annabelle mortuus {district twelve} fin

1, 2, melatonin is coming for you
3, 4, baby won't you lock the door?
5, 6, i'm done with it
7, 8, it's getting late
close your eyes, sleep for days

I. It began with greed and a pair with more hot on their tongues. Two dreamers of a dream too bright for District Twelve — money, enough food on the table for every children they wished to have, a nice house. (It all began innocent, didn't it?) But it is the people with honest jobs and honest lives who wallow in poverty, and it is the criminals who thrive. They made their choice, they set their tombstones with their decision. And from between the two unfolded their legacy and ten Mortuus children, each with a destiny for the black market business carved into stone.

II. Little body draped in a little white dress, feet encased in rounded pink flats. She's sugar and poison, she's faith and she's betrayal. Delicate body and great dark doll eyes were made to masquerade — power and lust for blood ring in the hollows of her bones, carved out by the sin that stains her hands. Little girl, little doll — teaspoons of sugar replace the poison in her voice. ("Sleep tight.") Little girl, little doll — a porcelain face like hers would be cracked by the curl of a grin shadowed by malice.

III. Her delicate hand presses against the surgical tools strapped around her thigh beneath a red and white checkerboard skirt. The gentle pitter patter of her feet against the white tile is as steady as a drum — confidence light in her step, she is unstoppable. She makes her rounds in ichor of the dawn and the black ash of the night, fresh pastries from the bakery laid out on a tray in her hands. Homemade painkillers slipped into the icing, extra sugar sprinkled on top — all to give her patients a taste of paradise in case they never check out of the Mortuus Medical Center.

IV. "Be careful, don't hurt them," she will warn. Gentleness is woven into her every movement, for her fists were never meant to collide with flesh and her steady hands wrapped around a blade were never meant to cut into the living. "Don't press too hard," she will chide, her voice hinting the shadow of a demand. Mortuus — the name means death but they are not death-bringers, they are the harvesters. They never meant to hurt them, so they don't.

V. Stitches in dark trails along flesh long left cold by the echo of a silence heartbeat will catch her eyes. She remembered sewing the skin of the patient back together — only to rip it open in death for the harvest. She values life, she cherishes every breath stolen from the air, every kiss of the heart against a hollow chest, but not death. The only purpose of cold flesh is not to rot six feet under but to unfold for the treasures beneath.

VI. In her boredom, She traces winding paths along her skin with her finger where she would cut into the flesh of deceased patients. A short sheet of ebony like still black water to match her siblings, cut bluntly just above her narrow shoulders, hangs over the imaginary lines she has made in her flesh, and she is reminded of the shadows it casts over the sliced corpses. And she will smile at the thought of their pallor and the blue, blue tinge of their flesh and the deep crimson rivers softly rolling from a split vein.

VII. A mangled mess and distasteful blood spatters are not what she yearns for. White gloves on her hands are bathed in blood — the morbidness of it all seems to stain her regardless — but her skin is not. Blood will not rain by her hands, it will cascade with grace down the smooth, intact flesh tinged a pretty shade of blue. (Or it will not come at all if too much time has passed between the death and the harvest, to her dismay.) She is neat, orderly, and clean. She makes neat, orderly, and clean cuts, draws thick rivulets of blood kissed cold by Death's blade. Her incisions are art.

VIII. She never sees where the organs go, but she hears the whispers — "Black market" "It's what we need to survive" "It's just a business on the side". She was promised it is for a good cause, and she believes, she believes anything they tell her. Black market is scratched into the back of her mind, but the doesn't mind the darkness of the word.

IX. Hot tea laps against her lips, sewed shut in dismay at a failed treatment that ended in suffering. She drinks tea to silence the chaos and ebb away into tranquility, but no drink could soothe the tears beading at the brims of her eyes. Her sadness was not from the silence burning into her ears in the patient's room, it was not from the lack of a heartbeat in their chest. It was the pain that had writhed through their veins and beaten dead and dry — they had suffered, and no amount of bandages could hold their breaking frame together. She did not weep when she cut out their organs: the life was lost, leaving only the body to harvest. (It is the harvest that made her bones.)

hush little baby, drink your spoiled milk
i'm fucking crazy, need my prescription pill
do you like my cookies?
they're made just for you
a little bit of sugar but lots of poison too