ingrid mayfield, district eleven | finished
Sept 26, 2023 16:17:37 GMT -5
Post by eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris on Sept 26, 2023 16:17:37 GMT -5
✾ I N G R I D ✾
It's not the nicest thing: learning how to look for shelter alone in the woods before getting the chance to ask the easy questions like, How do I invite the cutest boy in class to the dance? or, Am I going to flunk algebra? The thing is, she'd trade anything save for her little brother just to sit in Mrs. Boucher's freezing homeroom again, to hear that monotone voice drone on and on about fractions, to learn. About something more than just how to survive off the land.
But she knows more than anyone else the importance of optimism, crawling your way through the dirt until you find the right place to make a stand. If she were truly alone, maybe it would be easier to just give up and give in, but so long as she can look over her shoulder and see Edric following close behind her, there is a reason to smile. To believe. To hope. She is a girl with nothing — who would give everything to the last surviving member of her family. He is the only treasure she has left to her name.
Even if she sometimes feels spiteful about her lot in life, regretful, it all pales in the face of her determination.
To think that a pile of pressurized carbon would cost her a father, a mother, and a fair future — it takes her breath away, sometimes. The loss of it all. At any given time, she can look down at her hands and see her nails caked with dark soil. She can smell the forest and her own fatigue clinging to her skin. Her palms are empty of sustenance, her stomach growling in protest, a banshee wailing in the depths of herself. Her father was executed for a crime that was given no trial, and her mother vanished so long ago now that she refuses to accept any other possibility than the lone, inevitable truth.
The men in white found their mother, punished her for something she had no knowledge of — and now, neither Ingrid or Edric will ever have closure with the people who brought them into this world. They are orphans without a roof over their heads, fugitives still at large, assumed to be in possession of the missing diamonds so conveniently absent from the corpse of their "thief" father. The injustice of it all shakes her to her core, sharpens her to the cruelty of life. She has learned how something can be whole one moment, and then shattered the next.
It breaks her heart to watch her brother be robbed of the same thing that was taken from her, too. Each year, she watches that fire inside his eyes go just a little dimmer, losing its spark. He hasn't confided in her that he feels hopeless, and she knows him better to think that he would ever confess something so personal and negative to her. He puts on a face that's just as brave as hers every morning, and he's started to learn how to navigate and scope out prospective camps just like she had.
But she wishes he could be in school, fussing over which tie to wear, what teenage romance to pursue and lose all in a single semester's time. Instead he cleans berries in the stream, places them in neat piles, has what little laundry Ingrid owns washed and pinned high on a string to dry. Over her shoulder, she carries the carcasses of two rabbits tied to a stick, the same meal as the one the day before, and so on. But at least they won't go hungry tonight. He smiles up at her, and she smiles back. At least for now, it doesn't feel as if invisible walls are closing in around them.
So she breathes in deep, existing, and she allows herself to pretend that their continued survival is not a crime they will inevitably be punished for. So long as they can outrun the law, Ingrid thinks to herself, they can outrun fate.
The last of the infamous Mayfields will not go quietly.
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