finders keepers | custom ability one-shot

[Deleted]

It started like butterflies in his stomach. A tingling sensation that had no real root or reasoning to being with. One night, Jean had woken up and he'd had to find something. Like the feeling you get when you've forgotten your keys but it hasn't quite settled in yet. You just know, when he left the house, that something didn't feel right. Suddenly, it's not until it's far too late that you realise. That dropping in your stomach, followed by the need to retrieve them. Like you're missing a limb. It had been simple, he'd been laying in his cot at the orphanage, dreaming about the small wooden puzzle box a visiting family had left on the table the previous morning. They'd brought it along for another boy they'd intended to meet with, to perhaps adopt. Jean had been instructed to bring in the tea, he was being punished for something - as usual. When the nun's back was turned, Jean had swiped the puzzle box from the table and pocketed it.

Later in the day, he was found with it in the back corner of the library. Spilling over the little segments and wondering about what might lay inside, what picture would be assembled should he succeed. The nun had recognised it immediately and snatched it from Jean's chubby, boyish fingers. Ripping it so harshly that she left him with a splinter in his finger. That was the least of his worries, though, as Jean had been punished with ten lashes to the backs of his knuckles. He hadn't cried. Instead, Jean had fumed about the puzzle box. That he hadn't been able to open it before they'd found him. Before they'd taken it back. He'd gone to bed without supper, his gut rumbling but his mind ticking incessantly. He'd woken up in the dead of night with a screaming thought in his mind. His finger throbbing where the splinter was still wedged under the skin

'Find me...' it whispered. Trotting barefoot on the cold concrete floor, he'd followed the urge through the dead silent hallways to the empty office of the Matron. The door, miraculously, unlocked at the twist of his hand. He did not think of the punishment he would receive if he'd been caught. He did not consider why he was doing what he was doing. It was a silly little box. All Jean felt with the keen, unbearable urge to find that puzzle box. It lay in the drawer of the matron's sturdy, oak wood desk. Jean had been seized with delight and then an awful disappointment. She had opened it, the lid free, the pieces all arranged in the stained picture of a hare. Inside the hollow box there was a small slip of paper. Jean felt the desire sink out of him, leaving him cold on the inside, but strangely content. He picked the folded note from inside, opening it to reveal a riddle in miniscule French script. He couldn't read it. Jean sneered down at it, hating the matron for taking that supreme delight from him. After a thought, he popped the folded note in to his mouth, eating it. The box he broke in to two pieces and replaced back in the drawer. That was the first time Jean ever felt the extreme desire to find something. The first time he succeeded. It would not be the last.