home is [wherever] i'm with you {south/riley}

RILEY KALEN LIGHTWOOD

now every single crack, every penny that i pass
says i should either leave or pick it up
but with every single buck i've made i'm saddled with bad luck
that came the moment i was baptized
or when i found out one day i'm gonna die

Doctor Riley Lightwood.

The words sound stilted and awkward in my brain; the title fits all wrong on my narrow shoulders like a little boy waddling around in his father's too-big suit jacket. But it's been a hell of a long time since I was a little boy, even though I still have to stop and remind myself that the shiny new Dr. Lightwood name tag pinned to the lapel of my lab coat has come at the price of years of training. Years. I'll be twenty-one next month, but that can't be right, because it was only days ago that I was stressing over my algebra exam instead of my medical certification test, maybe a few weeks tops that Avon and I were sipping hot chocolate by the fire and talking about nothing and everything at once. People always tell me I grew up too fast, but what they never realize is that it wasn't my choice. My life has gone by in a blur of sorrow and brief bright spots and it's all I can do to just hold on for dear life and pray the curve of the earth doesn't get too steep.

I still remember what it felt like to slip into the darkness that never leaves the edges of my mind. There's a storybook of scars all over my skin that still whisper warning fables of a time when my only sanity came on the edge of a razor. Fenn swears in the darkest part of the night that they're beautiful, but she'll never know the details, the ugly stories they tell. I can remember every chapter written in my own bloodstained hand, both a cautionary tale and a carefully-preserved history inscribed across spindly limbs to remind me that no matter how close to the edge I feel now, there was a time when I was worse. I have not opened my veins for one year, three months, and seventeen days, and although I'm still finding out who I am, there's a certain comfort in knowing that I'm not who I was. A plastic name tag and a framed diploma won't solve a twenty-year identity crisis, I know it's not that easy, and yet somehow being able to say hi, I'm Doctor Riley Lightwood manages to make me feel a little bit more grounded, more secure, even though I've only been Doctor Riley Lightwood for a total of about an hour and a half.

The scores from my certification test are clutched in my still-shaking, clammy hands, and I have to stop every few seconds on the way down the road to gape at them, make sure I'm not hallucinating. Top of my class. Highest score in the last five years. I've always been smart, sure, but for life to actually give me an advantage in something I hold dear? I've been wondering when the other shoe's going to drop since before the first one hit the ground. And yet, what could possibly change what's written in ink right in front of me, could change the gilded diploma sitting back at my apartment or alter the words on the freshly-made chip of plastic pinned to my jacket? Nothing. So maybe, just maybe, this once I can allow myself some measure of satisfaction without wondering where the catch is.

The mansion looks different post-earthquake, all rebuilt and refurbished until it hardly resembles the place where I grew up. New carpet, new wallpaper, new Lightwoods, everything takes the home out of the place and that's why usually, I don't drop by that often. Today, though, it doesn't bother me, the door swinging wide and left open in the breeze as I dart across the entrance hall and scoop a bypassing Keela up around the waist, spinning her in circles and grinning like an idiot. "I passed! Record scores! I start my residency on Monday, Keels, holy shit, I'm a doctor!"

"Of course you passed. I've been planning the party to celebrate for weeks." A voice cuts across the entrance hall that sparks a visible tightening in my jaw, eyes hardening in a way they almost never do. I don't resent my adopted siblings, who could never be blamed for wanting an easy life over the community home, but I can certainly resent my mother for trying to fill the Avon-shaped hole in our lives with a slew of children like we're some warped, heartsick pseudo-Morenos. Mom breezes across the marble tile in her same fantasy world she's lived in since Dad died, placing a hand on my shoulder and not even noticing how I stiffen beneath the touch. "It'll be black tie, of course. I got you a new tux, sweetheart, it's upstairs in your old room."

"Yeah. Cool. Thanks," I say flatly, shrugging off her hand and loping up the grand staircase two steps at a time, still not able to shake the feeling that these halls are too haunted with the stains of human misery for me to ever feel comfortable here. I found out my father was dying on that corner, Xavier hit me so hard it broke my jaw in that spare room, and Avon, Avon slept right in there...

My hand reaches for the dusty knob but thinks better of it halfway, palm settling flat against the wood as I sigh. There are some things I'll never be ready to deal with. Heart feeling considerably heavier, I turn and walk to the next door down, the decor of my old room exactly the same as it ever was, shades of green, flawlessly organized, guitars that wouldn't fit in my apartment hanging all over the walls. The only thing that isn't familiar is the lithe form reaching up to ghost her fingers across the strings of a mother-of-pearl inlaid acoustic that Avon and Nettie got me for our fifteenth birthday.

"You play?" I ask quietly, names rushing through my head until Abra associates itself with her delicate features and the brokenness behind her eyes. She turns and I put my hands up slightly, a mild smile pulling at my lips. "Hey, sorry, didn't mean to startle you. I just dropped by to get some stuff. You're welcome to play any of those guitars as long as you promise to take good care of them, by the way. It kills me to watch 'em sit there and get dusty, but there's less than zero room in my apartment."

Throwing the test results down on my bed, I walk up beside her and brush my fingers over the masterful inlay on the neck of the guitar she'd been looking at before pulling the instrument off the rack with a small exhale of effort, perching on the edge of my bed and tuning it up. I strum a few chords, grin at the dulcet tones, remember coaxing out Spanish malaguenas and blues riffs from the polished rosewood and steel strings. "This one was one of my favorites. Great resonance, really smooth tone. That's the rosewood in the body, see? The artisan woods are what makes a Lightwood guitar have a better sound than others."

At the end of the monologue I have a fleeting thought of what my life might be like if I hadn't grabbed the reins and steered down my own path. I could be an excellent craftsman of musical instruments, it's been in my blood for generations, but would I be happy? Probably not. Keela's always been the CEO in this family and everyone knows it, which is why she's sitting in a business suit behind a desk right now, and I'm setting broken bones and giving out flu shots. Am I happy now?

Working on it. Definitely working on it.

Riffing absently into an intricate bit of improvisation, dark and layered with a Latin sort of sound to it, I grin up at Abra again and trail off, strumming one last chord before carefully holding the guitar out in her direction. "Here. Take care of my baby. She deserves a good home, and you look like you'll take good care of her. Call it an early Ratmas present."

oh, be calm, be calm, i know you feel like you are breaking down
i know it gets so hard sometimes, be calm
take it from me, i've been there a thousand times
you hate your pulse because it still thinks you're alive
and everything's wrong, it gets so hard sometimes, be calm

word count: 1391 JESUS CHRIST
song: be calm - fun.
outfit: click here
notes: this is what he was playing

RILEY KALEN LIGHTWOOD

come on, skinny love, just last the year
pour a little salt, we were never here
my, my, my, staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer
told my love to wreck it all, cut out all the ropes and let me fall
my, my, my, right in the moment, this order's tall

Abra holds the guitar like she might break it (or like it might break her, if there's one thing I've ever learned it's that there's a fine, fine line) if she isn't careful, her fingers ghosting along the frets and strings uncertainly. I remember her from before she was Abra Lightwood although I never told her as much, remember doing my intern's rotation on the trauma ward and seeing her battered, bloodied form wheeled in on a gurney, her brother whisked off to the oncology wing that no one has the guts to call by its real name - the place lost causes go to die. I remember hearing her screams of denial echo down the sterile hallways, thinking that maybe if I'd shouted my disapproval at the world that loudly Avon might still be breathing. But neither Abra's screams nor mine could save the people we loved in the end, and so it seems that in the months and years since, we've lapsed into silence, the two of us, only making our heartbreak known in six strings and pretty turns of phrase.

I've lost so much more than I could ever find the words to express. My entire life has been a cycle of loving something and then losing it - my father, my sister, my daughter... I force myself to stop the train of thought there; even a year later the place in my heart reserved for Lucy is raw and fragile and can't stand to be touched. I haven't said a word about it since we put her in the ground, never spoke her name aloud because it hurt, it hurt more than my soul could stand and in the end, I still clung tightly to the cardinal rule of life as a Lightwood: If we don't talk about it, then it isn't real. But Abra. Abra didn't grow up in my careful world of well-intentioned lies and calculated evasions, doesn't know what it means to really be a Lightwood and let everything that blackens your soul simmer beneath your skin until you want to scream but can't, until the only way to pull yourself back off the edge of oblivion is to carve silent crimson apologies into your flesh and hope all the darkness bleeds out along with your lifeblood. There's an exquisite sort of heartbreak in her song, in the way her body curls around the guitar like it's become her last salvation, and the big brother in me wants to pet the hair back from where it hangs in front of her eyes, smile and lie to her and swear that it gets better, that time heals the wounds of loss. But I promised a long time ago to stop lying, and lying to Abra would be like lying to a younger version of myself.

So instead I bite my well-meaning tongue (the road to hell is paved with good intentions, most of them my own) and grab another acoustic off its rack, sitting next to her at a careful distance as she finishes her song and riffing a bit over her chord structure, turning her singular melody into something deeper and richer. It fades to silence, our conversation without words, and slowly her eyes rise to meet mine. "Thank you."

"No problem. You're really good," I smile, absently tuning up my low E string and letting my fingers fret over the familiar grid of rosewood and wound steel. There are so many things to say pressing against the backs of my teeth, insistent and pushy and utterly not my place to speak. But still, the quiet brokenness in her eyes reminds me far too much of looking in a mirror, and the careful dam of my silence breaks at the idea of watching someone like her, someone who doesn't deserve it have to deal with the broken-record replay of all the mistakes I made in life.

"Look, Abra, I'm completely overstepping my bounds by saying this, but I know how you feel," I mutter quietly, a mournful sort of melody blooming beneath my nervous fingers. "I've been where you are. I've lost people. My dad died when I was six, and then there was Avon, and then last year..."

I almost choke on the words, but my new policy is to live by example and so I force them past my lips for the very first time. "And then last year I lost my daughter. So I know how you feel right now. Like you're falling headfirst at a million miles an hour and the ground's getting closer and closer and there's nothing there to catch you. But you've got to understand, gritting your teeth and trying to stay quiet through it isn't the answer, okay?"

Perhaps I've never understood people, or maybe it's just that I got so used to being everybody's fathermotherbrother that I don't understand personal boundaries, but it feels as natural reaching over to lay a hand on her shoulder a it would if she were Keela or Aris or Avon. The skin of her arms is pale and unblemished but in a terrifying twist of my overactive imagination I can see it overlayed with a crimson lattice of unspoken regret, and my breath stalls in my throat. Even after everything, I'm still trying to save people like I couldn't save myself.

"That's what I tried to do, to just stay quiet and soldier through it, and it nearly destroyed me," I say softly, removing the hand from her shoulder to roll back one of my sleeves and give her a glimpse at the intricate pattern of old scar tissue that crisscrosses the abused skin of my forearm. "And I don't want that for you. For anyone. So if you ever need to talk about it, to cry or scream or throw stuff or just know that you've got someone there who understands, you know where to find me, okay? Don't do what I did."

My eyes leave her face and trail to the faded family photos on my dresser, tracing the fifteen-year-old-features of Avon's tight-lipped half smile and my own soft, earnest grin. "I know it feels like there's nothing to stop you from falling, but there's always someone to catch you. You're never as alone as you feel."

and i told you to be patient, and i told you to be fine
and i told you to be balanced, and i told you to be kind
and in the morning i'll be with you, but it will be a different "kind"
'cause i'll be holding all the tickets
and you'll be owning all the fines

word count: 1041
song: skinny love - birdy
outfit: click here
notes: WOW RILEY WAY TO OVERSTEP YOUR BOUNDARIES