parker lachlan / d4. ( fin )

In the beginning,
            there is a girl.

Your story begins begins in winter, a baby coming into the world a short year after her elder brother, a shadow you will never quite free yourself from, a shadow that starts as a cage, a shadow you turn into your own version of a fortress. The birth is easy, you learn later, when your mother is recounting to you the story as she tucks you into bed the night of your seventh birthday. You smile up at her because she's taught you that's what you're supposed to do when people look at you like she looks at you in that moment.

My precious darling, your mother croons at you when you are still but a babe, running the tip of her nose up her little cherub's cheek, plump and full of color. She cradles you in her arms like a precious treasure, walks down to the oceanside with you in her arms nearly every morning and teaches you all the letters of the alphabet, sings you lullabies that will ring in your head a decade later and send a pang through your chest that you don't know what to do with. My beautiful girl.

Later, when you can only remember her in brief flashes and dreams, it is this image that you always see, her looking down at you and slants of sunlight glowing behind her, a halo of gold and yellow dancing around her. With every winter that comes, you remember her pushing your hair back from your forehead, running the tip of her forefinger over your nose and tracing the shape of your eyebrow, remember the way it felt when her lips were pressed against your temple.

You remember her voice.

You remember her singing you into a calm that you never needed any help finding, but loved all the same.

When she dies, it hurts less than you expect.

You stand at her funeral, and the whole world expects you to crumble in on yourself; and yet, you are a tiny little girl, but one with an ocean in her eyes and the dark of night in her hair, and those things always stand. You carry the strength of worlds in your skinny little bones, and the shadows that you have always stood in do not make you weak—they make you strong. The win whips through your lungs, sharp and relentless, bringing tears to your eyes. She was her mother's favorite, you hear whispered from somewhere in the crowd, the wetness trailing over your cheeks. The thought makes you purse your lips, makes your eyebrows scrunch together, and later you'll understand that it looked like you were in pain, but there was only confusion.

Zeke, who has always been made of war and tougher things than you—he had been your mother's favorite, you had always thought. You were too quiet, to uninterested in what she wanted to teach you, those things about how to be kind to others and how to speak to strangers. You're only barely eight-years-old when she goes, but you are old enough to understand that you are not the child she was expecting, old enough to understand that she loved you enough to move mountains if you needed it of her and that that fact did not change the truth: Zeke could have been human, and for that he was always going to be her golden boy.

You though—you had always been near-hollow, and when she dies, all the light goes with her.

With the absence of that, you and Zeke fell into your darknesses differently. Where his had always been a like an inferno of flame that burned everything else away in its path, yours was like a void, an abyss where emotion and want went to die. It swallowed everything, took in everything around you and made you apathetic to it all. Zeke was a forest fire, ready to burn down the world, and you were the ashen darkness that followed.

Your father has always been a cruel man, with the weight of failed expectation heavy on his shoulders, and when your mother is gone, you stand in your shadows and let all of that burden fall onto Zeke's shoulders. You don't really mean to let it happen, and when you're older and make friends some of them will ask you why you allowed yourself to become such a ghost, why it was that you never pushed harder to get your father's attention.

Why would I want it? you ask.

The answer is always the same.

How could you not?

It never makes any sense to them, even the one's that think he's cruel, the one's that watch on as he cheers Zeke on from the sidelines, watches his son smash in faces and sneers, thinking his son did not go far enough—they can never understand it, this extreme apathy. She's fucking broken, people sometimes like to spit at you, when you are older and do not understand why you had to talk to a boy again after sleeping with them, or when you simply stop talking to a girl who has begun to bore you.

You're like a black hole, your first boyfriend says to you once, days after he tells you that he's falling in love with you and all you can think to respond with is why?. He kisses you afterwards and you can taste yourself on his lips, and when he crawls out of your bed to go home, he looks at you sadly before leaving.

The void swallows him whole.

People say you have some kind of ghost complex, that you are the way that you are because Zeke burns so brightly, because he could pull lives from throats with the pounding of his fists. They say that you started training as a career just because it was what he did, because you wanted to be like him, because you wanted to burn.

They couldn't be more wrong.

You watch for years as violence turns your brother into a savage, and even as the training he undergoes turns that ferocity into something he can harness, into something that he can control, you know the truth of its origins and the truth of its viciousness. You were there the first time he came home after bashing another boys face in, were the one that handed him a wet towel to clean his face off with before walking out of the room and leaving him to his grief. You know that for all that his fire gives him the ability to burn down the world, it could just as easily burn him down as well.

You don't want to be

anything like him. 

Once, you were a
                                                girl.


In the end,
there is only

                  the void.