Homest[r]uck // (Sundrop)

One more year of digging here
And we're alight in heaven
If we bear the stones and stares
Then we're alight in heaven
We're alight in heaven

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Wandering through the trees begins to feel like a game, weaving a trail of footsteps between the ice gilded trunks until patterns begin emerging in our braided path. My little sister nagged me into helping her braid her hair often enough that I know two strands aren't enough for this, but I'm not worried that things will fall apart — the forest and I are not alone. When I finally stumble across her path, it's no accident, but the recurrence of an unexpected twist in the fabric of fate, because our footsteps have been intertwined since long before the forest involved itself. For a fleeting moment I am struck with hesitance — she is marked with new blood and bruises, some of which surely belong to others — worried that she is not the same as before we were separated. However, I have also been away with others, cradling the otherness within the inescapable deep of my blood, and I am enough of a mirror image to her that my own wounds become a kind of faith that tugs me toward her.

For a moment I just stare at her, watching her skin shift and swirl in the fading phantasmagoria of my mind, wondering how someone so unreal can also be so steady in my life. Emotions flickering once more at the blood that has also become such a persistent presence, lips tightening and eyebrows pressing together, I reach out and attempt to wipe one of the red marks from her cheek. It flakes beneath my touch, but stubbornly clings to her skin, and I withdraw my efforts, realizing that these things will still be visible on us, whether we clean them away or not, but there are other ways to make things appear and disappear. So I take a step backwards while pulling my gloves from my hands, stuffing them into a pocket before holding my empty palms up before her. "There is nothing in my hands," that statement is so true it almost hurts, "and there is nothing up my sleeves." Pulling at the fur around my wrists so she can witness the empty voids surrounding my scrawny limbs, I proceed to shake my arms as proof, a grin taking up residence across my lips as the following flick of my wrist summons a stick into my grip from seemingly thin air.

Mother says to hold our tongues
We are the chosen ones
And we answer to no one
Same dream I'm always having
Like shivering, shivering, shivering

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I try not to think about snapping fallen tree branches into portable pieces in an effort to distract my rebellious stomach earlier this morning, a simple task that felt incredibly difficult, about how this fragment in my hand is a product of that, of the sickness that separated Sundra and I to begin with, of the terrible awfulness within me that seems to cause all the wrongs of my responsibility. Instead I focus on movement, attempting to lose myself in distraction as I tap my makeshift magician's wand against the sides of my boots to prove its solid reality before twirling it through my fingers like a baton and sending it flying through the air. When it falls back into my grasp, I lower its tip into the snow and begin walking the perimeter of a large square, carefully drawing its line across the shimmering white surface until all four sides have been marked out and I've returned to my starting point.

Instead of connecting the lines, I leave a gap, stepping through it to draw a series of lines inside the square, divvying up the space into several smaller sections before turning back around to catch her gaze. "This will be the living room; I'll make sure it has the biggest fire place you've ever seen so we will never be cold again." I pause and scuff my foot against the snow, giving her a moment to realize exactly what it is I've just magicked into existence, before gesturing to the area marked off next to the one I'm standing it. "That'll be the kitchen. Now, I won't lie and tell you I'm a good cook," a beat of laughter stumbles through my lungs as I walk over to a small rectangle drawn in the center of the room, "but I promise our table will never be empty."


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Pushing the hood of my coat down, I stare at the ground and scratch at the back of my head in contemplation before deciding against confessing exactly how I would accomplish such a feat. She knows. After this morning she must be beginning to understand the things I've done in the name of survival. Dropping my rucksack to the ground, I crouch down and pull my spare coat from it, spreading it across the someday-tabletop like a picnic blanket before laying the leftover strips of mutt meat from this morning's meal in the center as proof of my words. It is at once a confirmation of everything I've said and of all the things I've left unspoken; the food's source is not a favorable one, but hungry stomachs can't differentiate or at least they couldn't in District Six.

Standing back up, I dust myself off and point to the series of spaces along the back wall of the floorplan. "One of those rooms will be for our daughter — Bloom boys are nothing but trouble," although our mischief is sometimes well intentioned, "but the girls are legit aces. We can name her Eden, so she'll always be in a good place and will never have to go where we've gone." My voice cracks as my eyes wander briefly over the trees beyond the home I've built, betraying the illusion, but I quickly give my head a small shake and squeeze my eyes closed to block reality out once more. You've found a home for the first time in what feels like ages (you have lived decades within days, after all), don't lose it now.


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When I open my eyes again, she's still there and that's enough to send my feet forward, out the front door of our homestead and back to her. My mouth stutters open for an instant, words tangling my tongue into knots as I search for more explanations, but lose track of how words are supposed to work. I settle for the only thing I can remember properly, putting the finishing touch on my performance: "Ta da." My earlier grin returns to me as a laugh comes echoing out my chest and I face-palm at how anticlimactic of an ending it is, peeking out the cracks of my fingers to self-consciously gauge her reaction. Realization sets in that this is the real moment of escapism and so I do what suddenly seems so obvious, impulsively sweeping her off her feet and into my arms with that perpetual idiot-grin written across my face that seems to appear each time I do something that's bound to catch her off-guard.

My exhausted, abused muscles scream out in objection and suddenly everything hurts in a way that would send me toppling to my knees if it weren't for her. There is enough red painted across her stomach that I can't be the only one torn between misery and the mending of the moment, but I remember just enough history — this afternoon; this morning; a lifetime before that was made of far more time than life, which I would doubt if I didn't know what I do now, because the time I've had is only a fraction of what it should be — and I refuse to give up on the traditions of humanity now. A grimace of pain flashes across my face as I carry her over the threshold and into the protective walls of my imagination, but leaves even more quickly than it came, and I manage to traverse the distance between us and the future without tripping.


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As I set her down and her toes touch the snow covered floorboards of our living room for the first time — no room in Aesop and Sundra Bloom's home could be more appropriately named — the lingering haze of hallucinogens retreats for an instant, bringing her into sharp focus, and I can't bring myself to release her completely. I'm a seventeen-year-old cliche of a boy and my suddenly single-minded thoughts know what's supposed to follow the crossing of a threshold, so there's no stopping my hands from ghosting across her cheeks to cradle the corners of her jaw in my palms as my mouth crashes into hers as if this is necessary. And to be fair, it is — she is — because this is how life is supposed to be and I can't live without her, regardless of whether I'm alive or not. A wedding isn't supposed to merely be the prelude to a funeral. These moments are the kinds of simple complexities this arena is truly aiming to strip us of — there's a reason the Capitol reaps children and not the elderly. They don't want the lives we've already made for ourselves, they want every experience we haven't discovered yet.

Do the Gamemakers realize that this is a rebellion, that Sundra and I have become a kind of defiance stronger than bombs or switchblades or crowbars? We are an Uprising all our own, rewriting the rules of their own Game for our unexpected benefit; death can't take away life that's already been lived. My shoulders curl forward as I cling to her, as if convinced that a simple shifting of bones could make room enough to fit her directly into the previously underutilized space within my chest. Still, I'm pushing at boundaries more insistently than I should and as our feet go stumbling back a few steps, I swear I can hear Poe muttering at our television screen back in District Six — "You're straight trippin', bro." — as Calliope gasps and looks away with the awkward blush of someone who has just walked into a room they thought was empty. It's enough to stop me in my tracks, even if they're still stubbornly written across the snow below, and cause me to pull away.


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Fumbling awkwardly with the air, my lungs struggle to find a steady rhythm as I blink numbly at the snow and watch my breath summon fractured clouds from nothingness, telling myself not to look back at her or you'll forget that you're supposed to care who might be watching, because it doesn't really matter, not anymore. The rest of the world is a lifetime away — in the distance, in the past. This is the Great Beyond, where "supposed to" doesn't count for much. Raking a hand through my hair, I suck in a breath and hold it until my chest burns with self-sympathy. "Do you feel older yet, Sundra Bloom?" My voice is peppered with contradiction, an unresolved mixture of childish wonder, immature frustration, and an intensity that is distinctly beyond my years, beyond who I was before I entered this deadly snowscape. "I think I'm starting to."

It takes a kind of courage to finally allow myself to meet her eyes in the wake of all these thoughts, because I am not responsible for myself. I have always been senseless and an off-kilter breed of selfish and, in this moment, I've forgotten all reasons for why I should be otherwise. She has changed me, for sure, but she has neglected to lead me away from the crooked line I walk between my rights and wrongs. I am still the personification of a gray area, no matter how often I turn the rest of the world technicolor. There is no hiding the would be, could be, should be thoughts messily criss-crossing through my mind, so I just try to swallow them down while standing my ground, because this is our house and together we'll decide our own rules and reasonings.


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