Anselm Salvatore | 2 |

I found my head in a ditch last night. It stared up at me through the reeds and water flowed in through my ears and out through my mouth. I pushed it under the snow melt and held it there, watching myself drown.

"Anselm, where were you last night?" they'd ask.

"I was killing myself," I'd say.

"I was killing myself but I'm better now."

But they would have stopped listening by then.

I raise a hand to my jaw, fingers finding the five o'clock shadow and inadvertently, the deepness of a bruise. He was good at making it hurt without making it show, damn him.

Cecil grumbles at me from his pillow, I am flung across the foot of his bed. Moonlight drapes the neatness of my brother's room in a silver laced dress, causing shadow where in daylight there would be none. My hair is dripping, wet still. I used the snow as a pillow. My lips are swollen from desperation, my head light from drink. I think about how goddamned heavy Cecil's must be.

"Just let me sleep here Cil," I whisper softly, "My room is too cold."

I have the room in the corner of the house, overlooking the gardens and windows on two sides. In the winter the windows frost over and I can fog my breath in them to make words.

"Light a goddamned fire then."

I don't answer, my fingers work at my jaw, trying to stop the pain.

If you could take a hero from myth and remove all his imperfections, that would be Cecil. He's smart, charming, talented, well-groomed and obedient.

Me, I've got a letter in my backpack from school, telling my parents that I'm failing three courses but I can't show it to them because someone spilled a beer on it. The only reason I haven't been kicked out yet is because of my last name and my perfect scores at training.

I have no illusions about myself.

it's odd but soothing to lie in the dark at my brother's feet, listening to the sound of him trying to ignore me. He's never been as good at that as everybody else. I have an inkling, near confirmed, that Cecil loves me. I think he might have to though, as he is my twin brother. He's got a strange little heart, diamond on the outside, molten on the inside.

He got to melt.

"Ignore him," my father's cold voice across the dinner table and me, laughing so hard I nearly cry because my mother has just dropped a spoon on the cat. The rest eat their steaks in silence as my father gestures for me to leave the table.

I was supposed to wait in his study but I left out the window, the neck of a bottle of expensive scotch from his shelf snug in my hand.

I keep a set of brass knuckles in my pocket but I don't use them on anyone. I like to feel the weight of them there, in reach. Sometimes I slip my fingers through the holes and I clench my hand into a fist. Like my own version of a stress ball. It doesn't work.

When Cecil and I were born, our legs were intertwined and my fist was inside of his mouth. They never told me which one but I know that it was my left because it's always felt strangely stronger than the rest of me. When I am afraid, it is the first one that curls up in my defense and I know that it's the piece of me that Cecil made and I tell myself that he loves me.

Even when I know otherwise.

I kiss my fingers and press them into her skin. I don't know her name but she was at the same party as me and I'm too drunk to care. She tastes like nothing but I press my mouth against her's anyway. It's friday night or it's saturday morning but it doesn't really matter at all. There's a bruise on my ribcage, right where she's put her hand but it doesn't hurt, I've drunk too much again. Her fingers fumble at my pants and mine at the zipper of her dress. the little bit of metal might as well be a lock. My digits don't know the passcode. I don't know whose room this is or whose house I'm in but I do know that I'm going to fuck her.

"You're a fucking shame to the family Anselm," and his fist goes flying into my jaw.

I take the hit and my head goes flying backward over my right shoulder. I stumble, losing my footing. I don't think I have any left for this, any feet. I left them at the party. I snuck into my own room, left foot becoming caught on the windowsill. He was waiting there, in the dark. My father was waiting for me to come home so that he could welcome me.

Sometimes they like to choose one.

A kid to discipline I mean.

Cecil learned to walk first, I was slower.

He learned to talk first, I still babbled.

Cecil learned to read early, I had to catch the letters first.

I was always after Cecil, following my brother.

No one after me, no one before. I am the one that my father hits. At first it wasn't much, just a hand over the head, or a rough yank on my arm when I was little. Slowly it grew as I aged, as Cecil continued to do better and my performance only worsened. I remember the first time my father's fist found my eye. I was four years old and it was because I'd spilled my apple juice on the carpet. Father told mother that I'd walked into the table. After that he made sure to bruise in spots that no one else would see.

Cecil and I'd had a nanny of course, we went through three. Father got rid of our first one when we were five because she'd noticed the bruising and would not take payment for silence. She was going to tell mother. Father had her killed; he made sure to tell me. Cecil doesn't know.

Christ though, I split the skin between my knuckles on the metal of my window, searching for something a little less harsh than pain. I think I almost know what it feels like to die, he's nearly killed me so many times.

My father's foot finds my side and I roll away from him, a pathetic sound jumping out of my throat with the contact.

The cut on my cheek is healing nicely according to Cecil.

I touch it, fingers running over the rough edges and let my gaze slide out the window. the teacher drones on at the front of the classroom but it's about the history of District Two's nobility. I know that I should listen but I have no care too. Whether my grades are good or not, my father will hit me anyway. It doesn't matter.

A Rathbone sits two chairs in front of me. I consider the back of their head. Her hair falls in waves down her back, carefully pinned back. She's playing at wealth, they all do. At least that's what my father says. We're at war, both families, with each other. I claim a special neutrality in the mess. They have something that I want.

I catch one after class in the hall, the younger one with a constant smirk on his face.

I give him paper, he gives me pills.

"Come on, An!"

My sister shouts at me from her place beneath the extravagantly large Ratmas tree in the dining hall. She's crouched down on the marble, nightgown pooled around her ankles. Her fingers graze over gifts, searching for ones with our names on them. It's three in the morning and everyone else is asleep.

I'm eight years old and I know that none of the gifts under the tree are for me. It doesn't matter how good my grades are, how much promise I'm already showing in training.

I go and kneel beside my younger sister anyway, hands on my knees. The presents are too beautifully wrapped to touch.

"Ahh... There's a lot here but I haven't seen one for you yet, Annie."

My sister digs through the large pile and I bite my lip, drawing blood. "I'm too old for Ratmas gifts," I tell her, unable to keep the ache out of my throat.

"But....Cecil got a lot," she says, put out for me.

"Cecil's still stupid enough to believe," I lie.

Last year there weren't any gifts for me either, or the year before that. She's too young to remember. I don't really care in the end, there's nothing that I want. My father will break it anyway, tell me I don't deserve it.

He leads me, hand balled up in my shirt, the sounds of the party echoing behind us. Everything sounds so far away, like it's at the end of a long tunnel. Everyone came in costume, not me. I walked the ballroom with masked faces learing at me with every step of indifference I took towards the table full of drinks.

He stops for a moment, turning, he's slamming me against a wall and his lips are suddenly against mine, his tongue in my mouth, hand up my shirt. His fingers dance along the ridge of an old scar and I shiver. I inhale him, desperate. He bites my lip and I taste iron between us.

I don't think I've ever seen him before. He's older than me, graduated from high school maybe, a washed up career. There's nothing left for us after we are too old for reaping, we are forgotten.

I pull at the zipper of his pants, his hand catches at mine, we haven't found a room yet.

I don't care, I want him to fuck me right there.

I don't care who sees.

I don't care.