forget me not {alexis x louvain}

I've been drinking less. Liquor smells like poison and vodka is fire down the drain and not my throat and-

I've been thinking less. About purple flowers that bloom every couple of weeks upon his grave and the hands from which they have sprouted. I don't think about his hands and the purple flowers that bloomed upon my skin or the stems he snapped with ease.

He likes to play pretend. That he was our knight in shining armor- the father he was meant to be and not a wolf sewn into sheep's hide. Sometimes he cries, acid rain crawling into the cracks in my brother's headstone- wearing away at all that is left of him with hatred so sickeningly sweet that it makes my stomach churn and I begin to remember why I emptied so many bottles looking for escape.

And I did escape. My father cannot hurt me anymore and yet like a shadow he lingers, sewn to my heels with the grin of a cat having just feasted on the canary. He carries a part of me in his jaws, teeth sunk into the scruff of my neck and every night I sleep alone it is he who wakes me up in a fit of angry tears and shaking limbs. It is his hands I feel, planting despair along the fields he so carefully carved out of his eldest son's flesh.

Louvain doesn't know about him. I can't bring myself to say any more about what came before my seventeenth birthday, to make it as real as it once was when I held Anthony's broken body to my chest and begged for God to take me instead. But they couldn't save him. (I heard none of it.) His heart has stopped by the time I arrived. (But I begged them to keep trying.) His brain was dead and- (they gave me sedatives to stop the screaming.)

"Hey there, big guy." I mumble and my knees hit the grass hard, shaking fingers tracing the crumbling granite and I know he deserves better. He deserves a resting place plated in gold and surrounded by angels, he deserved not to have his life trapped between the palms of a power hungry man who wanted nothing more than to make the rest of the world as miserable as he.

I don't visit Anthony when Lou is working. Louvain is something good, something precious and I cannot show him all of my broken pieces. Not without the courage stowed away in glass bottles and bitter poisons, without the walls that I have built time and time again to keep everyone away.

Ironically, he was the one who tore each and every one to shreds.

Sometimes I think it'd be better to run away from it all. Not to face the pain that comes with love, the stitches in between every breathless whisper and selfish smile. I'm a coward, after all. I sat and watched a boy die without raising a hand because at least it wasn't me and I know the names of the men who make Louvain's life a living hell and I lift not a finger because at least it isn't me.

"The fuck do you think you're doing here!?" My head is split open, blood like salt water down my temple, seeping into the corners of my mouth and turning the world into an ocean. It swims in front of me, waves of nausea forcing acid up my throat and into my mouth and his hand is in my hair. He pulls me back and it happens again.

I crash. I fall out of orbit and into the rocks below. I am impaled upon my sins, gasping for air where there is none left and this pain is somehow worse than death. Again he cracks my head against my brother's tombstone, painting it bright blue because the sky is falling, into my mouth- into my lungs. I am drowning in the heavens, weak fingers wrap around his wrist, nails digging into his flesh and coaxing acid rain off of his fingertips and into my clothes.

It doesn't matter, his blood is mine and mine is his.

"Dad." I gasp and the words get lost upon my tongue, tears leaving the taste of rotten pennies upon my cheeks.

I know his voice, I know the feeling of his shoes upon my ribs and the dread that leaves me nothing more than a useless child huddled upon my brother's grave- knees pulled to my chest and hands wrapped around the back of my neck as if that's somehow going to stop him from killing me.

"'S your fault he's dead Alexis!" He's drunk, I can smell the whiskey and the blood, I can taste the terror in my tears and it had been so long that I forgot just how powerless he makes me feel. "Doncha come 'ere greivin' your brother when ya didn't save 'im! Shoulda stopped me! You coulda! 'n your brother'd be a'live." There's blood on my hands, I don't remember where it came from.

"I'm sorry." The words are heavy leaving my lips, weighed down by every weakness I had forgotten in my father's absence. "Jus' kill me okay?"

Because I want the pain to stop. It's tearing me apart, seeping into every inch of me and it is a virus. Infecting me. Poisoning me. I cannot escape, not into the confines of my mind like I used to back when things got this bad. I'd rather die than feel any of this, than listen to my father scream every fucking word that has engraved itself to my tongue in the year that I have been without him and without my brother. My fault. My fault. My fault. "Please, Dad?"

He laughs and it is cold. A familiar kind of cold that was all I could feel before I met Louvain. "You're not worth it, Lex."

My feet touch the floor and then my knees. There is no strength left to keep me upright and so I slump against my brother and gasp for air. Anthony is cold, he is ice beneath my touch and I don't even recognize the feeling of his marble skin anymore. "I wish you a long, long life Alexis." He laughs and sinks his knee into my stomach and I think I would scream had there been anything left. "That way, you'll never be rid of what you did to him and you'll sure as hell never be rid of me."

And he does not leave me there to die.

He did something much worse.

He left me there to live.