these windows tell lies // welcome to sycamore house

[florentine, d4b ❁]

and                 some          days,           these    windows     have              eyes 

Six long months have passed since the latest loss in the Sycamore Household. With two children gone the family no longer feels as safe as it once did; they are a dying tribe of gaping holes and empty cupboards. Lilith and Edgar, as always, do what they can to keep it's nine living members breathing, but with Miss Aggie growing more and more senile each day and the funding dropping as the seasons pass, it is becoming more and more important that the truth about Sycamore House remains hidden; they desperately attempt to conceal their existence from the world for fear of being torn apart. Usually, this works. The house is set so far apart from the rest of the district that nobody can hear three year old Ara crying because her stomach is empty and the television won't stop showing her things she doesn't want to see. But today is different. Today is dangerous.

Silas and Arwen have returned from town (here) with news that the inspectors are doing their rounds. The orphanage is long overdue to be assessed to make sure that it is up to standard, and if it fails to present itself suitably the risk of Sycamore House being shut down forever is high. Edgar, Lilith, Silas, Arwen, Ruth, Septimus, Ezabel, Ara and Miss Aggie need a miracle in order to get themselves through this, however there is likely no corner of Panem where miracles are fewer or farther between. 

. . . 

I am aiming for two rounds of posting (I don't ask a lot of you guys, seriously) - I'd like one post during the preparation for the visit and a second chronicling the inspection itself. Please post in a timely manner - (I will nag you, and I will skip you!) because I really desperately want to get through a proper thread before the next reaping begins. The posting order is as follows, but please let me know if you won't be able to post within three days or so, so that I can notify the next person and keep the thread moving. I love you all. 

Ruth
Edgar
Lilith
Silas 
Arwen
Ezabel 
Septimus

[Cait]

r u t h

once upon a different life

This isn’t home.

Nothing is familiar and everything is broken. I see it in the looming faces of fragility, in the scarce pantry of our too-small kitchen, in the empty bed in Septimus’ room that I pretend still shelters a body when I walk down Sycamore’s narrowed hallways. I hold my breath each time I pass – it doesn’t help much, but I was born to pretend, to dream, to fool myself into thinking the world was kind, and that a few wasted breaths would bring me closer to him. Deterioration is splattered across the floorboards in flakes of peeling paint from walls that struggle to stand under the cloud of depression looming over nine souls. We all see it.

Nine.

Nine is a foreign number. Every time I try to wrap my tongue around it – ‘nine, n-i-n-e, nineeeeee’ – I choke on the letters that shouldn’t be there, because there should be ten of us, ten, ten broken souls, not nine.

Ten, t-e-n.

Ten, and one of them shouldn’t be Ezabel, and one of them should be Laila.

And one of them is supposed to be Blaire.

It was always supposed to be Blaire.

Blaire and Ruth.

Ruth and Blaire.

‘It’ll be okay.’

I hate the conversations that play in my mind because our last moments together were laced with lies and even though we both knew how to see through the final web we’d encounter together there are no photographs in this house and that really bothers me because what use is a new TV to watch our brother die upon when we can’t even reflect on the moments he lived for rainbows and loved to see me draw them because he said my eyes lit up when I experimented with new colours and I have counted the days of rain we’ve endured since he told me he loved me that final time and 87 seems like such a small number compared to the 5332 days we had together and that’s comforting in a sick and twisted way.

‘It will always be okay.’

i shouldn’t have said those things i shouldn’t have said a word i shouldn’t have made him promise blaire why blaire come home these walls are too blank and i can’t see anything but coldness without you here no more colours and they were all i had to be certain of i don’t want to be cold forever blaire where are you you promised stop me crying and just come home it’s not too late i promise i miss you i miss you

They made me watch him die.

I’d wanted to sleep forever, but invisible hands clasped at my neck and dragged me from my bed at 8:06am (the time never seems to change, I never noticed that until now, forever 8:06am) and sat me on the floor in front of a TV and I don’t remember screaming but my vocal chords shattered that day and I didn’t remember falling asleep in someone’s arms until I woke up on the couch with a blanket draped over my shoulders and a blank TV screen staring back at me.

I stopped sleeping with Lilith when neither of us could stand the silence of our fake slumbers at some ungodly hour of the night, but the clock still reads 8:06am each time I check it.

(I don’t think Lilith minded, she’s been so good, so good.)

I stopped drinking tea with milk when the mixing of black and white – once an intriguing pattern of swirls – became nothing more than a puddle to me. I think Lilith noticed – there was more milk for cereal in the morning – but she doesn’t speak much these days. It’s hard to see the world in nothing more than black and white, and sipping at a charred liquid in a chipped porcelain cup doesn’t help any more than a growing collection of unsent letters – memoirs of a former Ruth.

I stopped visiting Laila’s grave so that I could spend more time with Blaire, and although I tried to keep our conversations alive – ‘do you remember anything? I’ve tried writing everything down but the words are harder to piece together than the shapes that make up illustrations of life as a twin’ ‘I still have your gift, from the Sycamore party – I can’t forget the words you wrote’ ‘I miss you a lot, Blaire, nothing’s the same here’ – there are only so many stories I can draw upon. The happy memories are too few; the sad memories are too painful.

I stopped exploring. I grew up. Childish expeditions came to their standstill, and I thought I had lost all sense of a childhood when Blaire and I ran away from home, but it simply became too difficult to see anything more than shadowed darkness where magic once lurked. Drawings pinned to the blank walls of my room lost their colour, and each time I tried to save them, replacing faded colours with new ones, all that remained was a glimmer of what used to be.

Blaire left, and he took the sun with him. All that the light touched faded, and moonbeams are simply not strong enough to break through the monochrome.

Once, that cracked window in the corner of my shared room held something captivating. The bleakness of a crumbling house paled even moreso when one would stare out towards the unmatchable beauty of the land beyond our broken world. It used to inspire, fill pages and pages of notebooks that I never seemed to own enough of; now, those very pages sit abandoned in a drawer I stopped reaching for when the graphite in my pencils spread to my heart.

There are no colours anymore.

It’s hard to imagine a window full of lies, but they’ve steadily accumulated and each breath feels like heaving through the dark mendacities painted upon our faces. Perhaps it’s not too far from the truth, that our lives are governed by lies.

Lies, they sit in hallways, hide beneath folds in our tattered bedsheets, stand in the doorway on the tips of burning tongues and the open front door tells me there have now been 88 days of rain since Blaire left and all we have to commemorate that is a cold loaf of bread thrown down on the dining table moments before Sycamore House erupted in chaos.

I hadn’t heard Arwen and Silas return from their outing. Their hurried footsteps up the pebbled pathway had been drowned out by the rain, just like their words had not reached my ears when their faces shone with fear and the certainty that we would be forced to lie once again.

Lies, they go about stapling lies to every corner of our collapsing world, and it begins again.

For all I know, this house isn’t a home anymore.

It stopped feeling like home the day he was stolen away from me, and that’s not okay.

‘As long as you are okay, I'm okay – okay?’

It’s not okay, no.

It’s not okay, and it isn’t home.

I don’t want it to be okay, because it won’t be. My world ended months ago – perhaps even before it had a chance to begin. I’d dreamed of aspirations and small cottages where silence never lingered for longer than sleeping hours and piles upon piles of books and the world’s offerings in pastel coloured paints. But it’s not okay, no.

Blaire and me, we’re twins. We shared blood as simply as we shared secrets, raised with hair and skin as similar as our sad eyes and tiny smiles. So entwined our energies ran, it was impossible to see him being dragged from that Justice Building six unfathomable months ago, for when he left, Blaire took many parts of me with him.

But we saw the world differently.

Whether he ever believed my stories of fairytale endings doesn’t matter, because I’d seen the princess run to her prince after he’d slayed a thousand dragons to reach her, and even though there aren’t any pictures to fill my mind anymore – only words, thousands and thousands of words sitting there in that hard font, black letters against white screens, black and white – I have to keep trying.

And I’ll wait. Sitting on a couch, listening to bad news bringers (one day you’ll be able to call them your new siblings) I will wait.

This universe... it needs to be good again.

For when we falter – when that goodness dries up, when the inspectors come with their ballpoint pens and spiral-tipped notepads drawn like swords, when we’re torn apart for good – that is truly the end of our world.

I promised.

template by Chelsey

[chelsey]

EDGAR

"All you have is your fire, and the place you need to reach."

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING, but that fire is finally out.

The soot stains on the crumbling white walls that Lilith can never seem to scrub off, no matter how hard she tries (she always tries, that girl) say otherwise, but I know better. We all do. The fire consumed much more than our home: it burned away the last sense of security we had - a sense that had been ebbing away for years before, anyway. And, for years afterward, we could still smell that smoke and that ash and that burnt wood. It rubbed our eyes until our gazes became clouded with tears that weren't ever heavy enough to fall. The house fell, though, and (along with it) our twisted idea of 'family' and 'love' and 'loyalty.' Everything we had fell, except for our tears.

Fire breeds survivors, though, and that's what we all are. As orphans, we don't have much of a choice but to be survivors, anyway.

Well, most of us.

So, naturally, we bore through the flames, lived with them licking at our heels, tolerated the smoke curling in our lungs as we fell asleep. Survivors. Plain and simple.

I don't remember when the fire went out, but all I do know is that the fire was at its peak when Laila's name was called, and then not there at all when Blaire died on our TV screen.

It's been so hard getting used to the quiet, that I almost miss the way the flames roared in our ears. I step around everyone carelessly, but careful enough to not brush by anyone and accidentally ignite anything. (I find myself being least careful with Lilith, however. Sometimes, I'll walk by her in the hallways, and she'll lay a hand on my arm, or she'll be sitting down mending something, and I'll pass by and place a quick peck to her temple. We don't talk, at all, but I keep leaning in to her touch, anyway, spinning the illusion of an unspoken promise: I'm not leaving. Given our 'family's' luck, however, I'm not sure how long I can keep that lie up.)

I'm sitting on the porch, knocking my head back to a half-empty bottle of beer, when Silas and Arwen return. Ever since the fire went out, my life has been a straight line from my bedroom, to down the stairs, to the front porch, and back. We're all like that now, I think, just a bunch of parallel lines living together - close enough to touch, but never enough to break off course. The routes we've made to avoid each other, and the efforts we've painfully taken to keep it that way, seem to be the only constant thing we're holding onto left.

I've got an arm behind my head, my shoes kicked off to the side, and my legs stretched out before me. I think, maybe, if someone saw from a far enough distance, it'd look like I was relaxing. Come closer, however, and they might see the tension clad in my shoulders or the worry lines dented like a crater in my forehead. My hair's grown out, all shaggy-like, because I've made no effort to cut it since -

But, I don't focus on that, anymore. I try not to (although, it'll sometimes come in waves in the middle of the night, tossing and turning me in bed until I wake up and leave the house with the door shuddering behind me in a bang, because I don't want any of them to see the bruises I bury in my fists or the scars that my knuckles kiss when those waves do wash over me, because if I'm going to punch walls, it will never again be the ones in this house). I've gotten pretty good at ignoring things, these days, and I'm about to ignore Silas and Arwen, too, as they're coming back up the path, until I hear them: "Someone's coming to inspect the house."

Usually, not much can pull me out of a drunk stupor these days, but their words sober me up enough for me to snap out of it and look at them, startled. I haven't really looked at either of them in a while (especially not Silas), and the moment is long enough for me to notice they're drenched in rain, and have a little more than the usual wild in their eyes. A strangled "What?!" escapes from my mouth, but they dissolve back into the house, leaving me to clumsily grab at my shoes and beer and follow their lead.

Technically, I don't have to live here, anymore. Technically speaking, I could've kissed Miss Aggie on her pruney, lunatic mouth, swirled her around the creaking floors, tip an imaginary hat off in the classiest way a 19-year-old orphan could, and wished the rest of these pitiful creatures, "Good night and good fucking luck!" as I let the front door clatter behind me, drifting off into the night and unknown. Of course, as an orphan, I haven't the faintest clue when my birthday is, but I can still count my years as easily as I've counted the days Laila and Blaire have been gone, and I'm old enough to leave - without the committment of coming back. I could've let go of my responsibility, let Silas be the leading man, let Lilith march the rest of our soldiers straight into the battle we've lost time and time again.

But, as Silas and Arwen fill every one in, I'm reminded of exactly why I still haven't left. Why I might not ever leave.

It's a feeling more of rage rather than affection (at the incredulous thought that those goddamn government scumbags have already broken our family apart enough, and they're still daring threaten to tear us apart for good), but it awakens a part of me that I was sure extinguished a long time ago.

The smoke, however, starts curling all around me, just the same. I can see them through all of its black, misty haze, and I wonder if they can see me through it, too. I wonder if they even see the smoke at all.

My voice, when it crawls out of my throat, is released through my gritted teeth like hisses of gas. The fire of my words tastes like charcoal on my tongue. "You've got to be fucking kidding me."

If those assholes lay a foot in this house, I'll make sure to burn them all down.

[Stare]

a l l . w e . d o . i s . h i d e . a w a y

---

[googlefont="Lovers Quarrel:400"]lilith sycamore

---

a l l . w e . d o . i s . l i v e . i n s i d e . a . c a g e

When I was little I didn’t understand why the night terrified me so much. I would tremble between the quilts passed down through generations in my family - (I remember my surname but I refuse to say it) - and grit my teeth against an onslaught of fear. It never seemed fair at the time. These days I’m beginning to realize that it’s one of the few things that actually is fair in my life, because what kind of person watches so many members of her family die without suffering herself in some way? I remember my mother would come in and stroke my hair back from my forehead. I can’t remember the color of her eyes or the exact shape of her face, but I remember what her cool hand felt like against my own clammy skin. I remember the faint curve of her soothing smile. ”Don’t cry,” she would whisper. ”Oh, hush now, sweetie. It’s okay. Let’s just be quiet for a while. You’re okay. I’m here.”

When I was little, I wasn’t an orphan.

And maybe it is because of my mother, because of the quiet that she encouraged even in the heart of chaos, that I am so silent now. I swear my broken heartbeat is louder than my voice some days, on the rare occasion that I use it. It isn’t like the silence after Laila’s death, so complete and endless that I nearly forgot how to speak completely. Somehow, this is worse. This is a death in my chest that allows me to speak when I must, but the syllables are aching and hollow, every word guarded. The emptiness is clear in my voice and even clearer in my eyes. When I catch a glimpse of myself in the cracked, grimy mirror we own, I cringe away. That’s not me. I think that who I once was has left forever, if I’m being truly honest. She died with Laila and Blaire, leaving the children with a ghost.

But haunting Sycamore was always what I was destined to do, wasn’t it? Even with the holes in my chest, little bullet wounds no one else can see, I carry on. Floors are swept, food is rationed, clothes are mended. Late at night, when even Ruth has fallen into some semblance of sleep, I rise and visit their rooms one by one, readjusting blankets and kissing foreheads. Even Arwen and Silas when I find them together. Even Ezabel, our newest orphan. Even Edgar. (I fear he’s outgrown me. Outgrown us all. And I’d always thought that he’d be gone as soon as he became old enough to leave, yet he remains. Maybe he’s a ghost, like me. I need him, no matter how broken or tired or angry or - worst of all - quiet he is, but he has never needed me. That is why every morning that he catches me snoring over the kitchen table because I thought I was awake enough to restitch an old curtain is a relief; that is why every night that I find him safe and asleep makes my chest feel a little less tight. But I still fear that there will be a day that I search and search and he will not be there, and that terrifies me more than anything else.)

When Arwen and Silas first stumble through the door I immediately rise. They’re soaked, their teeth chattering slightly, hair plastered against their head. If I had known the bread would cause this much trouble, I wouldn’t have asked them to get it. The loaf is probably ruined, anyway. Sighing, I move toward the hall closet to pull down two of our worn blankets. “They’re coming to inspect Sycamore.” I freeze. My hand hovers just over the doorknob and I don’t look at them, don’t look at Edgar as he follows them in, don’t look at anything except the solid wooden door in front of me. I count one heartbeat. Then two. Then three.

Then, sighing softly, I open the door and pull down the blankets, handing one to Silas and draping the other over Arwen’s shoulders. My footsteps proceed to Edgar, fingers grasping the hand the holds the neck of the bottle briefly. I gaze down at it and then raise my eyes to meet his, the message clear. You should probably toss this before they get here. His hand is warm, or at least warmer than mine. I linger only for a moment before pulling away and moving into the kitchen, eyeing the mostly empty cupboards as my mind races. This is chaos. This is insanity. This is hell.

But if this life has taught me anything, it’s been how to endure.

I begin the work of preparing more food than I’d originally planned for dinner tonight. (I can survive with less for myself. I’ve always been able to in the past.) While it’s in the oven I move to Miss Aggie’s room, gently coaxing her out of bed despite her protests - ”Really, Lola, another scraped knee? Just have Lucas take care of it, I’m sure he’s around here somewhere.” - and dressing her in one of the few outfits she still owns that doesn’t have holes, which is at least a decade out of style. I work to brush her hair, thin and gray and greasy, pulling it back into a bun. “You’re so quiet today, Lola,” she comments at one point. I go on as if she said nothing at all.

At one point Ara toddles over to watch me and I shoot her a quick smile. She’s the only one I smile for these days. Settling Miss Aggie down in a chair in the corner and opening the curtains to let some light into the room, I scoop Ara up and carry her back out into the hall. She’ll be too big for me to pick her up soon, both because she’s growing fast and I hardly have the strength to do anything these days. The smell of dinner is beginning to fill Sycamore house as I move into other rooms, straightening curtains, pushing in chairs, and sweeping up floors as quickly as I can.

They’re coming to tear us apart, but I am the ghost of Sycamore. I have haunted this house for years. I have cared for these children even when they believed they could take care of themselves. I have stomped out flames and scrubbed away ashes. I have held sobbing babies and, when the end came for our brother and sister, sobbing teenagers. I have died again and again and again just to see these orphans live on. This is my house, and they cannot take it away from me.

Let them come.

all i did was fail today
all i want to be is waits and waste
all i did was fail today
all we do, all we do

[✨ zozo.]

. SILAS SYCAMORE .
empty words in your mouth
are the piano’s cracked teeth;
still, i love the broken sounds.

They keep dying, Silas.

They keep dying and we can't do anything about it.

We keep dying. We are a decaying house, loosing one room at a time. (We don't open their doors anymore. It's not right.) I think we expect that if we keep the doors closed we won't see what lays behind them: empty rooms. We can pretend that they're behind the doors instead of 6 feet under the ground. But I'm not a wishes and imagination kind of person. I've left doors open all my life. The only thing keeping me from opening Blaire and Laila's doors and screaming the truth are the 6 other souls that live in our crumbling, dying home.

Us, the Sycamore House version, keep dying. And that is the truth.

But the truth hurts. Lies hurt even more.

I love you.

And because we are us, the Silas and Arwen version, we end up entwined in one-another, and I tell the truth and wonder if she did too.

"I love you too."




Blaire is dead. That is the truth.

Laila is dead. That is the truth.

"They're coming."

That is a truth I don't want to believe.

Arwen and I are the breakers of even more bad news, shivering under the weight of our rain-sodden clothes and terrible events to come. Sometimes I wish there were no words in this world. Words and mouths and tongues of fire have nearly destroyed us all. It's all I can force out, even though I'm supposed to be the one that's good with words. I prefer the truth but right now I need someone to hold us and tell us that everything will be okay. That I can stay. (With Arwen, I think selfishly, because I am selfish and that truth isn't needed right now.) That we can all stay, us, together, a broken family trying to fix itself with not enough pieces to share. I don't know if I was fed a lie today from the lips of my love but I'm too cold, too tired, too miserable to care if I'm told another.

I need a lie from someone I trust enough to believe.

I don't dare look at Edgar.

So I look to Lilith instead.

ooc; sorry it's short :c

[florentine, d4b ❁]

[presto]

arwen sycamore
seventeen
district five

[/presto]

---

THESE ARE THE THINGS, THE THINGS WE LOST

---

i cried my heart out for so long and then wondered why i was left with an empty chest  and i screamed at the sky for so many years demanding "if there is a god, fix this!" that if my life is scripted out in front of me can somonee please stop making me rehearse the same lines over and over "goodbye" "i'm sorry" "i love you"  i used to leave marks in my palms  where my fingernails dug into my skin i used to burn down houses  just to remind myself how it feels to ache  for a long time, i was arwen, girl of thunderstorms girl of flames roaring, fierce, a patchwork disaster of broken promises  and laddered tights  now, we don't have the money for the patches  so i am more freyed edges and tears  rips in the fabric of something that used to be whole  at least when i was screaming, i could hear myself think because there was a time when it was simple to hurt it was the strike of a match, the flash of a blade  it was crying until everyone in the house was sure that i would go on forever i miss that feeling  that sharp relief, that reminder that i too can be punished if i sin but now i am hollow, oh,  so fucking hollow a canyon an echoe  a memory "lilith? lilith?" goodbye, i'm sorry, i love you i love you, i'm sorry, goodbye "someone's coming to inspect the house." it wasn't real until i said it out loud and now it is somewhere out there, there is a clock that actually ticks (unlike the ones in our house which died with laila and blaire) and that clock is counting down the seconds until we are discovered  little liars pretending that we're managing, that we're safe that someone is looking after us it's easy to close our eyes and pretend the paint is not peeling off the walls that the baby is fed the cupboards are full that the boiler works that the clothes are enough to keep us warm and that we aren't all falling apart,  prised into ten seperate pieces by the bodies they buried in the graveyard  something tells me that the inspector might not be so willing to close her eyes and make believe  and if she wont (how could she?) then our little kingdom, our stupid, vapid, makeshift hovel of a castle  is crumbling to the ground around us  all this time, i should have known usually i am not the kind of person to do things i am the kind of person to wail and kick and shout  and demand and burying her head in her hands and ask the world why it is refusing to provide sanctuary  but i am not the same arwen i was three years ago i no longer want to be the girl who burns down the house with the children inside i want to be the one that fights through the thick black smoke when the sky is falling around her and saves every last one of them and so i follow lilith upstairs  hang in the doorway, a shadow,  and watch for just a moment as she begins to tease miss aggie's hair out with the brush and i visit the attic and haul a drying tin of paint down into my bedroom and i paint over the bloodstains on the walls and i walk into the bathroom  reach up to the top shelf  (i can only do this by climbing onto the sink and stretching my hands right up into the air) and i take down the bottle of pills and flush each and every one down the drain  and then i take a scrubbing brush to the front hall on my hands and grazed knees and wash away ten years worth of mud and tears "help me" i snarl at edgar  "get rid of your bloody fireworks" i spit at septimus  "can you lock up the basement?" ezabel  "get a fucking grip" edgar  "ruth, do you think you could fetch the photographs back out from the attic? you know, the ones from that year we got the polaroid camera and miss aggie found some frames? and put them on the mantle piece?" poor thing "the garden, silas?" and finally "ara, could you go and get me another scrubbing brush out from under the kitchen sink, please?" nobody is looking to me they look to edgar or lilith they look to silas, sometimes, with his strong resolve they look to ruth with her sensible words or septimus with his brilliant brain or even miss aggie as though she holds knowledge none of us will ever find, locked away in her distant mind never me i have always wanted to die, selfishly but today is different  i will save these children if it kills me because i am arwen, and i am done with burning things down dear my former self, sorry, i love you, goodbye

THE THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE

[Python]

Ezabel Sycamore

He climbed through his window and stirred dust on the sill. The silk webs sewn across the outside had been torn by his repeated disturbances. It was simpler to escape silent and unnoticed, rather than to explain to the one Sycamore who cared (Lilith) why he spent so much time away from the house. So far there had been no detections of his absence, or perhaps just a silent acknowledgement of his inability to remain grounded. His unpleasant history with foster homes and orphanages continued to publish day by day chapters of his condemned presence in a room that belonged to the dead. He didn’t have the heart to tell Ezra that he was a forgotten orphan in a house full of broken hearts and dead eyes. He also didn’t have the heart to tell Lilith that he wanted to leave and bunk with his best friend instead.

He was in limbo.

The springs in his bed groaned beneath his weight as he kicked off his shoes and pulled up his socks for a comfortable fit. He could actually hear voices echoing outside of his door, and not one muffle resembled a shout. That was promising. He decided to prop it open to alert the residents that yes, I’m still alive, hi everyone, say hi if you want, but I know you won’t, and stood in the corridor to eavesdrop on the conversation downstairs. Genuine conversations between Sycamores were not something he heard often, unless it was Lilith trying to comfort Miss Aggie the senile woman, or Ara the toddler, or the rest of the teenagers in the house who could barely hold themselves up. Their grief for Blaire and Laila bled into the walls like the stench of a corpse. Ezabel couldn’t help but focus on his own life. It was distant from the roots of this orphanage. He had never even met Laila, and hardly ever spoken to Blaire.

Maybe that was why they hated him so much. He didn’t know them or their love, and pretending was hard.

He heard the fateful word “inspection” and froze. There was a dead silence – eerier than usual – that chilled the hallways. Then he heard movement.

House inspections were something he remembered. Ms. Bo’s house was inspected to ensure that her fostering ability was up to standards. She passed, of course, because they had their own bedrooms and plenty of food and enough money to last decades. Emotionally, Ezabel had been disconnected from that entire family, but that was never something the agency took into consideration. They didn’t care about his happiness, just his health. Both declined after he ran away, but one step led to another and another. Somehow he ended at the top of the hill, holding hands with Ezra in a warm bed. It was just like Ma said, life gets better.

Now he was learning how to read. It was a good way to occupy time originally meant to be spent cooped up in the Sycamore house, where there was no reason to attempt conversation. He didn’t want to be looked at with scorn. He was a nice boy, he knew he was. They just didn’t want him here. He was sure even Lilith pretended to care, but he appreciated her efforts a lot. She was one of the nicest people he had ever met.

He didn’t know what an inspection meant here. The conditions were poor compared to Ms. Bo’s house. Were they at risk of being shut down? Arwen’s voice snarling downstairs told him yes, this was a big deal. It was time to tidy up.

When she told him to lock up the basement he nodded, and shuffled downstairs to do just that. He didn’t know what to think about all of this, but if he could help save this house then he would try. Where would they put these people if the house was emptied out? Would they move them to another foster, or leave them homeless? He couldn’t imagine them in the streets, especially Miss Aggie and Ara. They wouldn’t do that, would they?

[Wonder]

he collected small trinkets, bent up paper clips, dusty pennies, single pages torn from large books in the library. they were collectables now, pinned to his wall almost as if plotting out a murder.
two - two murders, in fact.
he ran a lot, not from the law, though often on his tiptoes, cradling shadows as though they were the only chances to survive. there was a lot of knowledge found in dark places, small collections of letters, drug mules, little wads of bubblegum stuck between cement blocks.

there was a lot of space nowadays - he didn't work as much, any more. after the birthday party, money was slim - he'd grown slim. he ate less and less, grew a little faint. standing up to fast relinquished a tornado of stars across his eyelids. grasping for any sort of balance, he fell heavy into cobblestone walls, wobbling bed posts. there was food, sure, just enough to get by. but for him? no. he'd rather wither away. jasper wasn't around as much as he used to be, there weren't letters to address, what once was a big secret that he held above his head much like a crown was now a deflated balloon on the lap of a helpless child.

at twelve, he would have sworn up and down that the world would shift. he had a new family then, orphans, but a family. a lovely home, strong and sturdy. the only thing he had to choose was who he loved better - lilith, or edgar? he always chose lilith. laila always chose edgar. if there were sides any longer maybe for once, just once, lilith might win. but she's silent now, doesn't speak too often, much like every doorway, every kitchen cabinet - she's unhinged. they all are. the fire caused so much damage, septimus still hears the shrill cries of arwen, he sings the hushed lullabies of the old cooter under his breath - there was a time that blaire and him shared a room, bickering, like callous brothers - he's dead now.

he often wondered what it would be like to commit murder.
sure, his borther and sister had, and - maybe it runs in the family. blaire, laila, septimus.
good things come in threes.

two months ago, he planted a bomb outside the home of his mother. not lilith, never lilith. the bitch who left him for dead.
the wiring was faulty - it blew sky high before anyone could get near it. the creme door blown away, the frame covered in soot - a now eight year old girl howling for her mother.

he picked up the butt of a cigarette on the pathway, tried to smoke it but coughed it up - there were plenty of more ways to die, this was not his.

the bedroom was quiet now. what once was a place of quarrel and unrest, was now filled with an aggravating amount of silence, death, and solemnity. why they wouldn't move blaire's stuff away, throw it out, burn it, was beyond him - he'd tried, but - was it really septimus' place to burn the remains of his brother? no. his wiring was faulty, he was unhinged, unwound, unemployed - but never a monster (only sometimes a monster.)

he grew in the habit of thinking on his breath, muttering his thoughts and feelings to make sense of situations, 'the copper foil wasn't wrapped right, the clock is too fast, my breath smells, it's quarter past twelve.' he wondered what he was even thinking, complaining, all those years ago of a life that wasn't the best for him - things got far worse. he spent many days wandering up to jasper's old writing space wondering if he would lend an ear, a dollar - but he was never there, never there. he was with child now, septimus had heard, lethe was pregnant, they spent most of the time in the capitol. septimus was abandoned, 'i am useless, he is busy, it's one o'clock, where am i going, who the fuck is isabelle, ezabelle, izabel?;

he sauntered home on his tiptoes, caught two newspapers wet from peoples foot prints. tripped on his shoelaces twenty yards from home.
he snuck in through the broken window pane that lead to the basement, it made most nights chilly, but kept him from talking to the orphans.
he pinned his new findings across the busy walls, a map to where he was, where he would be going, he fell to his knees, just another day.
he let the stars take over his eyes, he held his broken stomach, and wondered how to get away with murder.

ooc - see i can post, fuck your mom

[Cait]

r u t h

all the thoughts that we transpose

Curled upon the couch under a sea of blankets, life seems gentler. In a velveteen world, it’s an escape from these walls, an escape for when the gardens have stopped flowering and I’ve engraved every etching on Blaire’s grave into the foreground of my mind so heavily that migraines are quick to come and hesitant to go. Leaving the house to venture out further than was visible from that broken window in my broken room terrified me, because although Septimus and Ezabel lived for their freedom and we closed our ears to the faint slidings of their bedroom windows opening, closing, each time they came and went, the flight was fearful. Running was a reminder of where we’d come from. Too many memories that we’d fought to burn. Too much to lose.

Truly, I’d wanted to help – to lose another family all over again didn’t add up with the words that slipped through the door when Silas and Arwen came home: ‘someone's coming to inspect the house’ ‘they’re coming.’ For the longest time, we’d been neglected, forgotten, had our spirits crushed and our dreams turned to ashes, but we’d been together. They wanted to take that from us, and we knew they could. The splitting was an impossibility taken too long to become a reality, and whilst this isn’t home, nowhere else would feel like Sycamore House did – the same feeling encapsulated in the fibres of my disgruntled dress of the day we stumbled upon its open doors.

How times change.

Times when Blaire would hug me before we retired to our separated bedrooms each night and Arwen, that roaring inferno of a sister I’d never understood yet never been able to bring myself to fear, wasn’t the quiet that set my teeth on edge each time I rounded corners to see her there and we still took the time to set flowers in the single standing vase on our single dining table and the doors weren’t permanently shut in fear of outside forces upsetting the remaining stability of a home hanging in the balance. Those times were nicer.

Truly, I’d planned to help – had been waiting for the summoning I was almost certain wouldn’t come – yet when it did fall from Arwen’s lips the temptation to stay beneath the tepid fortress I’d made for myself was enough to make me reconsider my position in this mess amidst a crumbling castle. But there were promises to keep, ‘promise you will be okay, tell me you will be alright,’ and the world comes to life – as the burden of wrapped warmth peels away from my shoulders, finding a new home in the creaking floorboards – and it’s corrupted with burning dinners and six pairs of feet moving in disjointed unison, up, down, up, down – the most togetherness I’ve heard in months.

Their urgency is wasted on me, a lost soul slowly moving through a movie coming to life, playing in fast forward. Manic footsteps down the corridors, and all I can manage is a slow shuffling up the staircase, because even one foot in front of the other is an effort these days.

To the attic, where the summation of the tragedies we’re living out had been confined to

one

single

box

and there’s a difference to the silence here. It’s promised, not unstable like the periods of peacetime we move within on the landing below, ready to erupt at any point. I’ve always admired the quiet, but this is foreign. It’s unsettling, prickling at my skin and crawling beneath my veins, reminding me why it was that nobody liked to venture too far from the main living room, where things always felt a little warmer.

There’s a box in my hands that I almost left behind when those alternate silences shook hands in the creaking of the closing attic door, because the memories scared me more than I’d ever thought possible. It’s miserable to leaf through the photographs we’d stowed away, because the scowls outweigh the smiles and today, there was only room for smiles. I’m left with two sorted piles – one much smaller than the other – and in my hands, they don’t feel right. Like the photo of the ten of us standing in front of an uncharred house needed a follow-up photo of the nine of us grimacing in front of half a house, just to see where we’d come from, whether we were better or worse off, then or now. Like the self-portraits they’d all been kind enough to humour me with the privilege of taking was a joke of an already pathetic childhood. As if the two meagre bundles couldn’t possibly be enough to summarise the endured years of our adolescent lives – that there had to be more.

Memories come and go in fleeting glances – a photo of Miss Aggie in a state of graceful youth I can’t remember ever having seen settle in her now-glowing cheekbones; Arwen and her bonfire hair picking at grimy fingernails with Silas pressed beside her in the shade of an oak tree, stealing a glance her way she doesn’t see; a Septimus too young to be playing with fire and yet the flame from the struck match lights up his face as if he’s made the most fantastic discovery in the world, so we don’t say a word against his happiness; Edgar and Lilith, younger than they are now, faces void of the stresses to come in a future where all these images are nullified, but in their moment, they are complete. Weightless pieces of polaroid film passing from box to hand to hand to box. I allow myself a faint smile of reminiscence, am grateful for the distraction from abnormalcy, until a new photo falls into my hands and the faces staring back at me hit me with the force of lashes dragged across our faces from our father’s whip a long time before the shutter of the camera sealed the moment in silicon gloss.

Blaire, staring into the lens, glittering eyes holding all that love I remembered them holding, a set smile upon his face he would have surely regretted mustering, his steady arm wrapped around my shoulder and my face buried into his side. The motion blur of my waving hand suggests laughter; the visible corner of my mouth, upturned in amusement, a confirmation. Happy, I don’t remember the time or day, but it’s real and it hurts. The walls are too shiny and the floor is too clean and the world beyond the window behind us is too colourful but I can see again and it’s the first glimpses of green and blue that I’ve seen in months.

Too perfect.

It’s not fair.

It’s not fair.

It’s not fair.

Everything’s wrong because everything was so much more right than what it is now and this whole idea was stupid and I blame Arwen for making me do something other than mourn our deaths and count our losses because blaming other people is a lot easier than facing the world but shredding the photographs nobody has touched for years and now I see why and sending them over the banister in their messy strips isn’t so bad of a substitute for misguided blame and it’s easy to watch all our old lives float to the ground in their last remnants of glory and I’d laugh if the novelty hadn’t worn off exactly seven seconds after tearing them all to shreds because

they’re gone.

Those smiles, those scowls. Gone.

Truly, I’d meant to help – in the small way that I could and had always been taught to be present as, staying out of sight, quiet and mute, the slight figure of a girl living in her brother’s shadow.

But it’s this snap in my mind when I see Blaire – real happiness – and compare his face with the ghosts that reside here now, the artificial happiness we wear, and it’s too late to leap from the top of the stairwell and stop the multi-coloured confetti from falling, preserve those few moments of true bliss, because she’s here and she’s staring right at me and she’s walking through everything we were and I’m falling and we’ve already lost this war.

‘Go away! Leave us alone!’ We’re fine, I’m fine.

‘Too many strangers, you’re not allowed here.’ Klaus with that TV Ezabel on that doorstep Patricia with those fake condolences but she never came to pity us and in a way I’m glad of that.

‘I want you to leave. I want you to drown.’ Like Laila, like Blaire, drowning in their own bloods.

‘Go kill another family. Just not mine.’ Pleading, almost. Begging, almost.

Below, a storm comes to life. I don’t see it – with bent knees and wracking sobs, hands that grasp the balusters of the balcony like they’re the immovable bars of a jail cell (I’m trapped) and a head cocooned in grief, there’s a storm coming to life. The tears already blossoming across my cheeks tell me it’s been too long coming, that we’ve been crawling from room to room with lightning in our hearts for the longest time – days, weeks, months, years. Waiting.

I want Blaire. I want him to find me clutching to these rungs so he can loosen my grasp on the splintering pieces of wood, whisper distractions to stop my lips from vocalising such horrible things, staunch the tears because they burn. But he isn’t here, and he won’t find me, and I won’t be freed and the tears will continue to burn down my face, into this desperate night – tears that will never burn more than the truth that this is all that is left.

template by Chelsey

basically just ripped up some photos and then cried a lil

[Stare]

a l o n e . i . f i g h t . t h e s e . a n i m a l s

---

[googlefont="Lovers Quarrel:400"]lilith sycamore

---

a l o n e . u n t i l . i . g e t . h o m e

It has been a long time since I have felt my own pulse.

There are days when I swear it as still as those of all the people that I let down. My movements are all wrong and stilted, like a puppet's, and I can't feel. I am numb to the world, carrying a chest that's been broken and hollowed out. (There are moments, so short-lived that I nearly miss them, when I catch Edgar's eyes and I almost think that my heart might be beating again. But then I look away and the moment fractures like one of our windows here at Sycamore, and I regret every word I can't say to fix it.) Maybe I'm broken, just a little. Maybe we all are.

Today, though, something clicks in me and I move like a wind-up toy. I've been spurred into motion temporarily but I'm moving and breathing and feeling, a steady thrum against my rib cage that sounds out like ancient war drums, and that is a miracle in and of itself. My hands busy themselves with brooms, rags, pots, pans. I glance over my shoulder every now and then to check on Ara or flash a small, if somewhat forced, smile at Ezabel. It almost feels normal. And when I burn the side of my hand on the pan, pulling back too late and glaring at the raw and reddening skin, it takes me a full minutes before I think of the fire. It almost feels like the wounds on the inside, the ones I don't allow any other eyes to see, are finally healing.

But then I almost set too many places at our cramped kitchen table and I falter, crash, burn. We are a family of survivors in the very worst way, and this inspector will not be our savior. She will condemn us, just like the world always does.

When the knock sounds on the door I have no choice but to stop, even though my hands ache to scrub and sweep until I've washed the heartbreak from our broken house. I notice for the first time that my hair's come undone and my shirt is wrinkled - I make a last minute attempt to straighten myself out before approaching the door with a practiced smile that lights up everything but my eyes. She's dressed neatly with a clipboard clutched in hands that look clawed, in my opinion not that that's ever mattered to anyone. When she steps inside her heels click, click, click against the creaking wood. I tuck my burned hand neatly against my leg where she cannot see it. "Welcome to Sycamore House." My voice creaks a bit in the beginning, always rusty for all its misuse, but by the end I've managed some semblance of bright confidence.

She remains unphased, and even as I feel the presence of other Sycamores drawing near my focus remains on the cold indifference in her eyes. They flicker down to Ara, who hugs my leg, and a pair of thin, neat eyebrows draw together. “And who does this one belong to?”

It takes me a moment to register as her gaze settles on me accusingly. Once, I might have had to resist the urge to laugh. I would have looked back on my busied life and been grateful, for once, for all the opportunities I never had. I’ve heard of other girls, girls who have had their lives completely changed by their mistakes. There was one who was reaped in our district a while back who was surrounded by the bitter rumors of a baby with an unknown father. If this woman had come years ago, I would have thought of that girl and I would have felt nothing more than relief. Now, however, the bite of her judgement makes anger spike in the place where my heart once beat. (At least it’s something.) “She’s no one’s,” I respond, perhaps a bit too shortly. “That’s why she’s here, isn’t it?”

The woman pauses, squints back down at Ara again, and then scribbles something down on her clipboard. The anger goes cold. After a moment she speaks, not looking at any of us. Not bothering. “According to our records, Sycamore House has undergone a great amount of strain these past few years.” Strain? Is that what the government calls fire and death? “The district has become concerned for the wellbeing of its residents. I’ve come to inspect the state of the orphanage in order to ensure that everything is in its proper order. May I please speak to your caretaker?”

Our caretaker. Miss Aggie. I will not let this woman tear us apart. But Miss Aggie will not pass the inspection. Miss Aggie will betray us all without even realizing it.

The silence in my chest swells suddenly, and I say nothing.

sleep, sleep all night
while the young, they wait alone
so get up, shake the rust
we crawl, we crawl, we crawl
we crawl on the ground

[✨ zozo.]

"your body is the house you grew up in, 

how dare you try to burn it to the ground."

I'm banished to the garden, finding myself in the company of half-hearted plants drinking up the last of the rain and crumbling, cracked flower pots. The wind still slices at my cold limbs and my fingers sting as I get to work, with nothing but the sounds of rustling weather and faint thumping footsteps from upstairs to keep me company. I don't mind the temperature. The afternoon's events nearly left me frozen solid, but I've learnt that what doesn't kill you or burn you or choke you or break your swinging fists or send you off to die makes you more durable. My skin becomes a shield, too used to the bites of coldness to register anything but movement.

Or maybe I've just become so accustomed to death I can't feel it's numbing grip on me.

"They keep dying, Silas."

As if I would know what to do to stop this.

I don't know what to do to stop them dying. But I do know, somewhere inside of me that begins to thaw and itch and shudder to life, how to stop this woman from taking us all. I've always been good with words. Good at drinking them in page by page, good at gifting the most treasured ones at birthday parties, good at calming my screaming love with nothing but a hushed voice and gentle sentences with an urgency underneath it all for her to stand up and rise once more as the beauty and strength she is. I'm good at turning every single adult who wanted me gone from here away. Words. I can do words. Lilith is lost for them so I shall be her voice.

I know what to do to make this woman leave with only the echo of her footsteps in tow.

The way I approach her makes her jump at first - startled by my element of surprise. So silent I usually am that some have mused that I don't have a voice at all. But I do, and I take my arms from behind my back and extend one out towards her, shaking her hand with confidence. My hair is still damp from the rain and Edgar's old shirt that's buttoned all the way up has a stubborn stain that still shows, even when tucked into my pants, but I paint on a charming smile and warm eyes and use my best weapon: words.

"Terribly sorry to interrupt ma'am - my name is Silas, one of the residents. Unfortunately Miss Aggie, our caretaker here at Sycamore House, has come down with a terrible cold - the weather has been rather misfortunate as you are probably well-aware of - and is on bed rest at the moment." I wonder if she can hear my heart racing in my chest but her expression seems unchanged, so onward I go.

"However we would be more than happy to show you around - we being Edgar, Lilith and myself of course. Edgar here is nineteen and of legal guardianship age, and Lilith is our duty caretaker as signed by Miss Aggie in our legal records. It's all in the files in the basement, if you'd like to see them."

I know this because I've read every single one of those files. When Miss Aggie was having one of her better days, amused by our fuzzy television blaring out a Capitol skit, I slipped the form to sign Lilith and Edgar over as secondary guardians and owners of the house underneath her nose. She signed without question, thanking 'Sage' for helping her with the bills, and I slipped it away out of Lilith's sight. Because I am good with words and I know that the world won't stop trying to tear us apart, and if deceiving Lilith meant saving us all in the future I was prepared to face her wrath eventually.

Or perhaps I'll be our unlikely saving grace. 

ooc; this is light years too late, endless apologies </3

[chelsey]

EDGAR

"All you have is your fire, and the place you need to reach."

IDENTITY IS SOMETHING I STOPPED BEING concerned about around the time I turned Silas's age. Identity, I also learned, is just one big jigsaw puzzle that everyone is born with, or at least born with the knowledge of. Some are just born with more pieces than others.

I had no pieces when I was dropped like a newspaper roll onto the front steps of Sycamore house from what seems like a forever ago - other than the piece that gave me my name (albeit, without the decency of at least giving me a last name). But, besides, that last name would have been a whole other piece, and, well, I've hardly ever described my life as "whole."

Fortunately, I've hardly ever been one to dwell, either. The permanence of most of my thoughts is just about as stable as the state of my identity, which is to say not stable at all. I don't mind, though, I don't mind at all.

It's around the time that I'm digging a hole in the ground that I grasp my identity wholly and entirely for the first time.

Sycamore House is a little way off from where I stand, about the size of my fist if I close one eye and stretch my arm straight out in front of my chest. I can hardly make out Silas's figure as he toils away with whatever work's to be done in the garden, and I have to forcibly swallow the lump of guilt in my throat at the sight.

Lilith would be disappointed instinctively flashes across my mind right as I drop my head back down to shovel away another pile of dead earth to the side of the gradually widening hole. A burlap sack filled with every bottle of alcohol we had in the house sits on the opposite side of the mound of crumbling dirt, and my hands pause in their dirty work for a fleeting moment, as if to consider that hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this. The moment passes, though, and the earth continues to be hollowed. Lilith isn't here, right now, the other, more darker, and much, much more selfish part of my brain counters, and I nod in affirmation, even if no one else is there to see it.

I ignore when the other, smaller part of my brain (the one that boyishly hoped against all odds, the one that dictated my actions more often when Laila was still alive, the one that shrinks a little bit more every day that her bed goes cold and untouched) says, That's because Lilith is probably busy doing something useful, right now.

When the hole is finally wide enough, I toss the burlap sack into it, with a lot more care than I've usually been using since I-can't-even-remember, and hastily shovel the dirt back over it. I don't have time for guilt right now - not when some inspector asshole is about to uproot our lives with her bare hands, effectively making damn sure that those roots have the smallest, if any, chance of ever growing again. It's my lack of guilt that makes me realize who I am and what my identity stands for - I'm a coward. Surprisingly, that fact's a lot easier to swallow down than guilt.

But, I bury that thought with the alcohol. When the rusted silver edge of the shovel smooths over the last bit of disheveled earth, I stick the end into dirt, so that it stands straight up, and run.

"Help me," Arwen says right when I enter, the screen doors clattering behind my heaving figure, and it comes out more as hiss than as a request. I bend down and help her, anyway.

I'd like to think that she's just annoyed with me, and isn't really all that angry, but there's a bite to her tone that sets me on edge. I'd probably miss her accusatory eyes (and maybe, even, it's just me imagining it), but there's enough blame in those two words that threatens to water the hole I just dug, sprouting weeds where I could've sworn I buried my guilt. She leaves after a while, to bark orders at everyone when Lilith is too nice and too tired to do the yelling by herself. The sound of the bristles brushing against the dirt-ridden walls isn't loud enough to mute my mind. You couldn't have just thrown away the damn booze like Lilith asked you to, couldn't you, Edgar? and Since when did alcohol become your crutch? Since when did you even need a crutch? and You've wasted so much time, and your family's gonna suffer because of it. and Coward. and Get a fucking grip.

It takes me more than a moment to realize that the last thought is actually Arwen's voice. I've been violently scrubbing the same spot on the wall for the past five minutes (changing it from dark gray, to slightly less dark gray), and Arwen's bounding back down the hall before I can even shout anything back at her. Great. More time wasted.

When the inspector arrives, it isn't Lilith or me or Miss Aggie who takes the reigns. It's Silas. And I'm grateful for that simple fact in more ways than one.

"Edgar here is nineteen and of legal guardianship age, and Lilith is our duty caretaker as signed by Miss Aggie in our legal records," he says, spurting out bullshit after bullshit so eloquently that even I believe him for a second. All I can manage is a tight grin at the inspector, who raises an eyebrow at me quizzically as Silas gestures to me as he briefly mentions my name.

The phrase legal guardian carries enough weight to make my heart swell - and to deflate it just as fast (if all of the buried alcohol in the backyard is any indicator). Cowards can't take care of seven other kids; cowards can hardly take care of themselves. The puzzle of my identity slowly clicks into place, and not one single piece says "guardian."

When I clasp my hands behind my back, it's so she can't see the way my nails are digging into my wrists, hard enough to draw blood.

better late than never, right guys?
I'm just a horrible person I'm sorry.