the adults are talking, lena & rowan

[fox]

🙃

His brother comes home to an infernal summer. The sun feels maroon, nights like they're swimming in soup.

There were the cameras and the mayor and the ladies from the church. They'd pinched his cheeks and tittered over how he'd grown in the last year. He's a beanpole now, that's what Ma says, stretched out four inches over a season, but he feels the same. He spent the whole party sitting on the couch staring at the jug of lemonade perspiring onto the table, ice cubes crackling against the glass.

There's Andal, talking to Lena, there's Andal, smiling at the neighbours, there he is, on television – and Rowan hasn't said a thing to Andal since he's returned.

The heatwave makes his head spin when the sun's high in the sky, the smell of light clinging to his clothes, thick and mellow. At night, he lies on the floor and puts a pillow on his chest – same old heavy weight that's been there for weeks. The old window A.C. sputters and starts, a loud hum reverberating through his brain. It kinda feels like it's etched there, a notch in the bone.

A storm brings an interlude.

In the afternoon, the sky darkens and white veins of lightning split through the heat. The house is quiet. The rain comes on and off.

Ma complains about all the fur on the couch for the fiftieth time, and he wants to leave the house so badly that he sends himself to the general store to pick up a lint roller.

It starts to drizzle again while he's in the shop. He stands just outside the entrance, water splashing onto his shoes, and waits for the rain to subside, holding the brown paper bag behind him so it doesn't get wet. The air has an earthy tone, deep and heavy. It goes straight to his lungs and feels like gulping in a mouthful of greenery.

He hears a quiet croak in the midst of all the thunder. He looks down at his feet but doesn't see anything. There's little ephemeral pools in the divots of the path. He looks around until he spots a flash of green.

This frog is very round.

It croaks again and then leaps down the steps in a kind of funny way – and when he's close enough, he sees a bubble of red around its eye, blood pooling and dripping.

The rain starts to relent, softening again. He hesitates for a moment.

And then, he takes a step down the stairs. It jumps another step down.

He's practically inches from it, when it darts away from him and under the porch foundation of the store. There's maybe about three feet of clearing. The croaking continues, faintly beneath him. Shit.

//

He sneaks around to the back of the house, ducks underneath the windows, and kicks off his shoes before he tries to pry open the back door. A loud croak comes from the front pocket of his overalls, hand on the knob, and he freezes there for a second.

It would be fine, really. The lint roller is a little wet. But he'll just stick it in the oven for forty seconds.

Honestly, it would've all been fine if Magdalena wasn't standing right there, in front of the door, when he opens it.

"Hi."

Shit. He looks at her and she stares at him, and then his front pocket moves a little bit. A pool of water slowly gathers beneath his feet onto the spotless floor. He tries to wipe the mud from his cheek with his shoulder because his hands are even dirtier.

"Uh. Please don't tell Ma."

[calla]

🙂

In a way that only her older brother could, Andal's gone and put this horribly wonderful horrible idea in her head.

She made the walk over to the Mayor's office yesterday to get the paperwork and work through a series of never-ending small talk sessions with Novak's secretary. The forms are still sitting in an open envelope in the drawer of her nightstand, the corners are starting to curl even though they're blank because she kept taking them out last night, nearly four times of back and forth, looking at them without really looking at them.

There's a spot for her name and her date of birth and her District number, her high school GPA and her sponsor's name (Andal, the insistent, perfect, horrible idiot) - that's the easy part. The hard part is the little Statement of Intent space at the bottom of the page, right above the sans-serif Archytas slogan.

Andal only gave her the one reason for why she should enrol. On her own now, Lena can think of about a dozen other reasons why she shouldn't.

Reason #4 slouches in through the door right on cue and brings a trail of mud into the mudroom. (Funny how that works - Ma's always been so particular about the mudroom, despite mud literally being right there in the name.) He's soaked though, there's not a lot of noise except for the pit-pat of the water falling from his clothes and the tick-tick of the little oven timer in the kitchen.

It's hard to tell which one is a worse premonition.

The air's heavy as all Hell today, but Lena's leaning over the boot-rack to shove open the back window because the oven's started smoking in protest of her baking again (always, always hers, she distinctly remembers being eleven and nearly turning the kitchen to ash, subsequently getting banned from helping with every other future bake sale).

One hand on the window latch, Lena just stands there and stares down Rowan until he squirms. She's got the classic motherly-disapproving-look perfect now, it was the very first thing in Ramona Searley's arsenal that she latched onto.

(The last thing, was evidently, the baking.)

Rowan's taller than her now, every one of them is, but she hasn't let it shrink her yet. They keep growing, but they never grow up and Lena just wishes so damn bad that her brothers would've gotten older the same time she did so she wouldn't have had to hit the wall first, all alone, this horrible (horrible) falling and smashing down over her shoulders.

"Lord's sake, Rowan."

That sends the windows rattling, like God himself heard the blasphemy and He's really truly upset about it like Mrs. Atkins always said He was. Lena feels the stare of the clouds; the ruler on her palm, all the ladies from church must start cringing all the way from across the district, crossing themselves like that'll actually achieve something.

This ain't His domain though. This is Magdalena Searley: as small as she is mighty, full of righteous anger and God-given talent, businesswoman aficionado, sister extraordinaire.

"Tell me you didn't just croak."

[fox]

🙃

Something's burning, but maybe it's because Lena's staring at him with the wrath of a sun. She can do that – be bigger than the whole room, more natural phenomenon than girl sometimes.

"Lord's sake, Rowan."

"I'm sorry, I…"

Somewhere, the oven timer is ticking away, the sound bouncing around his skull in the background. He can picture it on the counter turning, ancient thing that's shaped like a tomato. It feels like it's been in their house since forever.

His head spins, Lena burns, and he can't quite meet her eyes.

"...Fell."

It might've worked on Andal. But there's not a chance it works on Lena.

Because she's sharp like that, knew he was failing school even when he crumpled up the papers and doctored the report cards, knew about Andal Jr. living under his bed before the others caught on. Can barely hide anything from her, even when there's things he wishes he could bottle up and throw away for all of eternity, buried deep in his bones.

"I got the lint roller?" He says lamely, holding it up.

Shying from the blazing gaze of his wildfire sister, he tries to shuffle by her, but she's somehow blocking the whole door frame even though he's bigger.

The heavy scent of smoke and sugar wafts like a storm from the kitchen, and Rowan tries to change the subject, but it's graceless when he speaks. "Oh wow. Are you bakin' again?" He might've been nine when they almost died from a batch of her cookies. He breathes in deeply, tries not to cough when the charred fumes hit his lungs. "Smells, um, good."

And Rowan's counting on that to be enough of a redirection, but then the lump in his front pocket moves a little. There's a sudden pang of panic as he looks down, frozen with alarm.

The loudest croak on earth erupts.

The frog wriggles out from his overalls, and there's not even time to feel the hot creep of getting caught red-handed colouring in his cheeks. He makes a grab for the thing before it leaps off, drops the roller where it clatters onto the floor, clutching the frog like a hamburger around its middle, legs dangling in the air.

Slowly, he looks at Lena.

"Please don't tell Ma," he repeats.

There's a cut by the frog's eye that he first saw by the store, and he points at it like it's a valid explanation for everything, like it's totally reasonable and forgivable and not at all worthy of being grounded. "He's hurt," he mumbles. "I was just gonna let him rest, Len."

He holds it up to her. It's pleasantly green. It expands in his hands and belts another perfect bass note.

"Honest – I was gonna let him go after. Look he's no trouble at all –"

"No trouble at all" breaks free just then, slips out from his muddy hands, and bounces into a shoe.

Shit.

[calla]

🙂

She looks at him, deadpan face, voice flatter than the floorboards - ”You fell.”

Yeah she ain’t buyin’ it.

Thing is, Ro's got this bleeding heart. He's her littlest brother, and yeah, that's gotta count for something, but they move through these motions like they haven’t done the same song and dance a dozen times already.

“Are you bakin’ again?” - She narrows her eyes and crosses her arms, kicks away thoughts of worms in puddles and little Lena tugging little Rowan across the street because he always wanted to stop. - “Smells, um, good.”

"Uh-huh." It's charcoal by now and they both know it. She still loves him for trying and hates him for thinking it would work.

Then he croaks again.

"Ro-" But there's a damn frog in his overalls, and then the frog jumps out, and then Rowan jumps after the frog and Lena jumps back, everyone's jumping like it's some kind of weird fever-induced dream.

But here's the other thing - Rowan's a real little shithead, even if he doesn't know it. He's got this gift where he knows just how to pull at the right heartstrings, and Lena's never thought that he really did it on purpose, it's not malicious or anything, but it sure as hell's inconvenient.

"It's hurt," Ro starts babbling with his baby blues, pressing at all her buttons, holding the frog up like it's the brand new messiah that he found out in the mud.

Lena heaves the heaviest sigh that the District's ever heard and looks at the frog, defeated. It is very green. She presses her fingers to her temples and covers her eyes, building herself up to the compromise she's about to give into, because she already knows that Ro's gonna take it and run.

"You gotta keep it in the bathtub or somethin', no letting it jump around the house. And you gotta let it go after." Then because she knows him, specifically knows his five step process of Getting Attached and number one on the list, she points at him - "No naming it."