read all about it | kieran/ellerie ⋆·✵

D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]
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read all about it | kieran/ellerie ⋆·✵ Nov 6, 2016 9:44:23 GMT -5

Post by D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza] on Nov 6, 2016 9:44:23 GMT -5

I'd once thought that being iron meant being unbreakable. There was more that tied to me to Leticia and Noelia; we were united by blood but found pride in sisterhood. A shoulder to cry on, open arms to run to; I was swallowed whole by the calling of my own name, and once it was called, I was erased.

No longer a girl or sister—only a memory. I now stand alone in the storm with the expectation that death eliminates weakness and sows a seed of growth. It is assumed that I must learn from their mistakes and rise above the tears and brokenhearted feelings which have become my home.

But no two stories are the same, so I find ghosts in myself. And it feels like I have been caught in a cold shower and kept there for eternity, like I have been soaked through with ice, cutting out the warmth and good like it has no place inside me. Blood ties you to a murderous depiction of your name, and when Noelia killed the young boy from Two, I felt my heart sink.

Because in this world, killing equates to strength. And though some see it as a compliment, I cannot bring myself to force resiliency and see beauty in cruelty. My sisters longed for a good life only found within one another: to help, to heal and to save. Born into a game of survival, they forced themselves to wear family like love and be angels of light.

And I see it, I understand how strength sounds like a good thing, but when you believe in service and not servitude, it hurts.

Similarities can be drawn from my experience to countless of others in Ten alone. Notably, the nobility who wear cardboard crowns assuming they will last a lifetime, but this year proved that the untouchable are, in fact, touchable.

Running the roads of freedom would eventually lead Saffron Lowe into a dead end, and when Myara Lowe graced the stage like a lost calf, the Lowe reign came to an end. The calling of her name set the cardboard crown alight, and ashes quickly became an impossible puzzle to piece back together. On the second day, I watched as all the petals were picked from her flower.

She was going to make it—not.

A new victor has been crowned and it is not Myara Lowe, and so the power falls back to the Emberstatt family.

The boy is my age, I see him and realise that at fourteen, the only rain he's ever felt is from the sky. Never ripped, only torn, he doesn't know how it feels to be shredded and question whether or not you still exist. He will never understand the emotions you feel when you read a dead person's diary to try and figure out how they wish to be laid to rest.

Kieran Emberstatt doesn't know. And though our stories are the same in some respects, they are just words on a page. Nothing more, nothing less. He doesn't know, feel or understand self-infliction of emotional pain and I hope that he never has to.

For his sake.

He stands like a cut-out piece of the night. Surrounded by an aura of mystery, I am drawn to the darkness he embodies. Except, I don't know if that is what it really is, and whether I'm pulled by a sick bond that would never be enough to keep us together.

But I stand here alone, my only company: the corpses on my shoulders and voices in my head. They whisper into my ear and there is nothing I can do—it is the only card I have to play.

Perhaps if Leticia or Noelia was here, I'd still be in the garden with dirty knees, wielding a plank of wood like a sword. An unbreakable imagination was cracked two years ago and I am left with cold replays of rising only to make the fall further.

"Kieran," I say, closed eyed, and with a clear heart.

"I don't know the difference between happy and sad any more, and I think that, maybe, you can help me."

Pulse as a headache, the words I speak are heavy. Voice like angels of the past but I sing the devil's song, and I hope that it is Kieran's favourite.

coding : elegant

Last Edit: Nov 6, 2016 9:45:27 GMT -5 by D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]

umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]
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read all about it | kieran/ellerie ⋆·✵ Nov 18, 2016 17:30:09 GMT -5

Post by umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars] on Nov 18, 2016 17:30:09 GMT -5

K I E R A N ;

{ i wanna hold hands with you
i wanna feel close to you }

Who was Kieran Emberstatt, but a boy with luck? A boy who, though barely old enough to be reaped, could say he had lived in two separate districts, could say that his mother, his father, and any adult in his life wore crowns and clean teeth proudly above the rest of their peers? He was born with royal blood; it was never an option.

It was train rides to the Capitol, getting trading cards signed like death certificates, hotel rooms while his mother longed for him to come back and his father tried his best to keep things civil after two failed marriages, an arsenal of children, and a midlife crisis with pretty red hair.

It was not exactly full of glory.

Kieran liked to think when he got older, he would live a life meant for a crowned prince. Perhaps he would be a peacekeeper. Maybe he would fall into his family's footsteps and win the games. He wondered what kind of relentless satisfaction that would have brought him, finally feeling like he had earned his place in the Emberstatt house after a lifetime of hearing he had only gotten lucky.

Well, sure. He certainly had been lucky. Half the people in his class at school were missing a mother or a father or a sibling because of the Games. Kieran had only lost an uncle, and he was far too young then to even remember him. (Often, he felt as if his father was ashamed that he didn't. No, not ashamed, but disappointed.)

He recognized her as a face among the sea of living dead. Kieran had been blessed. Ellerie had been cursed.

Death, despair, heartache and failure. Only memories left to remember the twins, only old pictures and worn clothes and empty rooms. He hated seeing people like that. He knew they resented people like him and, well, he couldn't blame them.

"I don't know the difference between happy and sad any more, and I think that, maybe, you can help me." She confessed. Kieran's blue eyes widened as he stared at the floor.

"Happy and Sad?" He didn't understand. He couldn't imagine a way possible for those lines to blur; Happy was happy and Sad was sad. Water was went, night time brought darkness.

Maybe his life had been too easy.

"It is the difference between daylight and dark. How could a person not know the difference?" he asked.

Last Edit: Nov 18, 2016 17:32:12 GMT -5 by umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]

^{I AM A GARDEN OF BLACK AND RED AGONIES}

D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]
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read all about it | kieran/ellerie ⋆·✵ Nov 19, 2016 12:10:13 GMT -5

Post by D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza] on Nov 19, 2016 12:10:13 GMT -5

Sometimes I think that I'd trade everything to go back. to how things used to be.

And I don't know what that would entail; who I'd have to meet, what I'd have to go through or what devils I'd have to journey with—I know that I'd do it. Driven by the heartache that comes with grief, I find myself longing for a goodnight kiss and words to make the rain disappear. Perhaps it's the selfishness, and perhaps clinging to the past is something that needs to be addressed before the first steps towards progression can be made.

Because cold things have happened. Bitter tragedies, sweet solemnities. Maybe I was made to break—they'll remember me as the Tibideaux who couldn't last the storm. The tears I cry measure the pain which never seems to fade. It is what comes with unluckiness, stacked odds against you make the world seem larger than life.

Steps become hurdles and they become walls. They cannot be climbed, only broken. How can a broken girl possibly have that strength?

She won't, I think, because the girl is nothing.

To the blessed, it is a foreign concept. It plants thick roots in disaster and the flower blooms into a weak heart. The strings are made of hair, the walls are built of sand. Easily played, easily erased. Having a weak heart is something they will never understand.

Kieran Emberstatt is not going to understand.

"Happy and sad?" He asks, eyes pinned to the ground. Confusion plumes between us like smoke from a bonfire; strong scented and warm but it could never be capable of thawing my ice. "It is the difference between daylight and dark. How could a person not know the difference?"

He does not understand.

"Imagine there is a constant storm." My fist clenches. Honesty was never a strength; for years I'd found solace in taking on an entirely different persona and lying about my identity. Playing pretend was simple. "Always raining. The world goes on, it changes, but the rain never lets up."

I was raised with the belief that honesty is the highest form of respect. There's a white noise in my head and it's forcing these words out of my mouth. Each brutal word comes from the heart and is an explanation for a boy who will never understand.

But I can try to make him know what it is like; to have lost and lost again and not the opposite.

"The raindrops come thick and fast, it's hard to see—that is what it is like. I'm lost in my own head."

Leticia and Noelia's demise should have been expected. I should have prepared and collected sandbags to block out what was to come. Hope was so deceiving, making me believe that childhood games would lead to victory. Blind to the true nature of things, lines became blurred.

I looped back to square one.

Living in constant fear that something, someone will be taken. They say that hope is the only thing stronger than fear, but it can't be true, not today or ever. Hope is what drove me to fear, and this fear is set to bring total obliteration.

Does Kieran know what fear is like? To feel it climb up your spine like spiders, to shake with dependence and feel every little death it causes inside?

No.

"You have certainty and I don't. You have what I need."

I had it, once, but that was before and this—this is now.

coding : elegant

umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]
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read all about it | kieran/ellerie ⋆·✵ Dec 3, 2016 13:13:03 GMT -5

Post by umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars] on Dec 3, 2016 13:13:03 GMT -5

K I E R A N ;

{ i wanna hold hands with you
i wanna feel close to you }

"The world goes on, it changes, but the rain never lets up."

Kieran was familiar with thunderous applause and victims of the lightning and the rain-- his storms were the runoff of other people's. His storm was finding his father in the kitchen at two in the morning. Probably another nightmare. Kieran never asked. He never asked about anything to do with Mace's Games because he could see everything in his father's eyes: the ghosts, the skeletons, the answers.

His storms were Paige climbing into his bed and saying, "My sister is batty since those Games." He couldn't blame her. She was his age when she won the games, only a bit older than his enigmatic mother had been when she won. She was madness and poison on the brain, and she had every right to be batty.

His storms were his mother calling him on the phone and, while she had never asked him to, he could hear the hope that he would come back to her in her tone. He couldn't. He ran when he left her. He couldn't run again by going back.

Besides, he had been in District Ten for about four years. He had friends there. And he got to see his mother during the Games and special Capitol occasions. That was more than some people ever saw their mothers.

His storms were not his storms. They were never his storms.

"You have certainty and I don't. You have what I need."

Kieran did not have storms; Ellerie did not have certainty. Kieran probably didn't either, but if she could bring him the rain, it was his job to deliver the sunlight.

He closed his hand around her shoulder. The graveyard girl was fractured, fragments of light breaking through the treetops, damaged goods as much as he was-- she was just a girl, wasn't she?

"Ellerie..." he whispered. The girl with no one seemed keen on finding him in the dark, and he wondered if she would get to him in time.

"Life has been so unkind to you. You should hate people like me. You should spit at the mention of my name, but you don't. You're here." She was everywhere: a picture on the television of "What is left of the Tibideaux family?" and whispers in school, and secret meetings in the pastures by Dad's old orphanage. She was light and darkness, blurred edges telling Kieran up was down and the was no such thing as gravity, and he needed answers.

"Why? Why need the person you should hate?"

^{I AM A GARDEN OF BLACK AND RED AGONIES}

D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]
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read all about it | kieran/ellerie ⋆·✵ Dec 23, 2016 20:09:58 GMT -5

Post by D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza] on Dec 23, 2016 20:09:58 GMT -5

The touch of the boy gives me reassurance. It is china, not stone or iron, for the concept of reassurance is an impermanent state. It's something I'd come to know—Mother's endless words said all stars fell, and the warmth from hugs which seemed to fade away within the blink of an eye.

Comfort always has been a broken thing, but I still long for someone to fix it and give it as a gift. The open arms of an angel might be the only serenity I will ever be able to find, but when your sisters are hard as rock and buried six feet under, there's no arms to run to.

There's emptiness. No longer sisters—only a memory. Isolation comes and it feels like an incurable illness. There's no ice but it is still completely cold, just like how one can drown without water.

Where did all the life go?

"Ellerie," Kieran whispers, and I stand in the eye of the storm with him by my side. For a second, the crippling loneliness evaporates into the air and I can breathe so deeply; maybe my past was supposed to tear me apart so the future could piece me back together.

One second, two, and the tamed heart is as loud as lions again.

"Life has been so unkind to you. You should hate people like me." He's right. "You should spit at the mention of my name, but you don't."

"You're here."

I look around at all the teared edges, haunted by the word's of a dead girl. I've done it again, I swore I wouldn't make a habit of breaking the unbreakable. Pushing people away for their own good but never managing to find a refuge before I crash land; perhaps I'd be smiling if I wasn't so desperate for security.

I'd have time for things other than the shadows, I'd have patience crucial to solving the impossible enigma of reality.

"Why? Why need the person you should hate?"

And for a moment, I'm encased in a bitter silence. Emotion has the tendency to make me mute, make me freeze and feel smaller than a tiny, insignificant speck. I suppose that's all I am really, as is Kieran. The world is big enough for bigger problems, bigger stories; we may have the words to change a nation but our lips are sealed by metal gates and tall fences.

One look at Kieran and I know why I've run to him—the possibility of us doesn't matter. Words are just words, people can write for hours about decisions and reasoning but no columnist will have the nerve to mean what they say.

Here, we are open, even after a book of tragedies is closed.

"Because it doesn't matter." I tell him, my pulse soaring to my head like a bird caught in a breeze. "I can't hate. It gets you killed." I'm cold and my chest begs me not to tell another word, but I've always favoured my head over my heart. "And now my sisters are gone, I have all this love. I think I want to share it."

"With you," I say, laying a secret bare and naked between the two of us. Reading Leticia's diary taught me that unsaid words amount to nothing; the words we don't say keep us prisoner.

And a prisoner is something I refuse to be.

coding : elegant

umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]
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read all about it | kieran/ellerie ⋆·✵ Jan 13, 2017 13:22:09 GMT -5

Post by umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars] on Jan 13, 2017 13:22:09 GMT -5

K I E R A N ;

{ i wanna hold hands with you
i wanna feel close to you }

He choked on the air, stumbling away from the girl.

Had he heard her correctly?

("I have all this love. I think I want to share it. With you.")

He stared at her from a few feet away, heart pounding inside his head. No way. No way, no way, no way.

"I'm fourteen," he said. Perhaps she hadn't meant her words the way he had understood them. Perhaps she had only meant-- I don't know! He searched the deepest depths of his brain, trying to unlock it. (There was no answer for the frazzled young boy.)

A roller coaster of emotions roared within him: excitement, confusion, flattery, but mostly: disappointment. Most boys his age would have jumped at an opportunity like this. Attention from a girl? Better than anything else in the entire world, apparently. Sadly, Kieran disagreed. Maybe some day in the future he would love. But for now, he had better things to think of. School. Career. Tribute. Victor. Besides, even if he wanted to, he was--

"Way too young for love." He normally wasn't like this. Normally, he made it a point to make everyone else uncomfortable. And now, he let his guard down one time to help some sad girl with a death gene, and this was his payment.

He thought, I've learned my lesson.

He cleared his throat, shoving his hands into the pocket of his coat.

He was right-- if she had meant the words in the way he thought, he refused to play ball. He had a very bright future ahead of him, one that would not be ruined by childish wants and cravings. Hormones: the silent killer. He had heard Saffron say it before, and damn, she was right.

He wanted to kick himself for heeding Saffron Lowe's advice.

"Maybe we can settle on some cocoa for now," Kieran said, watching the girl like she might have exploded at any second and killed them both. Broken people had a tendency to do that, he had noticed. Too many times, he would be watching the games and witness the descent into madness, darkness swallowing a person's consciousness whole, refusing to let them ever see daylight.

"Yeah. Cocoa. Yeah?"

^{I AM A GARDEN OF BLACK AND RED AGONIES}

D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]
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read all about it | kieran/ellerie ⋆·✵ Jan 13, 2017 15:52:28 GMT -5

Post by D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza] on Jan 13, 2017 15:52:28 GMT -5

He is taken aback, his posture shifting to become uneasy and tense. It was not my intention to freeze him; it was my intention to give him reassurance.

I guess that he is just a boy. Noelia warned me about them: they make you stay up until midnight and force it to become a bad habit, they make you happy with a lie instead of hurting you with the truth, they make you love what they say, but they only respond with loving what they see.

Boys, inevitably, will be boys. But I'm falling for him, so where am I to go if he does not catch me?

"I'm fourteen." He says. Fourteen years old and the boy knows that I want him. Shut eye—and we are painting stars in our hearts to keep blood at bay. "Way too young for love."

Love doesn't have a number. Love doesn't know any boundaries, it just is. Love is light and the night. It does not scare or lose it's meaning, it has no honour to lose and does not take flight on the wings of another bird. It is a protection built on trust, on hope and resilience.

Love licks wounds.

"Maybe we can settle on some cocoa for now," he says, his words dusted with uncertainty. He'll play my heartstrings like it is no issue, he'll forge a beautiful symphonic disaster from the words of a girl who has a blurred line between happy and sad. "Yeah. Cocoa. Yeah?"

There's a level of desperation in his voice. Kieran's raw emotion draws me in like a moth to a light. Is it real, is it fake? Is it an act done only to see his status bloom and flourish even more?

My heart is clouded. I'm a dreamer and I find myself crashing into every fantasy Kieran provides me with. I wonder if his own thoughts shed a spotlight onto the same questions; if for a moment, sins from the past are washed away. A moment would be enough because it is long enough to prove that you are winning at life.

Freedom from history is a common goal for some.

"Cocoa." I say, eyeing his hands which have retreated into his pockets. I suppose it's chilling for them to be in between two cold bodies with only a fingertip on the remnants of warmth they have. It's my everything—young love relies on the care from risk and jeopardy to grow.

"Cocoa." I say it again. A smile that has fallen from grace creeps onto my face for the first time in years. It's a simple smile, triggered by a simple thing, but I can't help but be flooded with a million memories in a split second.

I ignore them, and that is when I realise I have found what I am looking for: the simple things.

This is my happiness now, and that is okay.

"Yeah." I tell him. "I'd like that. I'd be happy." The word feels alien. But I won't rush this, I won't rush this because I want it.

For today, tomorrow and the pages beyond. Perhaps I'll finally find my certainty.