Let The Rain (SOUTH)

Riley was going to die.

He was able to discern that much through an oxygen-deprived haze, brightly colored spots dancing in front of his fading vision. And honestly, he thought, even death would be preferable to this, this in-between stage of pure agony carefully maintained by the unforgiving hands pinning his lanky ten-year-old frame to the wall in an iron grip around his throat. Always tight enough to make it impossible to take a full breath, but consistently loosening for the briefest second to allow an occasional, wheezing excuse for an inhalation that kept him conscious and experiencing the pain of being slowly asphyxiated to the fullest.

Don’t give up, you idiot. Edana, Keela, the others… they need you.

The foggy thought gave him enough impetus to struggle to the best of his ability, which wasn’t all that effective given the fact that he barely had enough air to keep him from passing out. Still, his spindly fingers pried weakly at the other pair of hands, prompting a sadistic laugh from a hulking, shadowed form followed by the pressure on Riley’s windpipe suddenly ceasing. He collapsed to the floor sputtering and gasping for air in painful breaths, lungs heaving as that same shadowy figure hovered over him, still laughing as if the boy’s misery was the most entertaining thing in the world. “Now, what was that you said?”

Still inhaling in sharp wheezes that grated against the oppressive silence of the well-furnished room, Riley felt his watering eyes harden into a defiant glare, the last sparks of any dignity he may have had left flaring to life. It took a few attempts at speaking to make any sound leave his abused throat, but he was finally able to grind out a response in a faltering croak still augmented by heaving lungs attempting to return much-needed oxygen to his system. “I said that my father was ten times the man that you’ll ever be.”

He wasn’t expecting the impact of a boot in his stomach, the force of it effectively knocking the wind out of him and sending him skidding at least a yard across the carpet. Left yet again without air supply, the room swirled into momentary darkness before his lungs jumped back into action, a weak cough sending a trickle of blood blooming over his lips. This was definitely going to hurt later, more so than it did now, which was saying something. But before he could assess his own injuries any further, thick fingers clutched a handful of his hair in a tight fist and yanked him upwards, bringing him nose to nose with terror itself as hot breath reeking of alcohol blew into his face. “Wake up, Riley.”

“Riley? Riley, wake up. Get up, sweetheart.”

Riley sat upright in his bed with a startling speed, wide chocolate eyes darting around in a panic. Still half trapped in the nightmare, he registered the fact that his lungs were burning for air in an unpleasantly familiar way. After a few tentative breaths he calmed down enough to take in his surroundings, the same old royal blue walls of his room covered in the same old scores of guitars, the same old blankets tangled in an unbelievable mess around his long, sweatpant-clad legs. The unfamiliar aspect in the room, however, was Riley’s mother. Willow Lightwood’s face was knitted into an expression that almost looked like genuine concern, straying from its default look of bemused ignorance.

“Are you okay, honey? You weren’t breathing and you were tossing and turning something terrible,” she said, wringing her perfectly manicured hands in a way that could have passed for a concerned mother instead of… whatever she actually was. Blinking blearily, Riley brought a hand up to his hair, finding that the dark curls were plastered to his forehead with sweat. A quick glance down at himself revealed that the grey thermal fabric of his shirt was similarly soaked, affirming his assumption that the previous night had been filled with more nightmares than the one he remembered.

”M’fine,” he mumbled sleepily, yawning and stretching out his stiff arms. ”Why’re you in my room this early, Mom?”

Willow beamed, another rare occurrence, the excitement on her face as palpable as it might have been on a child’s at Christmas. ”I popped in to tell you that your stepfather and I are going on a trip. We’ll be gone all week; do you think you can handle everything for that long?”

Mother, I’ve been ‘handling everything’ for twelve years. I think I can deal with a week.

((ooc - Dear lord, he wouldn't shut up. Sorry if this mayhem and foolishness is confusing. I'm a little lost myself.))

Riley hissed quietly as he inspected the unintentional wound, the laceration stinging terribly because of the soap that had been on his hands when the skin was breached. He was used to the flesh of his hands being raw and damaged due to incessant washing, but this was certainly one of the worst instances of the skin actually cracking that he'd seen in a long time. It went without saying that bending his hand in the position required to effectively play guitar would be impossible for quite a few days, a fact that made Riley's breath hitch in his throat momentarily. When the only constructive tether to sanity he had was lost, he tended to lapse into things that weren't nearly as good for him with an increased fervor.

No guitar means more scars than usual. It's one of those simple facts of life. The sky is blue, the grass is green, and Riley's a basket case who can't face the world without a guitar or a razor blade in his hand.

His train of thought was interrupted by Keela entering the kitchen, delicate pianist's fingers wrapped securely around a box of bandaids. She smiled, a rare occurrence that would have made Riley beam in return if it hadn't been for the distracting pain blossoming from his hand. "Yeah, I've seen your wrists, you're so clumsy. You sure you only need one? Let's see it, Riley."

The world stopped. Riley couldn't control his reaction, dark eyes widening exponentially and the fingers of his good hand tugging absently at the cuff of his sleeve. As much as he loved Keela and as many secrets as the two of them held in their shared past of hellish existence and carefully hidden crimes, the scars were one mystery that she couldn't ever be allowed to unravel. There was just too much at stake to let her believe that they came from anything but clumsiness, that they might be intentional. How many bruises had he blamed on falls and careless collisions in that old world full of darkness and pain, how many heliotrope handprints had been carefully covered with bandannas and carefully arranged clothing? Hiding the signs that screamed something is wrong scrawled out all over his body was something that Riley had been used to for a while, shielding them from view for the greater good.

Can't take care of everyone very well from the inside of a padded room.

Was he really crazy? Possibly. Probably. Who wouldn't be after all of that, the loss and abuse and responsibility and guilt that never, ever stopped? But insane or not, Riley was more than aware that without him, the Lightwood family would fall back into the shattered mess that it had been so many times before. It wasn't arrogance that made him think this but rather the cold harshness of reality, the knowledge that while the older siblings, the other two triplets and Keela and Edana, could take care of themselves, the little ones had no father and might as well not have a mother for all the attention (or lack thereof) that Willow paid them. It would be ridiculous to think that Avon or Antoinette would step up to the plate if he were to disappear one day - Avon had about as much paternal instinct as a rock and Antoinette couldn't pull herself away from the mirror long enough to get anything done - cruel to imagine that the job should fall to Edana or Keela, who were both already so broken that Riley wondered whether they could handle the pressure or if they would end up like him, hiding physical and psychological scar tissue two miles thick behind gentle smiles and long-sleeved shirts.

"Jesus, Riley!" Keela shrieked, finally seeing the ragged, bleeding mess that his left hand had become. Riley cringed a bit at the sudden onslaught of high-pitched noise, flinching even more when her hand closed around his forearm and yanked it towards her, putting pressure on the still-fresh cuts beneath the fabric of his shirt. "What the hell are you doing? What the hell are we doing?"

"It's nothing," he replied in his usual quiet murmur, gently pulling his arm away and just as gingerly prying the box of bandages from Keela's grip. "Dry skin, that's all. When your skin dries out or gets rough, it cracks. It happens all the time to guitarists, Keels, don't freak out."

Bandages in hand, he did his best to summon a reassuring smile as he crossed back over to the sink and turned the tap once again, letting cool water flow over his wounded palm and rinse away the blood (odd, how it looked exactly the same in real life as it did in panicked hallucinations). Riley watched in silence as the water swirling around the drain went from red to pink to crystal clear, finally reaching up and turning off the flow before inspecting his hand, the thin scarlet line looking much more manageable than the bloody mess it had been a minute ago. Lips pursed in concentration, he carefully unwrapped the largest bandaid he could find in the box, placing it across the expanse of his palm and pressing it gently into place.

If you can cover it up, then it doesn't really exist.

"There. Good as new," Riley said, the corners of his lips quirking upward slightly as he held up his bandaged appendage for Keela's scrutiny. The wound still throbbed quietly beneath the pristine tan of the band-aid's coverage (but didn't everything - old scars, new ones, a broken soul that could never really heal?) but Riley pushed the pain to the back of his mind along with the rest of the morning's difficulties. Now wasn't the time to break down - and that time would never come. He just didn't have the luxury of breaking anymore, at least on the outside.

But under all these bandages, I'm an awful, fractured mess.

He chose to ignore Keela's comment about the nannies, full lips pursing slightly in mild distaste at the very thought of letting someone else inside the complicated unity (if you could call it that, with all the secrets and white lies and everything bad in the world kept carefully under wraps) that the band of siblings had formed in order to keep themselves afloat in raging rapids of loss and lingering pain that never seemed to have a real end to it. They'd had nannies before. Riley distinctly remembered those days, placed under the not-so-watchful eyes of women who cared even less about him and his sisters and Aris than their grief-stricken, absentee mother did. In the wake of these supposed caretakers' laughable excuses for child-rearing was when his work had started, wiping Edana's tears and patching up Keela's scraped knees and feeding baby Aris, all the while fighting with all his might to not collapse into a useless husk, completely hollowed by the loss of his father, his best friend. He had been six years old.

Twelve years later, Riley was still the same broken little boy staring at six others who looked to him for support and protection and love, still left with the weight of the world on his shoulders, asking himself but what about me? and trying as hard as he could not to scream at the injustice of it all. But if there was one thing that Riley had learned at a young age, it was that there was no such thing as justice in the world. No justice in a father being ripped from his children for the sake of vengeance and one man's desire for a beautiful bride who was never destined to be his. No justice in six years of horrid abuse for no reason other than a sick obsession with the pain of others, no justice in cold-blooded murder being forced upon the conscience of a fourteen-year-old boy and two sisters who insisted on going along for the ride, not knowing the psychological repercussions that their involvement would leave imprinted on their minds for heaven knew how long.

You don't understand, Keela. If we let someone else touch us, we'll all break into a million pieces.

No one ever seemed to realize what a delicate precipice they all stood on, constantly teetering on the edge of oblivion with only well-kept secrets and Riley's continued pseudo-parenting keeping the lot of them from plunging into the abyss. The burden of it all was downright oppressive sometimes and this morning was no exception, the weight settling somewhere deep in his chest and making it nearly impossible to breathe. For the first time in what seemed like forever, Riley began to worry about himself. He'd been surprisingly fragile lately, the slightest thing throwing him cripplingly off balance and resulting in an increased count of crimson tallies recording every ounce of pain it took to bring him back from that dark place inside that constantly yearned to swallow him whole and never let him see the light of day again.

Keela had it inside of her too, that darkness. And so did Avon, and Edana, and all of them, really. There was no way they could have come away from their past unscathed, whether the scars that plagued each of them were mental or physical. They all had their ways of taming it, Keela with her music and lack of words around anyone who was not her family, Aris with his bizarre mood shifts that almost made him seem like different people all locked up in the same body, and Riley with his hidden wounds and smiles that never quite reached his eyes. Smiles like the one he wore now, the curve of his lips fading slightly as he took note of the grave expression on his little sister's face.

"Pull down your sleeves, Riley. I want to see your arms."

So she had seen. Beneath the icy stab of apprehension that shot down his spine in a painful bolt, Riley couldn't help but wonder why it had taken her this long to put two and two together. Keela had always been the smart one, smarter than him, even, with an eerie perceptiveness that seemed more like telepathy than anything else. He had been careful to hide the evidence, of course, but long-sleeved shirts and hidden blades stashed in boxes of old guitar picks could only hold out for so long under scrutiny. This day had been coming for some time.

Even with this knowledge, Riley couldn't help that his breath caught unpleasantly in his throat when Keela's hands wrapped their way gingerly around his arm for the second time in the span of a few minutes, delicate fingers working under the hem of his sleeve. Pure, unadulterated panic was not a pleasant thing, and his agitated state was only made worse by the frantic screeching of his mind telling him to stop her stop this make it all stop before everything gets shot all to hell only to be rewarded with silence and a truly terrified pair of chocolate eyes boring into their lighter counterparts.

But really, what was there to do? For the millionth time in his life, Riley was backed into a corner with no options of his own and yet again bent to the will of others, specifically one other with fiery eyes and a look on her face that could make whole armies turn tail and flee in terror. Last-ditch efforts were a way of life for him and sometimes they even worked, so with his distraught mind clinging to that last bit of fragile hope, Riley at least had to try.

"Keela, don't." He was surprised how thoroughly calm he sounded, quiet tones entirely exhausted and worn-down more than panicked (but he was tired, everything just made him so tired nowadays that he constantly wondered what kept him going). Without even the impetus to pull his arm away - that would be as good as a confession and his house-of-cards life was about to come crashing down anyway - Riley exhaled heavily and placed his unbandaged hand over Keela's, not that it would do anything to keep her from seeing the whole mess if she really wanted to. It was odd, feeling how normal her hand was in contrast to the roughness of his own, worn down and weather-beaten from guitar and all of those dark things that seemed to make him the same roughed-up mess inside. A mess that no one could find out about, because if Riley broke down then everything he had built up in his family's carefully balanced life would break with him, and he couldn't bear to see everyone else hurt as well.

"Just... just don't. Leave it, okay? It's nothing. Nothing in comparison to the hell that could break loose. Please, Keela."

I've been hurting for so long that I've forgotten how it feels to be whole. But you, little sister, I refuse to let you hurt like that. You or any of the rest of them.

As much as he constantly reminded his siblings to keep their language in check (it wouldn’t do any good to have Chyba running around spouting obscenities he’d picked up from one of them, and really, there were better ways to express oneself than through vulgarity), Riley found himself going on an internal monologue as Keela yanked up one of his sleeves that would have made a sailor blush. Now that the incident had spiraled completely out of his control, the panic was starting to kick in, prompting him to flinch sharply when she raised her voice enough to alert the whole house to the drama that was brewing in the kitchen in place of breakfast.

Who am I even kidding? I’ve never been in control. I’m just a master of playing pretend. That’s all any of us are.

The raised ridges of old and new scar tissue looked much worse under the harsh fluorescent light of the kitchen than they did in the dimly-lit confines of his room or the glances he’d sometimes catch in a mirror getting in or out of the shower. Everything was like that for his family, Riley mused, manageable enough when it was kept out of sight and out of mind but something utterly horrific when it was dragged into the light of day. There were reasons for everything he did, justifications, purposes for the greater good that no one would ever really understand, unable to process why one boy would take so much pain upon himself to shield his siblings from at least some of it. Every pink-white line in the disorganized lattice that crisscrossed the spindly forearm was a time when he could have broken, could have dissolved into a hollow shell like their mother and left the others to fend for themselves, something he would never allow to happen. But Keela would never see it that way, he knew. He could see it glinting behind her eyes, shades lighter than his own, eyes that didn’t speak of understanding or acceptance but only you’re selfish, you’re so selfish, how could you?

And if I am selfish, little sister? Have I not earned the right after giving up my life, my innocence, my happiness, my everything so the rest of you could at least have a chance?

The sudden hike in volume that Keela’s voice took made the guitarist jump in surprise, heart thrumming with apprehension when he heard a muffles string of obscenities from Avon’s room at the top of the stairs as she screeched at her younger sister to shut the hell up and let her sleep. Amberdark eyes wide (he’d been told he looked like a deer in the headlights like this more than once), Riley tried to quell the rising panic tightening to a knot in his chest, gaze darting to the doorway of the kitchen nervously. If someone came in right now, things would go from bad to worse in mere seconds. “Keela, shh, listen, I don’t expect you to… I know it’s hard to process but I’m fine, I… Just don’t…”

“What am I supposed to say, Riley?” His sister hissed, small hands shoving him with a surprising amount of force that actually pushed him back a few paces. Keela’s features were stormy, tempestuous, angrier than he’d seen her in ages, and the outburst knocked Riley even further off his mental balance than he already was. “’It’s going to be okay, Riley? This is going to be our little secret?’ No, Riley. This isn’t okay. I’m not going to push this away! You know how easily you could sever an artery? I don’t want to fucking walk in on you in your bathroom dead from loss of blood.”

“I’m not going to… You couldn’t be more wrong about…” Riley sputtered, trying to counter her statement but finding it hard to lie directly to her face. If Keela knew about the handful of close calls he’d had, the times when he actually had lost consciousness, waking up a few minutes later in a mess of congealing blood and a heart that beat too sluggishly to allow him to function effectively for another half hour or so… She’d lose it even more than she was at the moment, and more screaming was the last thing that Riley needed right now. But before he could say anything else in his defense, Keela had turned on her heel and left the kitchen, storming out in the direction of the main staircase, only turning around to point an accusing finger at the ragged marks along his skin that still stood out in sharp contrast without the merciful cover of his shirtsleeves.

“Antoinette and Avon are going to hear about this. You best believe it.”

The last time he’d heard words that had frightened him this much, he’d been fourteen years old, listening to his demon of a stepfather-uncle’s last ragged breaths, cringing under one final, cruel grin and a broken sentence delivered on a faltering voice that still haunted the worst of his nightmares. You think you’re such a martyr, kid, but one day you’ll be just like me.

This prospect, the idea of his siblings finding out about his… unorthodox coping mechanisms, was almost as terrifying as the idea that he could ever become a controlling, abusive monster as that man. Almost. Riley stood rooted to the freshly-scrubbed linoleum, paralyzed for a few seconds as Keela disappeared around the corner, imagining how everything was about to come crashing down in one fell swoop. Everything he’d ever worked for, everything he’d sacrificed… it would all be for naught as soon as his sister reached the top of the stairs.

“Keela… Keela, wait!" For once, Riley thanked genetics for giving him freakishly long legs, since they allowed him to catch up with Keela’s retreating form faster than he’d anticipated, elegant fingers working their way into a vise around her wrist in a bizarre echo of what she’d done to him only seconds ago, arresting her progress as his eyes bored into his younger sister’s, actually assertive for once. “You can’t tell them. You can’t. You’ll kill everything that we’ve worked for trying to hold it together. Do you want that on your head, Keela? Do you want our family falling apart to be on your conscience?”

Riley felt terrible, guilting her like this, manipulative and calculating and everything a fathermotherbrother shouldn’t be, but he’d reached the end of his rope and there honestly weren’t that many options left. Keela was no longer that wide-eyed little girl that would follow his every direction without question, and simply asking her to keep it under the rug wouldn’t do him any good. But maybe even though she wasn’t as young and trusting as she’d always been, maybe a more juvilie approach would will work. Riley prayed it would, wrapping his other hand around her other wrist, thumbs against the pulse points and feeling the enraged drumbeat that her veins thrummed out beneath the fragile skin. “Look, I’ll give you anything. Anything you want, Keela, but please don’t say anything about this. They don’t have to know.”

He couldn’t read her the way he used to be able to, he realized, eyes searching hers and finding nothing to go off of as ragged, frightened breaths tore their way past his lips again and again. “Anything, Keela. I’m serious. Anything, just… Just please don’t tell the others.”

There had been only a few choice times in his life where he had felt fear. The type of fear that would shiver up your spine and leave you cold. The type of fear that would leave you awake at night. The exact same type of fear shivered up his spine at that point in time. This isn’t her problem, she isn’t the one who bears the battle scars, and yet she has the need to go off and tell everyone?