four. for perdita.

[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨ Advertiser 8,148 POSTS Pronouns: she/her last seen Apr 25, 2024 18:44:50 GMT -5 bloomtodeath	four. for perdita. Aug 11, 2020 20:52:36 GMT -5 Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by [ retro gm ] angel lí ✨ on Aug 11, 2020 20:52:36 GMT -5 four; four perdita. perdita (plural perditas) (archaic) a woman who has fallen...
	Last Edit: Aug 11, 2020 21:02:27 GMT -5 by [ retro gm ] angel lí ✨ “and men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins.”

[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨
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8,148 POSTS

Pronouns: she/her
last seen Apr 25, 2024 18:44:50 GMT -5

bloomtodeath

four. for perdita. Aug 13, 2020 4:46:54 GMT -5

Post by [ retro gm ] angel lí ✨ on Aug 13, 2020 4:46:54 GMT -5

"Arie?"

She holds her breath as the name leaves her throat. Her sister's head turns at the sound, a yellow blur in the daylight. India makes sure it doesn't roll off of her neck.

There's nothing quite like the sight of a girl who's place you wanted so desperately mere weeks ago crumple to the ground, her head landing with a thump, detached, in a pool of gem stones. When she blinks she sees her own head. Her sister's. Their father's. How desperately she had wanted to impress him. How furious she was when she was robbed of her chance to capture his attention.

Now, she thinks silently with a hard swallow, the sight of her head at her feet wouldn't even cause him flinch.

"I-"

Arie. Beautiful, delicate, poised and proud to be herself. Not a Krigel. Not a Perch. Not the daughter of a Victor or the granddaughter of a Mayor. Not even the sister of Leo Krigel. Just Arie. She was always so content with being herself and India never quite understood why.

("Will they make me go? I don't think I want to.")

Arie's hair sweeps across her sister's vision and she sees her standing in the crowd. Sees a sword slice clean through her neck. India shudders, fists curling together as the breeze raises speckled bumps across her limbs.

("I just want this. This is all I want.")

As much as she quarreled with Arie, India would have moved mountains to take her sister's place. She would have hunted down Jade Morin and ripped her apart limb from limb and then hunted down their father and driven a sword into his heart for letting his own daughter - his good, kind, forgiving daughter - die that way.

Arie wouldn't have, were their places switched. She was too kind, too delicate, too good. Arie was sunflowers embroidered into her reaping dress. Arie was an airy question mark at the end of her sentences. Arie was her second shadow, following her home and letting India scream bloody murder in her face the night after the reaping.

Yet still she smiled at India now, voice light. Hair yellow like the flowers on her dresses. Neck intact.

"Hmm?"

("Please Arie. I'll do anything. This is all I have left.")

A lie. She still had-

"Arie, I-"

("Fuck you Calypso.
She stole my spot! It's my sister's-"
"And that's my sister.")

- she had her sister. She still had her sister. Calypso Leto didn't. Calypso Leto's sister was dead, her head rolling across India's nightmares. Sometimes Arie's took her place. Sometimes her own head did. India screamed and screamed and screamed but nobody heard her, the ghost of Perdita reaching down her throat to pull out her tongue.

When she woke from that particular dream she had tiptoed quietly into her sister's bedroom, eyes twinkling with tears in the morning light filtering through the window.

Leo would be a slow burn. A grudge that she could not quite forgive. Not yet, at least. As much as she had ranted and raved at Arie for her aloofness that day, it wasn't her sister that had taken away her chance at glory. Even if she had seen her own fate with Perdita Leto in her place, Arie did not cause that betrayal. Not really.

But Leo had quite literally stabbed her in the back - with her own weapon no doubt - when she was down on her knees begging for mercy.

Arie hadn't been cruel. Arie hadn't been selfish. She had just been Arie. And it had saved India's life.

("You can tell your sister-"
"Oh. I will.")

The words catch at her throat as she raises a hand to rest gently on the nape of her neck. Words were hard for India - the more raw, revealing and honest the more difficult. The Krigel children were all passionate people. Emotional, in their varying degrees, teetering on the confusing edge of adulthood that didn't allow for the fiery passion that their youth once excused. If Leo was careful thought and Arie was a curious conscience, India was unsheathed words of the heart - not quite outgrown from her youthful habits the way her siblings had.

She'd thought her heart was in her brazen chest, in her swinging fists, in her fiery tongue. It turned out it sat on her sleeve, clear as day, as much as she tried to hide it. It lay buried the confused eyes of her sister as her name rang out across the district square. In the croak of her brother's voice when he'd left her punctured and defeated in the sand.

Brash and without thought, she'd outgrow her habits another day. For a moment she just stares at Arie, making sure her sister is still breathing. That all parts of her are still intact. And then she steps forward in a rush and sweeps her sister up in her arms, clutching the girl who had saved her life tightly to her chest.

"I'm glad it wasn't you," India breathes into Arie's ear.

A confession, a desperate plead for forgiveness, the deepest desires of her pounding heart. Her voice cracks, and she doesn't care.

"A-And I'm glad it wasn't me, either."

She is proud to be Arie Krigel's sister. Prouder still that her sister is standing here, whole and unharmed, without a crown on her head.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, lips pressed together as she heaves in a breath through her nose and tries not to think of Perdita Leto's corpse on the ground.

It's a struggle to let go of the girl in her arms and even harder to look her in the eyes, but she does because it's the right thing to do. Heart in her brother's voice. Heart in her sister's eyes. Buried in people that cared for her. Not in her blind rage or her last name or in the eyes of a father that payed her no mind, head or no head.

It's selfish to ask this of her sister. India knows that. She doesn't care if it takes days or weeks or months or a lifetime - Arie was owed time. Leo wasn't. Not yet. Not quite yet.

But Arie deserves her apology. India understands if she couldn't, wouldn't give her the same. But she asks anyway, heart on her sleeve, in her sister's eyes as her own spill over and her throat cracks open.

"Forgive me?"

✦

("Please Arie.
I'll do anything.
This is all I have left.
I'll never be unkind ever again.
Please
I just want this.
This is all I want.")

✦

Last Edit: Aug 13, 2020 4:53:26 GMT -5 by [ retro gm ] angel lí ✨

“and men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins.”

[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨
Advertiser

8,148 POSTS

Pronouns: she/her
last seen Apr 25, 2024 18:44:50 GMT -5

bloomtodeath

four. for perdita. Sept 23, 2020 20:26:03 GMT -5

Post by [ retro gm ] angel lí ✨ on Sept 23, 2020 20:26:03 GMT -5

Dying was the worst thing she could have ever done to him.

When she left him that was hard. The second time, harder still. But she had thrown knives and sliced open creatures and left a boy to drown in a river in her cold, callous way. And Brentley always knew where she was. In the home she grew up in, or the one after the first had washed away, or with him. Even on the train ride he knew she was there, and in the arena he could watch her be wicked, and he knew she had a second chance should someone dare to strike her down.

Dying was the worst thing she could have ever done to him, so when a blade finds her throat and her beautiful head rolls she doesn't get back up off of the floor.

Of course she doesn't.

"It's all right," he tells Audrey, himself, anybody - spoken words out loud for anyone that would listen, even though he is alone. "They'll bring her back."

But they didn't.

Of course they didn't.

He sits alone, terribly still. He sits for hours and hours and hours and he drowns right there on the living room floor he'd built for her. Over and over and over again, the sobs come in waves and he gasps as he tries to fight his way out of the floods he knew he should never have waded into but she is gone, for good this time, and there is no knowing where she is, no getting her back, no hope left to cling to that she one day might knock on his door.

Curled up on the wooden floor he waits for the rage to hit. So still, save for the trembling in his hands and in his lips and in his chest, he sits there until the sun comes up and the birds sing good morning like it was any other day. Like his whole world hadn't stopped. Like his muscles weren't on fire from pressing on hardwood floors for a whole twelve hours.

The grief comes back with the tide. He unfurls himself, back pressed against the ground he's built for her, and stares up at the ceiling and waits.

The rage never comes. The blackout. That temporary loss he craves, and when he realises it's not coming back either he is in agony.

Audrey wakes and finds him on the floor. She says nothing - even though his face says everything she needs to know.

She should tell him how she feels. She should tell him he was better off with her dead. She should tell him the truth, but instead his sister joins him on the floor and places herself carefully next to his outstretched figure, holding his hand as he cries and drowns and grieves.

He holds her hand tightly. Her arms go numb and the back of her skull thuds with pain that spreads into her neck, her legs, her feet - but still she does not move. After a while, he opens his mouth to say something but all that comes out if a shaky, broken sob.

"I know," his sister replies, squeezing his hand as she stares up at the ceiling.

And she sighs, her brothers hand in hers, wishing he could forget Perdita Leto and knowing he never will.

✦

Last Edit: Sept 23, 2020 20:36:00 GMT -5 by [ retro gm ] angel lí ✨

“and men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins.”

[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨
Advertiser

8,148 POSTS

Pronouns: she/her
last seen Apr 25, 2024 18:44:50 GMT -5

bloomtodeath

four. for perdita. Sept 23, 2020 20:29:20 GMT -5

Post by [ retro gm ] angel lí ✨ on Sept 23, 2020 20:29:20 GMT -5

But he would stop hurting one day. Not now, not any time soon, but one day her brother would heal from the wounds she'd left.

So when Audrey finds herself down by the ocean, hair in plaits atop her head and a forever frown across her face, she looks out to the sea and whispers something to a dead girl.

"Thank you."

He would heal. And she would be there with him. And they would be happy.

Perdita would not.

The thought makes her smile as she skips a rock over the still glass surface.

✦

“and men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins.”

[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨
Advertiser

8,148 POSTS

Pronouns: she/her
last seen Apr 25, 2024 18:44:50 GMT -5

bloomtodeath

four. for perdita. Feb 26, 2021 2:54:18 GMT -5

Post by [ retro gm ] angel lí ✨ on Feb 26, 2021 2:54:18 GMT -5

Perdita's knife hits the back of the boy from Seven's skull. Calypso's mouth twitches something of a smile.

The girl from One's blade slices her sister's head clean from her shoulders. Calypso breathes in,

and in,
and in,
and in,
and in,
and in,
and in.

Only when she stands on the edge of the mooring dock and steps forward, plunging into the freezing cold evening water and sinking toward the bottom, the ghost of her sister mocking her so childishly, does she let out a scream.

The ocean steals the sound of her grief, and she lets it. Fill up her mouth, snatch the air from her lungs, she hears it - albeit muffled - as she drowns. Her lungs feels like her heart does, burning, yet she still screams,

and screams,
and screams,
and screams,
and screams,
and screams,
and screams.

Until she breaks the surface, gasping and sobbing, until she walks home in the pouring rain shivering something violent.

She thinks about going home. About curling up in her room with the kitten, about screaming at her brother to leave her alone, about screaming at her Mom for never loving her like she had Perdita, about screaming at herself for loving her sister and spending a lifetime pretending she didn't.

But the ocean stole the sound of her grief. Her sister still laughs, they are five and seven, Artie is three on the shore with their father. Calypso can't swim, it was never about swimming, was it? It was about being a coward. It was about a kind of fear Perdita knew kept her little sister docked to her own mooring.

It's why Calypso had held her sister underneath the waves and her weight, hands wringing around a neck that would someday bear a forever line, smiling as she thrashed and screamed. It's why she fired the arrow and struck her sister's lover down. It's why she said nothing at Perdita's funeral, it's why she kept pushing her brother away, it's why she won't let anyone else touch the kitten.

Calypso is a coward, and Perdita wasn't, and they both knew it - even in death, her sister was never afraid.

She thinks about going home, and then stops in the middle of the road as the dark clouds above her thunder and shake. Fists white-hot and trembling, her bottom lip not far behind, ghosts and guilt haunt her - then lead her to her honest truth.

Leave her. She always comes back. Calypso can't swim. You'll regret this. I'm ready to try and fix things. You're my sister; you're a part of me. I'm sorry. You're going to die alone. You're such an angry person, Caly. Why? What made you like this? What made you so cold? Why can't you just fucking feel something besides anger for once? You're here now, that means something right? I'll be someone great. You know why? Because he loves you. And you'll just be another-

She knocks on his door, bites her bottom lip until it near bursts, inhales sharply when he opens it.

"I-"

This is her crossroads. Her time to sink or swim. Perdita knew, somehow, when she raised her hand. Calypso's sure of it. She had to be, because she's standing in front of a boy on his doorstep in the pouring rain, soaked to her empty core and knowing if he cannot fill the space her sister left then nobody can.

"I don't think I want to be a Keeper, Nico."

Inhale,
scream into the ocean where nobody can hear you.

"I'm sorry that I was so awful. I'm sorry that I stole your ethics paper from your bag - that was me, by the way - the day before they were due. I'm sorry that I told everyone not to talk to you and I'm sorry that I always messed with your gun and I'm sorry that I spent every day trying to beat you."

The thunder responds, filling the silence of the storm.

Inhale,
burning chest.

"The truth is you're really good, Nico, and you'd probably have beat me had I played fair. I've never not been the best at this. School's all I had. It's always been my plan, to rank first like my Dad. To go into the force like my Dad. So when you showed up and we ranked first equal I-"

Inhale,
break the surface.

"The truth is I thought I wanted that. And I did, for a really long time. But now I'm not so sure. But I- the truth is-"

Inhale,
swim.

"I don't want to wait twenty years."

Kiss him.

Exhale.

✦