jet caplin | district one | finished

jess Career Tribute 594 POSTS Pronouns: any last seen Apr 17, 2024 14:58:44 GMT -5 still here!! (kinda)	jet caplin \| district one \| finished Apr 26, 2015 12:57:49 GMT -5 Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by jess on Apr 26, 2015 12:57:49 GMT -5 Name: Jet Caplin Age: 14 Gender: Male District/Area: 1 Appearance: b Personality: o History: i Codeword: oDair Other: a wip if you couldn't tell already
	Last Edit: Jun 1, 2018 6:47:45 GMT -5 by jess

jess
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still here!! (kinda)

jet caplin | district one | finished Apr 26, 2015 13:33:25 GMT -5

Post by jess on Apr 26, 2015 13:33:25 GMT -5

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REAL GODS REQUIRE BLOOD

[attr="class","next"]"Make a wish and blow out the candles."

I take a deep breath and, in one loud motion, breath out onto the flames. Applause sounds from all around me, cheers and happiness. I don't know who is even speaking to me, or whose hand is on my shoulder, but there's someone there. For a moment I create the illusion in my mind that I'm at home, that it's my father's deceased wife whose hand is on my shoulder and my father who is cheering, and Quartz and Aquamarine are standing on either side of me.

Three out of those four people are dead.

Now all I have is Aquamarine, and even she doesn't look happy. It's my fourteenth birthday. Usually every year we'd go outside and run around the district and play, like we were all children again. Only this year Aquamarine never suggested it.

"Aqua, I'm bored."

Nothing.

"Can we go outside like we used to?"

She turns over and faces the wall. I can't see her face but she sniffs slightly and I think she's crying. I don't know why she's crying. I crawl onto the bed and pat her on the shoulder. She doesn't respond. I wait a few moments for her, but she doesn't do anything or say anything. She's curled up on the bed, her face concealed by golden blonde hair. The hair Quartz envies.

They said I have to start using the past tense now. I always refer to things about Quartz in the present tense and they correct me and say I have to say 'was' and 'used to be'. I don't want to use the past tense when she's not gone. Just because someone's dead doesn't mean they're not here.

"Jet, please understand. I think we'll need to take you to a counsellor. You seem to have a hard time understanding that your sister has passed away."

She didn't pass away. That sounds so peaceful, as if there was some kind of smile on her face as she died. There was no smile, I saw it up close. She looked sad in the few moments before the horrible monster tore her head off.

I have nightmares about that monster sometimes. It never looks like that one, though. More like a kind of shadow lurking behind me, silhouetted hands reaching out to me, enveloping me in darkness and pulling me away from society. But then I'll be leaving Aquamarine, because she's always there in my nightmare as well, begging me not to leave. She's a wreck, a mess of tears and tangled hair and wild eyes ridden of all sleep or life.

I can't leave her like this.

They all say the same thing when they talk about Quartz - "she's in a better place now, don't worry" - but it all seems too good to be true. Quartz has never liked death. She saved me from it years ago. I gave her the bracelet that gave her hope. I watched as she cracked a girl's skull and I saw the moment of shock when what she had done settled in afterwards. I watched as she saw her allies appear dead in the sky. I watched as she was saved from being gutted by her district partner.

I watched every moment and I hung onto the screen like Quartz was holding onto hope, the bracelet wrapped tightly around her wrist.

When she knew she was going to die, she transferred the hope. She unclasped my bracelet and handed it to the boy. He deserved it. But the hope did nothing for him, the bracelet did nothing.

Soon enough, the Games were over and people were coming towards me left and right and being sympathetic and I don't understand and I don't know what's going on and why are they talking to me and what are they saying Quartz where are you where are you where are you...

When the nightmares get bad I call out for her, and there's never a response.

As a result, I quit. I stopped trying. I became a skinny, empty boy at the young age of fourteen. People asked me what was wrong, they acted like they didn't know. Jet Caplin. Whispers spread around like wildfire, and soon people were asking - "you're related to her" - and they don't understand the meaning of leave me alone leave me alone leave me-

They beat me up that day. I'm not used to it. I know what it's like to nearly be beaten up, but she always saved me. There was always a flash of white blonde hair and an outstretched fist and kicks and punches and soon enough they were all on the floor and a blue-eyed girl was out of breath, standing, my hero.

She takes me home. We sit. She patches up the little wounds I suffered before she came to my rescue. She asks me questions. I answer her questions. She looks up and she tells me she loves me. I tell her I love her too.

Love has a cost, it seems.

She tells me stories about her mother. She tells me how beautiful she was and how much she loved all her children and how much she would have loved me if she had been my mother. Instead, I was born from some woman from one of Luis Caplin's drunken nights. I already know about my father. He drank himself to death when I was very small. It was a result from her death. Ruby Caplin. I never met her. She died of illness before I was born, but from what I know, she loved Quartz and Aqua. That's all that matters.

Or mattered. I need to start using the past tense. I've been told countless times.

She loved my sisters and my sisters loved her so I love her even though I don't know who she is or what she did that made her so loved. I don't know how Father was the match for her. From what I heard, Luis Caplin was not always a drunkard. He used to be the perfect man for Ruby, cheerful, outgoing and happy-go-lucky. When I stared into his broken eyes, he never looked like a man who used to smile. Who used to laugh and love and play.

Yet that's what I'm told over and over again. Luis Caplin and Ruby Caplin. They were the dream couple, from when they were teenage sweethearts to newly weds to a married couple.

I've never seen anyone who I'd ever want to marry. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong kind of people. I don't even know what love is, but all I know is that I love Quartz. Loved Quartz.

But not in the love that means you want to marry someone. The kind of love that is impossible to explain. She saved my life. She gave me hope.

Then she died.

Black hair, charcoal eyes. Chapped lips, pale skin, skinny, short, imperfect. My hair falls so scruffily I can never be bothered to fix it. My eyes are always dull and emotionless nowadays. They only ever came to life around Quartz, and she's a corpse now.

I'm short. I don't know my exact height, but I think it's about four foot eleven or something. They measured my height once but I wasn't really paying attention. I was in a daydream. I usually am.

Anyway, it's not nice to have to look up at people. I looked up at Quartz, I looked up at Aqua. I was the younger, smaller, scruffier one of the three and I don't know if I like that or hate it.

Scruffy. Always scruffy. Hair that is never neat, a bird's nest of black hair waves, which could sometimes be tamed to look a little more straight. Clothes scuffed up, bruised and cut knees from days outside, twigs in my hair and dirt on my face. That's how it used to be, when the three of us would go out and adventure. Quartz would be covered in mud, I'd be as scruffy as usual and Aquamarine would be complaining in the background about all the mess and how we'd get in trouble when we got back. Always the same. But I knew Aqua always enjoyed watching us play together like we were little children again.

I've always been a little child, or that's what it seems like. People treat me like one. They look down at me in a kind yet patronizing manner and they speak s l o w l y, as if I can't understand what they're saying when they say it at a normal pace. They use s i m p l e words and they make sure to be very c l e a r of what they're saying.

You'd think there was something wrong with me by the way they treat me. Maybe there is.

"Quartz, what are those things in the sky? They're always there and I don't know what they're called."

"Those? Those are stars."

"What do stars do?"

"When the night is dark and everything seems gloomy, the stars illuminate the darkness and spread hope across the whole world. There is no sight more beautiful than the night sky."

Then we'd sit in silence and lay back, watching the stars until I fell asleep. Then she'd carry me back to the community home and tuck me into bed. It was a horrible place, but when we were together, it felt like home. After all, home is where the heart is.

I don't know where home is now. It doesn't feel like my heart is anywhere. Just stuck, beating under my chest, torn to shreds and empty, barren.

Maybe it was ripped out along with Quartz's head. Maybe I am just as dead as she is inside, yet not physically. I could have died. I would have died, if I'd taken the plunge and slashed down my wrist with the knife I'd stolen from the kitchen. I didn't even think about Quartz during that time, I just wanted it to be over. Just to save me from the pain.

My friends left me, Aqua turned her back on me. Quartz was the only one there at the time. She was the one who walked in innocently and saw me with a knife held over my wrist.

"STOP!"

It was the loudest I'd ever heard her voice, shrill and alert. Her eyes were shiny with tears and her body was shivering as she held my wrist tightly, stopping me from lowering it. She took the knife away and threw it out a nearby window. She talked me through it. We stayed up all night that night, me huddled within my blankets and her sitting cross-legged in front of me, never stopping talking, never removing her arm from around my shoulder and never backing away from me.

She didn't call me a monster.

Instead she stayed with me and held my hand and I gave her my bracelet. She took it and wrapped it around her wrist, smiling at me. Then she clasped it and she never removed it after that. Not even when her name was pulled from that glass ball and she was marched into the Justice Building. The last time I saw her alive, she was waving a sad goodbye with the same hand, the same one where the bracelet that gave us hope was clasped around.

Clearly the bracelet didn't help make the odds be in our favour.

Hope.

It's just another delusion.

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Last Edit: May 9, 2015 16:30:57 GMT -5 by jess

jess Career Tribute 594 POSTS Pronouns: any last seen Apr 17, 2024 14:58:44 GMT -5 still here!! (kinda)	jet caplin \| district one \| finished Apr 27, 2015 13:17:40 GMT -5 Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by jess on Apr 27, 2015 13:17:40 GMT -5 finished i think there might be something missing but idk

Sunrise Rainier D2 // [Thundy] Retired Staff 6,346 POSTS Pronouns: He/Him last seen Nov 17, 2023 15:15:56 GMT -5 cozy, queer af	jet caplin \| district one \| finished Apr 29, 2015 12:17:17 GMT -5 Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by Sunrise Rainier D2 // [Thundy] on Apr 29, 2015 12:17:17 GMT -5 Accepted!
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