Tell Me A Riddle, Mama [open, reaction]

She had barely enough time to turn towards the knife wielding figure or wrap her head around why on panem he was even on the roof, getting involved in things that didn’t concern him when a brick sailed through the air. Tallow—now go on and git, y’hear. Peacekeepers are crawling all over these streets!, Elias yelled racing towards her and normally she would have frowned and given anyone that dared talk to her like a mare or a badly behaved dog a piece of her mind and perhaps her foot somewhere in the vicinity of their ass- but she had to admit that, under the circumstances, leaving wasn’t such a bad idea. She could still taste blood in her mouth from the raw, fleshy wound of her torn cheek and the curling ache of her stomach from where the boot had found her so Tallow was in no hurry to face a repetition of the situation. And the next time she might not have been so lucky.

Nodding to Elias, not that he could see her, retreating as quickly as he was- Tallow started forwards to make her escape too, get home and get back to her brother only to almost collide with Jack. Face to face with him, her mouth became a thin line with the hint of a snarl lingering at the edges of it. She was tempted to spit in his face but before she could summon enough saliva to make it impressive, he spoke to her. What you feel is not love.

Wordlessly her mouth twitched, unable to think of anything particularly cruel or pithy to say- caught as off guard as she is by what he just said. And before she has time to, he was climbing down the rooftop.

What you feel is not love.

And it wasn’t that the accusation took her by surprise, she reflected as she watched her nemesis retreating, more the fact that he thought it was news to Tallow. No, she definitely didn’t love Noreen and today- to Tallow- was born out of hatred rather than any other emotion. She was slim and slight, like a stalk of cotton when it reaches its full height in the summer and there wasn’t much room in her for anything remotely like love. Perhaps at one point she’d been capable of loving things, but that had been squished and squashed down under a pile of pig faeces and mud, the smell of alcohol on her father’s breath and the sound of hate coursing through the Tansy family’s tin can shack.

“You don’t know nothin’ about me, Jack!” she finally managed to shout out into the air, over the roar of fire and the peacekeepers below. He might have heard her, he might not. Maybe Tallow was just saying it for herself.

What she feels is not love because, to Tallow, love is an alien concept.

Perhaps that was for the best though, because even when she loved something Tallow seemed to do it wrong. She was supposed to love her brother after all, pretty much the only person she could love and even Tallow had to admit that- quite without meaning it to- she’d managed to warp and twist that love into something strange. Tallow still wasn’t sure how everything had gotten so muddled and so perverse, just had to dimly accept that there was something inside of her that would always screw up something that was supposed to be so simple, that came as natural to other people as breathing .

***

The first time was an accident. A fevered, intoxicating, not- really- at -all accident but Tallow would rather choke on her own teeth than admit it.

It happened in the calm before the storm, before Jack’s beating, before the reapings and before Noreen died and everything else that led to this moment on the roof, watching the whole world burn and sink under a churning mire of blood. Maybe that was the first sign of the aching horrors to follow and that maybe some divine power would come to intercede, to punish them for their sins.

Like so many things, the accident sprang from the garden - its seeds taking root deep in the earth and pushing towards the surface. For a little while, Tallow would watch Scutcher slink off somewhere secret and return with a look in his eye that sent a trembling curl of jealousy through her body. Happiness. Happiness without her, joy in something private and it grew harder and harder for her to tolerate. Their mother already thought that they were too close; had voiced her concerns privately to Tallow one agonisingly awkward evening. It wasn’t right to be so entirely consumed by a sibling, apparently, wasn’t right to burn with righteous love. Tallow disagreed- how could it be wrong when all Scutcher and Tallow had were each other? Maybe if their mother had done her job, had loved them enough and kept them safe then they wouldn’t have had to rely so entirely on themselves, as two people, as one entity. So Tallow went on burning

Burning like her father’s homemade gin sluicing down her throat. He must have known that Tallow swiped it whenever she could, because who else in the house would have? Her mom’s nerves were too obvious each trembling day of her sorry life and though she might desperately need a stiff drink-a little liquid courage- she never would. And Scutcher just wouldn’t steal; another lesson that their father had beaten into him at Tallow’s age or so. That was the way it worked, if it had been her brother then Loomis Tansy would have kicked seven shades of shit out of him, if it was Tallow then he couldn’t give any fucks.

She was late back from stumbling around town with Swallow-Anne, being passed around a group of guys like a nearly burnt out cigarette, but he was later. Slumped over the kitchen table, Tallow lifted her head, slowly tracing the curves of an empty mason jar with a ragged fingernail at the sound of the door handle turning from the outside. “Fuck me, Noodle,” she slurred slightly, but did her best to right herself, pulling herself up from her chair. She never like her brother to see her drunk. “Did you only just get in? Loomis aint got no right to let you work so late… no right.”

Going to him, her hands curled around the lapel of his jacket, helping him to slide it off and Scutcher looks away. “It weren’t work.”

Frowning, Tallow didn’t like the guilty edge to his voice. Her mind wandered to the cause of it and the wild imaginings do little to make her feel better; she imagines a group of people from school thinking it would be funny to take out the retard for a night, press him to do things he doesn’t like, watch him struggle with things outside of his comfort zone. Two weeks ago she'd watched her friends tie a bottle rocket to the tail of a cow, watched them nearly piss themselves laughing. She pictured Scutcher as the cow and wanted to start smashing skulls.

“Where were you then?”

He still won’t look at her, only mumbles at his shoes, “It’s a secret …I don’t wanna say.”

A secret? That word again that didn’t have any right to be said without Tallow well and truly in the mix. Hadn’t they always said, clutching close to each other on the nights that their dad had beaten Scutcher so bad he could hardly see straight out of swollen eyes that it was them against the whole world? Talllow trembled with white hot rage so violently that it took even her by surprise. He will tell her, she has every fucking right to know. “You fuckin’ will say,” she said hotly, taking a hold of his arm before he could slink away from her. “Scutcher where’d you go?”

“I gotta…” he’s the worst liar ever so he didn’t even try. “Tallow its bed time.” Scutcher tried escaping her and Tallow only held firm, shook him a little, angry but also a little desperate. What followed was a half hearted scuffle, Tallow pushing on him, Scutcher pushing away until she stumbled a little, tripped over her own drunken feet and put out her hands to catch her fall.

She should have trusted him to catch her though. He always would. Her brothers arms wrapped around her tightly, pressed into her back, while her arms found themselves against his chest. Her anger made her chest heave but slowly it began to die away. Looking up at him, Tallow was stung with sadness, with a fear that these secrets would be the beginning of the end for them. He’d leave her and stop loving her, of that she was sure- everyone did when it came to Tallow. They burnt her out, used her up and tossed her aside like a cigarette and she’d never ever cared before.

Fuck, Scutcher, if I lost you I think I’d die.

Her hands came up to cup his face, echoing her thoughts. Their eyes have always been the same; his a little rounded and heavy lidded like their mothers, hers narrowed and suspicious like their fathers, but both the same shade of robin’s egg blue- Scutcher blinked at her without any sense of derision, ulterior motive, anything other than innocence and, always, always love. Don’t ever fucking leave me. Pushing forwards, tentative and awkward at first, Tallow allowed herself to forget everything and pressed a kiss to his lips.

There was nothing so wrong with that. She kissed him all the time, for comfort, for affection, sometimes just to prove to her mother that- above anybody else- she could. But Tallow didn’t usually thread the back of her hand through his hair to keep him close, didn’t usually feel her chest ache and coax open his mouth with hers. Their tongues never brushed and mingled, she never breathed his breath through her own keening lungs or felt a familiar thrumming at her core.

Accidentally.

Keeping him close, Tallow felt Scutcher relax beneath her grip and when she ought to have taken her moment and pulled away, face hot and filled with the worst shame of her life, she didn’t.

Her hands gripped hard on his hair pushed him backwards into the corrugated metal walls of their messed up little house. Tallow couldn’t stop kissing him. Teeth clashing primal and strange, eyes shut against the world but always aware that it was him. Her best best brother. She remembered that and she didn’t kiss him in spite of their shared history, their blood tie. That wasn’t it at all. More that she had to grasp and clutch and paw at him because of it. They shared too much already, that it seemed only natural that her body should be his too, pressed up against him as close as she could, feeling him brush against the expanse between her thighs and trembling. His hands came round to almost hold her, but not quite; clutching firm and then hanging limp.

A jolt from somewhere inside of the house was enough to rip her from her thoughts, probably a rat snuffling around for scraps of stale bread, but it served to reminder of where she was and what she was doing with her brother in the front room of their parent’s house.

Pulling away, she could hardly look at him, her lips as swollen feeling as his seemed. There was a pregnant pause that swelled over the air and felt like a heavy weight pressed into her temple. “Tallow…I…I don’t feel so good,”he mumbled to his feet, a hot flush rising to the surface of his skin. “I gotta go to bed.”

Nodding, Tallow didn’t know what to do with her hands, scratching at her neck so hard that it began to sting, began to rip at her skin. Forcing herself to look at his retreating figure, she wished she could step inside of his head and find out if he knew what the fuck had just happened.

Shit, she still didn’t even know if she did.

***

All the same, she couldn’t not go back to him, standing at the edge of a burning world all she wanted now was to be home. Forget the tin can shack, that was just a place and everything inside of it was junk. Home was where he was. And that had to be love right? Scutcher was her brother and she loved him so much that it burnt. But—and honestly it had been like this for a long time now-- she wasn’t sure exactly what love meant.

So maybe Jack had it right.

Taking off running Tallow, followed the path Elias had taken through the building and out into the alley where she found him, feeling a little out of breath as the years of tar from cigarette smoke building up in her chest made her corrupted lungs begin heave. Reaching out to tug the sleeve of his shirt, she cast up the alley desperately in case Peacekeepers were trying to block them off.

“I got a place you can come to if you wanna lie low for a while,” she said hurriedly, “out of town.” He’d saved her from the man with the knife after all, and she still had to hand it to him for being essentially the orchestrator of the chaos unfolding so Tallow figured she at least ought to offer him a place to hide. She started running again and if Elias wanted to follow then it was up to him.