aurelia 'lia' irvine [d1] [finished]

"Your Aunt tells me that you've been looking down in the dumps a lot of the time, so that's why she's brought you here today."

I smirk, and say nothing. A sour oh, again? wants desperately to slip off of my tongue, but I'm supposed to be on my best behaviour. The lecture from my Aunt was short, but I got the message loud and clear. Don't make me look bad and try not to do anything stupid. I cross my jacket-clad arms in front of me, making my silent boundaries apparent. Who, me? I think as I look the psychiatrist (fourth in four years, a personal best) up and down in a quick flicker of movement by light blue irises. She will get nothing out of me. Not today, not tomorrow. Raised eyebrows arched high above my eyes say go ahead, try me. You'll find nothing.

"Right," I reply, crossing my bare legs just as defensively as I did with my arms. I've had many a compliment about the length of them, almost as lanky as my arms - but I think that they just get in the way. My limbs are not long enough to stretch to the skies, so what good are they, really? They may be the same pale, eerie shade as the moon, but try as they might, my long fingers can't touch the cratered, rocky surface. I'll have to settle for feeling the breeze whip across my pale skin and weaves itself through the tangle of red that sprouts from my head. For now, though, the sit in the crooks of my arms as I hold my chin out in subconscious defiance.

"So I suppose I'm supposed to, you know," I continue, shrugging my folded arms before opening them up again for a moment to let my fingers create quotation marks around my invisible words. "Talk about my feelings." I've been through this all before, the painstakingly boring meetings where they ask questions, probing my body and squinting at me through glassy, orbital eyes - as if I were a science experiment they were trying to get results from - and I lie through my china-white teeth. It's supposed to be a test, but I turn it into a game. With sly smiles, I watch them hungrily as the tables are turned - the interviewer becoming increasingly more uncomfortable with the words from the interviewees smirking pink lips. 1 minute 32 seconds, at a glance of my watch strapped firmly to my left wrist, it's a personal best.

She shifts uncomfortably in her seat, readjusting her clipboard. We could not be more different, split by the table I sit casually in front of. Her clothes are ironed perfectly, badge clipped in just the right position, not a hair out of line. A newbie, I note quietly as I fall back against the leather, my back lounging against the furniture as if this place were my own home. They've probably been whispering about me in the staffroom, briefing this woman on what the oncoming storm will bring. "Aurelia Irvine... oh dear, good luck girl. You'll know her when you see her." And she'd blink, with puzzled, childlike eyes, and insist that she didn't know me. "Tall, very tall. Ginger. Bit of a wonky right arm from when she threw herself off of that roof and broke it." (I didn't throw myself off of a roof, per say, but that's actually the real reason as to why my Aunt shunted me in here again.) 

"Well," she shrills a little too highly to be noted as calm, coughing nervously, "is there anything you'd like to talk about, Aurelia?"

At that point, I grit my teeth. "Apart from the fact that my name is Lia, as in L-I-A, then no, not really." I know that she's hanging on for something, anything to scribble down on her notebook that bleeds trouble. My nose twitches in annoyance and I sit forward, pausing the bored up-and-down motion of my boot-covered foot in thin air. "I'm doing swimmingly. Splendid! As normal as can be!" I over-exaggerate with a flail of my arms, as if to illustrate how glorious my current state of mind is supposed to be. I spy her scribbling down 'Reluctant to Open Up' and bat my fair eyelashes away just in time for her not to catch me, tsking under my breath.

"Well if there's nothing you want to talk about at the moment, we can reschedu-" "Fantastic!" I beam, jumping up in an instant to reveal the length of my (apparently "glorious", according to some drunken idiot-Career at a party last week) jean-covered legs. The same stupid idiot had spat the previous day that I was "Tall, lanky and ginger!", apparently the three worst attributes you could possibly own in terms of looks. Guess I lucked out. Striding over to the door like a bee to honey, I grasp the handle and am through it before she has any time to respond. "See you another time, then! Hopefully never!" 

With a convinced slam of the door and a victorious spring in my step, I slide into the waiting area to a rather surprised receptionist. "Miss Irvine, are you rescheduling?" Swishing my orange hair around, I pause in my position to smile. "I'll call you." And with that, I am an orange blur that disperses out of the building with a triumphant stride.

"....but she doesn't have a phone..." the receptionist mumbles. 

And Lia Irvine strikes again. 

★

Only when the sun sets across the streets of home do I begin to fall graciously back down to earth again.

We actually do have a phone in this house - I just made the teensy little 'mistake' of 'forgetting' to write it down when I filled out the latest batch of paperwork. You get to learn things about people who work in therapy - like how they never ask twice. My Aunt and Uncle aren't here - surprise surprise - only leaving a scrawled note taped to the fridge. 

DINNER IN THE FRIDGE. 

PS: RORY CALLED. 

2 3 4 TIMES. 

"Ripred, Rory," I groan, slamming the note back on the metal door. "Your poor parents and their phone bill." I turn to the phone, and for just a moment, part of me wants it to start ringing. Part of me wants myself to rush over to the damned thing and pick it up hurriedly, to spill out my inner thoughts and how goddamned sad I feel all the time to somebody who isn't trying to force them out of me and scratch them onto paper for everybody to see. 

And then I remember that Kiera won't be there to laugh a hello back to me, and I sink to the floor, defeated.

I don't cry. Lia Irvine does not cry. I just slide down against the cool surface of the fridge and sit there, curling my arms around my legs that I clutch to my chest and think. Think about life, and death, and how everybody but me gets to join the sparkling diamonds in the sky that house my family. My lungs seize to draw oxygen for a moment, feeling my throat bubble with what could be sobs and my eyes sting with what could be tears - but I don't let them be. Sometimes, when the rain falls at the darkest point in the night and the world seems to have stopped spinning altogether, I feel as though I might actually drift into an eternal slumber. But I wake up as sad as before I had given in to my heavy eyelids that forced me to rest. 

(When she first died, I would call in the dead of the night and sit here, listening to the high-pitched ringing in my ears before a background chorus of giggling would erupt in my eardrum, then a "Hi! You've reached the - BLAIR PUT THAT DOWN! - Dempseys, leave a message and we'll... BLAIR!" 

The faint clunk of the line on the other end drops, leaving only a continuous drone of one bleeping note in my ear. It reminds me of hospitals and the sound I sometimes wish my heart would make.)

So I shoved away any attempt at sympathy that my Aunt and Uncle bothered to give. My Aunt would look at me, and back to the television at Kiera Dempsey's fading face, and ask "Did you know her?" "Oh, shut it! We both know you know!" I screamed, racing from their presence like I run away from all the rest of my problems. "Don't pretend to care!" I had made raising me a challenge enough in itself, so why bother to undo all of that now? They had no idea how to sympathise with a grieving teenager. Let alone me. Only a week ago I was impossible to cope with, a truant, a daredevil who's one day going to get myself killed, and completely mad. And the sad thing was, she was absolutely correct.

The phone hangs dead on the cord long after I've fled the house into the night. 

I shiver against the harsh wind of the night, storming against the pavement and wishing I'd worn something else other than a tank top and skirt. All I need now is for the sky to growl and the rain to start pouring, and I would be walking through a picture-perfect representation of my emotional state. Rory always tells me that I shouldn't go out like this - or go out, permanent - but right now, I don't care what he thinks. I'll pretend that I don't care what anybody else thinks, either. So I drown in paper cups filled with liquid that burn the back of my throat, ignore the meds buried at the bottom of my drawers and prescribe my own version, block out the voices that whisper "She's nuts" "Jump, Aurelia" "Look at her, the slag" "Pretty sure she's kissed every guy in this room" "Yeah but she's a great Career, you can't doubt that" "Jump, jump, jump" "Y-you, you.. my dear.. are f-f-abulous! And I... am so drunk!" "Jump, jump! I dare you!" "Jump, jump! We dare you!"

There is an insect buzzing around my head and a drumbeat hammering against my chest. I stand up on the roof and look down at them all, raising my cup in a triumphant gesture. "Who dares me?" I yell at the top of my lungs, and everybody cheers me on. They all want to see the crazy girl that jumps for the stars landing on the moon instead. A laugh breaks from my lips, and the cheers from down below echo across the sky. "Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump!" "Jump, jump, jump!"

For a millisecond, my arms outstretch and my feet cascade off of the rood into the night sky. I am flying. Everybody always says that I seem to be so cross all of the time that they never get to see me smile - genuinely smile. But as my parents, my best friend and everybody else in the sky smiles down at me and hold out their hands for me to catch, I have never been happier. I belong higher than rooftops or Capitol Airships. I belong with the stars.

"Geronimo."

And I crash into the swimming pool below, hearing muffled hoots of laughter underneath the surface. Hey, Ki I think weakly before I am pulled upwards toward the surface by screaming lungs and cheering Careers. 

"She's mad, that Lia chick" somebody laughs.

"Yeah," another replies. "Mad, impossible Lia Irvine."

★

When I was a little girl, I dreamt of the stars.

Or at least, that's what everyone said I did. Dreamt. That I fell asleep and sleepwalked up on the roof, or just dreamt the voices talking to me. I asked my Aunt how I could have possibly ever gotten up on the roof in my sleep, but she just sighed and told me to run along. People just don't seem to want to deal with me. And that's fine. I feed them lies and build up walls, and they accept that and don't dare to try and cross them. I learnt long ago that people don't accept the truth when it comes from my mouth. 

"The stars are my parents,"I told the first psychiatrist, swinging little legs that couldn't touch the floor below me. "because they told me, you see. They say, 'Aurelia, our shining star that fell from the sky, you'll come back again someday.'" Vicious scribbling and much frowning was conducted in that office, and I blinked at the first psychiatrist questioningly. "You don't believe me, do you."

He sighed. "I believe, Miss Irvine, that you're a bit upset about not knowing who your parents are, and that you've come up with a way of channelling this through the... stars." I blinked again, about to scream that nobody knows who my parents are - and those that did have nothing to tell me. My Aunt didn't even know that she had a sister, and nobody knew who my Father was. I appeared out of thin air. So he muttered quietly to my worrying Aunt about tablets and good night's sleep, and I pictured daggers in his head.

"Don't worry, Aurelia, our golden light against the Earth" they whispered that night as I lay against the dew-covered grass, insects buzzing in my ears."Only stars can hear us. They just don't understand, that's all. We'll catch you, we'll come back for you, we promise. Just wait."

And I waited. Twelve years. I waited, and waited, and tried to jump into the sky from trees, roofs, anything that could spring me into the evening twilight forever. Each time, they failed to grasp me with twinkling hands and shining fingers and pull me up through the atmosphere. When stars die, they explode into the galaxy. And I almost died that night, exploding into uncontrollable anger. 

"Twelve years!" I cried, stomping towards my bedroom window to scream up at the sky. "You promised! You promised me and I waited twelve years for you! YOU PROMISED!" 

I threw my suitcase through a window that night. I never saw it again.

"There's something wrong with me," I muttered to the second stranger at age 13 when I realised that I was broken. "I can't jump high enough. I can't be fixed. I can't reach them."

"Reach who, Miss Irvine?" 

"My parents."

That was the last time I ever cried in front of a stranger. Being an orphan usually means that everybody throws down sympathy at your doorstep when you least need it. Once you're a clinically diagnosed psycho, though, you're pummelled with insults. It didn't take long to learn how to throw them back. And then I met Kiera Dempsey, who was bold and brash and was excellent at putting people in their place. I sort of latched onto her, like Rory does to me. Except Rory lets me bully him, whereas I wasn't taking any shit from Kiera, and she knew it. I was the bonkers girl who jumped into the sky, and she was the warrior who talked to the rain. 

We fitted perfectly. 

I'd tell her about the stupid psychiatrists and their funny moustaches, impersonating their wardrobe in my Uncle's closet. I'd watch her cousin teach her everything about being a Career, and followed along in suit. ("I think that she needs an activity of some sort to channel her anger," the doctor's recommended. "Like training?!" I beamed, delighted that my Aunt may finally say yes to something I had always wanted to do. Before she had time to argue, he smiled down at me and replied "Yes, that sounds perfect, Lia." I always did like that one the best.) 

I jumped in front of swords for her, fought off anyone who tried to remind her of Kaelen, who had disappeared off into the night to never return again and left her devastated. I took care of her for him. I didn't want her to hurt; because I understood what it was like to be left behind. We were abandoned souls, and I'd protect her from anything.

Except, of course, herself.

When I heard the slightly hesitant tone of "I volunteer!" that could only have come out of one mouth, my world seemed to have shattered again. My Aunt and Uncle dragged me away from the reaping kicking and screaming, begging them to let me see her, let me say goodbye. "You are not going to be interrogated by Peacekeepers about that Dempsey Girls' scum cousin!" my Uncle hissed. So I was dragged into a car and screeched off, clawing at the windows against the decreasing size of the Justice Building. "No!" I yelled all the way home. "Let me out! Let me out! I have to... I have to protect her!" 

I didn't dare let it be known that I had promised the stars. 

"You took my best friend from me, and she got hurt," I whisper to the night from my rooftop. "And now she's up there, with you. And she's fine." 

I smile through the sprinkling of water that run like rivulets of rain down my skin. "But I'll never see my best friend again," I continue, "not ever. How can you do that to me?" 

The stars, for once, have nothing to say.