porcelain | scar & shadow

An ice castle. That is what I have become. And perched upon an even icier throne is a formidable queen with blades for jewelry and menacing eyes to match. Her kingdom is ice, but she is stone, a boulder refusing to abdicate the throne.

And her name?

Daria.

Her screaming soul has woven itself into every fiber of my being. Agony does not recede, even as her ruined body lies six feet under in a casket. I could stomp on her grave and turn her final resting place into a barren, charcoal wasteland with a match and a puddle of gasoline. I could dig her up and toss her - or her bones, her skeleton, whatever she is now - into an incinerator or crush them into dust with a hammer.

But channeling my hatred in such a violent, morbid way would mean nothing but a hasty cleanup. I'd still be broken, just as I was before I made her bleed until she begged for forgiveness and spilled faux sorrows, before I let her hang like she was nothing.

If only it were true that Daria Blackwater was indeed nothing.

She was something. A monster, a rapist, my nightmare, a sadistic little fuck.

I wish the searing memory of her, burned into my mind, would crumble to dust and leave me, without a single fragment of its horror left behind.

She once said she would never leave me.

She meant it.

I can feel her squirming in my veins; I can see her blood on my hands that never washed off, staining my skin like red wine spilled on a carpet. There was a time when I found the crimson color ravishing, when I wore it like a crown, and now -

and now it is a ghost, plastered onto my skin.

I never left that room, as Daria never left me.

My body is at school or down the hall or in the dining room, an empty vessel without lights in its eyes, but my soul remains drifting along the walls, brushing its fingertips on the chair.

Just like Daria, I never break promises.

I'll never leave that room.

But we're all broken beneath this roof, just fragments of who we used to be - who we should be.

My sister's lips have been threaded through by the string of horror, and tied into bleak silence. But her demons, their names I do not know, scream in her eyes. Something has chased her into darkness. Something has finally taken a hammer to her chest and shattered her like a pane of glass.

And Scar, she was in pieces when they brought her here, to the damnation of broken things. I wonder if parts of her are still scattered in her house, if her blood is still stuck to her mother's knife.

I don't see it crawling beneath her skin or reaching its fingertips past the surface of her brown depths. Not today, while she is glowing with joy and anticipation. She inhales darkness and exhales light.

Happiness is a rare occurrence in the orphanage. It is a burst of light that chases away the darkness that exudes from everyone's pores and adheres to the walls.

I can feel the words threatening to spill out of my mouth in a cry - I KILLED DARIA BLACKWATER - at the sight of her, but I fear I'd break her, too, and her happiness, with the crushing weight of my dark secret.

Before I can utter one word, even a greeting, she says, "Shadow, there's something I wanted to show you. Something that's important to me. I know this is random, but it means a lot. Really."

"Um," I say, unkotting tangled words that swim through my mind. "O-okay. Sure? What is it?"

I am nearly choked by the fear crawling up my throat.