DANIELLE DRAKE, D1 :: FIN

"I do not have a gentle heart."

white lips, pale face, breathing in the snowflakes, burnt lungs, sour taste
light's gone, day's end, struggling to pay rent, long nights, strange men
and they say she's in the class a team, stuck in her daydream, been this way since eighteen
but lately her face seems slowly sinking, wasting, crumbling like pastries
and they scream the worst things in life come free to us

( a g e ) sixteen
( g e n d e r ) female
( l o c a t i o n ) district one
( s e x u a l i t y ) whatever pays the most
( o c c u p a t i o n ) mother of geckos

'cause we're just under the upper hand, and go mad for a couple grams
and she don't want to go outside tonight
and in her pipe she flies to the motherland
or sells love to another man
it's too cold outside for angels to fly

( b i o g r a p h y )

"I have never been nothing. I am the blood of the Dragon."

ripped gloves, raincoat, try to swim, stay afloat, dry house, wet clothes
loose change, bank notes, weary eyes and dry throat, call girl, no phone
and they say she's in the class a team, stuck in her daydream, been this way since eighteen
but lately her face seems slowly sinking, wasting, crumbling like pastries
and they scream the worst things in life come free to us

If I look back, I am lost. That has been the only prayer I've prayed ever since I can remember, taught to me in the long gone days of my wide-eyed childhood innocence by a brother who was old enough to see the horrors ahead even if I couldn't. Always look forward, Dany. If we look back, we are lost. Over the years I've learned to take Victor's commands with a grain of salt, but I've never directly disobeyed one, and so I have never looked back, at least not outwardly, never asked to go back to a home that no longer exists or spoken of the embrace of a family that no longer lives. But inside my head is a realm that Victor can't touch, and sometimes in the bounds of my imagination I forge my own destiny and allow myself a glimpse of days gone by. If I look back I am lost, if I look back I am lost, but I've been lost for so long that a moment of nostalgia once in a while is all that allows me to remember who I am.

And I am the blood of the Dragon.

Our house had a red door. That's really the only thing I can remember about the place itself. Sometimes Victor breaks his own rule and looks back, talks about marble floors and sweeping staircases and damask curtains, but all I can really envision is the bright vermillion paint of that red door, the golden shimmer of the dragon's-head knocker set into it. I grew up in the shadow of that door, turning cartwheels down the entrance hall, begging Victor for piggyback rides on the front lawn, and finally standing with him on the curb as we watched the flames consume that red door along with the rest of our lives.

I remember the people inside the house better than the house itself. My mother was gentle even if she was always a little off, or so people whispered when they thought her children couldn't hear. Maybe I hold the bias of a child that loved her mother, but to me she was perfect, a paragon of beauty with silverblonde hair and violet eyes, neither of which I had inherited. Still, sometimes she would pull my squirming body into her lap as I ran by in a frenzy of play, would weave my wild honey-colored waves back into intricate braids with her clever fingers. On occasion she would even hold me still for a bit longer with the promise of her massive box of Drake cosmetics, her touch feather-light as she'd swipe blush over my high cheekbones, dab gloss onto my too-full lips and carefully apply mascara until my eyes shone like blue diamonds. You'll be a model on the company posters one day, Dany, she told me, and I loved her for that, for making me feel like a princess despite the fact that my head had never known the weight of a crown.

They say my father was mad, though. Again, the truth of that matter is lost under a child's bias coupled with the fact that Victor and I never really saw him enough to know. Drake Cosmetics had been in the family for generations, and our father was determined to make the company rise higher than ever, slaving away at all hours behind a desk or in conference rooms - if he truly was mad, it's not hard to see how he lost his sanity. No person should ever work so much that it's hard for their children to remember their face. But on the rare instances that I did see him, he never seemed mad at all. I remember him being kind, like my mother, and always proud of his children. He'd ruffle Victor's hair and promise to take him into work to show him how the company worked soon, would snatch me out of thin air as I ran through the halls screeching like a little hellion and spin me skyward, grinning at my mother all the while. Look at this one, Rhaenys. She's got the blood of the Dragon, look at her fly.

According to some people, Victor's and my own Dragon-blood was a little stronger than it should have been. We both heard the whispers around town, affronted murmurs that named our mother as our aunt and our father as our uncle, but it wasn't until we heard the word abominations that Mama started sheltering us more, enrolling us in a home-school program and withdrawing us even further behind our red door where the scorn of society couldn't hurt us. That sort of thing simply wasn't strange in our world. The company held importance above all, and the more outsiders we allowed into its workings, the higher the risk of losing it became. The blood of the Dragon had to be kept pure. It wasn't any stalwart ultimatum or ominous rule hanging overhead, it was simply a fact of life. And I was fine with it. My father and mother always smiled at each other and seemed happy, and Victor was just as kind to me as they were, two years older but seeming infinitely wiser in his razor-tipped smiles and quick wit. For my seventh birthday he gave me three baby geckos, told me that if I was going to be a Mother of Dragons one day that I needed some practice. I named them Balerion, Vhaegar, and Meraxes, after the most powerful dragons from the story-books our mother had read to us for years of bedtimes, and they became my children, traveling around on my shoulder and becoming the focus of all my attention. I would be a good Mother of Dragons, I decided, at least if my prowess as Mother of Geckos indicated anything. My future seemed solid and bright, a happy little self-contained universe behind that red door of ours with my parents and my brother and the future-ghosts of little blonde, blue-eyed children screeching through the halls, Dragon-blooded all the way to the bone.

When I was eight years old, my pretty future went up in flames. Somewhere beneath the radar of all my happy fantasies, Drake Cosmetics had gone bankrupt. That was when my father really went mad, they say, choosing to burn down his house and doom his own family rather than be foreclosed upon and watch them descend into poverty. To this day, I'm not really sure if it was a fortunate or unfortunate thing that Victor and I (and my geckos) had left to go for ice cream down the street no more than five minutes before our father returned with his deadly ultimatum. We saw the smoke but thought nothing of it at first, maybe the Lightwoods having a summer barbecue, but as we walked home, saw the flames skyrocketing up over the trees, we knew - Everything we'd ever been promised was gone. I stood on the side of the road shrieking, my tears and frantic, half-crazed attempts to run back in the house (Fire can't kill a Dragon, let me go, Victor, let me go!) muffled in by brother's shoulder and locked within arms that were hatefully stronger than even my most valiant efforts. In the end, all we could do was stand there and watch. We watched as the red door crumbled beneath the flames, watched as the fire trucks rolled up too-late, watched them bring the charred remains of our family out of the wreckage draped in white sheets. I think that's when Victor went mad. In that moment I went a little mad myself.

There was nothing left for us. Our family had burned, our inheritance had gone down with the company, and the future we had both grown up believing in was nothing more than a pile of ashes around our feet. We became Wards of the District, sent off packing to a community home in the most terrifying part of the slums to languish with other motherless children until we came of age - and then what? Victor had no company to inherit; all of our family's assets had been liquidated, spread out between the Lightwoods and Shores and Morenos and anyone else that had been smart enough to buy stock in Drake Cosmetics before it all went up in smoke. All we had was a safety deposit box at the bank, a small wad of emergency cash tucked in with an ebony box of our mother's finest jewelry. The cash was gone soon enough, spent foolishly on the fine clothes we were so used to as we grew out of the ones that had been on our backs the day everything burned. We were so accustomed to affluence, we two homeless Dragon-children, and we had no idea how to be poor. We'd grown up with bellies full of rich food that the community home couldn't satisfy, and when the growling of my stomach started punctuating the darkness at night Victor even sold my mother's jewels for extra helpings of snacks that we kept secreted away under loose floorboards and under our mattresses. Our mother's well-meaning sheltering had been our downfall. The others in the home were children of the street, rough and ragged and utterly terrifying, and to this day I think it's only because of their own sort of misguided pity that they didn't tear us to shreds. We did a good enough job of tearing ourselves apart, anyway.

Victor's descent into the realm of insanity wasn't gradual, wasn't the same graceful downward spiral that had claimed our father. People say that madness and greatness are two sides of a coin, and every time a Drake is born Fate takes that coin and flips it. My father had always danced a bit too close to madness, and so it only made sense that my brother, and by extent myself would as well. There were warnings, now that I think back on it, small blips on the radar that should have set off alarms in my head but never did. I wanted to believe in Victor. I wanted to trust him because he was all I had, and that idealistic fantasy was what blinded me to the impending horrors lurking beneath his skin until it was too late. We grew up afraid, two directionless children with a past in ashes and a terrifyingly blank slate for a future, and fear drives people over the edge faster than anything else. We both wanted our old life back even though we didn't often say as much (if we look back, we are lost), but in the end it was Victor, not me who decided that the high road would never lead us anywhere but to misery.

You have a woman's body now,