beauden mortuus ✵ twelve

B E A U D E N.

"Come along, dear, the world's falling apart."

"Okay, mother." 

It was a Wednesday, because every Tuesday, he and his mother would drink honey oat tea on the balcony. They were very close, Den and his mother, even more so since the sun seemed to have fallen out the sky. Life is strange, and beautiful, she would close the screen door behind him and he would use both hands to carry the porcelain set out with him. 

"I sure would wish Lavre would come around one of these weeks, there's just no excuse for her not to see her parents."

"She's working, mother," and he would take ginger sips, taste the sugar staining his bottom lip. "There is no excuse-" 

"None?" 

How interesting. 

Beauden hadn't been one to argue with his mother much, mostly just hear her talk as he would daydream. His father was away, working at the hospital and trying to keep whoever paid him alive - rebels, traitors, pigs. They were all just another body, and whether they lived or died, Beauden would never come to meet them. With every change that came, Den and his mother would find a way to rationalize it. 

Ignore it. Perhaps it was just a bit of wine in the tea, just enough to convince the imagination that they were untouchable on top a balcony of privilege. Wine of the Riches, he had grown to imagine his childhood memories as just dreams. Disillusioned, an over protective mother and a mortician father, if not for his sister, it would have been one lonely decade.

She would grow up, quickly as it seems to come, and follow a father's encroaching grave. Lavre moved on with things as an adult, perhaps she just knew things Den didn't. Maybe it's because she remembers what it was like to live below the balcony- she told him so much of what life was like before the war. 

It never meant much, these places never existed. 

"Do you think she'd name her son after me? Haha."

"Oh, but that's tacky, dear."

Still, it haunts him. Just in hushed tones, laying on their soft bellies in the attic of their childhood home, Lavre would spill the universe's old secrets and Beauden would just listen. "Ahh, perhaps you are right," he tells his mother, with a closed ear. His sister would tell him of Korea in the spring, the billowed grass fields, the family they had left behind before they were ever born. 

A coal city that seemed the darkest, Beauden couldn't imagine anything more. Not the tattered remains of Seoul, a name that seemed to only exist in the back of his thoughts. He lived in a graveyard, watched neighbors struggle to bury their loved ones. Poverty ran through the new age, like troves and honey, and Mortuus was the flies.

And it was easy, to ignore the rotting of the world around them, when you watch from a lattice balcony sipping tea. The sky was built with smog, and with each passing day Beauden had come to terms that it would paint itself darker in increments until he couldn't see the hands in front of him. Mausoleums of honey, oats and sugar cubes, a legacy built off the carcass of district twelve. 

Wednesday, as it was, was the last day before the smog was lifted in reverse. 

Just another fly, caught in honey. 

[ firestorm ]