whitney leblanc / d5. ( fin )

Some boys take a beautiful girl
And hide her away from the rest of the world
I want to be the one to walk in the sun

It starts with a dream.

Her story begins before she is born, with a mother and her needlework in the cold of night, with a begging for something more—it makes almost perfect sense, that the second daughter of Amélie LeBlanc's story starts out as a figment of someone else's dreams, of someone else's wishes. The young mother sits at her open window, breathing in the crisp night of wintertime, and sighs to the stars about how she wants nothing more than a daughter who would trail after her the way her first trailed after her father, a plaything that she could teach all her ways to. She watches droplets of salt mixed with water fall from her chin and down over the casement ledge she is leaned upon, sees them disappear into the black of night and makes a wish into the darkness.

A daughter that loves me, she wishes, eyes and heart turned towards the moon.. A daughter like me.

There's no words to describe the feeling that came with realizing the two did not mean the same thing, that she could have a daughter who loved her with a heart larger than the sky, and still never have anyone to dress like one of her childhood dolls.

Whitney was born a dream, and a dreamer she became.

She was born into a life of wealth and privilege, taught from the time she could walk the proper way to hold her shoulders, the right way to tilt her chin up towards the sky just so. But there was a world at her fingertips, and she had her unrealistic dreams at the ready before there was ever a chance to stop them in their tracks.

Her father was an oil mogul, a man who found wealth in the bottom of the earth, extracting oil from its core and calling it his own to sell, where her mother was someone whose own father had done the very same. There wasn't a creative bone in either of their bodies, the best thing her mother able to dream up being another version of herself. No, Clement and Amélie LeBlanc's children were not destined to be who their second daughter turned into—no one expects a girl who knows how to dream.

    After all--when the world has given you
    everything, what else left is there to want?

                                                         But want she did.

Where Margot LeBlanc seemed made for the calm, Whitney was made from passions, made from things beyond imagination, but for years Whitney has only Margot and Margot has only Whitney, and neither has any real interest in expanding their circle of friends. They grow up as counterparts to each other; light to the others dark, water to the other’s fire. It was like the pair of sisters was born to match each other, to create someone whole and healthy and balanced. Where one had her feet solidly on the ground, her very bones tethered to the Earth around them, Whitney had her head in the clouds, with her eyes turned towards the sun and stars. She dreamed different lives for herself, started putting charcoal to paper when she was only a child, sketching out futures for herself and her sister the moment her imagination came to life. Where Whitney grew loud and lively, spent her years dreaming up other worlds and creating stories out of thin air, running through the halls of their big wide home as if monsters were chasing after her, Margot was quieter, drawn into herself in a way that Whitney never understood but loved all the same. She spent year after year reading in her books, glancing up every so often to watch Whitney scribbling notes in journals and sketching the different plants in the garden; she had a thirst for knowledge where her sister had a thirst for life, and the two complemented each other perfectly.

The ways their parents loved them were polar, too, with their father doting after Margot and their mother trying to dote after Whitney. From childhood, Margot would trail after their father, fascinated by the business, by trying to understand how to keep the books and how to make deals, about the logic and the strategy that came with everything that went into running the family business. Amélie did everything in her power to try and get her second daughter to dote after her the same way, but etiquette lessons never interested Whitney. How to properly dress, how to hold her chin, where the rest her arms on the dinner table—it just made her roll her eyes, high towards the sky as if she wished that she was dancing among the cloud instead of sitting at the big mahogany table in their dining room, napkin across her lap just so and cutlery all in order.

She taught herself to see the world in striking technicolor, in blacks and whites and no room for the moral grey, a spinning girl dancing under the moonlight, reflecting the light from the moon like a mirror in the sun. She lives her life as wildly and passionately as she does recklessly, dancing from passion to passion like a bee goes from flower to flower, taking what it needs and leaving its mark across the world. She’s got opals for eyes, blinded by the life of pale privilege that will ruin her if she doesn’t learn how to live outside of it.

    Like a wild rose, tender pink and soft,
    her beauty begs to be loved.
    Like blood in a wound,
    begging to be touched.

And as brightly as she loved, as darkly did she fall.

It starts a week after her own nineteenth birthday, Margot's twenty-third birthday just around the corner. It feels like a new kind of unimaginable cruelty, like something even Whitney never could have dreamed up in her worst nightmares. They've finally both made it past reaping age, made it through the hell of not knowing if they will be beside each other when Death comes to take one of the other—Whitney used to have horrible nightmares about being reaped, used to wonder if she'd have the stomach to volunteer in her sisters place if her name got pulled from the bowl. She was a spoiled child, allowed whatever she wanted, allowed such passions because her sister tempered herself, kept her head in books and numbers and vowed that she would protect her baby sister no matter the personal cost, and Whitney wonders if when push came to shove, she'd be able to exhibit the same strength.

Imagine how her heart broke when she realized the answer was no.

Margot is diagnosed on a Wednesday morning, clouds in the sky, and for the millionth time, Whitney wishes that they were her home, that she could dance into the sky and turn the horizon into her bedroom, make the sun her dance partner and the moon her best friend. At first, she thought she could handle it, that she could handle anything the world threw at her because Margot had vowed to do the same for her, but she couldn't handle it. At first, it was petty, just the attention that she craved, wanted eyes back on her—scolding her for showing up to dinner with charcoal on her fingers, for not tucking in her blouse to the back of her pants, for staying out past her curfew. She missed the scolding, missed being the center of attention, even if it had never been particularly positive attention, and when it first disappeared, she felt the lack of it like an abyss.

It only got worse from there.

Day after day, Whitney watched her sister get treatments, watched as the things that were saving her life were also leeching from her her life, stole the color from her cheeks and the shine from her hair. Whitney had no idea how to handle it, had no idea how to live without living, and when the letter showed up on her doorstep, she didn't know how to say no.

This place is a horror and an escape all in the same breath; she can't believe that she left Margot behind to get her treatments, can't believe that after surviving the reaping together all those years, Whitney still ran when Death came knocking.

But the escape is worth the horror, she thinks.

    She hopes.

    She dreams.

song: girls just wanna have fun
by charlotte lawrence