Ariadne Chautin -- District Two

ARIADNE
CHAUTIN



ariadne calphurnia chautin
seventeen
district two
nina dobrev

"my absence is strong and warm.
it will hold
you.
it will teach you how to miss.
how to be without.
and
how to survive anyway."

— nayyirah waheed, how my father raised me

She never loved the stars, but the night is an envious woman and steals her away, and she finds herself placing footholds on windowsills and the iron-rusted rings of fire escape ladders before she has time to think. She does this every night, a hour after dinner and the warm silence punctuated with exchanged laughs has been reduced to the faintest echo in the back of her mind. Most lights are still on. Her father tends to work late, the sound of shuffling paperwork inaudible but present in the way her mother focuses instead on preserving the youth in the reflection she sees. Tiger's light would be on, and so would Artemis'. She doesn't know what goes on in her sisters' lives, and for a self-titled protector she's doing a relatively crappy job, but she justifies in seeing the line between elder sister and borderline-excessive stalker. Most often anxiety would dissolve that line, but so far she's coping. At least, that's what she thinks.

Tonight's not a clear one, and she could see the faint silhouettes of the clouds, a purple shade distinguishable from the blackened sky. She could see Two's main square from her little nest up in her roof, little twinkling lights suspended in between large concrete slabs. It's as if the stars decided to fall out of heaven altogether and crash on the impending ground, but never quite did.

She doesn't know why does this to herself. Her bed was exceedingly more comfortable than the hard surface she was sitting on, and right beside her was a little puddle of rain, perhaps from yesterday. Yesterday, she thinks, as she remembers running through the rain after a Training session. Moments before, when she was perfectly dry under the shelter of the Center's front entrance, she contemplated waiting for her sisters to finish and then figure out a way to get home without taking a shower in the process. The raindrops didn't feel so romantic as some would think it to be. They rammed themselves like bullets against her olive skin, leaving her clothes soaking wet and clinging to the lean frame of her body. Trembling lip reveals teeth chattering and only a few meters in, she willingly kicks herself, not harboring a single care if any perfectly-dry passerby should see her. She was never this impulsive in the first place; she tended to lean towards lists and procedures that way things don't seem so complicated. A black and white mind, you might say, and surprisingly helpful in terms of Training, which is all she ever seems to do. Swing, swing, thrust, twist. It's all so simple.

She pulls a cigarette out of her pocket, running her thumb across the paper surface of the stick and stares at it. (Never had one, found them by that little space between the lockers and the wall.) She has this tendency to examine things without meaning to, her gaze all filler and no depth at all. You'd think she's lost in her own thoughts, and maybe she is. No one ever really knows, not even her.

There's something missing, though, and she knows it, maybe even feels it. Suppose light has subconscious, then that would explain why he chose to gave everything to Tiger and the remains to Artemis. There's nothing left for her, and she finds herself thinking that with every caring touch to the backs of their heads or by the nooks of their shoulders, some would stick and rub off on her palm and she wouldn't seem so engulfed in nothingness after all.

But there are nights where it's never close to nothing, every square inch of her room filled with her screams that had dwindled as time grows, but they have painted themselves on the corners and she's afraid to look. She's afraid to look at her sisters in the eye, surely they've heard, and they've known that she's not as strong as she makes herself out to be. There are ridges on her palms from when she'd held her weapons too hard, but sometimes she thinks it's from when she tried to block her ears from hearing them fight. She hates it she hates it she hates it, but most of all she hates how it'd be morning and they'd be sitting next to each other by the breakfast table, exchanging smiles and holding each other's hands like it was summer and they were once again the childhood sweethearts who fell in love with each other's money and married while it was still there. The shouts of grew bigger and bigger and threatened to consume each other, all gone and evaporated into the atmosphere. Like it was nothing.

Tell that to the girl who spent her nights screaming instead of sleeping.