name like an elegy / lena + andal

[calla]

m a g d a l e n a .

"i am not
a vessel for
your good intent."

Andal comes home to a great deal of fanfare. Ma gets all the church ladies together to hold a welcome back party with banners and doilies and five different casseroles. And fifty different cutting remarks about said casseroles.

The church basement still doesn't have AC yet, so it's in that shiny new house that Lena refuses to stay in, the one with the new couch and the curtains that everyone's been tittering over. It's barely even been a week and the whole place smells like wet dog. Funny how that happens.

Lena's seen Andal around, sure, but her eyes always seem to skate over him, he starts to turn toward her and she ducks around a corner. He towers over all the little old ladies fawning around him but she gets vertigo from looking up that high, so she doesn't. She knows objectively that it's still him, but it doesn't stop the strangeness of his silhouette setting her teeth on edge.

It's still her brother in there, someone's just painted over him with something she doesn't recognize. Seventeen years she's known him, now it's like that's all gone out the window.

Lena ducks out to the back porch when the sixth casserole comes in and Ma starts calling for another pair of hands. Uncle Ronnie's sitting right there on the couch, already three beers in and half asleep. He's got a pair of hands. Let him help.

And that's the other fuckin' thing. Andal comes home and everyone expects things to just go back to normal. Lena's been working her ass off here, situating herself, finally finally about to get Ma to crack and put her name on the deed. Then her dog of a brother comes back and ruins the whole thing. Fuck him for trying to survive - it sounds cruel, she knows, she hears it in her own voice hurled over the landing on the day of the finale, but watering herself down just makes her bubble over again.

It's this terrible thing inside of her, this girlhood that she was cheated of.

She sits on the steps with her fists between her knees and tries to ignore the way they start itching for a menthol - nasty habit that started long before Andal left, but it’s just been expedited since then.

First-born son; allowed to do whatever he wants because he'll always have the safety net of his identity.

Look at him now. She can't even recognize his shadow.

The porch creaks and Lena's jaw clenches. Of course even the Capitol wouldn't be able to take away his bumbling.

"You look like shit." She says without turning around. "D'they not let you pick out the mug?"

[gunner, d9 ₊⊹ 👹 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

As the sixth casserole makes its vile entrance, Andal becomes keenly aware of how his mouth has begun to ache from smiling. Laughter grates up his throat and he struggles to keep the cadence of the talk at hand, a tightrope walker beginning to quiver on the string. It all sounds the exact same to him now. The cloying sweet congratulations and the melodramatic consolations, we’re so glad you’re back and my goodness, I can’t imagine what you went through.

They all knew, though.

He catches it in glimpses, the way their eyes look at him with half-awe and half-terror, the secret gazes to the gloves he has yet to take off, and of course, the classic whispers behind their ostrich feather fans. When they weren’t reciting the holy book, these church ladies traded scandals and secrets like coins, and he could barely tell one from the other. After he won, it seems as though his mother had exchanged her old group for a more refined one: blue-blooded housewives, necks choked by all manners of jewelry and wearing dresses that rustled with the tiniest movement.

It makes his skin prickle, his head cottony. Unseen piano music wailed from a corner of the room, how in the tarnation does he not remember that there is a piano?

“Pardon me,” he interrupts a lady mid-speech, brightens his smile to console her for it a beat after. “Let me go check on the rest of the food, make sure it’s all good. I’d love to hear about how your husband beat the rose plague later, though.” A sympathic pat to his own chest, and then he tears away. Snaking through tiered dresses and the smell of baked goods, he is a man desperate for air as he bumbles out to the back porch.

Andal takes a deep gulp of the country breeze.

He isn’t alone.

When he smiles next, it’s genuine. “Scoot,” he says, yet pushes her playfully aside to sit next to where she is on the steps. “No,” a sigh, “no, they sure ain’t keen on asking.”

He takes a sidelong glance and sees that he’s older. Sharper. Like a whetted hunting knife whose edge does not dull with age, there is steel in her mettle and iron in her eyes. Not surprising, because Lena has always looked and acted older than him, despite the age and despite the size. If he is a summer storm, she is the monsoon, a swirl of dark clouds and silent lightning.

He draws his knees up to his chest. “I knew it was always gonna’ be you. The ledgers, Ma’s store, Rowan’s school. Even his grades got up. I thought I’d come home to a mess, but it’s way neater than before.” A chuckle escapes him. He looks down, then out towards the fields of wheatgrass ahead. They used to play there together as children, little heirs of summer. Andal feels an invisible chill run down his spine, a stark contrast to the memory.

“Out of all of us, it’s always been you who’s sharp as whip and that got me thinking …” soft blue eyes turn to look at her. “Go to the Capitol, or somewhere better than here. Study Economics or somethin’. You were made to run past these fields, Mag.”

[calla]

m a g d a l e n a .

"i am not
a vessel for
your good intent."

She can tell he's smiling just by the way his voice lilts. She wishes she couldn't. That he wouldn't. She wishes he'd stop with his puppy-dog eyes, or that'd he be angry with her, or more monstrous, so then she'd have a real justification for why she wants to snap at him so badly.

But he's just her brother, as earnest as he was before he left.

"They sure ain’t keen on asking.” Andal says, nudging her over and making himself comfortable.

Lena feels so small next to Andal. Always has. It used to make her huff and puff and she remembers stuffing her shoes with old newspaper on the first day of ninth grade because he'd had a sudden growth spurt over the summer and she was so damned jealous.

Maybe that's why she gets such a sick sense of relief from being able to twist the knife like this. She pushes and pushes and pushes and he's still genuine. It's unfathomable. She doesn't know how someone can share her blood and not feel that constant thrum of electricity that flows through it. It should be there. He should feel it. He should care about what happens to the family when he's gone because Lena's been doing it enough for the both of them.

Andal's carefreeness has always been foreign to her - she's never been able to afford something like that.

"You should ask for a refund." She picks at her nails and stares at one of the wind chimes hanging off the porch, "I'm not kiddin', Andal, you look weird, those docs ain't what they're cracked up to be."

And it unsettles her so damned bad. The brother she grew up with left, and someone else came home in his place. She can still feel her shock from when she saw that first broadcast. Andal was on screen with a brand new face and the big conspiracy started whispering through the family - that he actually had died and the Capitol replaced him.

Lena believed it. Right up until he stepped off the train and squinted across the platform at them. She knew the way he walked and the way he talked, and the Games might have changed his face, but it couldn't have changed that.

"Of course it's neater than before." Her proficiency is never the thing that's been disputed. She's capable. She's more than capable. Somehow it hurts even more when that's recognized. Everyone knows she can run this place, yet she's still here on the porch steps, regulated to dish duty.

"Go to the Capitol." Andal says, and Lena turns her face away so he can't see her expression.

"And let everything fall apart here? None of you would last a week." She tries to play it off as a joke, but it falls flat between them. "A degree ain't gonna change anything, s'just a pretty pipe dream."

Then she reigns it in a little, feeling him out, searching for a better reason to stay and fight and sink her teeth in, "You should be worried about yourself, got victor ticked off the list, what's next? The limelight's probably missing you."

[gunner, d9 ₊⊹ 👹 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

The sun is a red backdrop against the wheat fields, making them look aflame from where they sit on the porch.

On his first day back, he stared at this expanse for hours until his eyes ached. Until he remembered again of the days spent making odd contraptions by the haystacks and bounding down hills, never afraid to fall or bruise. A shepherd would be playing his pan flute, and the sounds of the thoroughfare in the town square would be faint but comfortingly present. The wind chimes would sing their lullabies in an evening breeze.

Remembering is the same as exercising an old muscle, meaning it never quite feels like it used to. Even now, with Lena, there is a dark lapse where there once was fight and quarrels and threats, and Andal finds himself missing all of that over the rift in between them. They sit close together, her shoulder brushing his side, but they have been so never felt far apart.

Whoever Andal had been before has died in the arena.

Sure, he still has his stupid resolve and he has yet to have the stomach for spicy food, but everything else that made him who he was had been torn out, ripped apart, and then replaced in the wrong order.

Perhaps being a victor is nothing about basking in the glory and everything trying to reclaim parts of yourself lost amongst the wreckage.

But in case he cannot find himself back, he wants his sister to find her own destiny.

”You don’t need anyone’s permission to leave,” he breathes the words out, feeling the knot in his throat untangle as they leave him. His hands wring themselves together, callouses against callouses. ”I can get people to keep the store running for Ma. Hell, I’ll buy her a new one if she wants. Reckon she’d need a bigger place to host all the church ladies, right?”

He turns to look at her side angle. He can’t see it but he knows the only thing they share now are their enamel blue eyes, the color that of a distant thunderstorm, lightning bottled up in each iris. He misses looking like a Searley. Brown hair, like the fur of a grizzly bear, and freckled face, sun-kissed since the day they were born, and Ripred, he misses being a real friggin’ Searley.

But Lena hasn’t changed a darn thing. She can crave out a destiny for them in a real way, a true way, and remain a Searley as she does it.

“This little patch of land’s too small to contain your multitudes, Mag. All of our multitudes. This is our shot at a legacy. It’s what people dream of, and it’s what I fought for.”

And then, in a much quieter tone, “it’s what I killed for.”

[calla]

m a g d a l e n a .

"i am not
a vessel for
your good intent."

Andal avoids her question like it's a damn sport.

He never used to be the podium shoe-in he is now. He wasn't the blue ribbon, gold star, Ma-puts-all-your-trophies-on-the-mantle kind of kid - none of them were.

They were born in pools of diesel fuel with rusted wire veins and as they got older and taller and started to raise Hell, the Good Lord had the common sense and decency to look away.

When track day rolled around each spring, it was the one time that the Searleys huddled together to figure out how discreetly they'd be able to trip up the fastest kid in each grade. Lena remembers being the worst kind of spitfire, being told she couldn't compete with the boys in sixth grade and then outrunning both Louie Mastings and Kent Ole through sheer spite.

But now.

But now, little silver boy, little victory ode, Andal's got more wins under his belt than any of them.

He can fix any problem, he can do anything. He'll buy Ma a whole damn new store, just because he can. Just because Lena's throwing another fit and they've gotta put a band-aid over it until she calms down again.

She scoffs.

The worst part is that Andal doesn't even do it on purpose. She knows he's not really cruel, she knows that. He can't help being earnest the same way she can't help being wrathful.

But now.

But still.

Maybe the problem is that she's just fundamentally insecure. She's still a kid with a towering brother who no one is allowed to snap at but her. She still wants that blue ribbon even though she has no mantle to put it on. And then Andal goes and sticks this idea in her head. He's got it dangling there on a string, she was just stupid enough to glance at it.

Lena keeps looking away from him, tracing a notch in the fence post to hide the way it's slowly, traitorously, growing on her.

"You really think I could?"

Because if he's making fun of her, she'll deck him, doesn't matter that he's a victor now, doesn't matter that he's part wolf or whatever, she'll do it.

She's affectionately harsh, deflection over deflection, at least they'll never say she's not layered - "I doubt you were in there thinking about sending me to school."

That's not what you nearly died for.

[gunner, d9 ₊⊹ 👹 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

To be a Searley is to question everything. They always had that inquisitive streak in them, children of old inventors and wood-smiths, heads whirling like polished cogs and hearts full of fear that the devil would possess their fingers if they went idle.

The damned serums robbed a part of that from Andal.

It turned him into an animal hellbent on its next prey and nothing else. Language, logic, invention- none of that stood a chance against the hunger he was plagued with during the last few days of the Games, that yawning pit in his gut. And even after he had returned, after every forsaken scar was undone and smoothed over, Andal isn’t sure if his full self has returned. He isn’t sure if it ever would.

Lena, on the other hand, still has her chance.

She may be the second oldest but she conducts herself as if she is older than him. And in some way, she is. Andal doesn’t know if he would have been able to step up in the way Lena had if she was the one who got reaped. If she was the one spirited away from rural frontier living and he got back to stay back home, trying to hold everything together.

In another world where it happened, Andal is certain Lena won as well.

"You really think I could?"

He leans back on his large elbows. “You got a cleaner shot than any of us.” Lena who won every spelling bee contests in school, Lena who stayed up until the candles burned down to ace every test.

”But, I …” his cheeks turn a rosebush red. “I sorta signed up for a few classes, too. Mechanical Engineering. Flynn recommended me a few places.”

It’s embarrassing to put into words, perhaps because Andal is not quite the university type, but he dreams about long shadows of automobiles and carts, of steel and chrome glinting under the summer sun.

Sleek objects, sharp objects, all bearing the Searley name. Legacy.

There’s a glimmer of that steel in Lena’s posture. He knows it is in his, too — perhaps a little warped, but there.

"I doubt you were in there thinking about sending me to school."

He doesn’t protest. In his best moments, he thought about home, and in his worst moments, he thought about survival. The moments between were superimposed with images of dark shadows, silver claws, Chiarra’s face blurring together with a skeleton’s and his dreamt image of Jack leaving, the shadows pulling her in, the lake engulfing her whole —

Andal draws in a sharp breath. Shakes his head tightly.

“Yeah. You’re right. Way to make me feel like a bad brother,” he chuckles.

[calla]

m a g d a l e n a .

"i am not
a vessel for
your good intent."

Lena tries hard not to scrunch her face up, tilting her head and lifting her chin and making a conscious effort not to sound too harsh.

"You know I didn't mean it like that." She scolds.

He might not know though. Lena's never been very crafty with her words. She's direct, all no-nonsense, and like their Ma sometimes in the way that her jokes come out a little too truthful and a little too biting, too sharp.

"Way to make me feel like a bad sister." She tries to return the jab lightly, gentler, just to soften the blow a little.

She'd always been a pigtail-puller until it made her brothers cry, and then it was less don't-tell-Ma and more don't-tell-God. Her inner conflict was worse than her outer. She's got that guilt in her, it's inescapable, and Rowan was always the worst of them all. That kid knew how to play heartstrings like a gold-greased guitar and he's played Lena for a sucker more than once, trading forgiveness for little pieces of penny candy.

Andal, at least, had the wherewithal to pull right back.

"Mechanical Engineering." He admits to, like he's shy of it, "Flynn recommended me a few places.”

Her eyebrows start to creep up, but she doesn't stop looking at the horizon line. Funny how sometimes, when the air's clear, you can see into forever.

"You on a first name basis with all of them already?" Her chin finds her hand, an exhlalation, "Don't let Ma find out, she's already been braggin' about having the Emberstatts over."

And the thing is, the stupid little thing is that Lena doesn't know if having Andal there in the Capitol will sour her experience or sweeten it.

'There's Andal Searley's little sister,' She can already hear in the halls, 'D'you thinking she'd get us in with him?'

She'd sooner stomp on their overpriced Ten-inspired leather boots, crumple up the notes with their numbers and never ever tell Andal about it. She doesn't want to be known as a Victor's sister for the rest of her life, but she doesn't want to be a nobody either. She's too all-encompassing for that, she's like a dust storm in the way she's relentless; finding her way into every crook and cranny and wanting a space to call her own.

"I think it'd be good for you at least." She admits, "Something steady for once."

School was always her thing. She was the one with the test scores tacked up beside the blue ribbons. But still, this is her brother. Andal ignoring her would be worse than Andal humouring her.

"We ain't roomin' together, if that's what you're trying to get at." And there's that fault of hers again, a little too truthful, a little too sharp, edges not quite smoothed over, "You couldn't pay me to put up with your snoring for another four years."