Dear Lil Hellspawn - Chapter 2
Chapter 1 • Chapter 3
This story is a commission for the same lovely reader as before (thankyou Morgan <3) - message me if you'd like to commission your own work!
CW: The same severe and targeted transphobia as the first chapter
The phone clatters onto the table, switched off and placed down like it was a remote detonator or hypervirus containment vial, a rushed gentleness that is imbued with fear from nail to wrist. The responsible hand vanishes out of sight soon after, shaking with a new, punitive limp to its uncertain movements, and with a distinct desire to find some painful cuticle to free from its mirrored twin instead of sitting aimlessly on Natalie’s lap.
Natalie takes a moment to think as burgeoning hurt and anxiety start a slow and ever-turning rancid simmer on her face. A riotous rainbow of hasty reevaluation runs across hurdles and speed bumps with every swallowed tear and dawning revelation, numbed and dull in parts by her monochrome makeup, yet exaggerated in others by cubist chiaroscuro suggesting the wholesale memory of a snarl within her black lipstick and winged eyeliner.
Realisation, full and proper, is filling her from a rusted faucet that screamed its protests against its opening, but whose collection of aged oxide has fused the valve wide open. Its pressure is threatening the badly glued seams of her. She looks as desperate as I felt when I first realised I was never going to be accepted by them. It’s mirrored perfectly on a face that thankfully looks nothing like mine.
The sight is not as satisfying as I might have wished it to be.
Sadism of this kind never suited me, no matter how hard our father tried to train it into me.
I take my time with my coffee, attempting to enjoy the relative skill of the barista behind the service counter that cramps him to an unkind degree, while the gifted food settles in my stomach. I watch as my matching gift gives Natalie emotional indigestion.
“They’ve never talked like that before.”
I just shrug, feeling anticlimactic and let down by some cosmic joke that never quite reached its punchline.
“He called me a dyke…” She sounds so hurt, torn up, and raw. A fair response, but one that was far too fresh for my liking right now. It was an emotion that would sit for days, and I was getting restless.
And it won’t even the worst they’d be willing to call her, if she falls as far as I did.
“I thought I was making progress. I thought he was changing-”
I finish the last third of my coffee in one large draught before placing the mug down onto the table a mite louder than I intended. It cuts off the end of Nat’s sentence and drags her eyes up from the spot on the table where my phone sat untouched. She stares at me, wide eyed, and for a second looks like a Miyazaki character. Chihiro facing down the bathhouse matron with eyes as big as saucers and some supernatural shiver that runs up her spine.
And then she melts.
She recognises it’s me, not some witch here to steal half her name, and she shows that innate trust once again. My heart clenches at the sight, torn asunder with anger and something more painful, and I ignore my suddenly bouncing, fidgety leg.
“Look, he’s not going to change unless you manipulate him into it,” I start soft, trying to settle the anxiety in me, but like the mug’s descent it comes out harsher than I intended. “You’ve given him a new script to follow with you, but he needs puppet strings to actually change. It’s what he’s done to us and mum.”
“It’s just- That was the only reason-” Natalie swallows hard, slouching in her chair and making herself look small. She pauses in the middle for a breath or two, realising the angle her sentence was heading towards. She backtracks while her voice grows shakier with every word. “I’m sorry I did this to you, Nina… I shouldn’t have done it with the reasons I had- the reason I had… But I thought it was a genuine reason. I thought I could bring you back.”
“I thought you would try.” My voice is hollow as it echoes over my tongue with stale air. “That’s why I showed you the texts.”
“…They’re never taking you back.”
The admission rings through Natalie’s mind like a bell, loud and clear enough I trick myself into hearing it on the outside. It cracks the shell of her hope and trust in our parents into dozens of little, ragged shards, each with an uneven razor edge sharp enough to do more harm if left unattended. The rock, that up until now she had been building her life on, reveals itself to be hollow; a paper mache facade that has been rotting at her feet for years. And it doesn’t help.
Maybe it helps her, but my mind is pacing back and forth while I’m stuck staring at the front door of the cafe and the street beyond.
“No, they aren’t.” It’s all I can say, but the hurt that seeps into the words is enough to carry a shadow of everything I’m feeling into the empty space between us.
I need to leave. I need to get out of this city. I have what few scraps of life Natalie was able to scavenge for me at my feet, and now every minute spent here feels wasted. I even have her on my side, more than I even desperately hoped for as I ran through different ways to handle the meeting with her while I struggled to not fall asleep in my seat as I waited. But I got the change handed to me, and now I need to leave.
But Natalie is immobile. She watches her faith in our- her parents crumble before her eyes.
A wax-wrought Damocles, staring up through blinked-away tears at the sword of candle flame; an Icarus of Paraffin tasked with holding up the weight of Helios’ chariot while he watches Atlas already crushed and discarded beneath Ouranoss’ corpse; a scared girl hesitating before the task of planning her escape.
I recognised the look.
The sun deserves my ire - my turbulent, painful anger - but only now do I realise it doesn’t deserve my fear any more. It holds the emotion close to its core, and will never let go - but it doesn’t deserve it. Making me more scared won’t achieve anything any more.
But it does deserve Natalie’s.
My anger aches to stop my painful extrication from happening again, but all it can really achieve right now is to push me to leave.
Even if it thought it could make a difference, reaching out to rip Natalie from her Mercurial spot so close to the sun would only leave me splattered with porcelain droplets of her. It would hurt her while she begged me for freedom, she would bend and sag under the melting attention, and strain against my inadequate strength, and all I would be left with would be trails of wax down my forearms, quickly hardening in streaming paths that look like tears.
The pain wouldn’t even matter to me, but I would only make things worse for her. She would be spent beneath my fingers.
I look down at my arms and see the maladive green undertone of my blood beneath my skin. Instead of the temporary, ivory scars of my sister’s imagined need for me I see real, pallid lines running perpendicular, evidence of what I was running from. I rub my skin to crack the illusions free of my arms, feeling the texture of softly brittle candle wax shattering beneath my fingers more vividly than I would like. My arms are warmer than they should be.
I gently shiver the disturbing fantasy away.
My anger remains awake. The temptation to smother it is weak enough to ignore as I level a stare at Natalie and wrestle my heart back into normal ranges. I see too much of myself in her, but right now I wouldn’t even be able to save an older version of myself.
Natalie breaks me out of my internal cycle, either through very lucky timing or an understanding of how dramatic my mind can sometimes be, by gently kicking the bags that are still cramping our feet beneath the table. The gentle tinkling of zipper metal rings like wind chimes for a brief second and drags me wholeheartedly back to the front of my mind.
“I grabbed what I thought was important,” She said, “But I didn’t have much time. I didn’t know how long they’d be so I rushed.”
“What did you get?” I kept a grip on the conversation, using it like a harness to keep me from falling into the cavern of my mind. I sounded a little distracted.
“Everything off your desk.” Natalie’s immediate, utilitarian answer soothes the worst of my anxiety and I breathe out a sigh of relief, finding myself grounded in the cafe a little more. “Clothes, a handful from each drawer, plus the extras I saw when I grabbed your phone charger from beneath the bed.”
The experimental clothes, bought from amazon and tried once or twice before being hidden in a bundle strapped up between bed slats, was in one of the bags. It was comforting to know that it wasn’t in my bastard parents’ possession, and then actually having the clothes was a relief. They don’t really fit me, but I hadn’t realised how much losing them would have hurt before realising I now had them.
I smile at Nat, finding safety in expressing the inert happiness rather than the violent mood of despair shaken free that definitely would have ended in tears.
“Ah… Good.” My words feel dwarfed and inadequate, but I have nothing else to add.
“Apart from that I grabbed honestly kinda random stuff from the bathroom, and I think your razor is loose in the bag-”
“Makeup?”
Natalie cringes a little, “Oh… I didn’t think to look.”
That’s fine, it’s easy to replace, just, “You should probably find it before they do.” When Nat nods I get her back on track. “What else?”
“Uhm… I went through mum’s files and grabbed your folder.”
My shock was probably very visible because a flicker of pride passes through Natalie’s eyes. She thinks she’s done a good job, not fucked something up, and it’s all true because that folder is probably the most important thing for me to have gotten out of that house. Passport, birth certificate, insurance information, everything original when it comes to me is in that folder, with copies placed in others for ease of access. It was part of the way our mother kept some sense of control over her life, by being the gaoler of all the vital documents of everyone in the immediate family.
Hell, even the prescriptions for the meds she knew about are in the folder. And I have it now.
I can’t keep the smirk off my face, “Oh, you’re going to eat so much shit for that when they find out.”
“Yeah, well, I genuinely thought I was helping them out when I grabbed the folder for you, so there’s not much they can do without my guilt.” The threat of repercussions fills Natalie with accurately measured dread, but she keeps it out of her voice.
“Oh to be a fly far away from that wall…”
Natalie shrugs something akin to agreement to the sentiment, but doesn’t say anything.
I bring up the last vital member of the list that has yet to be mentioned. “Hormones?”
My hesitancy is rewarded with a sheepish, avoidant reaction from Natalie, and my mind immediately jumps to the expensive conclusion that I’d need to replace it all. But then Nat jumps in.
“I got them! I’ve got them! They’re in the bag… It’s just…” She shies away from my intense stare, the one trying to dig the events out of her reticent mind. “They might smell real bad. And they might not be okay any more.”
“What happened?” My anger influences my tone too late in the process of making the words for me to stop them, and the sight of Natalie shying away from my harsh tone etches itself into my mind. It will be a long time before I forget the hurt on display there.
“I- Um… I realised that I hadn’t found them when I was already out the door, and I was already running late,” Her voice picked up pace as she said each word, nervous about my reaction and wanting to avoid another impatient question. Shame at my lack of control makes my blood run hot. I don’t want to do this to her. “I couldn’t really check everywhere, that would have taken too long, and there was one very obvious place I hadn’t looked yet, and it was on the way out-”
The garbage bin, placed on the pathway from the front door to the driveway.
“They threw my meds in the trash?”
A tiny, apologetic nod comes from Natalie, relaxing slightly as we both process afterwards my relatively calmer voice.
“I- I have no idea when they did it, how long they were there. How hot they got. The sun hadn’t quite hit it yet, but it was already warm…”
“So they might be denatured… Shit.” So it was a coin toss whether it was the same expensive replacement as before. I didn’t like that.
“Sorry I didn’t look for them earlier…”
I shake the price tag from my head, “Better than nothing. Thank you.”
The words are hard to swallow. They’re not exactly what I want to be saying. There’s a part of me that doesn’t like thanking her after what she put me through, but most of me just wants to be saying goodbye. Leaving. Getting away from here. Out, out now, before it’s too late-
My phone starts ringing, vibration against the metal table drumming with the resonant frequency of the tense surface to make it so much louder than it needed to be, and I jump so hard I have to scramble to stop my empty coffee mug from meeting the floor. Place it back down, take a breath, why is it so hard to breathe? Take a moment- The sound of the call gets quiet, the vibrations dulled, I see my phone in Natalie’s hands (now on silent) with its screen showing an unknown number facing me. I knew it wasn’t my parents already, their ringtones were set to an file of just silence, but I didn’t have any way of knowing who it was.
I swallow, place the mug right-way-up back on the saucer, and take the phone from my sister’s offering hand.
When I answer I am met with skinwalker, American Psycho charisma that writhes its way through the whorls of mobile service to curse my ear with its presence. It’s crisp and confident, and barely the right shape to mimic a professional kindness while not being offputting in an immediate sense, but I recognise the general shape of it and can feel out the shape of the man behind it. It’s also spoken through a terrible connection, and ends up horrendously compressed.
“Hello, this is Alexander Spence from Saint Dymphna Community Hospital,” It starts, masculine and optimistic, though pulled back to not scare off a jumpy animal, “Am I speaking to Sebastian Nikitovich?”
I wince away from my name, but keep myself focused on the task of the phone call and fall into my own script, calling up the response he’s fishing for, tweaked for my own purposes.
“Yeah, that’s me. You said you were from…” I make purposeful eye contact with Natalie and repeat the name he rattled off as best I could remember, “Saint Dymphna Community Hospital?”
Natalie jumps on the task, drawing her phone out and researching while the man - the fittingly-blandly named Mr Spence - continues his grease slicked drawl. I try not to curl up within myself.
“Ah, good, I’m glad you’ve picked up, Seb. Can I call you Seb?”
“No.”
“Now, Sebastian, I’ve heard from some concerned people close to you that you’re currently experiencing some difficulty - specifically housing.”
Nat is scowling at her phone, glaring at the screen like it would bulimically divulge its secrets if it just got intimidated enough. Her teeth worry at her obsidian lips, progressively staining her teeth, and her eyes dart around the screen. I rule her out as the source of Mr Spence’s concern.
There’s two very obvious options left, and the concern someone they would reach out to is not something I think I would want.
“Son,” He barrels through my silence. “We try our best here to help those who come to us only with what, and who, we have in the room, but regrettably sometimes there are situations that require a different hand. After hearing parts of what you’ve been experiencing we decided it was warranted to reach out to you and offer you a place to stay. Practically indefinitely.”
“Practically?” I ask, falling for the trap.
The monologue on the other end changes subtly in tone, becoming more confident that he was being successful. “For your situation I’m sure it’ll feel indefinite. We, of course, have our upper limits for how long someone can stay with us, but most people get back on their feet long before that clause comes into effect.”
“How long?” I keep my voice flinty, stem the flow of his confidence.
“We can offer five years of accommodation in our long-term patient area.”
“But I’m not a patient.”
The tone shifts again, from carrot to stick. Honey to vinegar. “Mental health is a very serious thing, Sebastian. And homelessness only makes it worse. I’m sure you’ve been very stressed in this time - have you been couch surfing? Sleeping rough? We can take that stress off your shoulders. We can give you a bed and a roof that won’t be taken away. You don’t have to stay out there.”
“You’re trying to institutionalise me.” I study Natalie for more information as I accuse him, but she’s so absorbed in what she’s found that she doesn’t even see my silent question.
“No, Mr Nikitovich, we’re not a psychiatric ward. We’re a community hospital that focuses mostly on quality of life and of mind, with a focus on returning to wider society when the scale of it is less scary for you than it is right now.”
“He’s right.” Natalie speaks up, her search finding its answer, and her ears picking out the words from the phone speakers pressed against my ears.
“Who is that? Sebastian are you alone right now?” I barely acknowledge him.
“They’re not a psych ward - that would require medical approval. They’re a conversion therapy camp.”
“Ah, right.” I scoff and end the call.
* * *
The phone falls from my sister’s grip, hung up and discarded back to its no-man’s-land home in the middle of the table, before the scoff even halfway leaves her throat. She’s angry, bristling at the hackles and scowling at some middle distance, and I don’t even try to blame her. Something in me wants to, but that’s not me: it’s our parents; the eye hooks screwed into the wood of my puppet shell that the strings are attached to.
I place my own phone on the table, neatly stacked beside my keys and purse, and try and push the horror stories of Saint Dymphna out of my head. Once I found a place that wasn’t on the side of the ‘hospital’ it was very easy to figure out who they were. The thought of Nina going through that brought a spark of anger to the front of my mind, but the surge of dread I’ve been treading water in soon swallows it again.
It’s hard to stay focused. Today is about Nina! Nina, who is homeless and needs help from me! Who deserves all the effort I can offer her, and more!
But it’s not fair.
I hide my short and panicky breath from her, but I still feel it just as keenly. I can barely spend any attention to fix it, and my hands are fusing together in my lap from friction welding, and my world is falling apart beneath me.
It’s not fair! I did everything they asked of me!
A leviathan of fear and observation cracks its way out of my internal landscape, revealing its hiding spot beneath the mountain ranges of rationalisation and indoctrination that obscured the beast’s presence. It crumbles the earth as it wakes, demolishing the road networks of the hopes and plans I had laid brick by brick at its feet and over its thickened spine. It brings an apocalypse to a world that did not know of its presence, and it’s not going away now.
I had been perfect for them - perfect grades, perfect obedience! They never told me to not be gay because they clearly didn’t think their golden child was dyke material. But I was! And that tore up the pattern and made everything go tits up.
But this is about Nina, not me, I’ve got to suck it up and be better for her, because she needs that really badly right now.
I look up at my new sister and see every half-buried, flickering emotion on her face like they’re spelled out for me on a page. She’s angry, hurt, scared, restless, hopeful for a quick escape, dreading a painful one, unsure how to feel about me, and recognising everything that I’m letting slip onto my expression like she’s felt it all before.
It’s absurd. I’ve never felt so close to her, yet I the very last thing I did was get her kicked out, and I feel more sure with every passing moment that she’s about to run away.
She’s slightly reclining in sullen disappointment, legs slightly parted to accommodate her height and the bags beneath the table, and has her head cocked down so she can stare at me and the front door past her eyebrows like just glaring at us will make us part for her. The sight does something dangerous to my brain.
Rich skin, full of depth and definition, curls around her arms and graces the curves of her neck and her jaw before pulling upward to the warm slice of her lips twisting unconsciously as she watches me back. She looks like she’s being lit from within, and the light is slowly going out, filled with the cold glow of carbon-choked flame fed very, very little.
My heart aches at the thought of losing that flame.
My wringing hands in my lap bring my mind to back to my skin, exposed up my arms to the very top of my biceps where even at the thickest portion of my muscle there’s nothing but pallid, ghostly absence to be found. If her flame, so close to being snuffed out, is so still so colourful, how bad am I going to get before mine vanishes?
Maybe I should leave too?
I watch as Nina’s eyes gravitate to the cafe’s door. She twists around so her legs are in the walkway between tables, one step closer to leaving. One of her legs starts anxiously bouncing.
I could fall to my knees in front of her. I could beg and offer every hidden corner of my heart up to her, for her. I would place myself at the mercy of that glare, flood myself with sympathetic, nauseating hurt and hopeless fury to show that she is not alone. I’d stow myself in her bag, reduce myself to a trinket or arm candy to convince her to not discard me. I’d pull myself forward to the harbour of her hips, wrap my arms around the outside of her thighs, and apply the begging of my tongue any way she wishes.
I’d drag myself up to straddle Nina’s legs and free my shirt from my skin. I’d reach a hand behind her neck and offer everything I am up to her - including the motherly care I was keeping for some future child or promising partner - in an attempt to fill the ravenous hole our mother has left within her.
I would let her feed off me, if it pleased her, simply to be offered a chance to be by her side… To not have to go back home.
I would debase myself rather than return to the middle-class Bluebeards and the evidence of their previous victim that now is looted and scattered across a bedroom that will either never be touched again or have every little thing sold off in an online auction within the month for a fraction of its value.
I could offer everything up on a silver platter for her. I would. I’m about to…
But she barely has the strength to get herself away.
So I have to prepare to go back. Prepare for pretending that I haven’t seen their truth, like I’m still salvageable. Prepare to do and say ludicrous, hurtful things to convince them I’m still on the puppet strings while I plan my own escape.
But first I’ve got to help Nina’s.
Gods, how did she live like this? Already anxiety was eating away at my stomach like a bacterial ulcer, chewing my stomach lining and the bravery that relied on it staying intact. How long had she managed this, as well? Her meds had dates on them from months and months ago, prescribed to someone I’ve never met.
Not important. Ugh. This is so much to think about.
“What now?” I start, weaker than I should sound, and cringe at the waver in my voice. Whatever I set up for doesn’t follow, topics and suggestions second-guessed until they found shallow ditches of my mind to repurpose as graves.
What could I even say? Well, what would even make a difference?
Make a gamble.
“Hey,” I restart, “At least that meant they were out of the house this morning. I don’t know how much I would’ve been able to grab if they weren’t gone.”
Can she see through my smile? It feels weak even in its apology, and like it’s fighting against its anchor points keeping it tied to my face. Nina takes in my words with well-earned cynicism, but there’s a ghost of something that passes behind her eyes and the response coils from gallows humour to a smile that fractionally fills some hole in my soul that had been running dangerously empty.
“Yeah, they’re their own undoing.” It’s a smile forged of tears that she talks through, the grain of genuine appreciation brought out of the white water and purposefully presented. Something between us repairs a little bit. Then Nina answers my original question. “What happens now is that I find my way to the train station and leave.”
Leave? The dread I had arrived with today comes back in it’s full-blooded, cold-sweat nature and tugs on my guilt with way too much strength. Once again I’m met with the thought that I’ve completely ruined Nina’s life, and each time it’s a little harder to fight off. I know now that she’s not able to come back home - and I wouldn’t subject her to that - but I thought at least she would be living in LA! Sleeping on couches for a while, yeah, which hurt my guilt already, but still here! Still within reach…
But she’s bailing on the city entirely. Giving up on her degree here, her friends here, on-
No, it’s not about me.
I swallow my distressed shock and just try to be supportive. I hope most of the emotion was invisible to Nina, but she knows me too well to have missed it and so she gives me time to process. It’s a kindness that I don’t deserve, that hurts to swallow, and that is interrupted by another ringtone buzzing against the table.
It’s my phone this time, and I jump a little less than Nina when her phone lit up, but the glimpse of my mother’s face on my screen before I answer sets some gears turning in the back of my head before I even speak.
“Hi mum!”
I plaster a mimicry of my usual, lighthearted tone across the speaker in the way that she never notices or cares about, and I pull on the strings that make me sound a little relieved at the chance to hear her voice on the other end. Start grateful, react to what she actually says, that way she can believe I like her on average. It comes so easily to me, I don’t really notice that I’m doing it. Just that I needed to.
“Natalie! What’s going on with you?” Outrage, sensationalist emotion, and a hint of deep, moral concern that justifies itself as it goes. “We’re trying to sort out this whole thing with Sebastian, thinking you were fine at home, and…”
I stop paying attention to her words and start to speak over her. “Okay? And? So am I. I think my strategy was working just fine until she got a call from a fucking conversion therapy camp.”
“Her? You’re don’t seriously think he’s-” A pause, a change in tactics. “The hospital wants to help, is able to help, but you got in the way of that. Why?”
Fuck, fuck fuck fuck, I hate this. This is making my guts churn like a dough hook is trying to knead all my different organs into one, homogeneous blob of stomach acid and internal bleeding. Why do I hate this so much? She’s saying terrible things, but this is otherwise a normal phone call and I’m freaking out like I’ve just been conscripted. I want to throw up.
“If you wanted to help,” Is what comes out instead, “You wouldn’t have gone there.”
I make very brief eye contact with Nina, but I’m too rushed in my own mind to process anything I see on her face. It would take too much, be too complex, and letting anything slip with my mother is a bad idea. Years of proof and practice pile into that opinion, convincing me of her inability to bend and then covering its tracks so I can pretend better.
I don’t think about it. I slide my car keys out of my purse and over to her side of the table.
“Put him on the phone.” Harsh, softened at the edges, showing the blade edge that could fall on me if I don’t hand Nina over to her.
“Mum…” I sigh the word, buying time. I turn in my seat to face an empty chair across the walkway between tables before answering. “Even if she was right in front of me, and I thought handing the phone over was a good idea, do you really think she’d pick up?”
“He will if he knows what’s good for him.” Bitter. Barely smothered to politeness. The blade edge turned just barely towards me.
I put as much condescension that the mindset of teaching a young and stupid kid will let me get away with into my voice, and then speak through the angry silences, “That’s not the point. The question is if she’ll even listen to you… Do you think so…? Because you haven’t really given her any reason to.”
“We’re her parents…!” A pause. “His! Fuck!”
She’s livid now, letting the mask slip a little too much, showing the fresh anger that was polite to let simmer for a few days before releasing. I glance at Nina who is holding the keys a little dumbly, still in plain sight. Awkwardly swap which hand is holding my phone just so I can reach over the gap and - quietly - swat her hand out of sight.
“And?” I say, full brunt force. “She already chose homelessness over you. If you want her back, give her more! But you’ve already chosen to give her less.”
I can hear the low whine of her mood change from anger to pleading desperation, and I pull the plug. I interrupt her before she can enact her new plan, however genuine the emotions she’s using for it may be.
“Look, mum, I-” Cut off mid sentence, put a quizzical tilt to my words. “I know you wanted to get to her through me but-” Cut off again, more confusion, turn back towards the table. “Shit.” Phone down, not on speaker, ignore the hints of her words that are coming through in the next silence. Play the partial truths. “I can’t see my keys… Fuck- I’m worried…” Shake my head at Nina who’s trying to gesture that she has my keys. Take my phone from my ear. “Mum, you’re on the table right now, I can’t hear what you’re saying, but I think-” Stumble over the name ‘Nina’ because I know she doesn’t want them to know her name. “I think Seb has my keys. I- uh- I gotta go! Talk later.” Slam the hangup button.
Sag.
Breathe in air that feels too thin..
Shake like I just padded the bill for someone who will definitely find out, but who might not find out too early.
Recover. As best I can. Unpack how easy that was later. Unfold myself from the self hug that I can’t pin down the start of.
“I hated that…” My voice is distant and shaky, but present nonetheless. Doesn’t help me not be surprised by it, though.
The quiet that comes from Nina doesn’t feel like the calculating moments of silence I’m so used to in the family. It flows as dense air, cooled by its proximity to her, pooling as mist as it hits the ground. It’s not frigid, nor is it suffocating, but the presence of her hatred of our parents - of our mother - is almost visible.
The warm part of it is wonderful. It’s a breath of fresh air, an acknowledgement of what I actually have to deal with constantly, and it’s a knowing glint of empathy surpassing sympathy. But it slowly vanishes. It is smothered by the shared truth we reached in separate ways: the empathy can’t achieve anything.
“Yeah, that was rough.” The apology in her voice is worse. Wait, has she been voice training? She doesn’t sound how she did when I turned up. Maybe I just didn’t notice- “That was some wonderful lying, though.”
I let out a laugh - a hollow, dry expanse of an outlet that lets all my collapsing bravery escape before they try to tempt my tear ducts.
All I can manage in response is, “Thanks.”
“I should probably support your lie by driving somewhere.”
“Yeah, probably.” I’m so deflated… I can barely think. I vaguely hear her get up from her chair and extract the bags from underneath the table.
Then she pauses, expectantly.
“You coming? I’ve got a train to catch.”
The question is so innocuous, so childish in the need for company before something scary, so easily asked, framed in the casual familiarity we embodied just days ago, that it knocks some energy back into me.
I sit bolt upright, stare up at her, watch her brown eyes shimmer in the harsh sunlight with bolstered bravery and a small sliver of joy in the mischief, and my eyes catch on her smile. Who could ever hurt that smile?
Me.
I did.
I nod and shake myself from my mood as best I can to follow my sister to our shared car that has been marinating in the early morning warmth of it’s twelfth Californian summer. I hope, based on memory, that the trip across the city will take a few hours. Enough to feel like things are somewhat normal. That I just have a sister, and nothing more dramatic is happening…
* * *
The hug is unbearable and horrendously kind. Natalie is soft and warm, pressing herself into me without reservation or overbearing concern, simply desire to hold me before I vanish from her life, and I feel tears start to ram at the barrier gate of my eyelids.
Following some desperate, lonely instinct I’m trying not to look to close at I run my hand through her hair. I grip the back of her head with all my strength and smell her conditioner mixing with the sweat of the humid day.
I feel the last vestiges of the family I wanted, the only fragment that ended up real, hold me back, and still the hurt over her betrayal rears its ugly head from the worm-hole it’s gnawed into my heart. It’s been beaten and bruised today, but it’s not dead yet. I wonder how long it’ll take to starve.
But I don’t let go. I don’t let it ruin the last moment of reprieve I’ll get before the long journey and new life I’ll have to manage alone. I hold my sister.
I hold her until the loneliness is going to steal my legs out form under me, trap me in a new cage of cold iron, and in a flash I’ve pulled away and I’m pretending the teeth of that looming bear trap don’t exist.
My heart has never been so strained before. I wonder if it’ll ever recover, or if it will stay malformed and scarred from the pressure of it all. I hide the arrhythmic panic from my mind as I climb onto the train. It stops threatening a heart attack when there’s glass between us, but my eyes struggle to leave her for any time at all.
I wish I had managed to look away, because the expression of tortured heartbreak on Natalie’s face makes me realise the mirrored one on mine.
I want to run out there and wipe it from her, to replace it and show her she doesn’t deserve to be sad. To show her all the secret ways of treading water while you yearn for anything else. Show her it’s not all permanent, not inescapable. That she deserves the type of love that they will never offer her.
But it’s at that moment that the train starts to move, and I disappear from her life.