a constellation is a tragedy — ebony & sybil {✾}

In even her best moments, she feels so terribly full of rage.

There's a part of herself that she buries beneath the bravado — beneath the girl who is always on time, always has a plan, always knows the right thing to say except for when she's standing face to face with her own reflection. Staring at someone who has never once invited her in. Her love for her family is her hatred for herself. The cycle repeats on and on; the serpent swallows itself at the end of the tale. "Don't you speak to me like I'm a child."

This is how the fury hits. Like a thunder clap, like nothing in her life has ever stung worse than this moment. It cuts into her like fiberglass, an itch in all of her worst cuts, a slap across her face that leaves only one simple thought ringing in her head: I want to hurt all of the things that have hurt me. Her fists clench at her side, pulled into her sister's room like a pariah from the streets, like a thing meant to be silenced. Only the bruises on her hands know just how capable of carnage she truly is.

"What exactly do you expect me to do? Lock myself in my room and wallow in my self-pity?" Her eyes stare daggers into Sybil's, death sentence. "That's what you do. That's the same bullshit mess I've been trying to clean up ever since you left in the first place." Ebony wants to feel something shatter beneath her touch, a wreckage to make it fair, but she opts instead to stand taller in a space that only wants to shrink her. "Don't you ever act as if you've been a big sister to me."

She makes no move to mourn the childhood she lost — the one she willingly yielded in order to guide the bomb factory that is her household. Her sister went chasing her fantasies until it brought her here to Six, to this cage they now find themselves trapped in. For every flash of Sybil walking away, choosing a different battle than the one they were born into, the one Ebony so tirelessly fights in. The Mars family deserves better than their lot in life. She wants nothing more than to believe that.

But she doesn't think she's capable of being a savior. She moves through life like a storm cloud forming, an impeding disaster just waiting to go off and destroy everyone she claims to love so fiercely. It sickens her that she has the audacity to pretend to be good, that she weaves herself so tightly around people she knows she's only damning to feel pain. When the castle crumbles down, her first instinct is to reach up and catch the rubble on her shoulders. She makes an Atlas of herself / she stands her ground.

Someone has to.

No one goes to make a move, so she does. Always. "You'd be so shocked what you can do for your siblings when you, I don't know, exist around them." Ebony knows she will regret it, can feel the white hot rage burning in the palm of her hand, but in lieu of throwing a punch she simply parts her lips, and feels. "We don't need another ghost in this family, Sybil. Dad's enough." Part of her wants to sob; part of her feels like she's suffocating behind a sheet of glass. She gives nothing away.

"So either you get over yourself and help me for once in your life, or you can just stay in this room forever. Even when all this shit clears — because it will — don't even think about following us home again." For a girl so young, she speaks like an executioner who has seen only death for centuries. This is how deeply it hurts. "You're with us, or you're against us. Pick."