The Age of the Understatement {Aramir, Charity}

Tallow's never tried to pretend that she's perfect. Makeup plastered over the face can hide a multitude of sins; the pebble dash of acne running across her cheeks, broken blood vessels and dry patches of skin, while soaking in lemon juice solution can bring a sheen to her hair but it's only ever skin deep. She's a bitch, she doesn’t know how to love anything properly and above all Tallow is selfish. Selfish when it comes to possessions, selfish with her love, keeping all the things she counts as hers clutched close and jealously guarded like secret piles of gold hidden underneath the floorboards.

Her brother belongs to her and so does Swallow Anne. For Scutcher, it's been something that's developed over the course of their entire lives- her mother would say that she knew the sound of his voice from birth, and would grab out to him with fat, cherubic arms as a man in the desert grasps out for water. Swallow Anne had crept up on her though, just another girl from school- Waddle Anne- as they liked to call her back then, a soft little jelly of a girl with none of the hardness and strength that Tallow- slight from starvation- had always possessed. At first she was good for an audience to Tallow's rants, a little yes man to hang of her every word and stroke the delicately boned, flighty bird that was a teenage girl's ego, then it was just funny to push her into all kinds of situations- testing her out like a length of rubber, stretching her out and seeing how far she could go before she broke. But somewhere down the line she'd started to feel something genuine for the girl, as much as she tried not to admit to it. Tried not to think about some strange maternal instinct towards her friend.

They were slipping out of her reach though, she could only think miserably, slipping off the roof where she'd been sitting with Naif Malloc. The sky above was freckled with the illuminations of the sky though the party underneath the tent was slowly winding down, it's lights fading like a dying red dwarf as people, heads heavy with lethargy began to swarm from under the tarp like moths heading towards their next source of light. There were families leaving the tent, couples leaning against each other and though she scanned out into the distance for her brother, still somewhere looking for the nameplate that she had tossed, she couldn't find him out there anyway.

Let him look for a hundred years, Tallow didn't care. She was still angry at him. Still angry at the world really, her Ms. District Ten sash folded neatly over her arm, the crown swinging neglected at the end of her fingers as she stalked her way through the crowds. It didn't feel right for her to be alone at the end of the evening- she was Ms. District Ten after all, didn’t that mean she was something special? Her things were nowhere to be found, had been stolen out from under her nose even though she thought she'd been keeping them so carefully under her thumb. Scutcher had the memory of his dear dearest dead woman while Swallow Anne now had her stupid, boring, kiddy fiddling farm boy.

Hadn't she always stooped to tie Scutcher's shoe laces when he needed her to? Hadn't she sat with Swallow Anne when she was bored of the community home kids, busting her out of that god-awful place and taking her into bars in town, making her smile and laugh out loud like the air was all hers. And now I need them...more than ever

[/i]...more than they’d ever needed her and she'd still been there, Tallow would never think or admit to herself, and they are nowhere to be found. Ungrateful bastards, fuck them both. Second place, way way behind these undeserving people (what had Noreen ever done for Scutcher, what made Nakota so fucking special?) didn't sit right with Tallow, not when she was so accustomed to getting her way- she had the crown to prove it now and for a second Tallow felt like she might be fighting the urge not to cry. But that wouldn't be like herself at all, so she sniffed back the sadness as forcefully as she could, slipping under the tent.

She wanted to do something reckless. The way that they used to. She wanted to down the nearest drink and grab onto the nearest boy- not because it would make her happy- just because she wanted to feel like she still could. Her eyelids felt heavy, her heart felt sick and Tallow knew for sure that even if she was offered, she probably still wouldn’t. All she would do was go home alone and curl up into a ball in bed, praying for a night of dreamless sleep. They were all of them growing up now, weren't they? Tallow could have sworn she'd always been a woman grown, stepping out of the womb at about age thirty and wearied by all the trouble she’d seen by thirteen but it was in these moments, in the dying light of the dance, as the musicians packed away their instruments and the decorations slumped impotently to the floor that she realised how much growing up there was left to be done, how much more of her already sparse desert of innocence was left to be stolen from her.

Reaching into her skirts, she came up with her hip flask again and plonked herself down on the grass, a cold dead expression in her eyes as she watched the revellers leave. As a familiar figure passed her, along with one that she didn’t know- though she’d heard enough about him to last a lifetime and it was too dark to make a proper assessment- she took another swig of the drink, a deep one, her legs feeling cold and her shoulder bare for want of someone’s heavy arm curled around her to keep her close. All Tallow had for comfort was the bite of the night’s coldness settling in. “Well,”she said in a mocking voice to alert the couple of her presence. “Aint this…sweet,” though the curl of her lip suggested she thought it was anything but. [/blockquote] [/size][/justify][/color]