two || orla antoinette markham [wip]

how do I wake my spirit cold
we always say when our history's told
if only we knew the things we know
there's a question ages old
---

In the fall, three years after, when the leaves paint themselves in pretty colors and lose their will to hold out any longer against the growing chill, Orla strikes a match.

Her mother sleeps, the deep slumber of someone untroubled or quietly medicated, but far be it from Orla to know which it is. It doesn't matter, in truth. What matters is that she sleeps, soundly enough that she doesn't hear her daughter's pacing footsteps moving back and forth in the night. She collects things from the room across the hall from her own, fingers wrapped tight around old shirts and sweaters, papers with scribbled notes about plants and medicine, scratchy drawings of two little girls. There are books, older than she is and older than the house, her mother's name scrawled on the inside cover in faded ink. All of it goes with her into the building out back, tucked behind closed doors in the dark to hide the flash of an igniting spark, the growing hunger of a flame. It all goes with her. Orla sits beside a stolen trash can until dawn, breathing in the remains of her brother's life little by little, singeing the edges of her hair, wiping the soot into her skin with every swipe at the tears that trail down her face.

Claudio Markham is dead.

In life, he'd half felt like a ghost to her: always lingering on the edges, a gentle hand passing through her hair in the night when he thought she dreamt. He'd never wielded the same burning anger that sang Helena and their mother into existence. Orla had gravitated toward them like a moth, circling and reaching for fiery wonder. In the cold of their family training room, with the morning sun glinting through the windows and the funeral pyre burning down, she wishes she'd taken more time to bask in the quiet warmth that would remind her to eat, to bandage her wounds, to rest.

Her brother is dead, and Orla feels whatever heat she's managed to grasp from Helena and their mother over the years slip through her fingers into the ash.

---
let me down easy, let me down slow
if all good things ever come and go
let me back down in a place I know
hold the nail for the hammer stroke
---

On any given day, Phyllida sits quietly to the side of their training area, dark eyes staring resolutely at her feet as Orla picks herself back up again and again, always spinning, always spun. Her muscles feel too tense beneath her skin, but no matter what she does, she can’t unclench. There’s no time; Helena won’t give it to her, and mother won’t stop her, and Phyllida is too meek to put her own neck on the line to buy Orla a few moments reprieve.

Each morning, she wakes before dawn and is subjected to her eldest sister’s fury. Helena Markham hadn’t planned on Meredith Strauss volunteering for her Games. Her Games, she says, as if Helena would have had a chance in hell at surviving the 85th and not crumbling to ash like Strauss had herself, as if being eighteen and volunteering is any indication of who would becomes the victor. Instead, Helena had screamed her rage into the air out back of their home, pressed it tight into Orla’s skin come the next morning’s training. No amount of days, no amount of years has lessened the destructive dissatisfaction of their mother at having two children who had failed to follow through with volunteering like they’d decided was the plan, like they’d trained for for so long.

It wouldn’t matter to Orla, the anger or desperation, except she can feel their eyes on her. They watch her as she eats, and as she leaves for school, and as she picks herself back up over and over again. Her every breath is catalogued by their stares. Every quiet contemplation, curious question, biting word, all of it measured against their demands. Thirteen, flirting with the line between four and five feet, quick as they come and dangerous in a corner.

Thirteen, and the eldest eligible Markham in a long line of disappointments.

It burns some days, a searing heat against her ribs and shoulders, but that could also be the bruising. Helena and her mother never slow, never tire. She spins round and round between them, dizzy in a way Garrison had never managed to make her when she had been so little and unaware of how painful family could truly be. Her mother and sister push her until she can hardly breathe for the pain, for the weight of their expectations, for the way they pretend as if Dio had meant nothing.

He had meant something, hadn’t he? Hadn’t Garrison, once, before he had left them as well? Or Everest? How little will she mean to them when she survives them as well? How much weight will they pile on Phyllida in turn?

On any given day, Phyllida sits quietly to the side of their training area, and Orla volunteers to take the brunt of Helena's anger and mother's disappointment and Garrison's glaring absence. She will take it all, and pretend all the while that the bruises hurt less because Phyllida refuses to look at her.

---
how do i learn my dreams to mold,
to lay them bare in the morning cold
if they're still out there then the chasm grows
for all you know, for all you've known
---

wip wip wip
her mom is literally gave her cricket's last name in hopes of aspiration

---
how do I wake my spirit cold
most people die but others just go
she's still out there and the chasm grows
steady are the feet in the morning glow
---

wip wip wip
we're gonna get into some feelings

---
oh this my trash, this my tome
oh this my weapon, this my loam
oh this my mountain, this is my home