ness . one [fin]

[pogue]

Tennessee Redwater, "Ness"   .    Seventeen    .    One    .    Career

[pogue]

N  E  S  S 

Mom never wanted kids.

She never told us directly but it was always there, brimming just below the surface, circling each and every one of us like sharks in the water, drawn to the smell of our own blood. When you’re one of eight kids, each one with their own fears and their own burdens and their own expectations to live and die for you start to realize that what it means to not be wanted, that none of you were meant to bring a new life into the world but rather, to continue a life that had already been written in blood and stone centuries before you were born.

I was only Ten when I realized it all, pressed my hands too firmly into the mirror and watched the facade shatter and fall around me. She never held me, she never held any of us, ushered our forms into the hand of every avox and nanny that roams the halls of our home like ghosts in the night. I was born a number, a means to an end and an end to any chance of our family line ever fading into obscurity. After all, the only reason we have survived this long was by planting our roots so deep that it strangled all other means of competition, bled them dry and let them rot until they were nothing but dust.

Some days I blame her, when the morning sun splits through the clouds and blankets itself on the floor and walls and ceiling of my room, the light fracturing and dancing across the surface until it feels like I’m trapped in a coffin of glass, doomed to die a slow and painful death surrounded by a beauty I’ll never be able to claim. I blame her with everything that is left inside a heart that never was granted the room to grow, that she had the nerve and the anger and the poison in her blood to make sure so many of us were brought into the world and into this family. And I know it is not her fault, that she was always just a victim of the business, of our own blood, that she had no choice but to make sure we could continue on this legacy no matter how deep dark and blood stained it becomes. But with all of my being I want to rest my burdens on her shoulders for once, to lay the blame into her soul until she withers away into nothing. I realize, on days like that, that my hatred for someone else’s existence is precisely why I am a member of the family.

Some days I blame myself, for never having the nerve or the courage or the heart or the stupidity to go against any of it, for drowning in those waters so easily.

Some days I blame love, because it’s the only thing none of us have ever been able to figure out. After all, we’ve never even seen it. Not in the business, not in the academies, not in our reflections in steel blades, not in the empty heartbeats and intertwined fingers Mom and Dad show at every party we hold.

And some days I do nothing but wander the halls after Academy training, charting a course of lefts and rights and dragging my fingers against the pristine wallpapers of our home, feeling the sins that fester and rot in my own blood blossom with the ghosts that live in the walls, voices heard and voices silenced behind closed doors, bodybags and brokered deals and toasts to a new tomorrow and a forgotten yesterday.

Inevitably, I always end up amongst the backrooms, shelves on shelves of the alcohol our family sold its soul to staring me down with the moonlight dancing through their skin, pooling on the granite floors in an ocean of burnt orange and red. When I was younger, our Grandfather found us playing hide and seek amongst those very shelves, innocent childhood forms stuffed behind trophies and badges and bottles of whiskey.

He dragged us from our hiding spots with the all the force of a prime Peacekeeper in his day, purple and black flowers blooming from the spot where his fingertips wrapped around our skin. And he screamed at us until his voice went hoarse and teardrops pricked at the edges of our vision, legs weak and hands shaking.

Delicately and with the utmost precision, with more care than we’d ever been given in our entire lives he took down each and every bottle from those shelves one by one, cradled them in his hands and told us how much more valuable they were than any of our lives.

A reminder of our own place in the world, that blood was thicker than water but never thicker than the liquor our family was built from. That is, if you can even call it a family.

Whatever we are, whatever it is, we didn’t survive the Dark Days without getting blood on our hands, without making sure it shows in every move we make, branded into our lineage with the fires we’re all destined to end up in. I used to try and talk to Leo about it, desperate to form a connection with a sibling that shared the same fate as I, to convince myself that someone cared for me and not just for the surname I carried on my shoulders.

It worked, for a time.

Huddled underneath the bedsheets far after lights out was called, our faces hardly visible in the soft glow of a flashlight we’d stolen from Dad’s desk, loosening the batteries until the beam was no more than a soft lull. We’d talk of everything we’d been taught about our own history, about the way our name had survived and about the way we were expected to carry that legacy until far after Mom and Dad were gone.

About how the people in white with Capitol emblems branded on their sleeves came once a month and escaped behind heavy wooden doors, voices fading to a soft murmur as soon as the click of a lock was heard. Leo told me that he’d snuck to the doors once and pressed his ears into the wood grains until he could just make out what they were saying, harsh words of deals made and debts paid and people taken care of. When I asked him what he thought that meant, he told me never to ask about it again. It felt warm, to have a Brother, even if only for a while.

But to survive in this family means to cool your heart until it’s numb, ice spread across blood-stained skin and fangs bared at all times in case of an attack. When we started at the Academy those late night talks died, replaced with the steel of knives laced between our fingers and the scars that are left in the wake of once red skin. It has a way of killing you, the need for your own survival and the need to make sure what you were born into survives.

Mom never wanted kids, I see it in her face in her eyes in the way she curls her fingers into her palms whenever we cross her path. When I look in the mirror, I can’t blame her. Bad people don’t create good things, none of us are an exception to that.

[pogue]

I jus' be writin' because if I don't I'll go insane or somethin'



ripred_bot

[pogue]

Bump!

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Bump <3

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