chariot { lex + denali }

[aya]

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[attr="id","lSpeech"]swing
like a chariot
at the trumpet call
when we're all unsaved

Lex turns her carving over in her hands. It isn't her best work — not by a long shot — but considering the circumstances it could be a lot worse. Redwood is much harder than any of the wood Lex has used for whittling before, Denali's paring knife leaves a lot to be desired, and the lack of fine sandpaper means the finish isn't as smooth as humanly possible. Still, it's distinctly a bird. Grooved wings, tiny beak, long tail. Crested head, chubby round belly, no feet. Yep. That's a bird.

She sits up, stretching out her neck and rolling her shoulders. Sitting still for so long has never been a trial of patience for Lex, despite her proclivity for impulse. The real test is tension. She ought to get up to stretch more regularly, but that means putting her work down — an impossible task once she's gotten engrossed.

An opposite but equal fixation has taken Denali. Some hours later and she's still preoccupied with... nothing? Her own thoughts? Biting her knees? Lex has filled the silence with every calm thought that's passed through her brain. Stories from her childhood in Seven, a description of the puzzle desk she and her dad had just started the week before the reaping, Arthur Lionel's takes on privacy and autonomy and breakfast food, an impromptu whittling tutorial. Turning an errant groove into happy little feathers.

She offers the totem to Denali. No response. Lex tries waving it in front of her face, tries pecking her on the nose with the little bird beak and an emphatic [attr="id","lSpeech"]"boop!" She finds success in physically slotting the carving's tail between Denali's teeth, which obligingly change their primary target to the redwood cardinal.

Lex unrolls the yoga mat on the ground and sits, stretching out her stiff back.

When the weather was good, Lex and her dad hiked through the expansive forests of District Seven. Lex had loved the woods so much that Arthur had been forced to save the outings as incentive - any finished project was rewarded with a day spent hiking. (This was quickly amended to any major project, as Lex would quickly produce picture frames and birdhouses and more requests to go exploring.) They'd see deer and foxes and rabbits with regularity, but only rarely did they run into a bear.

When you run into an aggressive bear in the woods, Arthur had explained, you'll be grateful that you decided not to hike alone. If you're with another person, you don't need to outrun the bear - just them.

Seven-year-old Lex didn't do the math on her running speed relative to her dad's until years later, but the point he'd made had stuck.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"Hey Freckles, you still in there? Denali?" Eye contact, that's a start.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"Look..." Lex sighs, scratches her eyebrow. Dried mud flakes off, a remnant from her earlier altercation with gravity. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"I'm no knight in shining armor. I'm just some bitch in a battle jacket. And when it comes down to it, I'm leaving your ass for the wolves if it means saving mine."

She clears her throat and rephrases her disclosure.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"I'm not making a habit of saving you, so don't make a habit of needing saving." Her ears burn. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Or do. You're an adult. Do whatever you want." Lex heard the you're an adult speech from her dad for the first time as a twelve year old. She sounded so much like him now she could practically feel the mustache sprouting on her face.

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[L△LIA]

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we don't need ghost stories
let's live in the moment

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"Boop!"

Lex taps Denali’s nose with the beak of her completed whittling project. There’s no response from the Lyons girl, lost in catatonic panic over the worst memories carried within her heart and the realization that she didn’t leave all of her humanity in her little sister’s hands for safekeeping like she thought. That or maybe it regrows. All these old feelings keep bursting forth from empty places Denali told herself would stay unoccupied, at least until she returned home. Just because she doesn’t always allow emotion to touch her face doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a secret refuge within her. That it does is the problem.

Something taps at her teeth, insistently naming itself as her new target for absent destruction. She bites on it softly, uncertain, but gives it a chance because the shape feels nice within her hand. "Hey Freckles, you still in there? Denali?" Lex’s voice sounds different than the rambling of her stories, edged with the smallest hint of concern instead of the casual tone of someone talking just to kill the silence. "Look..." And Denali does, meeting her eyes with an open stare. Numb, but attentive. "I’m no knight in shining armor." No kidding. "I’m just some bitch in a battle jacket." One corner of Denali’s mouth attempts to hook itself up, sending a little twitch across her lips that echoes momentarily between her eyebrows. "And when it comes down to it, I’m leaving your ass for the wolves if it means saving mine."

There has always been something suspicious about people who say things out loud that should go without saying. (We’re sorry for your loss.) It’s as if they’re worried that Denali might be able to hear the little contradiction of truth whispered in their head if they don’t make some kind of noise to drown it out. Lex clears her throat. "I’m not making a habit of saving you, so don’t make a habit of needing saving." The secret to being a good liar is not giving a shit that the words coming out of your mouth are half-truths, exaggerations, or straight up fiction. (I feel like I’m okay now and that home will just feel like home again. I owe it all to you for helping me come to terms with my emotions. Thank you — so much — for everything.) "Or do. You’re an adult. Do whatever you want." Lex’s ears burn, telltale color sneaking onto her cheeks, and Denali’s expression finally cracks into the deep frown of someone who wishes she didn’t speak this language.

"Don’t —" Picking at the hem of her gown with the hand that isn’t wrapped around the redwood bribe for attention, Denali’s fingers stretch and curl and stretch again, as if waking up from a long nap. "Don’t feel guilty about it. I get that we have to kill each other." Eyes dropping to the ground, she thinks of Oliver; of his sword and his spite. "But we don’t have to be mean about it. Like..." Toeing the cart, her boot clicks down a row in the steel gridwork. "If it comes down to me and you then just... don’t be an asshole about it. Just this one thing." Stress chewing a little more forcefully on the edge of the carving Lex pressed to her mouth, Denali rubs her palms against her knees, her fidgeting settling slightly with the burn of sweat in the fresh bite marks. "Don’t call me a bitch if you’re the one with a knife to my throat." (I hope you know that you deserve to feel pain.) "Don’t tell me I deserve it; don’t make that the last thing I ever hear."

Revulsion flickers across Lex’s face, caught off guard by actual honesty. Maybe they’d both rather face the wolves than a second round of cruelty. Denali only lies when the truth wouldn’t make a difference and she doesn’t want to waste her breath pretending she hates someone that she doesn’t; there are already too many opportunities in her life for sincerity on that front. "Sure," Lex blinks like hitting a panic button and her expression immediately flips to a smirk, "if I’m about to slit your throat it’d be rude of me not to compliment your eyes first." The snark hangs awkwardly in the air between them, despite how smooth the well practiced delivery is. It doesn’t take a lifelong relationship to recognize a signature move that’s already been busted out too many times to count within the intense stress of the past twenty-four hours. Denali snarls and gnashes her teeth when pushed over the line while Lex tries to pull a fast one on any trouble that finds her; they’re both too obvious for their own good. Like every other time, Denali rolls her eyes. "Well," the blonde relents, but moves her attention to a deeply fascinating corner of the yoga mat. "what do you want me to say?"

Shifting her weight onto her knees, Denali releases the carving from her lips and grabs onto the side of the cart, pulling herself up to prop her chin on the edge. Her head tilts in serious contemplation. "I dunno..." It’s a little startling when someone actually cares about an answer to a question they’ve asked her. (Denali, how do you feel?) There is a voice in her chest that warns her not to waste hope on what she wants from such fleeting companionship. "More nice stories about your dad and your cat," she hesitates — trying not to hit another switch — running a thumb over the bird in her hand, "and how you won’t go back and just be sad and drunk about how you killed me that one time." She doesn’t punctuate the statement with a grin or a laugh because it’s not a joke.

It’s quiet between them, but not the terrible kind. Lex keeps her face tucked out of sight, as if she can feel Denali’s shameless staring. Despite the silence, she doesn’t try to backtrack or begrudge the other girl’s right to take some time for herself. It’s only after a long stretch of minutes have passed that Denali finally attempts to explain her own catatonic shutdown. "That hole in Zion’s face... it wasn’t very good at keeping things in his head anymore." Running a finger down the middle of her eyepatch, Denali’s voice catches on itself. "So when we got him back — in this ugly crate that gave us all splinters," pausing, she dangles her arm over the side of the cart, offering a long, straight scar across her palm up for Lex’s inspection, "there was this cavern where his eye used to be and stuff had fallen in and gotten stuck. Packing peanuts. Sand. A dead fly." For a moment her voice is as flat and unresponsive as her expression following this morning’s fight. "Seville picked everything out with tweezers because nobody else could stand it, not even our dad. But my mom and I were the ones who bandaged Zi's head so there could be an open casket at his funeral." The scar on Denali’s outstretched hand continues to hang between them, bright white and permanent.

live in the moment portugal. the man



[ let's be friends little birdie ]

a|0XDQI3W1-4

[ better luck next post ]

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[aya]

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[attr="id","lSpeech"]swing
like a wrecking-ball
like the heart of god
what a mystery

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"Splinters," Lex repeats, fixated on the smallest horror in Denali's whole tale. The distain in her voice is palpable, for all the wrong reasons. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"You'd think that it would actually kill some carpenters to have a little pride in their craft."

She grabs Denali's outstretched hand and examines the long scar. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Oof, must've been a big fucker. The palm is the worst, too. Well, after the webbing between your fingers. And under the fingernails, of course." She shows off a sliver of cherrywood still buried securely under the nail of her right thumb. Denali investigates with interest, face flickering between deep fascination and minor revulsion. It's still another month from growing out. She heard somewhere that fingernails keep growing after death - so maybe she'll be rid of it someday, regardless.

([attr="id","lSpeech"]"But palm splinters are a close third." "What, do you have a scientifically perfect ten-point scale for splinters or something?" [attr="id","lSpeech"]"No! I told you, just for grandfather clocks and breakfast meats.")

Lex fidgets with a stray stick plucked from the ground beside her. She's already stripped away the bark before she knows what she's doing. It's said that idle hands are the devil's tools, but Lex gets into just as much mischief while she's preoccupied.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"They really are ugly crates," she agrees, dredging up the original conversation. Lexandriy Lionel has opinions, dammit, and she's incapable of keeping them to herself. She gets a snort and a quirked eyebrow in response, but with the subtle encouragement to keep going, Lex launches into a full-on tirade. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"The specifications for them are basically identical to shipping boxes for things like statues. More efficient to transport them if they can be stacked four or five high in a train car, I guess." She wrinkles her nose. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Plus, they're all cheap pine." Denali nods in fervent agreement, as if deeply invested in the quality and firmness of the wood. (Well, why wouldn't she have been - why wouldn't she still be?)

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"Unlimited budget for the annual murder festival, pittance for the carpenter contracted for the caskets - go figure. Not that it's any excuse for not sanding the damn things. That part hardly took me six hours." With the realization that she's probably just talking for the sake of talking again, Lex bottles up the rant. But it's the only way she can think to say you deserve better than that fucked up thing that happened to you and your brother and your family without sounding disingenuous.

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[L△LIA]

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when you're gone
goodbye, so long, farewell

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Tragedy is sad, obviously, but that's not why Denali bares her teeth at every sudden movement or why she began throwing knives into the walls of Zion's bedroom. If she were just sad then she would have curled up and sobbed, maybe for a very long time, and that would have been the end of it. It's the frustration that gets to her. There are people who respond with vacant words of pity and become offended when she isn't moved by their condescending cliches and there are people who come after her as if she did something wrong, as if all of this is her fault because clearly she just allowed it to happen. Denali's indignation is not born from sorrow; it unfurls from every small wound of misunderstanding, from bruises and —

Splinters. Lex fixates not on the graphic indignity of Zion's corpse, but on the pale scar of Denali's suffering and the Lyons girl can't remember the last time someone outside of her own family cared about an insignificant detail like that. The splinter shouldn't matter at all. The box a slaughtered child is dumped into shouldn't be the priority in a story like this, but these are things that Denali has lost countless hours of sleep over. These are things she has named targets on Zion's walls after, in the breaths before throwing a knife. These are the types of memories that make her want to scream, because insult was added to injury and suddenly her brother's death wasn't just pain, it was torture.

Lex shows off her own splinter, embedded deeply beneath one of her thumbnails. Cool, that's gross. Thinking about how that must have felt — stabbing into a soft space that isn't used to feeling anything at all, let alone that — turns her stomach for a moment, but a small smile chases it away. I like it. Splinter buddies. Denali high-fives the scar on her palm against the tip of Lex's outstretched thumb before pulling her hand back as Lex becomes preoccupied with ranking the severity of splinters. Wisecracks are tossed back and forth and both girls relax into the banter, the grim tension of panic attacks and brutal honesty giving way to a much more easygoing atmosphere.

When the conversation circles back to ugly pine crates — ("Yeah! Down with pine!" Denali cheers under her breath with a snort of laughter as Lex puffs up with the shared enthusiasm and immediately throws herself into a particularly zealous rant) — it becomes quickly apparent that oh wow, Lex sure knows a lot of very specific details about tribute casket transport... how obscure and overly specialized of her. Somehow it's not actually very surprising. Or at least, it's not surprising until it is. "Not that it's any excuse for not sanding the damn things. That part hardly took me six hours." Wha—

Ohhhhhh.

Even Denali can't quite tell if she's hesitant to ask, but curiosity wins out and the question is let loose from her mouth before she can pause to think it over. ("You make tribute caskets?" "Uh-huh. I did, anyway. Two years when I was younger. My dad subcontracted them out to me, since — as he put it — 'this order is child's play'. And I was... what, ten? Eleven?") A crucial detail that Lex had omitted. She shrugs and Denali's expression twitches in three different directions, not quite knowing which part of that information to focus on. Taking a page out of Lex's book, Denali blurts out the more trivial of the questions bouncing through her mind, accompanied by an incredulous tilt of her head. ("Are there not child labor laws in Seven?") Lex chuckles at the obvious joke until she catches the wide-eyed judgement on Denali's face. ("Oh, you were serious?" "That explains a lot.") Denali looks her ally up and down, laughter on the edge of her lips as Lex tucks her latest whittling behind her ear and defensively crosses her arms.

Denali's grin only grows wider with Lex's disgruntled bristling. ("Did yours still look like crates? Do they always look like that?" "Well, they're a hell of a lot better if you sand and finish them." "Still ugly though?" "Yup. Still ugly.") Will ours look like that? There's something deeply sad about the idea of Lex being shipped back to her father in an unsanded, unfinished pine crate. Denali pushes the thought away and trades it out for an idea that's just as morbid, but far more amusing. ("You'd better make me a mahogany one if you kill me. Or something else fancy." "Mahogany is good. I'm thinking black walnut for mine." "Well what if I want a black walnut casket, that sounds nice... wait, isn't walnut brown? I've seen walnuts before. If this is a joke, I don't get it.") Lex is already too busy waxing poetic to herself about inlays and dome lids to bother with Denali's ignorance, only pausing at the mention of the word casket. ("I took you for more of a coffin girl, you vampire." "...are those not the same thing? Whatever. I wanna rot in a pretty box. Don't fuck it up.") Pulling a face at the utter nonsense coming out of Denali's mouth, Lex tries to pick up where she left off on the finer points of ornamental molding when Denali finally declares something truly offensive. ("And don't you worry. If you're the one who kicks it then I'll give yours a really gorgeous macaroni mosaic.") Fully aware she's being messed with — she can't be serious... right? — Lex tries not to let the utter horror show on her face, but the idea of pasta decorating her final resting place is simply too much to bear. ("It'll be the greatest thing you've never seen. Because you'll be dead. Suck it.")

The horror only increases the longer Denali blinks innocently in response to Lex's gaping alarm. Oh, yes. She's serious. ("Shut up about macaroni and let me fix your face before it gets infected." "Are you sure? I could sketch out some design ideas and —") Lex bumbles around for a moment, rethinking this alliance completely as she tracks down a medkit. Savage laughter bursts from Denali. ("You should see your face!" "You're one to talk.") It takes a few tries for her to settle down enough to have her wounds stitched, unable to resist mimicking Lex's narrowed glare and soured scowl. Even when she finally let's it go, she jumps the second Lex lays a hand on her cheek. The calloused hands of a girl who's already worked at least a decade of hard labor are shocking to the daughter of oil riches and unparalleled privilege. It's not uncomfortable, but Denali suddenly feels the undeniable, uncrossable distance between them. The two of them came here from completely different places and, one way or another — in rough pine crates or solitary victory — that is where they must both return.

live in the moment portugal. the man

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