This is your family
This is your home.
Your home. Your home.
Scorched earth and charcoal awnings. Where did the great lakes go? The stunning pavilions?
Gone?
But not gone, not in the way that matters - never in the way that matters.
Not whilst you carry your brother's love in your chest. His hope, his memories. His life, his time. His voice seems to hiss at you from under the eaves of the rotting houses.
What did you do? Brother, what did you do to me?
You pay the voice no attention, your brother may be dead, but he’s not gone. Not like that.
You walk through the grounds and pretend that the ashes you kick up are just the remains of the tree in the main courtyard. Pretend you don’t see the feeble attempts at burial shrouds hiding in the shadows, made by hands younger than yours.
Jagged edges welcome you into the family quarters, the door a great black maw, ready to swallow you whole. You can almost hear your mother's voice ring out.
You foolish child! Look what you’ve done, don’t you see you’ll ruin us all?
It’s only a memory - not even your own - but the harsh crack still stings against your cheek. As if you were the one Mother refused to acknowledge. But no matter how painful the reprimand is, it is only a phantom. You push it away. you were not the ward, you were legitimate. There is a stone lodged right where your brother’s heart beats, and you console yourself with the knowledge that he got over it, so you should too.
(The feeling doesn’t go away)
Passing your father's room, you bow your head in acknowledgment. You do not enter to offer respects, nor to see his burial shroud. You don’t need to see it to know that it is expensive and gaudy. Unfitting for a man who surrendered to the first porter of war knocking upon the front gate. Not even properly dead, the man roams your halls as a mere spectre, destined to never be heard.
You reach your destination, the only intact room in the complex. Inside are the only two things you care for anymore. A young maiden clothed in red, and the machine keeping her here - teathed - to this world.
‘Sister,’ you say, ‘he is gone.'
'Sister,' you say, 'we’re safe.’
You do not say it is his heart that beats in your chest, preventing you from suffering the same fate as the one in front of you.
You do not say it’s his life force keeping the both of you here.
You ignore the whispered cries of your once-sworn brothers and sisters as they cry-
Traitor.
This is your family, not theirs.
This is your family.
Your family.
Your family.
Not his.