all that {we} will ever be || eckharts; lucy's funeral

[я𝑜𝓈𝑒]

WE MUST GO DEEPER INTO GREATER PAIN

E L V A I N A  E C K H A R T

FOR IT IS NOT PERMITTED THAT WE STAY

{ the atlantic was born today
and i'll show you how . . .
the clouds above opened up
and let it out ;

I have a bitter distaste for the color black, and yet I seem to find myself wearing it often. And maybe that is where my disdain for it comes from- all those satin and velvet funeral dresses piling up in my closet.

Lucy's funeral is my third, so it is not unnerving or shocking to me when everyone spills into the funeral home dressed in black and offers me their condolences for my sister with solemn faces. I am not surprised when their eyes follow me to her casket, when they whisper under their breaths, "That poor family."

The only thing that I never get used to is the expanding feeling of emptiness within me. Perhaps that is because it escalates to a whole new scale every six months or so and I am plunged into a new fathom of darkness. But the feeling is all the same- hopeless, black, bitter, despairing- just more severe.

Pain has a talent for outdoing itself, it seems.

There are no tears today. I'm too tired to cry and it hurts so much that I don't need to anymore. Instead, I carry the pain with me. I have cried out every drop of moisture in my body, and I have grown tired of wiping my eyes in front of staring strangers.

I don't even cry when I stand before her casket. I've seen this a million times, just a different face in the coffin- Jequirity, Amerika, Lucy. The three almost seem to blend into one another, just a big blur of gray and agony and black funeral dresses. I can hardly decipher one death from the other anymore, and I'm sure that with the next Reaping, there will be another Eckhart in a casket.

I stopped asking, "Why my family?" a long time ago. Because there is no reason, really. Death is a random, merciless thing. It takes what it wants.

Looking at my sister resting so peacefully in her coffin makes death look almost attractive. If her chest was not so still, I would think that she was just sleeping. In death, Lucy feels nothing. No pain, no suffering- and that is something that has an almost dream-like appeal.

I can imagine myself laying there so easily- Lucy and I have the same blonde hair and similar features, though she was always prettier. And when I die, I think I'd like to be wearing a pretty dress like hers, and have white roses in my hands, too.

"It's okay," I tell myself, keeping my eyes fixed on Lucy's white roses. The words don't resonate with me, but I hope that someday they will. Maybe if I say if enough, I'll believe my own lie.

{ i was standing on the surface
of a perforated sphere
when the water filled every hole
and thousands upon thousands made an ocean ;

LYRICS: "TRANSATLANTICISM" BY DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE.

table by elegant

[d6a georgie cham 🍓🐢 frankel]

[googlefont="Architects Daughter"]

Lynlee Eckhart

It seems to be a recurring event, attending funerals, funerals for the girls that lay in a casket with my family name written on it. It has almost become norm, an annual event to dress up in black and wear a frown on my face. Thanking the condolences that so many of the District civilians give to me and my sisters, it is just a part of my life now and unfortunately I will just have to put up with it.

I know many of us ask why?, there are so many other girls in the District that could have had their names pulled out of that glass bowl, why does it have to be one of us? I’ve always questioned it, in the moments when I am trying to sleep and when I look at myself in the mirror every morning. Is this something that I have brought onto the family? All those years ago, I escaped…I cheated death. Easily I could have followed my mother to her fate but I ran away. Maybe Death is punishing me for not welcoming him in opening arms. I fled death and now it’s latched onto me like a shadow. Instead of taking my own life, one by one it’s taking the lives of those I love. Eventually I’ll be left alone in this world, I’ll either be left to fend for myself or Death will be gracious and claim my life too.

Carrying a small bouquet of white cyclamen flowers, I get into the line to say my final farewells to Lucy. Since Jequirity’s death, I’ve always tried to find an appropriate bundle flowers to send them off with to next life…or to the world of dirt underground. I’ve always been uncertain on what happens after death. Maybe Death just sucks up our souls, destroying them forever or sends us somewhere, somewhere we deserve to go through the actions of our lives. As told by words in a book, white cyclamens are a way to say goodbye to those who have passed away and well that’s what I am here to do.”Good bye…or maybe see you later.” I make sure that there are white cyclamen’s growing in the garden every year; I never know when I’ll need them again…

Looking down at Lucy’s peaceful face, I plant a single kiss on her forehead before placing the flowers in the casket with her. She is already surrounded by plants but I hope she appreciates my good token. I’ve been able to hold in the tears for some time but being the one for theatrics, I am unable to contain them for much longer. Pulling a handkerchief from my ebony satin jacket that is draped over my equally black dress, I mop up the tears that begin to trail down my cheeks. I best save my weeping for the next funeral…

[✨ zozo.]

I M O G E N      E C K H A R T ;

Imogen of the unwanted,

the dying,

the dead.

Eckhart girls get dumped on doorsteps in wooden cots and dumped back on their doorsteps in wooden coffins. The first time it happened, Imogen laughed and laughed and laughed until someone with glazed eyes hit her over the head with a book and she woke up on the porch. The second time she watched from the window and left two paper cranes on the windowsill.

Bruised knees, a band aid around her index finger, she twirls along the path to the graveyard with a familiar ease.

"I made this myself!" she sings aloud to no-one in particular, lost in the crowd of her sisters. "It took forever to stitch", fingertips brushing down the creases already forming on her coat-turned-skirt-turned-overalls. 

Nobody responds. She shrugs and skips along, used to their silence.

Another dead body. Oh.

This again. Right.

She stares and stares and stares and furrows her bushy eyebrows together as if the idea that concentrating really, really, really hard would cause Luci to sit up and stare straight back at her. She doesn't, of course, but Imogen still stares and waits for tears and when they erupt from someone elses eyes instead she sighs and blinks at her dead sister, turning to the rest of them with hearts still beating.

"It's okay."

White flowers. White lies.

"No it's not" the odd girl blurts out, a daisy plucked from the grass twirling in her hands and a crown of it's sisters at her head. "She's dead."

Imogen, words unwanted. Of glares that could kill and dead sisters. Weirdo, loser, shut up Immy. Doorstep child, paper heart, paper skin, paper words, a shredded mind and a cut-out between her thoughts and her tongue.

Crumpled paper crane, the third of it's kind, white and gold at Luci's bedroom window: its twin placed in her cold, dead hands.

"Fly away Luci."

[Deleted]

frances ;

It's

I don't know. 

The braid is tight, like it's pulling my tongue and lungs to keep my ass quiet through the funeral; I don't know what to feel. How to feel, how to care -- Lucy. Fogging up the mirror with my breath the night before the mirror, I draw her. Chubby cheeks, strong jaw line, dead eyes -- fuck me. She was just some girl, Lucy, Frances, why do I even care. She was, she was just like the other two: my sisters, strangers, dead, murdered. And each time I was indifferent. 
What's different now. 

I wanna trace it, like a line of rope that leads me back to the tree or when I drew her in the mirror or when she kissed my bloody knuckles or- or. Nothing, there's fucking nothing. It leads me to Elva only; I didn't care about Lucy, I tell myself. I swear on my heart, I swear I swear I swear, god my hearts probably tired of all the times I've crossed that shit. It's like a dress rehearsal. We wear black and a few wear braids and we're all quiet as if her casket is right in front of us; I'd rather be dead. 

Even when Jeq died, I hated this shit. Hated pretending to care, hated pretending that I wouldn't be able to carry on without them -- I'm doing just fine. Cracked mirrors, smoked lungs, I have Elva. That's all I need, one steady touchstone. So who cares? Who cares about another dead Eckhart, who cares if I died next; hell, I might as well volunteer to be the fourth. Lucy died, the others got ruined while I got wasted; you don't care, Frances,
you don't. 

So why is it so hard?

The funeral isn't dark. A bright morning and pastel pink cheeks, we wish condolences and kiss the setting moon. I try to take a snapshot in my head, imprinting every time I blink -- I'm painting this. Green lines and weak brights; I don't want to forget this, for once. I want this memory, I think.

"It's okay,"
HA

I don't know why I'm here. Why I even bothered to come, stepping straight past Lucy's casket and sitting down out of the way -- that's where I'm best at anyways. This isn't for me, this isn't for Lucy or the morning sun or these peach cheeks; I don't know who this is for. For Jeq? For Amerika? 

For whoever dies next year, I guess. 

Would it be rude to smoke at a funeral -- Lucy hated it. She'd probably wanna kill me if I smoked at her casket huh. Cool, whatever, I'll just chill here for an hour. 

What a waste of time, huh Lucy. 

What am I doing here.

table inspired by rook

[ghosty]

ELETTRA.

There's a reason funerals are dressed pretty in midnight-black satin; the dress hides in the back of the closet, never to see the sky again. They're only meant to happen the once. Twice a chance - a freak occurrence.

Three times the charm, they say. But it's not a charm when the tears no longer fall when a sister lies in front of you. Peaceful. Yet nothing stops the echo of a nothingness without her inside my head. It's no longer just my space inside there, not just my memories. It's the memories of them, every second a reminder that I'm no longer a kid in a peaceful home.

I'm a damaged heart inside a cursed name and I'm just counting off the days until another sister goes marching off away from me, from everyone and returning with eyes firmly shut, and arms tangled over their still chests. It's something that I can no longer last.

It's funny how funerals always look like chess. After all, we'd never have been here if it wasn't for a Games, or 3. Jeq's fingers gliding over the strings of her violin, Amerika sitting in grace. Lucy being the angel she always is. Was. I don't fucking know any more, the difference between the warmth of affection and that of tears on my cheeks. Between the coldness of loneliness or of loss. Yet neither is true;

Instead I feel nothing.

Nightmares spit everything I fear to what's in front of me- the face upon the lifeless body of Lucy changes in my head, flashing faces of each sister in turn. Imogen, Lynlee, Frances. I can't see them go and feel the emptiness that I feel now, that I feel every single moment since Jeq stepped foot in the arena that resides nowhere but the nightmares awoken with a cannon and a shot of red that bathes my memories. Never will it fade, the vibrancy like the candy in the shops I used to desire over, along with my sister, my-

My sister Lucy. I glance at her; peaceful. At odds with the grinding from within me. Regret is a beast, and it gnaws until I'm left with nothing. Once is an infinite hole, never to be filled. But thrice? I'm left with nothing but bones and skin. I am empty, all leaked out.

I am nothing anymore. Rage and fear and sorrow is a cocktail of nothingness, yet I'm seemingly addicted to it. Yet choice had nothing to do with it, I assure you.

Midnight satin is a colour that spreads disdain like my tongue across my teeth. It coats me in oil that not even water can shake, can even touch before I drown in the water that I can no longer escape from. Nightmares fuel me now. Angelic dreams are like a joke to me; no more will I ever face them in my sleep. It's just Elva or anyone else I care about, lying in front of me. Eyes as peaceful as a princess lying asleep in a forest covered in petals.

It can't happen, it won't happen. Ripred knows I have nothing else to give up. They already have it all and there is nothing left but the shell that remains.
Ripred knows it's the truth. Midnight-satin's the colour of my heart;

It's the only colour I feel alive in now.

[ :hell_rave: ]

[я𝑜𝓈𝑒]

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I do not know their pain.

I know of agony, I know of hate. But Lucy Eckhart was not my sister, despite our shared surname. I was brought here not long after she volunteered for the Games — perhaps the Eckhart couple wanted an early replacement.

No, I do not know their pain. But I can feel it in the air, I can feel how it sticks to each and every one of them like black ink, how their empty eyes look at the stars and wonder where their sisters are. If they asked me, I could not tell them; I know of death, the mark it leaves behind, but I have always tried not to consider what happens to the ones who leave us behind.

Perhaps they go deeper into greater pain or perhaps they once again behold the stars — I couldn't tell you, I can only theorize like the rest.

The empty, the void I felt within this family is more pronounced today, when they, we, are all dressed in black velvet and gathered at a funeral home in a pew before a casket. I don't get up, not once, like the rest. I just watch with hollow eyes and a sunken heart — sunken, hurting for them, not I — as they get up to say goodbye to their sisters before her burial.

I hate funerals, I decide, although this is my first. I hate heavy black dresses that cling to my body and make me melt into shadow and sadness with everyone else. I hate the suffocating stench of white roses and the melting wax of candles as they burn and dribble down the sides like cream colored raindrops. I hate the leathery, faux-looking skin of corpses and how dull the dead Lucy Eckhart's hair looks in the light. The entire room screams despair and desolation, especially with those sullen, sunken looks plastered across every Eckhart's face (even mine).

They look like ghosts, just voids of people drifting through their own thick mess of misery. And I decide that I hate ghosts, too.

The painting I made of Lucy just before she died sits on a stand beside her casket and the bouquets of flowers. She looked alive then — she was alive then. There are flowers in her hair, windblown and ruffled but at the same time like silvery blonde streams pouring down her shoulders where blood stained her purple tank top. Streaks of grime and blood and grease shine on her face, but the determination, bright as fire, in her eyes make them look like the marks of a warrior.

I believe that she was in real life, too.

Elva — I think, or maybe it is Elettra — says something to herself when it is her turn to go to the casket. I barely catch the words —

"It's okay."

But even I know that it is not. I'm not even the one hurting, bleeding, here, and I know that it won't be okay for a long time.

("Fly away, Lucy.")

And I never believed in angels, but perhaps I could be convinced that Lucy was one, by the way she acted in the Arena and how her death stole all the light away from the Eckhart house.

When one of the blonde Eckhart twins sits back down in the seat next to me, I turn to her, sympathy in my eyes and sorrow written all over my face. "You have my condolences," I say gently.

"It's okay," she repeats in an almost robotic voice, like it is a line that she was rehearsed over and over again in her head. "Really, Rey, I'm used to this by now. It's fine."

(But it's not.)

Jequirity. Amerika. Of course.

I nod, because that is all I can do. Saying sorry will not heal her broken heart.

We sit in silence and watch the candles slowly die out with the goodbyes.

_{{ table by elegant }}

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

J A D E ;

"That Jade is made of ice."

She sat alone, quiet. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, and her hair covered her face. They knew she did not cry: she never did. ("You'd need a heart to cry.") But even without the tears, she hid her face. Because she felt like she was.

She felt like the sky was falling down around her, and her stupid fucking pride wouldn't let her admit it.

One, two, three gone now.

Maybe it would be her next and they wouldn't have to go through the trouble of caring.

She pulled the hem of black lace down over her knees as her legs bounced. She patted the back of her head to make sure her braid was still the precise level of messy acquired to both look good and give her enough to hide behind in the front, and then she realized she was just trying to distract herself.

Your sister died, Jade.

(Again.)

One. Two. Three.

One: Jeq.

Her room was next to Jade's. And though Jade couldn't remember a single time when she had spoken the words aloud, she loved to lie in her bed and hear Jeq play through the walls. Many nights, her sister had helped her fall asleep, and she probably never knew it.

Two: Amerika.

No, the two hadn't had the best relationship. But the minute it was too late to say anything to her, Jade regretted it fiercely. They were sisters. They didn't have to get along to love each other. And it was a rocky relationship-- Jade could remember several times when there were actual screaming matches right there in the common room.

Now, three: Lucy.

Her favorite. She knew people weren't supposed to say that, but it was true. Lucy was her favorite.

And now, she was just number 3.

For just a moment, while everyone talked about how much they had all loved her and about how much of a good person, Jade wanted to scream. Lucy was not a good person. She had always been a runner and she had left this time and she wasn't coming back and Jade was stuck behind to clean up the mess.

She was not a good fucking person for leaving her behind.

A single tear fell before she got up and walked out.

"That Jade is made of ice."

And steel.

And poison.

And anything else that meant she was not supposed to cry at funerals. But she had. She had broken, and now everyone knew her secret. Once outside, she glanced at the sky with her blue eyes.

"Thanks a lot, asshole. You ruined my reputation." she whispered.

"And I miss you." she thought.