We Are Catalysts // (Nino & Ursula)

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You've made me into someone
Who should not hold a loaded gun
And now you sit upon my chest
Knock out my wind, knock out my best

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Dear Learna,

We lead lives of tragedy.

The scaffolds of our childhood crumbled away in your absence, and it’s all I can do to gather the debris in my shaken hands to keep the shelves of the pawnshop from collecting dust. Like the blood of your open wounds, our youth drained away with every metallic gleam of an all too inevitable future we never anticipated. Every slice pressed upon your skin was just another gash inflicted onto my scarred wrists, and sometimes I’d watch the blood drip from my flesh to the cold tile floors as the fluorescent lights above me flickered with every muffled shriek and cry emitted from Mama’s mouth behind the locked bathroom door. Grief is like a heavy fog in our home that has no intention of clearing up anytime soon – its elements are toxic as they clog up our airways and fill our lungs with poisons we’re too tired to exhale out. But its breath weighs down like hot lead in my mouth, and every guilty pulse of my heart is just another drumming reminder of how far a girl can fall to realize she’s never gonna find her way back up, again.

I brewed a storm across the seven oceans of guilt within me. The electricity of my own lightning stings as it surges through my veins, and my blood is just a tsunami against the pink walls of my scarred flesh because they’re always trying to discover a chasm to flood. (There’s one chasm they can’t fill anymore, Learna, and it’s you. But trust me when I promise you that if I could I’d open more wounds and spill half my blood into you and the other half into Pen if it meant I could hear your heart thud against it’s ribcage for at least one last time.) When we bury your coffin right beside Penelope’s, we’ll fold your hands over your heart to match hers and hike a stone over your graves to immortalize “The Deaths of the Libertine Sisters” and pray to a God we know isn’t listening that our tears on the freshly dug soil will water flowers and not weeds.

We lead lives of tragedy, Learna - we all know you hold a sword that’s just too big to belong in your fragile hands. When your alliance turns on you and the gleam of Demeter’s sword comes flashing down towards your unscathed body, your eyes go wide and unflinching like how they would while watching lightning storms through a misty glass window. Your plea for help is louder than the storm, and I heard the thunder of your cries the second your name was pronounced three weeks ago. But, I clung to those five syllables as they drifted into the air, as if keeping the sound of your name that would soon become your death sentence was the last piece of you I could keep and hold. Nothing lasts forever, though, and I had to find that out in the tragic way.

We lead lives of tragedy, but you don’t have to worry about leading yours anymore.

Your sister,
Ursula

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I turned my head away from the screen when she died.

Her screams melded into synchronization with Mama’s fainting cries, and they branded themselves into the pinks of my brain until the ink of her death was tattooed into my mind - so I took the easy way out and turned my face away from the harsh, bright red colors on the screen and walked out of the room. Learna Libertine is dead and I wasn’t there to see how the blade would cut across her flesh.

[/color](When I lock the bathroom door behind me and grip onto the sides of the sink while my heavy breaths unsteadily heave in and out of my mouth, I see Pen’s head jolt back again as the spear pierces through her eye.) [/i]My knuckles turn white from holding onto the edges of the counter so hard, but my whole body feels like it’s been ignited into flames and I can feel every scar and vein embedded into my flesh set themselves on a blood-red fire.

And no one is there to extinguish it.

Daddy’s muffled [/color]“My baby, oh God, my baby!,” seeps in through the cracks beneath the door and I claw at my ears, hoping to drown out the sounds with silence. The blood beneath the scars on my wrist pulse violently against them, like the death of my sister is the moon pulling the tides of the gravitating blood within me. Daddy’s cries are echoing like thunder between the four walls of this bathroom, until it’s suddenly flooded the room and I’m drowning, drowning, drowning in the seas of my own guilt. “My baby, my poor babies!”

A spontaneity of violence and rage rattles within my core as Daddy’s voice and pleas increase with volume and desperateness. I need to break something, I need to scream, I need to fight, I need to erupt, I need to leave.[/b][/color] My steps are unsteady and sloppy as I hastily yank open the bathroom window and heave my head out of it, quickly becoming more and more pathetically desperate to gulp in more fresh air to quench the fire that’s blazing inside of me. I need to leave, I need to leave, I need to leave, I need to – Soon, I’m crawling out of the bathroom’s window and stumbling through the concrete streets alone.

All my limbs are trembling as I run through the empty streets. My feet stumble over cracks and bumps in the road but I can still hear Mama’s cries and Daddy’s ”My baby, my baby!” erupting in my head, and it grows louder, and louder, and louder until it’s in synch with the deteriorating drumming of my heart. Every pulse is a stab to the chest, and every shuddering gasp of air into my lungs is another suffocating breath. I can feel the vibration of Pen’s screams for one last deal on my sticky flesh, and the singe of Learna’s eyes as she watches for vulnerability in my stance during a storm. I need to leave, I need to run, I need to fight, I need to break something, I need –

Nino Ripley comes face to face with me in the middle of a road.

Our breaths are ragged as the electricity of the three yards between us sparks so loudly, that even Mama’s cries drown out to the sound of our hearts pounding against each other. The shadows on the street engulf our bodies with a darkness we are so much more capable of (a darkness that’s brimmed the edges of our skeletons since we were children, since the moment we started making deals with the devil and dug up graves to steal riches from the dead).

In my rush to break something – anything – I find the palms of my hand pushing themselves straight into his chest (and maybe my anger isn’t really directed towards him, but the flames blazing within my head gradually muffles down with the shattering contact of trying to break something possibly more fragile than me).[/blockquote][/blockquote][/justify][/color]

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Her footsteps are fragile as she carefully walks her way across the minefield towards my spot by the window. My gray eyes are glazed towards the storm behind the glass, calculating how many milliseconds it takes for the lightning to hit the surface of the black waves. When I hear the brass hinge of the door creak, I don’t turn to look at her, but instead, “Dammit, you’re louder than the storm.” A crack of thunder echoes through the seeps in the cracks of my windowpane, and rattles the caverns of my four walls. “Is your room flooded?”

“Well yours isn’t.” She mumbles something else too, but I can’t hear what she says. She crawls towards my spot, my body huddled under blankets that couldn’t spark a flame if it were the last thing in the world, and leans her back against the wall. I don’t look at her, but I know she’s looking at me. I keep my eyes steady and my grimace stern, and my gaze pinpointed on the gray horizon never withers.

Learna is trying to unearth a weakness within me. But, even if I can’t face my own storms, I can at least face this one.

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[/color]And so long to no disasters and mornings too
And so long to ever afters, so long to you[/i][/center][/color]

I stumble back a few paces from him, scared that two broken things put too close together will ultimately break the last whole thing they possess within them. (But maybe breaking apart will make room for creating something anew.)

My eyes mirror Learna’s during the storm as we both try to pinpoint the vulnerability in the one thing that’s keeping us afloat. My voice is as soft as the tide before it swallows the street, and the both of us, up whole,

[/color]“So, are you gonna dig up her grave too?”[/blockquote][/blockquote][/justify]

[ooc - the coding is kinda horrendous and i am so sorry this took so long BUT ILYSM AND THIS SHIP WILL NEVER SINK]

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"YOU'VE MADE ME INTO SOMEONE WHO[/color]
should not hold a loaded[/i][/color][/size] gun[/i][/b][/font][/size][/url]."[/i][/size][/center]
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