No, not somehow, because she knows how. And Hollandaise lets herself think about the hows and whys of everything she's done wrong. It's a fatalistic way of thinking and she knows it, but it's so easy to fall.

And still she falls, and thinks so hard she feels as though it's swallowing her. Her thoughts swell: a cacophonous din swirling around her sparse room - they brush against the message messily, insidiously etched into her door, curl around the posts of her suddenly too-big bed. Hollandaise feels small, smaller than trees, small enough that weight of her own thoughts could crush her. She doesn't want to look at the door anymore, but she can't help it and she does, gold-black eyes wide and staring. The fabric never completely hides the words. SLEEP TIGHT. In their very simplicity lurks fear. Hollandaise bites back a laugh. As if she could sleep with those scratched letters hiding behind a thinly floating curtain. The urge to laugh dies, her chest hitches, she forgets how to breathe and the only thing she can think of is how she has no one, no one and no space to herself, not even her room. She's grown up surrounded by life and now she is alone. Hollandaise twists her fingers around each other, thoughts bubbling up so quickly they blur, become muddled.

Compartmentalize, compartmentalize, break it up, think smaller, organize, compartmentalize, she chants silently. Her fingers twist in her sheets. Don't do this to yourself. It's a school of thought she's not the best at. But Hollandaise tries and she does, and she slows herself down (just like a Warder, they might have said, and maybe they would have praised her for that) and she thinks and she thinks until her eyes hurt. It's a slow roll of thinking, a forced slowness that categiorizes every thought, every subject she needs to cover. Hollandaise breathes. An idle thought pokes its way through and Hollandaise wonders when the last time she blinked was. The words on her door, her poor abused door, have burned their way onto her retinas. And, with her eyes sticky from thought, she curls up, the vines stitched into her blanket cold and dead. Even the lonely cactus next to her bed offers no comfort. These are little things, little problems, her brain says, she's a weakling. And how awful is it that even her own head mocks her?

Compartmentalize.

Slowly, Hollandaise remembers how to breathe, how to blink. Her eyes hurt still and it's from tears and staring and thinking without any direction at all. The tears had been unexpected, unnoticed. She needed to become slow, slow as trees' growth, slow as seasons' changing. And with that slowness in her, she moves, uncurls her stiff, unyeilding body. Her vine-covered blanket slides to the floor, forgotten deadweight. Hollandaise does not look at the words again. Instead, she moves, and folds herself into the chair at her desk and it creaks inorganically, the settling bones of a long-dead tree. Corpses can be useful, Hollandaise thinks, and is somehow surprised by that thought. It's not a new thought - her fingers have run across the spines of books. She does not sigh. Slowly, her thin, fragile fingers pull out a drawer, fumble for a pen. The irony of writing to trees on the pressed dead refuse of other trees does not escape her. Corpses are useful. And maybe, she thinks, the elders are just a little wrong about some things.