shadow of the day — the lachlan's.

It's almost a surprise when he reaches out.

The sounds he makes are so honest, so real and true and broken that they make Parker wonder if she should shiver, if she should only need to hear them in order to wince. He hides them well, there's no doubt about it, but she can hear him groan when he stands at the open window, and the shifts in his breathing as he hoists himself through. Maybe, in another life, with a set of parents rather than just the one absent father—maybe then Parker would have turned into a girl with empathy, a girl who heard another person's pain made verbal and feel the innate desire to help.

Maybe.

Perhaps.

There's a thousand possibilities, she supposes. A thousand different people that she could have turned into, and probably another thousand after that. She doesn't believe in fate, not really, believes there are parts of her that have been shaped by what has happened to her and what has not rather than the notion that this was always the only person she could be.

But she's a girl who likes computers, a girl who likes math and numbers and calculations, a girl who likes the feeling of a blade as it dances between her fingers, a girl who can find a blade's center of balance and bury it in a person's left eye socket from a hundred feet away in the space of a single breath, a girl who is born of the sea but has iron in her bones.

She is not a girl who cares.

But still, Zeke burns brightly, blindingly, and as much as he makes his pain known, she knows that it's only because he won whatever fight he's just gotten in, knows that if he had lost—well, he never loses, so she doesn't know what she's indulging in that train of thought in the first place, but she has a feeling that loss would turn him silent. Anger turned into a simmering rage.

There is strength in showing weakness, but only when you're on the winning team.

His lack of anger is almost enough to make her smile, but not quite, and she doesn't look over at him immediately, just listens to him as he groans and struggles to get himself through the window and out onto the roof. She knows, of course, that she could offer to help him, that she's as good with a needle and thread as any medical intern and even though her stitches lack the elegant grace another employ to ensure he was left without the memory on his skin, she knows Zeke is no stranger to scars. She knows his body is a patchwork quilt of them, that there are memories of battles won all across it, marking him as the victor that he is.

She could offer.

He could ask.

Instead all he does is demand, and when she finally looks over at him—she laughs.

It's a full-bodied thing, honest and relentless. His hand is bloodied, and that's barely even the beginning of it, and the sight of him—God, she just can't help it. "You look like fucking shit," she says, the last of a chuckle echoing in her chest. She extends her hand, offering her the lit cigarette.

”Surprised you could even climb out here.”

She wonders if he knows how often she climbs out here.

She doesn't know why she indulges in the thought; it's almost sentimental, she'd supposed, wondering about her brother thinking about her, caring about what she does and where she goes. She never usually does, usually tries not the think about him unless she's thinking about how she could beat him. What would be the best way to beat him, one of the Academy's golden boys? Would it be better to sneak up on him? She could slip out of the darkness and press a practice blade against his throat, grin and bear the wrath and the anger and probably the bloody nose, but she could do it. The world had always underestimated her, and her elder brother was no exception to that rule. She's always been quiet, the shadows her home and her hiding place all at the same time, but she knows Zeke. As much as they have always avoided one another, grow up parallel instead of together, she knows him, and she knows that the last thing he would expect her to do would be to stand in front of him and pick a fight. So, maybe that would be the best way to go—out in the open, for the world to see.

Maybe it would throw him off his game.

These are the kinds of thoughts she usually has about Zeke, the wonderings and longings to beat him, to prove to the world that she wasn't someone to be underestimated. She doesn't want for much, doesn't care about enough things to truly want anything, but she knows that Zeke wants nothing more than to win, nothing more than to kill 23 other kids and take home a crown, and the small part of you that still loves him wants to understand that want. So she fights, and she tries to win all her fights in the academy, and wonders whether or not she can throw a knife farther than her brother. But this—wondering if he wonders about her, it's a sentimentality that she usually doesn't find herself falling prey to.

It's soft, indulgent, and Parker has never had any interest in either.

But here they are, the two Lachlan children, burning together in the darkness, and she can't help but ask herself if he knows her as well as she thinks that she knows him.

"I look better than you," he says, matching her laugh with one of his own, and she wonders if he knows she's memorized every line of his face, wonders if he knows that she knows the space he inhabits like the back of her own hand. She knows the lines of this roof and can predict every creak and groan the shingles will make like clockwork; she knows that she could press her hand against the siding behind her, two below the bottom edge of his open window, and that the siding would come slightly loose and she'd be able to show him the tiny place where she'd carved her initials when she was fourteen. She knows the sounds of his coughs, and that through the pain he will always put on that stupid fucking show and smile.

All bold and brash and relentlessly stupid.

Another sister would have joked. Clearly you haven't looked in a mirror lately, she could say, make a joke and keep the laughter going, but then they would be laughing together, and Parker doesn't think that she well and truly knows how to actually do that, and so the burning grin on his face fades and he looks away. The distance settles between them again like a familiar blanket, almost as comfortable as the smell of the sea in the distance, and the look on his face interests her far more than the idea of family bonding does, so she stays quiet and watches him from the corner of her eye. She can see the flash of pain across his face when he reaches out to take the cigarette from her outstretched hand, and that there's a 50/50 chance he might ask for help if the location of that spot of blood is anything to go on.

It's also possible that he may have stopped for help on the way home, conned his way into some girl's home and smiled at her brightly while she patched him up. She doesn't much keep track of his love life, but people are always whispering about him, so she knows it's a possibility.

"Do me a favor, will you?" he asks, and she lifts her eyebrows in mock apprehension. She doesn't much try and hide her amusement at his clear discomfort. He winces again, and makes a noise around the cigarette dangling from his mouth that is all too familiar to Parker. Now it's her turn to bite back a shit-eating grin. "Get the first-aid kit," he demands, and Parker just keeps her eyes trained on him, eyebrows raised. "This needs stitches," he goes on gesturing to the wound she'd already spotted.

She doesn't move.

He takes another drag, and she wonders if he'll do it, if he'll go on and say the one thing she hasn't heard in years. She'd heard it all the time when they were still just little kids, when their mom was still around to bleed light into them both. Back then, there had been kindness and manners, but she doubts he even remembers that, most people wouldn't.

But then—please.

And she can't hold the grin in now.

"I can't see it to do it myself. I ne—" he goes on, breaking off on what was so clearly going to be an admission of weakness that even Parker is surprised by. "Unless you'd like to finish your cigarette while I bleed out."

She laughs again, and can't quite remember the last time she laughed this openly, this widely, this unabashedly. She definitely can't remember the last time Zeke made her laugh like this, especially at his own expense.

"Don't be so dramatic," she says, rolling her eyes. "Quit bitching." She puts her carton of cigarettes down on the roof and then pushes up to a stand, and to some people looking over the edge while standing would be dizzying, but Parker loves it. "Keep the fucking cigarette," she says as she steps lightly around her brother. "If you were going to bleed out from that, you'd have done it by now."

She slips gracefully back through the window all the same, landing lightly on the balls of her feet. Before walking away though, she pokes her head back out the window and does something she knows Zeke won't expect—she makes a joke.

"Feel free to try though in the two minutes it takes me to grab it from the bathroom."

And then she's gone, pulling herself back into Zeke's room. She wonders if he knows he left behind a small streak of blood on the face of his door when he walked in. Probably not. She leaves it for him to clean up anyways, slipping across the hall and into the bathroom to grab the medical kit from where it lives under the sink. She flicks it open first, making sure that everything she'll need is in there, and then grabs a stray cloth from under the sink, dampening it with water before leaving and going back out the window.

"Alright, Drama Queen," she says, voice flat and without humor, though she knows rationally that it's an amusing thing to say. "Let's see the damage, then."