chantilly damask » d8 » wip

apparentia - -

Growing up is a struggle. Anyone will tell you that. They’ll coddle you and hold your face in their hands, hush you as tears slip-slide-fall down your face in dribbles then brooks then rivers then seas, cascading down your cheeks in a non-stopping flow as the world around you grows smaller and you grow taller yourself, become more aware of the things you never wanted to be aware of. Wrists and waists begin to narrow as legs and arms and fingers stretch out, reaching towards the sky or the ground or something else, but as you grow you can’t ask these things anymore. Or else you’ll be laughed at. Ridiculed for not knowing all of the answers yet.

As everything seems to shrink around you, even your reflection starts to look different. A wavering timelapse as you go days, weeks, months without a clear pane of glass, a puddle to look in, anything but a warped, dirty mirror hardly bigger than the palm of your hand that glares back at you with an image you don’t trust. Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes you’ll find yourself staring into a rippling lake and hardly recognize the person staring back at you, something new in their eyes as they see more, experience more, open up their ears to the screams and the terrors of the world no matter how much they want to cover them and yell themselves.

So what do you do when you grow too fast to see your own reflection and not do a double take? There’s no one around to tell her what she looks like, not when she’s twelve and lost in the clouds. She doesn’t check her hair or her cheeks, only sees her own tiny hands lined with the scratches and callouses that come with day after day of sewing and fixing machines as they still rumble and shake, hungry for more than just string. The little scars dotting her forearms from nicking them on the gears, the smudges and grease under her nails that don’t ever wash away, no matter how hard she scrubs, those are the parts of herself that she’s most familiar with. Everything else is a distant memory in her mind, a wavering photograph that she’s not even sure was ever the truth.

Still, there’s some things that she knows. She can see her bones in her knees, can watch them prick and pull and shift under her pale skin, webbed with blue veins. The blood of a girl who doesn’t get enough oxygen in a stuffy factory all day, trying not to breathe in the cotton fluff that would clog her lungs and choke her slowly, day by day, hour by hour, until suddenly she couldn’t get air at all. A slow, painful form of drowning above ground where you never really knew what the effect of every gasp through your mouth could add to the growing toxins tangling around your throat. Her skin isn’t the only thing that shows evidence of her life, it’s shown in every protruding bone. Every wound that should heal with ease, but instead doesn’t so much become festered as it does just not heal, no matter how much time is given. A body that’s shutting down when it’s barely started.

There’s nothing healthy about her gaunt appearance, about the way her legs hardly support her own weight. They wobble and waver and try to collapse underneath her with every gawky step she takes, the ungraceful movements of a growing child that doesn’t know what to do with all of her extra length. Still, she tries. She holds her head up as high as she can with her hair in a golden halo around her neck, sticking every which way with a bird’s-nest like quality. In the right light, she looks like something that stepped out of the forest with her mess of hair, living in a hollowed out tree or a castle made of leaves. There’s almost always something atop that chaotic tangle of knots and flyaways, a crown of wilting flowers or a weave of scrap fabrics, things that were too small to be made into anything that the Capitol would want or to be used even as a patch for one of the worker’s clothes. There was something like a promise in her crystal-blue eyes every time she fashioned another circle and waited for someone to put it atop her head, if only to get her to carry on with her work before she was whipped.

She looks like little more than a ragged doll, thrown over and over into the dirt, dragged through fields and puddles and occasionally dusted off with a rough, careless hand. It used to be that people would tell her parents that she would grow up to be a fine young lady, a pretty girl that could catch a good man’s eye. Now, as she gets older, it’s Peacekeepers whose attention she grabs as they wait and watch, wondering what will become of her, wondering if she’ll keep growing quick and lovely as a rose. She is precious, in her own special light, though as her body fills out and her cheeks become less rounded, there’s nothing to say what will become of her soft smile, her fluttering lashes like hummingbird wings. She’s nothing but a guessing game, and she doesn’t know who she’s playing.

- - persona

When people are scared, they dream. Sometimes, those dreams come only at night, pictures with monsters and phobias chasing them down an alley that never stops, a hill that just keeps getting steeper and steeper until they’re sure it’ll flip them right around, drag them straight into the snapping jaws of their greatest fears. Some kind of symbolism behind the exact moments before they wake up, the tendrils of sleep still grasping onto their wrists and trying to drag them farther down into the abyss that they just escaped, even as they sit up in their beds sweating and wringing their hands. Looking for a way out even though there’s none to be found, even though there’s nowhere for them to go. Because how do you escape your own subconscious or what it’s trying to tell you? You can run from your fears for as long as you might in your waking hours. Trick yourself into thinking it will all be okay while your brain is alert and you’re still in control. But once your eyes close for the last time in a day, then there’s nothing you can do about where your mind takes you.

Scared, angry, confused, unsafe. All reasons to dream. All reasons to wake up screaming, crying, kicking or punching out as you struggle away from the grasp of your own sheets, clinging to you and keeping you restrained to the bed. There’s nothing you can do but relax, take deep breaths as the panic subsides and in its place comes the calm that your mind lulls you into, that paradise in which your pillow is soft and welcoming, more comfortable than a few rags piled on top of each other could ever really be. When dreams are the only way you will listen to your instincts, to yourself, then what choice does your body have but to lead you into the secret places that you keep everything locked away? How can you move forwards in the real world when you can hardly put one foot in front of the other in your dream world without your muscles cramping, aching, begging for mercy. Begging for you to give up.

Then there’s the dreams that come as whispers, as a gentle mother’s hand around your shoulders or the soft brush of a lover’s kiss against your cheek. The ambitions and lights of the world, the hope that keeps a steady flicker no matter how desperate things may be. The blind optimism that tells you that maybe, someday, everything really will get better. There will be a magic wand and a fairy godmother, or a lamp and a genie and three wishes, or a kind man with a castle and a carriage, waiting to make your life turn around for you. Waiting for the precise moment, the very second in which they’ll finally be able to take you away to somewhere all of the bad in the world doesn’t matter. Where you can eat enough that your wounds will heal, you can sleep without one hand edging for a blade under your pillow, you can look outside and see blue skies, not the deadly smoke that climbs out of factory stacks.

Those are the kinds of dreams that she lives in. The beautiful wonders and mysteries of the world that she’s yet to see are gateways to other realms, to places she’ll never hurt again. They’re all waiting for her, with princes and other princesses, servants and maids, knights and soldiers all waiting to lay down their lives for her. And she’d accept them all humbly, gaze upon their adoring faces and smile but shake her head, tell them all that she’s nothing but a girl like anyone of them. Shower them with gifts and make sure their families were healthy, make sure they could live almost as comfortably as her with her makeshift crowns upon her head. She’s promised herself time and time again that she’d make the loveliest princess in the world, and later on, the most darling queen. She wants only to be all that’s good in the world.

Yet she lives in these distant realities, choosing to run away from reality. It’s made her distant on the outside, as she tells herself every night before she goes to bed that she must not make friends, just in case they find out her secret. That she’s a long lost princess from a faraway land, away from Panem and far, far away from the Capitol. They mustn’t know, or else someone who was jealous or afraid of the power she’d come to have would kill her on the spot, would watch as she bled diamonds as all princesses do. They’d gather the glittering gems in their hands, stuff them into their pockets and walk away rich, and she’d be the reason a monster was given power over everyone else. No, she couldn’t let that happen, so she kept absolutely silent about it all.

Really, it started out normally. Just as a little girl who made up stories while she was at work, pricking her fingers and scraping her arms on the hungry, ragged metal of the machines that cricked and turned around her. Then it became an obsession as people around her told her that she could make anything with her tiny little hands that so deftly flicked over sewing needles and fabrics, managing to turn scraps into a kaleidoscope dress that could actually sell for a few handfuls of berries, sometimes a bundle of cheese or half a bottle of goat’s milk. So when she heard this enough times, tossing the compliment away every time with a brush and a small quirk of her lips, she began to think of just what “everything” entailed. When she realized there was no limit at all, she built her very own kingdom with her hands, drawing it in the dirt behind her rickety house and calling it real.

Now it’s an all-encompassing obsession, a reason to stay quiet and shy. To fold in on herself and do nothing but work, work, work. She has to do at least that, with her parents relying on her for the pennies that she earned. She doesn’t speak, hasn’t said a word to anyone in years. There’s some people who think she’s mute, but really, she can speak just fine. She does, too, whispering out of her window to the birds and the sparse trees, telling them to send news back to her castle that she’s okay. That she’ll be home to them as soon as she can find a way out. That there’s no reason to worry, as she’ll be just as much a princess in a few days as she always has. She doesn’t understand that there’s anything strange about her words, or stranger about what she talks to, or stranger still about who she doesn’t open her mouth for, not even for a second. And all the while, she’s always had people to protect her. No one to tell her to knock it off.

It’s a dangerous combination. A wild imagination and desperation. More dangerous still when there’s no one to put out a spark.

historia - -

WIP WIP WIP