the fear of falling apart {tobias and ira}
Apr 25, 2015 8:28:06 GMT -5
Post by ᴥ on Apr 25, 2015 8:28:06 GMT -5
T O B I A S
Rain stains his cheeks, falling from silver skies and tap dancing across gray pavement. He has watched the color fade, hue by hue, these long three centuries. To see anything but dismal gray was a luxury, he had come to realize. For boys whose mothers' loved them, whose brothers' were found and whose fathers' were happy.
Mordecai was nowhere to be seen. His mother couldn't so much as look his way without a sneer painted upon her lips like the bright red lipstick that normally adorned them. His father wore sadness down both of his wrists, wrapped in white cloth and drowned in booze.
And so the world withers around him.
The graveyard is quiet, these cold mornings. Not a beating heart to be found. There's something comforting about that, Tobias decides as he falls to his knees, crumbles under the weight of the world as he so often does and watches the heavens weep. His eyes dance across the gravestones, not a single new caskett to be found since yesterday when he sat and watched the silence.
He won't bother asking the kindly man with the graying beard whether a body has come in when the answer is as clear as the stones given to those found without names. Guilt burns like acid up his throat, tearing at his insides because even a place like this makes him hopeful. Hopeful that closure is just around the corner.
Because maybe he wouldn't mind Mordecai being dead as long as he knew that was the case.
But his big brother simply faded into nothingness. Crumbled into dust the minute Tobias awoke in a hospital bed, half dead and hungry, screaming and begging for a brother that would never come home.
It grows tiring to search. Every inch of the district has been scoured, cleansed of possibility like the coarse side of the sponge mother used to rid the dishes of blemish. The same way she tried so diligently to push Tobias onto the streets. He can near taste the disappointment laced within a harsh gaze when he returns after days of sleeping under the docks in dark, wet sand.
He wears Mordecai's clothes now. And although his brother was a mere fifteen to his sixteen years when he disappeared, the clothes still hang off of Tobias. They tangle his feet when he walks and have bloodied his knees on more than one occasion. But it's okay because if he tries hard enough, he can almost imagine Mordecai in the garments instead of he.
It was always supposed to be Mordecai and Tobias. Because Mordecai protected him, because he felt safe with his hand clasped within his brother's.
It was never supposed to be Tobi.
And just Tobi.
Because nobody wanted just Tobi.
The sky's roaring has stopped by the time he moves, leaving silent corpses behind, peacefully sleeping under six feet of dirt. When silence ends and busy street life, hurried whispers and muttered swears, overcome him, rip the safety from his arms he wants to scream. Tobias had never much liked being around people. They were too unpredictable, too likely to hurt him when he couldn't stand much more pain.
Sometimes he understands father's insistence upon trying to leave Panem.
But Tobi couldn't go because he knew no one would look for Mordecai otherwise. And it was always there, always in the back of his mind. He couldn't stop looking because what if his brother was still alive. Stuck a damsel and waiting to be saved by the little brother that now scuffs his feet across the pavement.
The homeless know him by name. He's there every week, with chocolates in his pockets and a question upon his tongue. Have you seen anyone calling themselves Mordecai? Looks kind of like me but taller and stronger. (and better in every way.)
And every week he can see the guilt in their eyes as they inform him they hadn't seen Mordecai, hadn't seen anyone matching the description, but he'd be the first to know if that happened.And he can see the grateful gleam as he hands out the treats anyway.
Tobias had lost his taste for sweet things a long time ago.
"Listen, Kid." A kindly old woman with a patch over her eye and dirt under her nails spoke up, gummy grin spreading from ear to ear as though she had the brightest, juiciest bit of information begging to leave a stained tongue. "There's a kid, Ira, he knows all of us. If there's a Mordecai around here, he'll know it."
And his heart raced, as it always did when a lead, however feeble, surfaced. "What does he look like? Where is he!?" the hunger in his tone must have been apparent as the woman laughed, pointed a crooked finger at entrance to the alleyway and revealed perhaps Tobi's last chance at finding Mordecai alive.
But he isn't holding out much hope.
There's really no point, for boys like him.
