We Are Catalysts // (Nino & Ursula)

[L△LIA]

( N I N O D E K K A R I P L E Y )

To make you want me I can fabricate the truth
I'll give you easy it'll keep me destitute
You hang me up on the line
Hang me out to dry
And you got nothing to lose

When it comes down to it, very few things in life are actually a choice. We don't choose to live any more than we choose to die, but that doesn't stop us from fighting for the right to every breath we take. Fitz and Penelope never got to choose anything and Learna...

The Capitol thinks it has a right to us now. A right to our blood. Distance means nothing when inevitability haunts you as if your own shadow were following you with a Reaper's wicked grin. I'm a Ripley and so I know, I know, I know that my death will be decided for me all too soon, just like Learna's was decided today. Because Learna is was a Libertine and so the Capitol determined that she ought to follow in her sister's footsteps.

Our families have a legacy to uphold.

You've got the story all made up inside your head
You write me out of it and use your words instead
You hold me just out of reach
But you keep me pounding the beat
To take all the soul you can get

My own footsteps will surely bring me back to Fitz one of these days, in much the same way, but for now they travel back and forth across the floorboards of my living room. The echoes of Learna's death still crackle out from the television and I can't bring myself to turn it off any more than I could stop myself from turning it on. I had to know. Since that awful week last year, I've wanted to pretend that the Libertine's have nothing to do with me and that Learna had nothing to do with me, but I'm a bad liar. Fitz died because of Penelope and no one stopped him. Not Kraken. Not Harper. Not Jorge. Not Kip. Not Jude. Not Noah. Not me. Their fault. Our fault. My fault.

The truth of it is, regardless of our gruesome history, that I can't watch Learna's death and convince myself it has nothing to do with me. In its way it bothers me more than Pen's death, even if I wasn't as close to the younger Libertine, because no one volunteered to stand by her side. Not my brothers or her own. She was alone... or at least as alone as a person with a thousand other souls living within them can be. There is a piece of me that understands Fitz's decision a little better when I glance at Learna's lonely corpse on screen. This is not something I want to understand, however. I hate this sense of knowing.

And I hate the Libertines a little more for making my brother's death even more infinite than it already felt.

You take no chances and you give no other choice
You fill your pockets and you empty out my voice
You use the shallow and old
Trade the heart for the gold
You sell the song for the noise

Still, my feet carry me back and forth, as unsettled as the contradictions I keep inside me. I want to stay. I want to go. I want to save them from loneliness. I want them to suffer for every drop of blood Fitz shed in their name. I want run to them. I want to ruin them. I want to continue hating them forever. I want to change. I want —

I'm sprinting out of the house, the front door clattering shut behind me with a violence that still can't define who my fragile anger is directed at. Maybe I'm crying or maybe I'm spitting so much venom that my shirt is soaked through with poison. I don't even know if the whys of it all matter in this moment, because something within me hurts so badly that I'm tempted to claw it out of me. These unfair fates we've been given are enough to tear us apart...

But as I pull up short, finding myself face to face with Ursula Libertine, I realize it may also still be enough to bring us together. As if we had another choice.

You want me to
Change
Change
Change
You want me to change

[chelsey]

U R S U L A L I BE R T I N E

[/color]

↣ soundtrack ↢[/center]

You've made me into someone
Who should not hold a loaded gun
And now you sit upon my chest
Knock out my wind, knock out my best

[/i][/center][/color]

Dear Learna,

We lead lives of tragedy.

The scaffolds of our childhood crumbled away in your absence, and it’s all I can do to gather the debris in my shaken hands to keep the shelves of the pawnshop from collecting dust. Like the blood of your open wounds, our youth drained away with every metallic gleam of an all too inevitable future we never anticipated. Every slice pressed upon your skin was just another gash inflicted onto my scarred wrists, and sometimes I’d watch the blood drip from my flesh to the cold tile floors as the fluorescent lights above me flickered with every muffled shriek and cry emitted from Mama’s mouth behind the locked bathroom door. Grief is like a heavy fog in our home that has no intention of clearing up anytime soon – its elements are toxic as they clog up our airways and fill our lungs with poisons we’re too tired to exhale out. But its breath weighs down like hot lead in my mouth, and every guilty pulse of my heart is just another drumming reminder of how far a girl can fall to realize she’s never gonna find her way back up, again.

I brewed a storm across the seven oceans of guilt within me. The electricity of my own lightning stings as it surges through my veins, and my blood is just a tsunami against the pink walls of my scarred flesh because they’re always trying to discover a chasm to flood. (There’s one chasm they can’t fill anymore, Learna, and it’s you. But trust me when I promise you that if I could I’d open more wounds and spill half my blood into you and the other half into Pen if it meant I could hear your heart thud against it’s ribcage for at least one last time.) When we bury your coffin right beside Penelope’s, we’ll fold your hands over your heart to match hers and hike a stone over your graves to immortalize “The Deaths of the Libertine Sisters” and pray to a God we know isn’t listening that our tears on the freshly dug soil will water flowers and not weeds.

We lead lives of tragedy, Learna - we all know you hold a sword that’s just too big to belong in your fragile hands. When your alliance turns on you and the gleam of Demeter’s sword comes flashing down towards your unscathed body, your eyes go wide and unflinching like how they would while watching lightning storms through a misty glass window. Your plea for help is louder than the storm, and I heard the thunder of your cries the second your name was pronounced three weeks ago. But, I clung to those five syllables as they drifted into the air, as if keeping the sound of your name that would soon become your death sentence was the last piece of you I could keep and hold. Nothing lasts forever, though, and I had to find that out in the tragic way.

We lead lives of tragedy, but you don’t have to worry about leading yours anymore.

Your sister,
Ursula

[/i] [/color][/blockquote][/blockquote][/justify]

And so long to no disasters and mornings too
And so long to ever afters, so long to you

[/i][/center][/color]

I turned my head away from the screen when she died.

Her screams melded into synchronization with Mama’s fainting cries, and they branded themselves into the pinks of my brain until the ink of her death was tattooed into my mind - so I took the easy way out and turned my face away from the harsh, bright red colors on the screen and walked out of the room. Learna Libertine is dead and I wasn’t there to see how the blade would cut across her flesh.

[/color](When I lock the bathroom door behind me and grip onto the sides of the sink while my heavy breaths unsteadily heave in and out of my mouth, I see Pen’s head jolt back again as the spear pierces through her eye.) [/i]My knuckles turn white from holding onto the edges of the counter so hard, but my whole body feels like it’s been ignited into flames and I can feel every scar and vein embedded into my flesh set themselves on a blood-red fire.

And no one is there to extinguish it.

Daddy’s muffled [/color]“My baby, oh God, my baby!,” seeps in through the cracks beneath the door and I claw at my ears, hoping to drown out the sounds with silence. The blood beneath the scars on my wrist pulse violently against them, like the death of my sister is the moon pulling the tides of the gravitating blood within me. Daddy’s cries are echoing like thunder between the four walls of this bathroom, until it’s suddenly flooded the room and I’m drowning, drowning, drowning in the seas of my own guilt. “My baby, my poor babies!”

A spontaneity of violence and rage rattles within my core as Daddy’s voice and pleas increase with volume and desperateness. I need to break something, I need to scream, I need to fight, I need to erupt, I need to leave.[/b][/color] My steps are unsteady and sloppy as I hastily yank open the bathroom window and heave my head out of it, quickly becoming more and more pathetically desperate to gulp in more fresh air to quench the fire that’s blazing inside of me. I need to leave, I need to leave, I need to leave, I need to – Soon, I’m crawling out of the bathroom’s window and stumbling through the concrete streets alone.

All my limbs are trembling as I run through the empty streets. My feet stumble over cracks and bumps in the road but I can still hear Mama’s cries and Daddy’s ”My baby, my baby!” erupting in my head, and it grows louder, and louder, and louder until it’s in synch with the deteriorating drumming of my heart. Every pulse is a stab to the chest, and every shuddering gasp of air into my lungs is another suffocating breath. I can feel the vibration of Pen’s screams for one last deal on my sticky flesh, and the singe of Learna’s eyes as she watches for vulnerability in my stance during a storm. I need to leave, I need to run, I need to fight, I need to break something, I need –

Nino Ripley comes face to face with me in the middle of a road.

Our breaths are ragged as the electricity of the three yards between us sparks so loudly, that even Mama’s cries drown out to the sound of our hearts pounding against each other. The shadows on the street engulf our bodies with a darkness we are so much more capable of (a darkness that’s brimmed the edges of our skeletons since we were children, since the moment we started making deals with the devil and dug up graves to steal riches from the dead).

In my rush to break something – anything – I find the palms of my hand pushing themselves straight into his chest (and maybe my anger isn’t really directed towards him, but the flames blazing within my head gradually muffles down with the shattering contact of trying to break something possibly more fragile than me).[/blockquote][/blockquote][/justify][/color]

I am soft for only you
Impale me with your tongue, it's true
And slices of me piled sky high
The same old me to the naked eye
But I can't find myself tonight

[/color]

Her footsteps are fragile as she carefully walks her way across the minefield towards my spot by the window. My gray eyes are glazed towards the storm behind the glass, calculating how many milliseconds it takes for the lightning to hit the surface of the black waves. When I hear the brass hinge of the door creak, I don’t turn to look at her, but instead, “Dammit, you’re louder than the storm.” A crack of thunder echoes through the seeps in the cracks of my windowpane, and rattles the caverns of my four walls. “Is your room flooded?”

“Well yours isn’t.” She mumbles something else too, but I can’t hear what she says. She crawls towards my spot, my body huddled under blankets that couldn’t spark a flame if it were the last thing in the world, and leans her back against the wall. I don’t look at her, but I know she’s looking at me. I keep my eyes steady and my grimace stern, and my gaze pinpointed on the gray horizon never withers.

Learna is trying to unearth a weakness within me. But, even if I can’t face my own storms, I can at least face this one.

[/i][/blockquote][/blockquote][/justify]

[/color]And so long to no disasters and mornings too
And so long to ever afters, so long to you[/i][/center][/color]

I stumble back a few paces from him, scared that two broken things put too close together will ultimately break the last whole thing they possess within them. (But maybe breaking apart will make room for creating something anew.)

My eyes mirror Learna’s during the storm as we both try to pinpoint the vulnerability in the one thing that’s keeping us afloat. My voice is as soft as the tide before it swallows the street, and the both of us, up whole,

[/color]“So, are you gonna dig up her grave too?”[/blockquote][/blockquote][/justify]

[ooc - the coding is kinda horrendous and i am so sorry this took so long BUT ILYSM AND THIS SHIP WILL NEVER SINK]

[/justify][/size]

[L△LIA]

[bg=C7CEA2][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,400,true][atrb=style,width: 400px; background-image: url(http://i46.tinypic.com/33kbzfk.png); background-repeat: no-repeat; padding-left:40px; padding-right:40px; padding-top:40px; border-left:1px solid #000000; border-right:1px solid #000000; border-top:1px solid #000000; -moz-border-radius-topright: 25px; border-radius-topright: 25px; -moz-border-radius-topleft: 25px; border-radius-topleft: 25px;opacity: 1;] Maybe I didn't know where my idiot-feet were taking me when I fled my house, but if that's true then the space between Ursula and I's hearts is quite the coincidence. This street is smaller than our combined agony, so although several paces of distance remain between our bodies, I still feel as if we're pressed against each other with the kind of force that could break bones. In this space, her weight upon my ribcage is heavy enough to explain my ragged breathing, yet provides no clues as to why my hands ache with emptiness when I see her face. She is a vortex, dangerous beyond comprehension, and I know I should back away, but I can't. I should, but I can't. It's a curious kind of torture, the way witnessing her ravaged emotional state bites into me, when I shouldn't feel anything. The backwards guilt of sending Learna off alone, with no token soul of home, should not matter so much more in Ursula's presence than it did moments ago in my own loneliness. This is a girl who made as little effort to save my dead brother as I made to save either of her dead sisters and so my regrets should not be for her. I know this and yet my face flares with shame when I meet her eyes, until I'm flushed with fire, my cheeks red enough with the blood of the living as to become a mockery of Learna's death. Where the two of us stand — and only here — it is raining. When I glance up at the sky, I can't see a single drop falling, but I can feel it hit my face, wet and burning. Again and again, one drop after another, until I swear the two of us are trapped in the middle of a downpour, but I still can't see anything. Ursula's hair is dry and there's not a puddle to be found upon the ground, but we're surely in the midst of a hurricane. I can feel it. As Ursula hurls herself at me, at first I'm convinced it's the wind sweeping her into me. This storm surrounding the two of us — and only us— is obviously so violent that it has thrown her into the air and I catch her, my hands gripping her shoulders as her own palms fly into my chest. I owe her nothing, but I have to catch her because she is so clearly broken and I don't know why, but my hands ache to fix her. My hands ache until my heart hurts, until I realize that I'm wrong and that: No. My heart hurts because her fists are crashing into it. And my face is not damp from rain any more than she is moved by a wind beyond herself. I told myself I wouldn't feel pain for her and I meant it. As she beats a cadence of rage into my chest, I'm reminded of all the walls I punched when Fitz died and the way I collected bruises across my knuckles like tally marks. That's why I let her hit me without interfering, even though I could easily catch her fists in my palms or wrap my arms around her until she was bound into stillness. Instead, my hands fall away from her shoulders, dropping limply to my sides as she hits me over and over. For Fitz. For Penelope. For Learna. It's alright, because this is a small kind of pain, to the point where the rhythm is nearly comforting. However, we were meant to be broken and whenever I begin to forget, Ursula always remembers how best to remind me. (That's why she said it, I will tell myself after, when I need reason more than the desperation and danger of her touch. Truth is the rain, the wind, and the lies I invent to protect myself. Truth can never simply be truth anymore or I don't think I could bear it or her tone of voice as she says perhaps the one thing that was always meant to remain unspoken between us.) "So, are you gonna dig up her grave too?" For a moment, I am consumed by honesty. My tears are not rain and I'm suddenly the kind of man who could admit that just maybe I love this girl a little bit beyond my teenage hormones and her pretty face. Except, for as much as I care, I also can't help hating her for not being there for me the way something in her wants me to be here for her now. There is no coincidence between our hearts or our feet and I will run to her no matter how many times she hits me, but her question is more than all of this and it stops me. No breath. No pulse. No defense. She knows. Although, exactly how much, I can't tell. Enough to be vicious and maybe rightly so. The Ripley family secret is poorly kept when it comes to the Libertines, the buyers of our stolen goods. With the four three of us hawking wedding bands and pocket watches that belonged to people who no longer know time, it was always inevitable that they connect the dots. Still, her knowing rocks me until my soul is unsteady beneath her gaze. She's not supposed to know. She's not supposed to know. "I —" My very being stutters, mouth hanging agape as the single sound I manage to reply with becomes ironic. "I —" Suddenly I'm not sure how much I there is left in me, because something within me has surely just died. I'm so numb it hurts and her accusation cuts so deep that I can't counter it. Ursula Libertine knows I'm a grave robber. Yet that alone is no longer my most shameful secret and I'm more terrified that she might know that too, that she might already know the worst of truths within her words, but I can't tell. The question echoes in my mind: So, are you gonna dig up her grave too? And I'm thinking about her sister, because she asked me to. Yet, I'm not thinking about Learna. Instead, all I can think about is Penelope. How Jude and I dug her grave up. How I stole her Games token (that old paper bag of panic that once belonged to Jude, but I wouldn't let him have it back). How that crumbled, blood stained paper bag is all I have left of a girl I used to kiss in the alleyway behind the Libertine's pawn shop. How I folded it into a boat, as if I were attempting to restore something beautiful to something all too awful and how I wanted to set it to sail on the ocean, except I haven't found the guts yet. I've never had the guts. That's why I couldn't volunteer to save my brother or either of the Libertine girls and it's why I can't refute Ursula's question. It's not that I can't lie — I'm lying to myself more and more even as I stand here — but that I'm too scared of her question to know what to do with myself. "I —" If I were still that honest man from an instant ago, maybe I'd be able to admit that for as much as I hate Ursula for all the things that have gone wrong between us, I hate myself more. I want to be that man. So I say: "No. I don't want to go anywhere near it, but I —" This is the only courage I've ever had and I could claim not to know why I'm saying it, but the two of us standing here is no more of a coincidence than my words. "I'd dig up your grave."

[chelsey]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][bg=ffffff] U R S U L A L I B E R T I N E

[/FONT][/SIZE]
"YOU'VE MADE ME INTO SOMEONE WHO[/color]
should not hold a loaded[/i][/color][/size] gun[/i][/b][/font][/size][/url]."[/i][/size][/center]
[/td][/tr][/table]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][bg=705c82]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][bg=ffffff] IF GUILT HAD A COLOR, it would be purple. Purple, like the bruises on Nino's knuckles, and like the bruises my hands kissed into his chest. Purple like the veins silver edges snip through like ribbons, purple like the skin of Penelope's face when her body was shipped back home. Purple like lightning in storms that two sisters face together, purple like the raw edges of Learna's severed hand. Purple, the color I see when I close my eyes to sleep. Purple, the color of a night sky after a rainstorm, the color I snugly cloak myself in while my loved ones are buried beneath six feet of purple shadows. Purple, like the color of their tombstones. Purple, like the color of my lips when I smile. Looking at Nino is like drowning in purple, like dancing near the edge of a cliff in the complete dark, like knowing you are going to fall and not caring. When I look at him, I see the nights of our eternal childhoods, spent scouring the constellations in stars for treasure maps we never found. I see grounds and graves of untouched grass, I see hands free of callouses from shaking on deals. I see Ursula for when she was Ursula, Nino for when he was Nino, purple for when it was purple. Time spins backward so that the raindrops from this invisible hurricane shoot up into the clouds and float away, so that me and Nino are looking at each other as we take frantic steps backwards and run into the entrances of our home, so that I crawl in through the bathroom window, so that I use the edges of a razor to sew and mend the seeping wounds blotched on my skin, so that Mama's cries (played backward) sounds like hysteric laughter, so that Learna's severed limbs fly back up to her dismembered body and reattaches itself, so that Learna's name gets placed into a glass bowl and we all walk home together, so that the ocean flashes lightning from it's glassy black surfaces into the gray clouds, so that we dig Penelope's coffin from her grave and uncarve her name from her tombstone, so that Penelope flies from the sea into the window of the sandcastle, so that a spear dislodges itself from her skull and flies back into the rightful hands of it's owner, so that 24 kids are sent home, so that I shake someone's hand and walk away, so that Nino and his brothers use their shovels to fill the holes in the graveyard with soil, so that each year we grow a little shorter, so that each year we gain youth and lose wisdom, so that each year we forget. "No, I don't want to go anywhere near it," Nino says, "But I - I'd dig up your grave." His voice is as gentle as a drizzle, but his words sound like thunder. I hate him for speaking words that lash against me and create scars even more permanent than the ones on my wrist; I hate him for speaking the truth. But, I hate myself even more than I could ever hate Nino Ripley because, immediately, I weighed out my losses to be far greater than his. (As if I could measure the worth of my sisters’ lives against Fitz's. As if tragedy could be calculated as a competition - and yet it was a competition I still wanted to win.) I wanted to create a gash in my arm, bleed out all the purple that sits like a tumor inside of me, and feed it to him instead. But, we are in the midst of a hurricane (I see it, I can see the reflection of a storm in his eyes, I can see the rain that threatens to pour down on us, I see the flashes of lightning that rage beneath), and we cannot help but inhale these purple fumes, so that the toxics settle in our lungs and corrupt our breathing and make our throats turn to lead from all the purple words and promises and broken deals we choked back down with our tongues. The polluted air drives us closer, drives us together, and it's funny how such tragic circumstances make me feel the least lonely I've felt in a while. We've made our last deal and dug our last grave - and what a pair of poor, unfortunate souls we are because of it. "That's a pity." I say, my voice tiny but my words trying to be big. I know that if losses could be weighed, and if sadness could be measured, the length of mines and Nino's would run parallel besides each other from here to where the sky meets the ocean and back. There is no worth in tragedy, there is no worth in losing something, and there is no worth in a person who breaks her deals. "I have nothing valuable left you can take."

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][bg=705c82]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][bg=ffffff] [OOC] So sorry for the wait! Have no idea what this is, either, sorry just bear with me.

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][bg=705c82]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][bg=ffffff]

[/font][/center]

[L△LIA]

[bg=FCFCFC][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,400,true][atrb=style,width: 400px; background-image: url(http://i46.tinypic.com/33kbzfk.png); background-repeat: no-repeat; padding-left:40px; padding-right:40px; padding-top:40px; border-left:1px solid #000000; border-right:1px solid #000000; border-top:1px solid #000000; -moz-border-radius-topright: 25px; border-radius-topright: 25px; -moz-border-radius-topleft: 25px; border-radius-topleft: 25px;opacity: 1;] The worth of a person is not an easy thing to measure. While the Ferry Man may demand a simple price for a soul, the rest of us always want to make things more complicated. We add up our good deeds and subtract our sins, turning our lives and emotions into a strange series of mathematical problems. Who's to say when our good is more than our bad or when we've overspent our own value on lies and selfish greed? When digging up caskets from the earth, I don't think I've ever thought about what the sight of those rotting bodies might be costing me. There's a number for each piece of a suit, for pocket watches or cuff links, and for wedding rings that cease to represent love within our own hands. However, a length of hair, the rotting remains of a pair of lungs, skin that is forever unaware of our thieving touch — none of that means much to me. "That's a pity. I have nothing valuable left you can take." Yet, Ursula's response to my confession makes me question my arithmetic skills. When I said — I'd dig up your grave — I didn't mean that I'd be looking for silver or gold. I meant to say: You are worth something to me. These words had nothing to do with burial clothes or jewelry, but something else that would be locked up within her coffin. Even after she dies, I'll still long for the disintegrating remnants of her heart. I would still be convinced that her skin might contain a memory of me, the same mine would of her, and that beneath six feet of soil I could find something worth digging up. Something too valuable to give to the Ferry Man. Her voice disregards me, knowing me too well — more than I'd realized until this point. For all these years, I still believed I was keeping secrets from her, unaware that at some point those hidden truths simply became brutal lies that took away from my scattered moments of redemption. Every time I set foot into the Libertine's shop, I was making less of myself and I didn't even know it. I should have sensed the way the girl before me now was weighing me against my own dirtied words, subtracting from my remaining humanity with each slip of sin that passed my lips as I traded my own worth as a person for a few tarnished coins. They way she looks at me now, as if I'm already putting her in that grave just by standing here, makes it impossible for me to explain myself. I can't help wanting to reach for her, to babble out a thousand words of explanation in hopes that just one of them might turn out to be the right thing to say. Except, with all the death that has already found its way between us, I'm terrified to add anything more. Acknowledging that we are less than immortal in this moment — how the next time we run through these streets looking for each other, that we might not find anyone at all — would be too much honesty to handle when Learna's blood is still coloring our every breath. "If that's the case —" My voice turns hard and my jaw defiant as I glare at her, something within me scraped raw at being told so precisely that even at the end of our lifetimes, nothing of her will be for me. "— then I won't bother." Taking a step back, I can't break my stare. All the hurt between us is gathered into the space I'm slowly trying to convince myself to vacate. Just leave it all behind — Pen, Fitz, Learna... Ursula. It's not my job to hold onto what's gone, only to search for what remains. My feet are silent against the pavement as I back away, retreating before I've even fought. Only a few minutes ago, part of me wanted to destroy the both of us. Now I'm convinced I already have. As I turn around and walk away, I'm doing the math. No matter how little worth Ursula thinks she has left, after this, I have less. well this is torturous electricity between both of us and this is dangerous cause i want you so much but i hate your guts