guide you home {kiah/tacara}

there is a house built out of stone
wooden floors, walls and window sills
tables and chairs worn by all of the dust
this is a place where i don't feel alone
this is a place where i feel at home

There's always a lingering presence of sorrow whenever Klaus leaves for the Capitol.

It's his third trip on the train this year. And although for the past two we've known that he's coming home again, even that can't shake our prevailing memories of a time when we didn't think we'd ever see our brother again. Not even peace-of-mind that he is going to send others into the arena and not himself can lift this mood of resentment that creeks like floorboards and whistles like the wind. Absence makes the heart grow fonder of my brother who would come home smiling, hiding underneath pages of books and in the corners of rooms with his glasses atop his nose. (They fixed his eyes when he came back from Hell, but his glasses are just another thing that they removed from him to make him less and less like Klaus and more like Klaus Goravich: Victor of the 61st Annual Hunger Games.) I don't want a shell of my brother who comes home distraught with the guilt of two other lives pressing down on his body every year, long after he won his Games and left 23 bodies behind. I want bookish Klaus, nerdy Klaus, who would do my homework for me when I threatened to hurt him and would simply pick himself and his books off the floor when I did, dusted himself down, and did my bidding without any arguments. He kept my secret so well-hidden, so silent in his doing-so, that sometimes I'm not sure if he ever knew my biggest flaw existed. Now he is a ghost of Klaus, of something I didn't know I had until it was wrenched away from us all. (Maybe Marina was right in saying that he was a robot, a monster, something the Capitol warped and twisted so much that all that is left of him is his body, filled with toxic regret that collects in his eyes.)

I am here, but I am not yours.

It is his job; I have to keep on reminding myself. It is his way of paying the Capitol back for keeping him alive. Bring more up for slaughter, and we’ll keep your family safe. On our 19th birthday, we all huddled around one cake and blew out 5 candles, knowing that we were leaving behind a life of teenage fear and entering a new one, filled with far scarier things than bumps in the night or monsters underneath our beds. The monsters are in our heads instead. Reaping bowls still hang in our futures, should any of us have children. We never escape it. Not really. Everyone expects Victor Children. It’s yet another unspoken deal between Victors and the Capitol. They do it, because they simply must. I’m never putting my own children through what we all had to go through. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Entering adulthood felt no different than our lives before the Games changed us forever. We still bring ourselves up, under a sometimes less-than attentive eye of Hopper, but we all have our separate demons to fight with. Adulthood means that there is no chance that any of us will have to go through what Klaus did, that we will stay, in a way, intact to our separate selves. All 6 of us – even Hop – now have to rely on ourselves again. The Quintuplets were bound by absence. Now, we’re pulling ourselves apart by our own strains, our own singular problems, our own absences from each-other’s lives. At least we can all agree that nobody, not even I, have it worse off than Klaus.

So here I am, one fifth of a jigsaw that sometimes fits, but most of the time refuses to. Scanning my eyes over a wall of book spines, I furrow my eyebrows at their topsy-turvy letters and concentrate, trying to differentiate between my eyesight playing ticks on me, or just the fact that the books are lined in such a way that the words are sideways. There is a silent war in this hallway – one between myself and the inanimate objects that line wooden shelves and hold the key to my steady success. I find myself here time and time again, picking up the stupid things and forcing myself to breaking point, struggling through paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence – and only finding that I’ve barely finished the first page.

So when I stumble upon a recipe book, my eyes light up. Pictures have always been my strong point, as has doing things rather than reading about them. For our 10th birthday, Hopper had bought me the book that slides out of its place amongst the bookshelf in delicate, patient fingers, containing pictures of cups and flour and slices of butter, rather than little words for ingredients and instructions. It was my favourite thing in the world – and apparently, our mothers, too. I had to learn that the hard way when my father walked in on me baking muffins for him, and forbid me to use the kitchen other than for meals every since. Despite its intentions to be used by younger hands, I clasp it with the knowledge that I am an adult now, free of my father’s drunken rules. I live in my brother’s house, not my father’s - and if Klaus doesn’t want me to bake, then I won’t. For now, though, I will do just what I like.

The house is emptier than ever as I patter past our bedrooms towards the kitchen. Klaus’ door is shut, and although it contains nobody behind its door, there seems to be a whole other being that none of us could never imagine who resides there. Hopper’s is across the hall – although he’ll be at work (it baffles me how we can afford to live without pay, yet he still finds enjoyment in hard labour), Jamarion next to Klaus, who is more than likely with his girlfriend whom I’m probably the last person in the world to meet, Marina next to mine (Ripred knows where she is or what she’s doing), and Tacara at the very end. Of all my siblings, Tacara seemed to be the one most distant from me. I seldom paid much attention to her growing up – but whether or not that was a bad thing, I’d beg to differ. She kept her head down, kept quiet, kept in the line of order I had chosen to command. Hop and Marina always knew – and I think Klaus did, too – and Jamar, well, we were the two ring leaders, the stronger ones, battling head to head and side by side all at once. The empty spaces where my siblings branch off from me grow further and further apart each day, yet Tacara has almost broken off altogether.

So in my desperate attempts to cling to whatever family I have left, I knock three times on her door and enter.

“Hey, Car” I muse quietly, my head peeping out from behind her bedroom doorframe. It’s uncomfortable, invading her space. She feels unfamiliar, like I haven’t spoken to her in years. (Have I? Everything seems to have happened so quickly, so fast, that we didn’t see the time between us stretch to unbearable distances.) I find my words hastily conjured from thin air, as if I am trying to keep our relationship afloat underneath a tidal wave that will surely suck us down into the sea. How odd, for two people who began life in the same place to feel so much like strangers. Raising the baking book into view, I lean my head to one side and smile hopefully.

“Wanna bake?”

and i built a home, for you, for me
until it disappeared from me, from you
and now, it's time to leave and turn to dust
i held on as tightly
as you held onto me