asleep on the butcher's block {✰} ebony & van / blitz

[d7f amber bosch 🌿 tris]

She visits Van with a cup of hot tea and his favorite triangle-shaped sandwich, but she is careful to leave her pity and her anxiousness on the other side of the bedroom door. Only a bright smile and optimism may enter here. "How are you holding up?" More than anyone, being near her brother makes her acutely aware of just how damaging it is to be in her presence. Each step an aftershock, every movement a gut punch, her very existence is something like a volcano erupting.

There are blurs between being a person capable of snapping bone and being a dependable big sister — and she teeters there, trying her damnedest to press on. What matters is that Van is still alive, healthy home life pending. She tries not to reimagine the terror that flooded into her chest when he was taken from them, diagnosed as positive with the plague, sequestered away with the ill and the mad. Lately, she has stopped prying to know what exactly he experienced in that facility. That trauma is his, and his alone.

This is theirs / the silence that seeps in from the halls and the endless amount of questions that could be asked, but will never be spoken. Still, there are always the rare few that break the quiet, the sparse rays of sunlight on a winter morning. Hope can come from embers, too.

"Would you like to leave the house and do something today? Just you and I, for old times' sake." A shark asks a diver to exit the cage that protects him.

Isn't the open sea lovely and tumultuous?

[hesper hart 🐺 d9f]

V A N ;

They look at you differently now. Like something's changed. You look into the mirror and its the same guy it's always been: rail thin, big-eyed, messy hair, loose tie, mischievous smile. But they see something else. More fragile than before, somehow always at risk of breaking. You wonder if this is how Joplin feels since her breakdown- if she's aware of how often people walk on eggshells around her as you are. It hardly seems fair to compare- you'd only been trying to see the world and win a stupid robotics competition at what turned out to be ground zero for a freakin plague. She lost her mind with grief. But the procedures for both were surprisingly similar, in a chilling realization. Both of you were taken away and shoved into a room. Both of you lost time. Both of you were pumped full of meds that made you feel awful. The only difference is that your scar- a slight indentation on the side of your neck, right below your jaw, which swirled and curved in a rose-like pattern- was right there on the outside for everyone to see anytime they wanted to. Joplin's was inside. Which meant the worrying was warranted. But it'd been six months since you got better, and still they just-

"Oh, thanks."

They bring you sandwiches in bed and take you for enrichment walks. Or, at least in Ebony's case. Sybil just stops by every twenty minutes or so and pokes her head in to make sure you're still breathing. Joplin seems more eager to sit next to you at dinner. Bowie can't look you in the eye. Your sickness was powerful enough that it drew your mom's distant gaze from the empty place where your father sat to right on you. They're all gun-shy, you get it. More than anyone, really, since the trauma of losing your father was entirely your own fault.

You take a bite and chew, and even though you know you don't deserve it, you swallow down the sandwich your sister made for you.

It's still a bit taboo to leave the house at all at this point, even if the plague has levelled off now that's spread nationwide. District Three was still one of the first places hit with it, and one of the most damaged as a result. You grab your mask from the bedside table.

"Let's go to the boardwalk. Nobody ever goes there." Because, of course, it's too far out of town and it always stinks. But you and your friends sometimes go there to smoke pot, so it has sentimental value. Plus, if you can get past the rest, the view is pretty nice.