nuits sans sommeil - felix + elspeth blitz

elspeth
dollanganger goravich.

the first night i slept here, i slept on the floor. 

i had grown so used to the cold, hard bite of the ground beneath my bones that even the floorboards felt too good for me. it was easier to close my eyes and pretend i had not betrayed her, in a way, and that the irreversible shackles i had accepted were not wrapped around my wrists. it was my way of pretending she was still mine. 

when klaus found out, he looked at me with the sort of cautious pity you give a stray animal. like he wanted to scoop me up but was scared i might bite him. in those first few days, i might have. instead, he stacked nine mattresses up in my room and said, you choose whichever one you like best, and i held out for a week before i gave in and woke up one morning right at the top of the stack, teetering on the precipice between my old life and my new one. 

without her, my weakness devoured all of my strength and i relented, a victim of the sorts of things that made normal children soft and pliable. mauve would shriek and claw at my eyes if she saw the way i folded myself in two, reshaped myself to fill the elspeth-sized gap in goravich house that they swore was just for me. the lines between prison and sanctuary faded until i could not piece together the truth. 

"elspeth, are you sleeping?" comes a voice from the crack beneath the door. it slips it alongside the draught and the dust. it belongs, i know, to felix, who roams around a night like a bare-footed vampire, looking for victims who's ears she can talk off. she reminds me of my sister, hissing at me in the early hours of the morning. i pretend to be asleep until the new, soft me consumes my being and forces me to respond, tells me she is just a tiny thing, just thirteen, small and hungry for attention just like the dogs mauve tends for. 

"no," i say. "do you need something?" 

nobody has been inside my room since klaus stacked the mattresses here. i think i can hear here sticky little fingers on the doorknob. 

elspeth
dollanganger goravich.

she enters as though she has a right to it. 

i suppose you cannot have it all, and somewhere in the niceties and comforts, something has to give. for the first sixteen years of my life, i was never alone. wherever i went, she was beside me, a mirror of all my worst intentions. i don't think i'll ever quite get used to it, the way that an empty room amplifies my thoughts into a cacophony. i am not exactly pleased with felix encroaching upon my bedroom, but at the same time i do not resist it; part of me doesn't really mind. with her constant talking, i know she will offer me the sort of quiet that comes with company. 

"just can't sleep. nightmares." this, i understand. 

she looks up at me, all wide-eyed, her lips forming an 'o'. "wow," she exclaims breathlessly, as though my bedroom contains a palace, or an amusement park ride, rather than a stack of dubiously stained mattresses. i don't know where klaus got them from, but i am certain that somebody died on at least one of them. 

"all those, and you're not asleep yet?" she asks, as though the two things are connected in any way. as though you can fix deficit with excess. how simple it would be if things worked in that way. "can i try it?" she says, completely untethered from social norms. i am taken aback by the question, but at the same time jealous of the way her mind seems to be free from the sorts of things that bother other people, like not imposing upon people in their own beds. she seems even younger than she is, looking up at me expectantly.

"if you want," i say. "this way, you see, there can't be any monsters under the bed." it's a joke, but suddenly i worry that she will take me seriously. hurriedly, i reach out and offer her a hand to grab onto.

"still get the nightmares, though."