a constellation is a tragedy — ebony & sybil {✾}

[d7f amber bosch 🌿 tris]

— ebony —

The last few days, Ebony Mars feels like a bird with an arrow through her wing.

For all her determination, moving forward in life has become akin to stepping through barbed wire. She does her best to press on until every movement hurts straight down to the very core of herself — until she feels like one continuous wound just waiting to be salted. Maybe that's exactly what she deserves, the punishment to fit the crime. Miles away from her home, a few hours past learning that her brother has been diagnosed with an illness that no one has any answers to, despite her pleading and demanding. This is where she lays her scene.

Shut off in a small apartment room with only one window looking out at an empty alleyway; boarded in the quarantine zone, trying fiercely to maintain some sense of order within all the madness of the crowd. "Stop working yourselves into a riot. What's all the howling supposed to do for any of us?" The velvet of her gloves rubs against the fresh scrapes scarring her knuckles, evidence of what had been so important that she missed her shot at signing up for any of the competitions. Missed her chance at infection, apparently.

Her mind races a mile a minute, and yet it feels like she can't focus on anything at all. It shifts in and out like a dream playing out in wisps of smoke, little shapes and reasons and things that always seem to keep her up at night. She locks herself in the bathroom after a long winded speech in the hallway, imploring the residents on her floor to realize that panicking so loudly it can be heard through the walls is not of any rational help to anyone. Least of all her.

"Shut. The. Fuck. Up." She yells the words as loudly as she slams the door, trying to catch her breath inside the even tinier space that she's tucked herself away in. For the first time in her life, things don't seem quite as clear. Nowhere near as logical as they should be. She knows that they need to work together, keep calm, start coming together as a unit, but it's all she can do to stare at her reflection and the dark waves tumbling over her shoulders, the pale bruises spreading under her eyes like a long shadow.

People with her brother's sickness are dying as she breaks down. She can hear the gossip through the walls, and she knows the death toll will only continue to rise. And she has absolutely no idea how to reach him, how to cure him, how to truly deal with any of the chaos in a way that can help clear her head. She can't see past her own hurt, the frustration that always comes to feast on the sacred parts of herself she offers as a sacrifice.

This is where the line is drawn in the blood red sand.

She steps over it, seeks out her older sister within the disfunction of the building, so thick with tension that every step makes her chest all the more tighter. She might just suffocate here, cut up hands pounding against a wooden door, against an obstacle that will not yield so easily to her. "Let me in, Syb. It's Ebony. I know this is your room number." She thinks of her brother strapped to a medical table, alone in a strange place, and it eats away at her.

Nothing is familiar to her / except trying to reach her big sister through static.

"You need to help me find out if Van is okay, or I swear, I'll tear this building apart brick by brick."

[nolan goode 10m / kaitlin.]

✵ sybil ✵

Minutes stretch into hours, and Sybil starts seeing stars.

The room they keep her in is bland, four walls with no personality, perfectly designed to drive her more and more mad with every passing moment. It could have been hours, it could be days; her neighbors start wailing on either side of her, their heavy sobs feeling like they're rocking through her own chest until she realizes—they are. There's water pooling in her eyes, too, her mouth an ugly, downturned thing when she finds her face in the mirror. You look horrible, she thinks at herself. Horror, illuminated by her own fear, pulled out of the depths of her chest so that something monstrous can take hold. She doesn't know how long the gasping lasts, only knows that somewhere between start and stop, her vision blurred and little dots started twinkling across her vision.

A rational part of her brain reminds her she needs to take a breath. Her body doesn't react.

Sybil feels herself get swallowed whole by it, the four walls rising higher, upright around her as she gets smaller and smaller. Trembling, she pulls her knees into her chest, her back against her headboard, the white of her sheets blinding the back of her eyes. She stares at the place where the brick of the outside wall meets the floorboard, the neat wooden floors tucked underneath the moulding. She hears Ebony scream down the hallway, and slumps down further. She puts her hands over her ears, doesn't want to hear her sister's stupid words, doesn't want to hear her stupid voice, doesn't want to hear anything over the sound of rushing blood in her ears. It's making her brain foggy, making her give into her fear instead of running away from it.

You should be the one strapped to a table right now, something shrieks in her head. It only spirals from there, girl unable to control her own thoughts, she lets them rip her apart shred by agonizing shred, pathetic girl, pathetic girl, pathetic girl, you can't even save yourself, look how much room you take up, waste of space, waste of space, waste of space—

Ebony pounds on the door, but Sybil doesn't get dragged out of her spiral. She shoves off the bed, faster than her ugly thoughts, and whips the thing open, hard, drags Ebony right down with her.

"What the fuck is wrong with you, Ebony? Can't you restrain yourself?" she hisses at her sister. The guilt starts to eat at the back of her brain with gusto, all her worst instincts bubbling up. She wants to run, she wants to run, she wants to run. I'm not your mom. The thought burns behind Sybil's eyes. "This is completely unacceptable."

She wraps her hand around the top of Ebony's bicep, hard enough she's afraid in hindsight that she'll have left ugly bruises flowering in her fingers wake, but she just adds it to the list of things to let eat her alive when she can't sleep later. With a sharp tug, she yanks her younger sister towards her and into Sybil's own room, poking her head out to look down the hallway and make sure that no one saw Ebony come.

Afraid, all she has are her cruelties to feel better.

"What the fuck makes you think you're going to be able to do anything for Van?"

[d7f amber bosch 🌿 tris]

— ebony —

In even her best moments, she feels so terribly full of rage.

There's a part of herself that she buries beneath the bravado — beneath the girl who is always on time, always has a plan, always knows the right thing to say except for when she's standing face to face with her own reflection. Staring at someone who has never once invited her in. Her love for her family is her hatred for herself. The cycle repeats on and on; the serpent swallows itself at the end of the tale. "Don't you speak to me like I'm a child."

This is how the fury hits. Like a thunder clap, like nothing in her life has ever stung worse than this moment. It cuts into her like fiberglass, an itch in all of her worst cuts, a slap across her face that leaves only one simple thought ringing in her head: I want to hurt all of the things that have hurt me. Her fists clench at her side, pulled into her sister's room like a pariah from the streets, like a thing meant to be silenced. Only the bruises on her hands know just how capable of carnage she truly is.

"What exactly do you expect me to do? Lock myself in my room and wallow in my self-pity?" Her eyes stare daggers into Sybil's, death sentence. "That's what you do. That's the same bullshit mess I've been trying to clean up ever since you left in the first place." Ebony wants to feel something shatter beneath her touch, a wreckage to make it fair, but she opts instead to stand taller in a space that only wants to shrink her. "Don't you ever act as if you've been a big sister to me."

She makes no move to mourn the childhood she lost — the one she willingly yielded in order to guide the bomb factory that is her household. Her sister went chasing her fantasies until it brought her here to Six, to this cage they now find themselves trapped in. For every flash of Sybil walking away, choosing a different battle than the one they were born into, the one Ebony so tirelessly fights in. The Mars family deserves better than their lot in life. She wants nothing more than to believe that.

But she doesn't think she's capable of being a savior. She moves through life like a storm cloud forming, an impeding disaster just waiting to go off and destroy everyone she claims to love so fiercely. It sickens her that she has the audacity to pretend to be good, that she weaves herself so tightly around people she knows she's only damning to feel pain. When the castle crumbles down, her first instinct is to reach up and catch the rubble on her shoulders. She makes an Atlas of herself / she stands her ground.

Someone has to.

No one goes to make a move, so she does. Always. "You'd be so shocked what you can do for your siblings when you, I don't know, exist around them." Ebony knows she will regret it, can feel the white hot rage burning in the palm of her hand, but in lieu of throwing a punch she simply parts her lips, and feels. "We don't need another ghost in this family, Sybil. Dad's enough." Part of her wants to sob; part of her feels like she's suffocating behind a sheet of glass. She gives nothing away.

"So either you get over yourself and help me for once in your life, or you can just stay in this room forever. Even when all this shit clears — because it will — don't even think about following us home again." For a girl so young, she speaks like an executioner who has seen only death for centuries. This is how deeply it hurts. "You're with us, or you're against us. Pick."