Homest[r]uck // (Sundrop)

[L△LIA]

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."

Find a home amongst the trees
Bend your branches over me
Find a home
Defy the freeze
Dance around the rosaries

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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.

Faith alone must clear this snow
Or we'll have doubted heaven
It's finisterre for dancing bears
If we have doubted heaven
We have doubted heaven

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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.

Everyone I left behind
They think I left my mind
Under Mesmer, sola fide
Same dream I'm always having
Like shivering, shivering, shivering

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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.

Find a home amongst the trees
Bend your branches over me
Find a home
Defy the freeze and glow
Find a home

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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.

Oh
I can row, I can row
I can row back home
Or we can lay, we can lay
We can lay in sway

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[shrimp]

Little Red Riding Hood dashes through her snow, the red cape flying behind her and leaving droplets of fabric liquid on the ground; her plight is similar to that of Hansel and Gretel, their desperation for survival rubbing off on the girl. I need to get out of here I need to find Aesop. Because regardless of what he may know or do or not know or not do, I need him and he needs me. Solace is searched for in the vast empty whiteness, and Sundra soon realizes that it's possible that Aesop is dead, for the trio had gotten separated in the morning, Denver dragging Aesop to who-knows where, and there were two cannons today. She knows that Shayde is dead, killed by Charas Harp, but it could be Aesop lying in a puddle of his own blood, his head detached from his fragile body, or limb after limb amputated until he is no more.

The thoughts of his possible (yet imminent) death cause chemicals to rush through her veins, culminating in a mad dash to find him - to find anyone that won't pose a thread; Ember could be lurking in the shadows, her spirit whispering in her ear along with the others; or Storm might be flying through the air unseen by all, merely a spectral being in the midst of the icy frost; maybe even Trace will walk out from behind the narrow spindly branch of a tree and shout "Surprise!". Yet then, finally salvation comes in the form of the alive (alive!) Aesop Bloom, who reaches up and wipes away more red from her face, stained with the evidence of a massacre. She feels like crying, but it's evident that he has gone through worse (and Denver is nowhere to be seen - little does she know that his body has already been transported to the hovercraft with two limbs missing and empty eyes, although she can inference it).

"You have some on you too," she mutters, reaching up to smear the remnants of blood away from his porcelain skin, the stain fading away as she rubs the skin warm with her own, eyebrows furrowed in concentration. Only when he pulls away however, does she realize that no matter how they look, nothing will make their deeds fade away, not even death. Guilt hits her like a brick wall, and Sundra feels like sobbing over Shayde's death - it could have been her. It should have been her, and it wasn't because of the grisly betrayal and drama that unfolded before her eyes. Now stuck in a fortress of despair, she refuses to leave it, sniffing once as Aesop begins to attempt some sort of healing process (This is a magic trick. Magic tricks are false, but the facade looks as real as anything else in Panem.)





I barely even got to the meaty parts D: So anyways, Aesop does his little magic trick, which consists of him drawing boxes in the snow and Sundra's thinking that drawing isn't going to help at this point because she knows that if she drew it would only result in more tears and frozen cheeks. But instead it turns out to be something more fantastical than she ever imagined, because it's their own escape from reality, their own house to call their own. All of her worries are immediately replaced with make believe happiness and perfection (yet, part of this isn't truly make believe, because she is simply so touched by what Aesop has done for her that she can't even bear to think about their empty shells that are still encrusted on their bodies).

She smiles at the thought of a daughter - she's been a mother already after all, and Europa and Io never fail to bring a happiness and spring to her step when there is no danger involved. The illusion however, does crack when Aesop talks about the real world, and almost crumbles altogether with the last "tada", for it is like the end of a breathtaking story. So then she almost starts to cry again but then OH MY WHAT ARE THESE THINGS ON MY FACE OH WAIT THEY'RE AESOP'S LIPS. YOU GO GET HIM, GURL. She briefly wonders if the Capitol wouldn't want them to continue this but then she goes all BADWORD THE POLICE and then there's more eating face until her stomach begins to bleed again and she winces and he backs away for other reasons.

I've felt old for millennium, Aesop is what she wants to say, but instead she doesn't answer. Rather, she stays silent as she contemplates stuff, but goes closer to aesop and wraps him in a tight hug, sobs beginning to take over her body until she is hugging onto him extremely tightly with the her tears becoming the river Styx. Because crying cures everything, duh. And in Sundra's case, it could, simply because she doesn't have a plan in the games and it's screwing her over and she doesn't know what to do and she's so frightened and upset yet happy at the same time because of Aesop and it confuses her to no end so she's very frustrated. IN OTHER WORDS, ANGST. She then kisses him again, softly and unsure of herself before she finally pulls away, and her hand feels her stomach, which is wet and cold but the snow isn't white, instead it's stained rose and she looks at him in fright because she doesn't want to die and this could be fatal. Yeah.


[somehow gets the meat that aesop gives her in here]

[L△LIA]

When you try your best but you don't succeed
When you get what you want
But not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse

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We are sick with red and know that it will continue to come for us — and from us, forever and ever, until the end of our days when all our houses will come tumbling down and we will cross over into the true whitelands — no matter where we try to hide ourselves away, but it will not have us today. Even as it stains the snow at our feet (as she leans into me and I have to clench my fists and furrow my eyebrows, with tightly shut eyes and that oldworld mantra of numbness, or I'll —), there is still enough willpower between us to hold ourselves together, or at least each other, and there are ways of healing here that even Calliope has no knowledge of. So when she pulls away and her sudden look of terror stares at me with an idea scarier than anything, I am still something less-than-panicked — despite my drumheller heart that only remembers how to crescendo — because this isn't beyond us... yet.

Breaking my trance to take her hand, the withdrawn defiance that holds all my impulses inside dissolves as I lead her away from the colored snow and into the kitchen, clearing the food from our table with a dramatic wave of my hand — because maybe this is still just part of a magic show — and tug her down until we're both kneeling on the coat-turned-tablecloth. I want to tell her that all houses need to be swept clean from time to time; just because our feet have tracked in dirty snow, doesn't mean we have to keep it here, that we're still bigger than the red, but the persistent fear in her eyes tells me she won't believe me until I prove it and I can't really blame her. Maybe I've been spending too much time proving I'm alive and have neglected to show her that she's alive too.

When the tears come
Streaming down your face
When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

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So it's something more than determination or devotion that starts me rummaging through my rucksack, searching through its disorganized — now is not the time to remember why, no, Aesop, please don't think about why — contents until I've found a roll of bandages. Unlike the switchblades and violence I've been weighing in my hands these past few days, this is a weight that is familiar and an unexpected kind of comfort. In District Six, I spent so many days faking illness and injury for my sister, clutching my side with false complaints read from the pages of a textbook so she could practice various ways of putting me back together, mending my invisible aches and pains in pursuit of education. I may have dropped out of school before my teachers had the opportunity to teach me words with more than two or three syllables or mathematical equations too complex to be counted out on my fingers and toes, but it seems I still managed to learn a thing or two anyway, because I know what to do with the bundle of cloth in my hand. I know how to stop the blood. I know enough.

Setting the bandages down in the space between our knees, my hands reach out to her, but stutter into momentary stillness in midair as my nerves catch up to me. My hesitance is silly and inappropriate, but that's on par for me, and I duck my head with a flickering half-smile as I blink at least twice as much as is actually necessary while biting my lower lip in an unsuccessful attempt to quell the quiet reddening of my face as I realize that this is completely different than helping Calliope study. Sundra is definitely not my sister and although she is another kind of family now, her skin is — With an awkward cough to break the silence, I convince my myself to finish crossing the distance between me and the buttons of her coat, my fingers fumbling self-consciously as I begin to unfasten them one by one, holding my breath as my hands make their way down her chest.

Lights
Will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try
To fix you

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By the time I've managed to open her coat, I'm convinced my hands must be shaking enough to rival my withdrawal symptoms — and maybe I'm not seeing straight or it's her exposure to the cold, but it seems like I'm not the only one. It's the need to steady myself that ultimately brings my hands to rest on her hips (she is the last steadiness I have left in my terrifyingly upside-down and beautifully backwards life, after all), before I close my eyes in remembrance of and preparation for what I'm about to witness. Allowing my thumbs to hook themselves beneath the hem of her turtleneck, there's a brief moment of acknowledgment for what this isn't, but should be, as my fingerprints attempt to sear themselves into her bare skin for what suddenly feels like the first time I've ever touched her... and then reality returns as I slide the fabric up like the blood-red velvet curtain of a theater being raised for a performance of Real Life.

What foolish reality is doing trying to sneak into the Bloom household, I'm not quite certain, but one glance at the gruesome gash on her stomach and I know I want to chase it away more than ever before. It is more than a historical menace now, more than a childhood friendship gone wrong; this feeling gnawing at me isn't the inconsolable sadness of the secretly forlorn Aesop Bloom whose mother died and left me to be raised by my uninvolved father, misguided brother, and a sister too kind or too book smart to realize that what I've always needed wasn't a smile that said everything would be okay, but a little bit of honest judgment for everything about me that wasn't. This time my substandard coping skills and drug withdrawal excuses aren't responsible for the pain seething within me as I hunch to examine Sundra's wound, fingertips skimming over the goosebumps rising up from her exposed skin to hover over the sticky red that bites too deeply into her flesh for my eyes to follow. Rather, this is an emotion that is both more and less selfish at the same time.

High up above or down below
When you're too in love to let it go
But if you never try
You'll never know
Just what you're worth

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Picking up the bandages once more, I roll them back and forth in my palms for a moment in an attempt to chase the cold from the niches of the threads before I begin to dress her wound. Carefully leaning into her so I can more easily wrap my arms around her waist beneath her coat, I pass the tiny bundle of fabric from hand to hand — around and around like the literal bindings of an unspoken promise — until I'm out of bandages, but not out of reasons to stay just the way we are. Releasing a shivering breath from my mouth after making certain the dressings are tightly tucked and tied into place, a heaviness remains within my lungs that insists I stay put, so I silently rest my forehead against her temple as I try to focus on each inhalation and exhalation that passes through me, instead of dwelling on the tension passing between the two of us.

[Aesop uses bandages on Sundra]

A soft twitch courses through the tendons of my hands as they rest against her sides, tucked into stillness between the fabric of her clothing and the warmth of her skin. "I—" I'm out of words and actions, Sundra. The only thing left that I want to do is stay and so I do. I stay motionless, huddled close enough to her that the cold can't touch her, can touch us. Second by second, the walls of our house seem to build up around us, solid and utterly wind-defiant — and, still, I stay and stay and stay. Perhaps this home only existed in my imagination before, but with each hushed increment of time that passes in the space surrounding us, there are floorboards solidifying below and ceilings shutting out the sky above. Each fictional brick, plank of wood, and sheet of glass in my mind flexes against the reality that tried and failed to claim us, windows and doors declaring victory for the fantastical by materializing in the snowscape, shutting out the frigid white with warmth.

Tears stream down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears stream down your face
I promise you I will learn from all my mistakes
Tears stream down your face and I —

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Inquisitively nudging her damp cheek with my nose (if tears could fight, her army would rule the world), I drop my head to press my lips to the corner of her jaw, using small movements to ask questions too big for words: Do you see the house too? Despite my silence, there's a hitch in my throat as my thumbs begin drawing slow figure eights on her waist — Do you feel the opposite of cold, like I do? — and a pause as I wait for her to pull away, but she doesn't, so my fingers stretch in tentative response, gently fitting themselves into the notches of her ribcage. There is life yet to be lived between us and I can't escape the curiosity, the impulsiveness, the inevitability of it all. Do you still believe in futures?

"Run away with me?" My voice rasps clumsily against the words, struggling to transform complexity into simplicity as I speak. I'll teach you how to flee a fight while standing still. Sure, it's a kind of con and maybe it will only be on ourselves, but it never fails completely. I'm not infamous for nothing — all my nothings are of my own making and I have no interest in them now... so run away with me, Sundra Bloom. We can hide from the whole world inside this house: lock the doors and close the curtains, turn out the lights and sink into the dark. Time becomes agonizing — as if it wasn't already — until she shifts subtly into me and all my memories of boundaries and those supposed to ideas from earlier thoughts slip away. The house will cover District Six's eyes if I ask it to and even if it doesn't, why should we care? There are worse things than letting the world know you're alive. So I abandon my hesitance and runstumblesink into her: mouth first, hands second, and reality never.

Lights
Will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try
To fix you

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