the laments of beasts — eurydice. & emerson. [jb]
Jun 7, 2021 4:10:38 GMT -5
Post by gunner, d9 ₊⊹ 👹 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ. on Jun 7, 2021 4:10:38 GMT -5
She should have predicted it.
Hell, a wiser part of her did.
Hell, a wiser part of her did.
Whenever reaping day stumbled along, Eurydice made her children get together for one final gathering because a part of her knew that it would be the last gathering for one of them. Perhaps it was her blood that marked them for the reaper’s grasp, this hot and fiery rebel blood coursing through her veins, but she wasn’t surprised when Emerson’s name rippled across the reaping stage. Instead, she held her chin up and smiled as a career mother should, because this was a cause for celebration. But in her chest though, the emptiness that Emmett and Silk has left behind tear looser, tears wider. Her skin is golden, but not much lays underneath it now. She is a hollow woman.
The path to the justice building is memorized in the balls of her feet as she strides towards it in a click-click-click of stilettos. She wonders absently if Emmett followed her here when she visited Silk, and she wonders absently if Silk is following her now. She doesn’t know, though. That’s the thing – the dead dies once, but the living goes on living.
“Move,” Eurydice snarls at the peacekeeper in front of the door, and the man is quick to comply. She pushes through the mahogany doors, fire in her steps as she crosses the distance to where the curtains are. She draws them open, and the sunlight is searing.
And only then, in this new light, does she slowly turn to look at Emerson.
Her girls have her looks, and she has always been proud of that. Drawn in by the sunlight, Emerson is still burnished gold, an extension of her that she has polished and polished until it hurt. She wonders if that was a mistake, if pushing them wasn’t doing them any good. It hadn’t for Emmett. It hadn’t for Silk. She wonders if her tenacity and strictness is wrong. She wonders if … if she has failed at being what a mother should be.
Quietly and with her shoulders braced, as if marching towards a battle, Eurydice draws her daughter in for an embrace. She smells of cigarettes and leather. Wretched girl. Her little girl. “I’m going to destroy whoever is ripping you all away from me,” she whispers, low enough for the other to hear, but not the world. This is an angry woman’s promise, muttered only to herself and her daughter.
Moments pass before Eurydice’s arms loosen and she is left nearly spent from that single tender gesture. She doesn’t do tenderness. She doesn’t have enough of it, never had. Her children were tempered in flames and heat, not doting words. She offered an embrace, but she wasn’t going to start spewing sweet words. They wouldn’t help. Instead, her eyes burn as they lock with her daughter’s.
“Kill him,” she mutters sharply.
“Kill Julian. Smother him in his sleep. Give him a friendly nudge down a flight of steps. Let him be a martyr. Do not let him live, Emerson, you hear me?” The word breaks at the last syllable as it leaves her.
She takes a step back to look at her daughter, her beautiful daughter. “Wretched girl,” she whispers, and it's affectionate. Why does it have to be you? Why does it have to be any of you?
Eurydice’s loss is already a bottomless well that if one were to toss a stone into it, no splash would follow. Her dress is red and it feels stained hotly with the blood of her two children. If Silk and Emmett are here, she wishes to apologize to them because she should have been predicted their fates, should have pushed them more, should have loved them harder. And those are all things she should have done for Emerson, too. But the Fates are tricksters as they have always been, refusing to be predicted, and so all Eurydice has to rely on is the hope that she has made Emerson enough of a soldier, that she has trained her well.
And looking at the fire that burned in her daughter’s wake as she walked up to the stage and hearing those twisted, angry words spat at her, she knows she has.
Eurydice yanks free the necklace around her neck, a pin of a lion roaring, and presses it into Emerson’s palm.
“Kill him and then everyone else in that arena. Don’t do it for One. Don’t do it for me. Do it for yourself. Go and get that goddamn crown.”
Wretched girl. Her little girl.
“Give ‘em hell.”
