corrupted lungs {ember + rave}

l u c e

I never liked the idea of burying my sister; kinda funny really, since I never liked the idea of a sister either. Charlotte, though, Charlotte was blood, meaning that, whether I liked it or not, I had to show her whatever respect that came with the ties, no matter how much she belittled me while there was still oxygen making its way to her heart. Back before she stabbed it out on national television. But there's nothing I can change about it, she was given her stack of cards and one of those were that district four lady and her fire knives to match Charlotte's temper, and whether I liked it or not (I can't say I enjoyed watching my sister die, no matter how malicious I am a person and how much of a bitch of a person she was) there was no changing it.

At least she can't fuck things up from inside a grave.

But knowing my sister, my darling Charlotte, only she would be able to find a way. For weeks, weeks, I had people on my end of the business - my business - talking to me about my sister, the fact that she died as if I was a couple lifetimes late of the memo. Personally, I wasn't a fan of it, these few frats talked down about her as if they would've catcalled her from the afterlife, and I was half tempted to skin them. She was spilled Brownings blood, and of the few odds of us left, we still cover each other's asses. Dead or not.

That's the way Brownings work, my great uncle Sully taught me that when Charlotte moved out. There aren't more than four Brownings that actually get along with people, and one of them would be my mother buried under the ashes of my first house. Sully is one of those four of course, he's an outstanding guy, but he also told me that we're Brownings by namesake. If one of us is a cripple, then we're all cripples. Charlotte was a good example of this, but she went out swinging and so nobody's allowed to fucking down talk her.

Somebody in the vine told me about this one girl though, a Wren or a Rena or something of the like, but it wasn't anything special. He just yammered on a bit while I twitched the ring around my finger that I took from Charlotte's body; she took it from the games though (that's one of the few things I do know about what occurred in the 67th) and once she died everything that was her's became mine. I didn't become any type of invested in the conversation until he mentioned that she was Charlotte's friend, and I choked at first. My sister didn't have friends, she had alleyway hook up's and bar fights.

Ridiculous.

Both my sister's behavior and this man's topic, ridiculous, in the near two decades I have been breathing and exhausting for some significant plant's life, I have never, not once, heard of somebody who actually liked my baby sister. I nearly shot my own foot that day for not remembering the name clear enough of the person, because hell I would have paid them a visit had I remembered. But in the end, I am a busy man in a busy world, so that, of course, was when I stopped caring.

It was driving me mad though, because if my sister, this inconsiderately obnoxious child could actually make somebody like her, just imagine what else should could have actually done with whatever dead beat life I thought she had. I wasn't as much interested about somebody caring about my sister, I could care less, but Charlotte is my sister, she's no idiot. She never talked to Sully or I about anything, so how do I know she never robbed a bank or had some stash of Aunt Patty's.

At this point, I was really fucking interested to put it bluntly, for Charlotte could have actually amounted to something worthwhile and I at least wanted to know. See, my family had a real Brownings run of the mill funeral for Charlotte, in the means that Sully gathered a few family members who didn't fully hate the girl and threw some things in her casket, and then we - we being Sully, grandfather Pelton and I - buried her in the backyard of her first house, which just so happened to be a bunch of ashes.

I made this theory, however, that when she was buried ole Aunt Peggy might have threw in something important, since she's always been real heavy on leaving around notes. The last note of her's they found was in my great grandfather Roy's casket, which had led to one of Aunt Patty's stashes. Plus, Charlotte had her own life at one point, and knowing how sneaky a bitch she could be, she could have died with coordinates in her pocket without me even knowing.

My main problem with grave robbing my sister's casket for information is that I hate that lot - Charlotte and I's first home. Every time I pass it or simply think about it I punching each scorched brick into rubble myself. Neither of my parents were poor, and neither were Charlotte and I, but for some reason, for some odd dumb ass idiotic reason, we lived in the slums of district one, and if I hadn't met runaways from eleven through the vines, I would think with my privileged thoughts that we were poorer than they were.

Because that's what we looked liked in that house.

And, sure enough, as I rounded across to the ruins of that first house that the district never got around to cleaning up because it was in the poorer side, and wasn't even worth it with my shovel in hand, I felt exactly like smashing it further into the ground.

I still remember the layout of this house; I remember the way the bathroom door creaked and the way Charlotte always managed to smash her head on that one pipe in the laundry room. I remember how I always laughed at it too, and how upset my mother looked as she knitted from the living room in her great red chair. I remember how my father always slept in that library of his, and how my mother wished it would burn down one day. 

What I don't remember of my first house is a pink haired girl and an X drawn into the ground. At first I thought she was a squatter, but of course, that makes no sense, since first of all why would somebody sleep at a completely burned down site voluntarily. Second of all, why would somebody with pink hair do it. In my line of work, though, you see a few things that make you question, and I have seen a fair share of corpses, of course, so as you can probably tell, I was questioning this girl's ability to breathe. The closer I got, however, the more obvious it was that this girl wasn't dead, but just stupid.

Or insane. 

Once I got maybe five feet away from her, I slammed my shovel on the ground, trying to wake her up from whatever state she was in: hungover, drugged, etc. Hoping more than usual that this girl wasn't actually dead, since nothing is more suspicious than a tattoo'd man holding a shovel over an unconscious girl in a burned lot in the eyes of a peacekeeper. This is the kind of Charlotte-thinking that gets people arrested, making a scene and all, but I have somewhat of a decent reputation, and I'm not losing it to some pink-haired fairy watching me dig up my dead sister. 

Now, I can't say truthfully that I was paying attention to this body as much as I should have been, since as soon as that shovel made contact with the ground I was preoccupied making sure that nobody else was too close to my sister's grave. This girl looked, more or less, alive by the time I turned back to her, and more or less alive is good enough for me, as long as she gets the hell out of dodge.

"Hey ma'am," fuck you, "why are you in my house?"

l u c e

This entire sight gave me that taste of vomit you get when you eat a lot of sugar, except instead of a risk of diabetes I was high on heartache. See, think what you want to think of me, as a business man I'm supposed to be an embodied cold front anyways, but in my heart is a sweet spot for this old place: the house, the neighborhood and whatever's left of my childhood. I mean, not so much the house, the thing was practically a festering red rot before my mother and father even bit it in. The environment though, that's what really gets me. On the corner of my house lot, I can still see where I used to play with those stupid glass marbles with that one boy, Elliot, and he accidentally knocked mine into a gutter so I accidentally knocked his face with my size six boots at the time.

Which was, arguably, one of my favorite memories.

No way was I an excessively abusive child though, in fact me kicking Elliot Lowe in the back of the head was probably the most malicious thing I've done in my lifetime, without enough cause of course. In fact, I was always one of the best behaved on our street, me and that brunette, Dulcie. But she grew up to be a prostitute, while I'm actually giving back to my community in the form of something other than hormones. Then there was Desmond and Tiras, who Elliot told me were inbreeds and at the time I hadn't known what that meant, so of course I asked Uncle Sully, who brought up my Aunt Peggy. At the time I didn't catch it what he said, but at least now I know why her and my Aunt Patty look so much alike.

This was almost the same stress my Uncle Sully almost got married to his, at the time, fiancee, Francis, except Grandpa Roy had something against it and burned the entire thing down like a fool. Francis didn't die in the fire of course, only Uncle Sully's love for him, so the wedding was called off and Uncle Sully attended Francis's funeral nearly two months later; why he died we aren't sure, but I still think Grandpa Roy helped dig that man's grave for a reason.

Now, I've never had a special place in my heart for any special man or woman, I'm mostly married to my job you see, but I'm not saying I'm against finding one either. The one time Charlotte and I caught up after she decided she was smart enough to live on her own, she went on about this one person and of course, I told her it wouldn't work out. Marriages don't work out in this family, somebody always ends up dying in them - my parents, Aunt Patty, Grandpa Pelton's wife. She, of course, told me I was a dick and also that she would never talk to me ever again. So, I guess Charlotte never did anything too special with the unlucky bastard, since she died at seventeen, or maybe she did, who cares.

Honestly, I think the banshee owes me more of an apology and a thank you, I mean half of her pride work on her body was because of me after all. First time ink broke into the walls of skin sculpting my sister was from a pen I was holding, and her first completed tattoo was a photo of our father on her neck. She never shut up about it either, a thirteen-year old Charlotte half-crying, half-screaming while jumping around our Uncle Sully's house when I first gave it to her, can you even imagine that?

I was there, and I fucking can't.

It's insane though, I can recall all these memories of Charlotte's "devil may care" self as thirteen, and Uncle Sully's first attempted marriage, and my glass marbles, and unfortunately Dulcie, but I can not, for the fucking life of me, remember where this pink haired girl crawled the fuck onto my lot from. From her tone of voice, her complete blunt half-shouting of, “you--you look like her tattoo,” I almost took her as a long lost cousin of mine. Completely fucking crazy. She looks mad at least, as if she's gonna start speaking out of tongues the longer I look at her until I roll my eyes. Manics.

"Who the hell are you?"

I chuckle at first, ("who the hell are you?") crazy, this random ass lady plops her-mess-of-a-self on my home, and questions me as if it wasn't my goddamn last name burned into the ground and my family buried feet away. She's a tombstone on my front door, this girl, and I don't even know what casualty brought her here. Who the hell am I? Manic. "I'm only a business man," here to collect my grievances in the form of Charlotte's fortunes. It's mine anyways, from death her will goes to the first Brownings to go for it.

"Just here to reclaim a family diadem, so long as I don't bother anybody," I said it smirking, I could feel it in each syllable I said before squatting to eye level with her. "Now," give me one reason not to bury you along with those graves out there, "who are you?"