Enribbed and Wrought :: South

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Enribbed and Wrought :: South May 22, 2012 22:21:31 GMT -5

Post by meg. on May 22, 2012 22:21:31 GMT -5

I long for a spark, for a light
A dawn for my long, sleepless nights
And you keep them high on me tonight

[/color]
And we’ll be a light all of our lives. [/size]

ILANORA ADEPHUS-LIGHTWOOD

[/center][/size][/right]

Cotton buds of cold forced themselves into the back of her mouth, obliging her tongue to curl into a crescent-moon ‘u’ so she was able to channel honeyed air to her lungs. Each breath was a bite into a black chocolate cake, almost unbearably rich, sticky fingers taking hold of her spine and ensnaring themselves around the hooks of her ribs. Her trembling lower jaw and the squeeze between her shoulders said cold, but the lyrics written of hot sweat on her forehead told a different story, a body of confusion, in sickness and in health.

Through her bedroom window, grey clouds hung heavy, as did her fever. They spat drizzled droplets onto the visible lower storeys gutter. Once, in a true Nora-philosophising state, she had pondered how she had never once seen a perfect circle. A human hand did not know the meaning of perfect, after all, and even a close up of a robotic replication revealed that what was supposedly a curve actually constituted a thousand miniscule straight lines. But now, now Nora realised she had been mistaken. Mother nature did it, unfurling paper petals of raindrops in such an even manner that they created a paragon of encirclement. Perhaps her life, also, showed that ringed perfection. From constant illness to well being and now returning to being sick, it seemed her life truly had come in full circle.

The hollowing she felt in her throat suddenly had nothing to do with her prison-guard, who she had once known so well. Anxiety pooled in the crevices of her molars, and dispersed itself in the small of her flat-laid back. Perhaps her seeming-health was an illusion, and now she was to be contained within infection’s bounds for the rest of her life. Her strength had been but the calm before the storm, had been a brief respite, a moment of God’s pity, meant to show her that there was beauty in the world. Of course her mother had not made her sick, what was she thinking? The doctors had always been wrong in the past, not being able to correct her sickness through their myriad of pills and powders. How could she have trusted their word over that of her ever-caring mother? Perhaps her insane thoughts had been but a symptom of the sickness that was still to come.

Trying to squirm out of her skin, she let the blanket fall off her underdeveloped body. She didn’t want to be sick again. Her freedom had unlocked her mind, let her creativity flow, and helped her see all the good in the world. She was no longer trapped between crisp hospital sheets and her caring-but-smothering mother. Finally, fresh air danced between her feathers. Her knees could get grazed, but she had learnt that they would scab, and soon they would scar, and eventually even their scars would fade. The scarred skin would be tough, tougher than what surrounded it, almost impenetrable. She had understood that she could walk on through her scrapes, because the tears of blood that whispered down her shins were nothing but emotion, a stupid, human invention.

“I have been strengthened through my break from illness,” she breathed, words tumbling from her mouth and reclining into her plush pillow. They were barely audible, and meant for no ears but her own. Speaking the truth to herself was something she considered a speciality.

Through fever’s vapour, a tall figure edged open the door into her sickroom. A seagull was perched on his shoulder, a bird that she had known for a little over a year but had never met before now. That bird had given her a new chance, a new family, new hope. She found it bashfully rude that she had not introduced herself to it before, though she knew it was well acquainted with her.

Quite lithely, she flicked her weighted body upright to stare into an unfamiliar face whose features she knew well. “Riley,” she said, a shaded smile plastered on her features. “A pleasure.” Next, she looked to the bird, it’s plumage the most brilliant whites and browns and as close to earthly faultlessness as one could be. “Avon,” she said with a bob of her head, ever-polite.

“How are you both?”

Oh, in the dark we could hide
But we’re human, so we fight.
And we can be higher than our hearts

[/color]
And I’ll be a fighter by your side. [/center]
[/size][/blockquote]

Last Edit: May 25, 2012 2:45:54 GMT -5 by meg.

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Enribbed and Wrought :: South May 23, 2012 16:34:10 GMT -5

Post by Deleted on May 23, 2012 16:34:10 GMT -5

They say that things just cannot grow
Beneath the winter snow, or so I have been told
They say we're buried far just like a distant star
I simply cannot hold; is love alive?
Is love alive, is love alive?

The absolutely unholy shriek of the phone ringing cuts through Riley’s sleepy haze like an air-raid siren, tearing through the swirling chasm of his dreams and causing wide chocolate eyes to spring open before squinting in the milky light filtering through the blinds. The alarm clock reads 7:00 AM, and Riley notes with a faint twinge of despair that he’s only gotten two hours of sleep. Between trying to finish the last stretch of his internship (it’s so odd to think that in a few months he’ll be Dr. Lightwood. The title makes everything seem bigger and scarier and far too grown-up for only almost-twenty years of life experience) and acting as a de facto assistant to Panem’s only consulting detective, he’s beginning to wonder if he’s running on anything besides a potent cocktail of energy drinks and protein bars.

He groans feebly, pressing a pillow over his head of sleep-tousled brown curls in a futile effort to block out the noise, but the phone continues to wail in his ear until he’s been dragged unwillingly into full consciousness. Riley glares at the offending device, vision too blurred without his glasses or contacts to read the caller ID, but he’s spent enough time around the Detective to develop adequate deduction skills to figure out who it could possibly be. It’s far too early for Fenn or Bridgit to be up, Arwen’s on some sort of odd forest retreat with her creepy sister, and as far as he knows Phoenix doesn’t even have access to a phone anymore. With all of those possibilities eliminated, that only leaves one person who would call at such an ungodly hour. Riley grumbles mutinously as he yanks the phone off the hook and brings it to his ear. It’s not as if the Detective ever answers the phone even if it is for him. Riley feels more like his secretary than his flatmate most of the time. ”This had better be a really good case if you’re calling at seven in the morning on a Saturday, Lestrade.”

”…Riley?”

”Mom?” Riley blinks confusedly, sitting up in bed. He hasn’t spoken to his mother in months, not since the massive fight about her filling her emotional void with a slew of adopted children caused him to pack his bags and set off on his own. There can’t be a good reason for Willow Lightwood to be calling her newly-estranged son, and it takes approximately two seconds for Riley’s paranoia to kick in, nineteen years of being the one to take care of everything in the Lightwood home unable to be erased by a few months of living on his own. ”Is everything okay? What’s wrong? Did you forget to pay the water bill again? Do I need to go down to the company and get it turned back on? You didn’t try to cook again, did you, Aris told me about how you set the kitchen on fire last time. Is Keela sneaking out again, because if I need to have a talk with her I can -”

”Everything’s okay, Ri,” Willow’s voice floats, airy and disillusioned (Nothing is okay, mother. Nothing has been okay in a very long time.)

[/i] through the tinny speaker of the handset. ”But Ilanora’s come down with some kind of fever. I don’t have time to take her to the hospital and I was wondering if you could drop by the house and give her the once-over since you’re almost done with your medical… thingy.”

”Internship, Mom. Yeah, I’m done in three months, I just have to do my obstetrics rotation,” Riley sighs, carding long, spindly fingers through his hair. ”And Ila-who?”

”Ilanora, Riley. Your sister.”

”Oh, went and picked up another one, did you?” Riley says, his usually soft tenor clipped and strained as his grip on the phone tightens to the point that the plastic casing creaks in protest. ”So you call your firstborn for the first time in half a year, and it’s because you’re too preoccupied to haul one of your herd of adopted emotional crutches to the hospital and you want me to come take care of her?”

”…Well, yes.”

Riley sighs again, wishing now more than ever that he had it in him to actually be an asshole to people. ”I’ll be there in an hour.”

The house where he grew up has never felt less like home. The halls of the Lightwood mansion are filled with strangers now, children who look at him like he doesn’t belong when just the opposite is true. But he bites his tongue against all the injustice and utter wrongness of the whole situation, painting on a smile for his real siblings, noting how Aris has gotten at least an inch taller, telling Edana how the twins look more and more like her every day. The pleasantries feel awkward, stilted, and Riley is thankful when they’re over, making a point to not even acknowledge his mother’s existence as he breezes past her and trots up the main staircase. He’ll find the sick girl on his own.

They gave her my room.[/i]

Of course they did, it’s not as though he lives in the house anymore, and with Willow picking up new children like a raving yard sale shopper they’re probably running out of room even in a massive house.

They gave her my room.[/i]

The guitars he didn’t take with him still hang in their brackets on the wall, the décor is still a palette of shades of green, and the girl in his own bed doesn’t look the least bit like a Lightwood.

They gave her my goddamn ROOM.[/i]

”Riley, a pleasure,” the bird-boned form entombed in the covers states in a voice that’s spring-breeze soft and undeniably sweet, blue eyes that definitively hold the haze of fever fixed on the patch of empty air beside his head. ”And Avon. How are you both?”

Riley blinks a few times, turning to look at the empty space and then back to the little girl who has usurped his space in the family, no more than thirteen, fourteen years old at most. Her cheeks are flushed, her frame emaciated, skin too-pale and definitely sickly-looking, and despite the fact that he should be irritated with her for trying to be a Lightwood when she’s not Riley’s inner caretaker takes over any irritation he might feel as he carefully approaches ~~his~~ her bedside and kneels down to get a better look at her. ”Yeah, you’ve definitely got a fever. It’s nice to meet you, Ilanora. Liking my room?”

Riley sets his canvas messenger bag on the viridian carpet and flips it open, digging through bundles of herbs and bottles of medicine alike until he comes up with a small penlight and a glass thermometer in a case. ”I don’t know how much you know about me since I moved out before they adopted you, but for all intents and purposes we can say I’m a doctor, okay? Or at least I will be in a few months. So I’m going to see if we can get you feeling better. Sound good?”[/color]

This is my winter song to you
The storm is coming soon, it rolls in from the sea
My voice a beacon in the night
My words will be your light
To carry you to me

[/blockquote][/justify][/size]

Last Edit: May 26, 2012 11:28:53 GMT -5 by Deleted

meg.
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Enribbed and Wrought :: South May 26, 2012 4:24:38 GMT -5

Post by meg. on May 26, 2012 4:24:38 GMT -5

I long for a spark, for a light
A dawn for my long, sleepless nights
And you keep them high on me tonight

[/color]
And we’ll be a light all of our lives. [/size]

ILANORA ADEPHUS-LIGHTWOOD

[/center][/size][/right]

She didn’t understand how the birds plumage, which she knew consisted of hundreds of thousands of tiny feathers, could move in such liquid motions, could move as one. But that’s all of us, isn’t it? Her thoughts flick against the window, begging desperately to be let out into the cold. We’re all made of little tiny perfect parts. She watched it curl its neck, eyes full of ocean, full of far away storms and stories. Freckles of red splattered its beak, but she couldn’t work out whether they were blood or just the way it had hatched.

The heat in the room was stifling, it’s blankets squashing her cheeks and squaring her empty lungs[/colog]. A cough forced itself into the constricted spaces of her throat, hacking away at her body like a madman with axe, his weapon getting caught in her spine. Breaths only reached just under her flat breasts before they were whisked off, her body having much greater plans for them. For a moment, her mind marvelled at the ingenuity of something so simple as a breath, how each curled finger in her lungs had a part to play in pushing air into her blood. Another wheezy cough, however, forced her thoughts from out of her interior workings and into the swirling sea of muggy lime walls that encased her, yet another sentry.

”Yeah, you’ve definitely got a fever. It’s nice to meet you, Ilanora. Liking my room?”

It had been his room. Of course. That accounted for the green wallpaper, the guitars mounted on the walls like fat ladies. The mansion, sprawling across perfectly manicured lawns like an infection, may have been large, but it wasn’t that large, and Willow Lightwood had that many kids, now. Of course she had to recycle rooms if she were to give her new kids their own space. And that vague smell of beer and breath? That could not have belonged to Antoinette or Avon. Surely, any girl would be much too civilized to make an odour like that. Of course it had been his room.

All of a sudden, she felt flustered, like she was intruding on his private space[/colot]. This may have now been her house, but it certainly wasn’t her home. A peach flush bashed her cheeks, although that could have been associated with the febrile nature of her illness. She did not want to upset him, not when his family had given her so much. His round face and walnut eyes were soft, somehow, as if his scars had opened him up instead of tempering his body. He was the sort of person she wanted to hold between cupped hands ever so delicately, and show only those she trusted the most, like he was some sort of prized beetle. “Look,” she’d say, letting shafts of light filter through cracked fingers. “He’s special.”

”I don’t know how much you know about me since I moved out before they adopted you, but for all intents and purposes we can say I’m a doctor, okay? Or at least I will be in a few months. So I’m going to see if we can get you feeling better. Sound good?”

Oh, and she’d thought he was special.

He was just another one of them, with their smooth-sounding words and their soft-smelling promises. He was just another stupid doctor who knew nothing but how to get her hopes up and her diagnosis wrong. Perhaps they were all on it, all out to prove to her that doctors were the worst people on the earth, becauseinstead of gluing her together, they had ripped her life apart.

Why should she trust anything that he had to say? It was fairly obvious that once again, the doctors had been wrong. She was sick again, sick for good, allowed a respite to catch her breath, but that was it. And the stupid doctors would apologize for their mistake, and continue to prick her with needles until her insides leaked out, testing for an illness that they couldn’t prove the existence of. Her sickness was just like her belief in a higher power. To scientific eyes, it could not be verified, but it tied it’s invisible cords around each of her fingers and dragged itself along with each step she took.

“So you’re my brother now, I guess?” she said with a smirk, eyes far away. The boy with a seagull on his shoulder was supposedly her brother and the house with wings wrapped around it was supposedly her home.

She’d always wanted a brother. When she was an only child, her imaginary friends with wind-flush in their cheeks were always male. A glass girl who might shatter at any minute, she liked the idea of rough and tumble and getting hurt but standing up again.

“And why on earth do you think you, mister trainee, would be able to get me better? They’ve never been able to make me better before now.”

Oh, in the dark we could hide
But we’re human, so we fight.
And we can be higher than our hearts

[/color]
And I’ll be a fighter by your side. [/center]
[/size][/blockquote]

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Enribbed and Wrought :: South May 26, 2012 14:42:07 GMT -5

Post by Deleted on May 26, 2012 14:42:07 GMT -5

And to this day
I look for what it's gonna take
To just let things be
Still today, I wonder is it
You or me who should feel guilty?

RILEY KALEN LIGHTWOOD

“So you’re my brother now, I guess?” the fever-flushed girl asks, ocean-eyes all distant and faraway with something Riley can't quite place tugging upwards at the corners of her lips. He makes a concerted effort to bite back the sharp-edged no I'm not that collides with almost audible force against the backs of his teeth. No I'm not, I'm not your brother and you're not my sister and this is all wrong and that's why I left. Despite the foreign bitterness that paints itself in a sticky veneer over his outlook on the situation, Riley knows that of all the people in this world he could blame it on, this little girl with the ethereal voice and worlds behind her eyes isn't one of them. So instead of letting himself go over to that always-growing darkness that eats away at him and never seems to stop, Riley just smiles, low and unsure but a still a little victory in and of itself.

"Yeah," he says, popping open the thermometer's case and holding the crystalline cylinder up to the light. "Yeah, I guess I am."

“And why on earth do you think you, mister trainee, would be able to get me better? They’ve never been able to make me better before now.” Her voice shifts from that easy, airy flow to something that holds an echo of the bitterness that Riley's felt sitting heavy and unspoken under his own skin for a longer time than he'd like to admit, something in a cross between disappointment and doubt weighing down the edges of her words, clipping their wings and tethering them to the ground. He remembers the conversations downstairs, remembers hearing Keela say that the newest addition to their family had always been sickly and remembers thinking what a shame that was (Ilanora, he thinks, is a wonderful name, something that ebbs and flows like the tide and deserves to see so much more than an endless parade of doctors and the ever-closing walls of imposed quarantine). Still, Riley's never been good with people, never known how to respond to them or what they want or even if they want anything at all, and her question, all wrapped up in a cloak of quiet cynicism, makes him give pause and ask it anew to himself.

What makes me think I can save her? I can't save anyone. I can't even save myself. I can't, I can't, I...

Stop it.

Riley forces his train of thought to stutter to a halt, blinking in the suddenly too-bright light of the window and trying to replace the hurt etched into his features with something more neutral and less worrisome. He doesn't quite succeed, the remnants of a fear and pain as old as time lingering behind disks of tawny amber, but he manages to pull up the same soft smile, almost physically shrugging off her words and going back to looking at the thermometer. "Ilanora, when you get the chance, ask my brothers and sisters about me and they will all tell you the same thing. If something in this house is broken, I will fix it. That includes you. Now put this under your tongue and don't talk for a minute, ka-peesh?"

The smile fades as the mercury rises, though, settling decidedly at 102 Fahrenheit with a scarlet delineation that looks far too familiar (he tries to stop the uncomfortable tingling of his arms but the thought has been planted and won't leave any time soon) to be denied. Riley's face contorts itself into something more concerned, brows knitting together as he plucks the little glass contraption from between her lips and examines it again.

"Okay, high fever. That narrows down what it could be a lot, actually. Has anyone ever actually walked you through the diagnosis process? It's kind of like reading a mystery novel but a bit more... real, I guess." Riley's mind is already whirring with possibilities as he leans forward and presses two slender fingers beneath the hinge of her jaw, humming speculatively. "Your lymph nodes are swollen, that means infection. The fever is your body trying to fight it off. You've got a cough that sounds pretty dry and your breathing is more of a wheeze, which probably means you feel a lot of pressure on your chest when you're lying down."

Not nearly as bad as it could have been, then. Riley grins down at the newest Lightwood adoptee, fishing around in his bag for a few ribbon-tied bundles of herbs that Arwen gave him a few weeks back. "Good news, you're not dying. You've just got a pretty nasty case of bronchitis, which makes sense. The weather's been crazy lately, added to the fact that you're in a new house and your immune system is probably out of whack as a result. And you don't have to get any shots or even go to the hospital. I'm just going to make you some tea that will help with the fever and the cough and give you some antibiotics. Just make sure you get up and move around for about an hour a day so it doesn't turn into pneumonia and you'll be right as rain in a week."

She trikes him as odd, this tiny girl who seem to believe that she's beyond salvation with so much certainty. Riley can relate on some aspect. Even though he's had the good fortune to have a sound if overly-skinny body most of his life, his psyche hasn't fared nearly as well. It's easy to believe that no one in the world is capable of saving something so lost, but Riley came to accept that facet about himself long ago. Ilanora on the other hand, she has her whole life ahead of her, and his inner nurturer squirms quietly at the thought of such a very little body with such a very big soul being confined to four walls and a bed because of her own limitations.

"You're only as healthy as you want to be, Ilanora," Riley says, carefully dividing the herbs into smaller piles to take downstairs and throw into some hot water. "Girl like you, you should be dreaming of something bigger than a sickbed for the rest of your life, whatever the rest of the medical world told you. Most of us are complete idiots."

I'm pulling, I'm pushing
I'm putting it
Out of my mind
Thought that I had said
Goodbye

[/justify][/size]

Last Edit: May 26, 2012 14:43:51 GMT -5 by Deleted

meg.
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Enribbed and Wrought :: South May 28, 2012 5:48:51 GMT -5

Post by meg. on May 28, 2012 5:48:51 GMT -5

I long for a spark, for a light
A dawn for my long, sleepless nights
And you keep them high on me tonight

[/color]
And we’ll be a light all of our lives. [/size]

ILANORA ADEPHUS-LIGHTWOOD

[/center][/size][/right]

She watched a flower wilt in her hand and knew she should not have made a comment about him being her brother. Why would he want anything to do with her? She was nothing but a cut out from a magazine, a paper-frail girl pasted with weak glue over the seagull’s picture. The bird had been his sister, only once she had skin and emotions, not feathers, and once she was not flawless, unlike the creature that stared Ilanora in the face. Willow was not her mother, and never would be. Why should she expect Riley to not see through her thin curtain appearance? He, of all people, could see the gash that she was intended to hide.

Before the earthquake, she had not needed a brother. Sure, she’d wanted one, but there would have been nothing for her to confide in her confidant, or learn from her teacher. She was too wrapped in her mother’s steamy protective vapors to be allowed adventures, secrets to hold in her chest. But now, now she was visited by devils- or perhaps angels, because she didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between the two. Now, she held thoughts of adolescent impurity and knew wafers about boys and girls. When then she had her bearings, now she was lost in a purgatory between the heavens and hells of sickness and health- though she couldn’t tell which one was good and which one was bad.

At least now that she was sick once more she’d be safe. The real world, the world were people held bites of wind in their cheeks and didn’t worry about whether they’d be conscious the next day, was a volatile place. You were thrown around like sailing a rough sea, rocked and churned until your stomach’s contents turned to fluffs of butter. At one stage she’d liked the excitement, liked the way the danger made her heart flutter like a butterfly using its wings for the first time. But all too often, at the end of summer she would find the insects carcasses rotting on her windowpane, a quick life, one that could have held so much more. Nora felt like a butterfly at the end of a brief season of sun. Health’s sun had warmed her cheeks, scared her and scarred her, let her grow, but now she was re-cocooned in bones. Now, once again, she was sick, back in the world she knew.

"Ilanora, when you get the chance, ask my brothers and sisters about me and they will all tell you the same thing. If something in this house is broken, I will fix it. That includes you. Now put this under your tongue and don't talk for a minute, ka-peesh?”

She liked his arrogant stubbornness, but soon he too would learn. She was not a pot that had shattered, a clock that had worn out. Ilanora had been born broken, the child of a night spent far off and a jar of lies. She knew that she couldn’t be fixed, because she wasn’t broken. Sick had not infected her, sick was just who she was.

At one point, she had even been glad for her mother’s death. How could she have been so stupid? The innocent face that stuck a thermometer under her tongue did not have her melted love in his eyes. The displacement of her tongue, an action that she had repeated a hundred thousand times, was strange, because it was not her doing it. He didn’t twist her hair between his fingers, and calm her down until she went to sleep. In his headstrong way, he busied himself describing her symptoms, speaking directly to her words that she knew, but until now had only been said around her.

"You're only as healthy as you want to be, Ilanora. Girl like you, you should be dreaming of something bigger than a sickbed for the rest of your life, whatever the rest of the medical world told you. Most of us are complete idiots."

He had been wrong with her diagnosis, she was sure, his young mind determined to not acknowledge the fact that he too was wrong. But about that, he was right. They had always been wrong in the past, none of them knew what they were talking about.

And he was just another of them. So why did she want so badly to trust him?

“You know my history, right, Riley Lightwood? Surely your-“ she stopped and then smiled slyly “-our- mother told you?”

“Munchausen’s by Proxy. Heard of it? That’s what they said my mum had, after she died and I suddenly became better. I’d always been sick, see, and they never managed to fix it, so when I went into some sort of remission they blamed someone else, said it wasn’t their fault they couldn’t fix it. But, Riley Lightwood, you have a mother, and she seems like a pretty good one. Do you believe that she could make you sick? Because my mum wouldn’t. My mum couldn’t. You’re right you know, most of you are idiots, idiots who made me believe that the only good person in my life had hurt me. And I know you mean well, with your easy-sounding fixes, but they tried all their stupid drugs on me, and they only made me worse. You understand now, Riley Lightwood?”

Her hollow eyes watched her words flutter to his shoulder and perch next to Avon. How had she done that? This boy, no matter his paper-written relations to her, was a stranger, and she had let the weight of her stupid pressing sickness crash down on him.

“I’m sorry, Riley Lightwood. I’m sorry for everything.”