palace deville, district ten / finished, cb

You often wonder, in your darkest moments, if there's anyone out there who mourns the person you could have been more than yourself. Every version of the true, real Palace DeVille spreads in and out of you like cracks along the sidewalk pavement — threads of silk connecting the web. Some days, you feel like the spider carefully executing your tasks to the final detail, and other days you feel like the fly tirelessly beating your wings all with the hope of claiming the right to live a terribly bleak existence. All because it's your instinct to fight. To resist.

Chin raised highly in the air, brown eyes glittering like you're the last vestige of some long forgotten royal court. In your mind, in the tragedy that belongs to you, lost somewhere in the pages and pages of missing person reports that you've read, this is the delusion that is owed to you. Your mother, your captor, raises you on the story of the princess plucked from her castle. And once upon a time, you take it for the sole truth, but now you are older and wiser and capable of seeing past the veil. You've visited the majority of your potential first-homes, looked into all of Ten's kings and queens and their dead dynasties.

The closest thing to your namesake that you've found is a three story ranch home to the eastern edge of Ten, where the clearings and pastures meet the wall of trees that hug the borders of the district. It's a quiet place, and when you were standing there, the lilac bushes in the front yard looked as if they hadn't bloomed in over half a decade. The lights were dim, the only sign of life a flicker of shadows moving through glass, through the motions, figments of people who hurt the same way you did. Parents who mourned a missing girl that was entirely, awfully like you.

Maybe, possibly, you.

But you never knock, and you never open that door. You go home, listen to your siblings try to weave themselves around their hurting, smiling passively and turning the other cheek all in the hopes of ignoring your own, too. The DeVille family's favorite game. "Do you ever think about where you would like to settle down, Wen?" Today is one of those rare days when the two of you are only each other, only sisters, and not expected to be anything more. The sun outside the window paints a farewell letter across the redhead's freckled cheeks as it sinks below the horizon, the glow of fading embers. The only thing about losing Palace that really scares you is losing them. Your patchwork family, your anchor in all things that you do. "When it's all said and done, and we can go anywhere we'd like."

Strange. You work so hard, and hold yourself so proudly, for a girl who seems to want nothing more than to walk away from herself.

"Because I like to think of it."