harlan fray {district one} fin

She's got stained, scarred lips. She's a liar and a cheater, but her tongue is clean of broken promises. The only honorable thing about her is her word- she holds it so dearly, so high above her head. She's a liar and a cheater and most of all, a thief ("finders keepers," she'll snicker), but she tattoos promises onto her insides and never lets them go.

She couldn't bring herself to. Her mother had tucked her in at night after she had kicked off her covers in her flurry of terror in the wake of a nightmare. She made a promise that she shattered with one swift stroke of a match- she promised, with love in her eyes, that she would always be just down the hallway. She promised, with the sun on her lips, that she would always be there, no matter what.

Her mother was no liar- she just couldn't see.

The Frays took her in when she was five. Her old life is still engraved into her mind, drawn in charcoal all over the walls of her skull, despite how quickly it ended. She still flinches at the flicker of a flame- she remembers the fire engulfing her, hissing threats into her ears that they would crawl up her flesh and consume her as they had consumed her parents. They were beasts and the echo of their roars would never fade from her ears.

When she twists within herself, spirals within her own mind about what happened, she imagines how her mother would have looked when she lit the cigarette and how such a small, meaningless action could send a story slamming to a close. She must have worn a nonchalant face of stone as she struck the match against its box and held it up to the cigarette perched between her lips. The smoke must have risen into the starless sky like a veil of dove gray, and her mother's head must have been empty of worry- truly careless and blind towards what lurked in the encroaching future.

It ends there- she shrinks away from the thought of fire alone and the ashes it left in its wake. It turned her home into a graveyard and her mind into a headstone, where Lula Kaspar and Xander Kaspar are etched in cruel, bold letters.

She tries to go through her day- through training and plastering a smile across her face at the dinner table and sitting up straight and crossing her I's and dotting her T's- without regressing back to the flames and the ash. But it's an uphill battle and her mind likes to disobey.

Perhaps she was never meant to be a Fray- perhaps it was a mistake that they raised her up from her bed of ashes and called her their own. She isn't one of their golden girls- one of their trophies. She's tarnished and cracked and her delicate body was not made for training. Her hands are too frail to carry a sword- she can feel her arms plummeting to the ground against its weight- and her fists are too fragile to throw a punch.

The blood that courses through her veins is not theirs, and it is not them- not one single sibling out of the horde of them, not one little piece- she sees when her eyes scrape up from the floor to the mirror. It is her parents that stare back at her, each just as haunting as the other. She is split half and half between her mother and her father. In her eyes, she swears she can see the same gleam she saw in her mother's the night she leaned over and let the promise (I'll always be just down the hallway, I'll always be right there") slip out of her mouth. Her eyes are blue, blue, blue, like the sea. They are just how she remembers her mother's eyes to be.

And her hair, pouring down her back in and spilling across her shoulders, belongs to her father. It is dark- almost ebony- and unruly, and there's a lot of it. It serves as a curtain when she looks down at the floor to avoid the eyes that burn into her flesh at the dinner table. On the days she spends in the sun, she can see the ghost of red in the light, and she can feel the color bleeding onto her skin, turning porcelain to pale gold.

She's turned the mirrors to face the wall in her room- she doesn't want to see her parents along the curves of her face or the gentle slope of her nose.

It is a reminder she doesn't need when they're already engraved into her mind.

{ table: zoë }

THE CLOUDS MOVE OVER THE PONTIAC SKIES
THEIR SILENT THUNDER MATCHES MINE
I KNOW THIS FEELING FROM LONG AGO
I WONDER WAS IT GONE, BUT NOW I KNOW