i am the dagger in my heart / esme {✾}

They shove her out of the house she's been defending for the better half of her life.

As quick as a finger snap, four whole years of doing everything in her power to be the guardian of her younger siblings despite still only being a child herself, she watches it go up in smoke; slipping through her fingers as she reaches out. Disaster comes in the guise of a viral outbreak, surprisingly not her mother cracked out of her head and begging for pity that Esme refuses to give. The peacekeepers close off her entire neighborhood, by chance or by convenience she'll never know, and the best they can offer her is temporary shelter at a local group home for her brothers and sisters, and the promise that she can reunite with them after the pandemic has subsided.

That first night being without them, without the constant itch in the back of her mind that she needs to follow in their every step, nurse their every wound, protect them from every evil... she hates herself for staring at streets on fire and thinking the evening strangely peaceful. She exhales a breath she didn't realize she was holding; a long sigh, an endless hurt, a girl on her own trying to piece together the childhood that shattered around her. Trying to leave behind something better. And now here she finds herself.

Homeless, family-less, so exhausted that she can't help but feel a quiet, terrible relief at the absence of the weight on her shoulders. Like a birthright, she unravels in the flickering lamp glow in her one bed apartment. And no one needs her to be whole, to be brave, to be there at all. So she keeps breathing. Keeps letting herself down.

As long as it's not them.

She'll betray only herself.