 Spring 39, 508 AV
He had left hours earlier, before Syna’s warmth could even think of kissing the distant peaks and stream in through the still-open bedroom window, as brilliant and yellow as it was perturbing. My eyes refused to open for a long time, a hand blindly reaching for my side where the scent of another still lingered and as morning light kept the spot warm you would swear someone still slept there had the sheets shifted or mattress exhaled. I remembered him leaving, whispering a word of thanks or apology – I couldn’t quite tell through his sharp accent, or remember if I was lucid enough to even know what language it was in. I finally gave in to Syna’s insistence on me not sleeping through the morning with a mumbled curse; my room always caught the morning light so well. Something anyone in any other city in the world could no doubt appreciate: me, I just wanted to sleep until late afternoon like any other Lhavitian.
I felt an unnecessary jolt of fear as a thump came to my door – I was alone, why was I so damned jumpy?
“Se-ben?”
The singsong chirp of a female voice wafted into my room, muffled as if her very lips were pressed against the thin wood in impatience. O’Ren. No one else would be awake at this hour; she knew I was often up early reading our father’s books or mulling about my room impatiently and would keep me company during my bouts of insomnia (Could you call it insomnia? Does that apply to night? No… somnia undoubtedly has something to do with sleep). I sat up painfully. My arm was stiff at the bend; no doubt I’d extended it too far climbing too eagerly up the side of our apartment building the evening prior. Bending it a few times, my other hand grasping and pinching at the skinny elbow, I replied;
“Come in.”
A rattle.
“It’s locked.”
Of course; I’d locked it. “Sorry,” I mumbled, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed and bending to grab a pair of cotton pants I’d discarded hours before. They were still dirty and scuffed from grass and dirt, and I did my best to wipe off what I could before answering the door.
O’Ren was wrapped in some sort of silk-cotton shift, purple in color with a pattern of deep blue peonies, tied with a cord at her tiny waist. It hung to her bare knees with flowing sleeves that ended at her elbows. Despite the sour look she often had painted on her face – a mixture of fleeting displeasure or genes from her cold mother – O’Ren was blossoming into a beautiful young woman. At the age of thirteen, you could already tell that she would soon attract the attentions of young men; something that made me both proud and a little sick to my stomach.
As soon as she was safely in my room, whatever twittering façade she’d used to gain entry was gone.
“I heard you.” The accusation caught my ears and bottomed out hard in my gut.
I decided to play stupid. “Heard me?” I repeated, allowing the door to swing open and my sister – the ‘oldest’ of my twin sisters (she insisted that since she arrived first, she was older) with her swath of dark, straight hair pinned back only from her eyes with the same flower barrette she always wore – slipped soundlessly into my room to sit on my bed.
She was glaring at the open window, and she did this for too long before turning those dark, almond eyes on me again. There was an accusation in them that made the rock in my stomach churn.
“What were you thinking?!”
O’Ren: wonderful, vigilant O’Ren. She had the hardness of a woman matured far beyond thirteen, and as she sat straight-backed on my bed, hands folded neatly in her lap to keep the silk shift she wore closed, proper, you could see age in her narrowed eyes. What sort of woman would she grow into? I pray not her mother. Cold, detached, as if some ghost had swept in when she was young and taken away her very soul; she may have been caring to my sisters but to me she was little more than an acquaintance with obligations to my father.
Lifen did not possess the poise of a young temptress when she sat. No, the younger of the twins was, for lack of a better word: boyish. She enjoyed sparring with wooden swords and staying out late with boys that were friends but not boy friends (she protested this vehemently) and asking abrasive questions to strangers that dare take a second look at her odd older brother with his blonde hair and red eyes. The thought made me smile. Despite their differences, they both were so protective of me – the only ones that seemed to understand me.
“Seven!” O’Ren grew impatient and I realized I’d lost myself in thought.
“Oh,” I replied.
“Oh?” Impatience flourished anger, and her hands shot down to steady herself on the edge of my bed as she rocked forward with those dark almond eyes narrowed in contempt of my act of obliviousness, “I heard something early this morning. I thought it may have been you, sneaking out of your window early for whatever reason so I looked out – and do you know what I saw?”
Of course I knew, but I remained respectfully quiet.
“How dare you,” She hissed, standing again and bearing down on me. At thirteen, she was nearly my height. Both of them were. Growing like petching weeds. “I saw him, Seven. I saw him crawl out your window and slink down the wall.”
O’Ren’s voice was rising, and I lifted both hands in an attempt to quiet her.
“You brought a Widow into our house;” the word grabbed at my stomach, “into our home, where Lifen and I sleep one wall apart from you. What in the hell were you thinking?!”
Her anger was contagious. I felt the hair on the back of my neck rising and I crossed the floor to close my open window. “He was of no danger to you-,”
“Oh? Did he tell you that?” She snapped.
“No.”
“So how do you know?”
“I don’t.”
Her eyebrows rose. That look, I could have slapped it off of her beautiful face. It meant that she knew she was right; that she had defeated me.
I took a breath and a chance to continue, turning from her to glare across my room. “He has no interest in harvesting anyone.” My weak defense came out as little more than a whisper.
“Oh, good; it’s comforting that you ask Symenestra you bring home whether or not they’ll steal and fuck your sisters.”
“O’Ren!” I gaped at her appalling choice of words. She often censored her hatred of the Widow race for my sake, but I knew it was in there. It had been put there. And now it was out, lingering and stinking up the air of my room.
“I’m not sorry,” she snapped, “you of all people should have known better.”
“Are you going to tell father?”
O’Ren hesitated, the smooth ‘m’ of her pink lips flattening in thought. Then, she shook her head, chin dipping to fiddle with the silk at her lap. “Don’t make me regret not telling him.”
A chime of silence passed between us. I rocked from left to right, shifting my weight uncomfortably as my eye caught the mirror that hung on the wall above a particularly simple wooden dresser. My bottom lip was swollen, cracked from venom stronger than my own, and my hair hung in blond-white mess around my ears and eyes nearly obscuring them altogether. How my face looked Lhavitian, but how little the porcelain tones of my skin and hair and heavy-lidded ruby irises did not. They belonged to someone else; someone I had never met.
O’Ren was the one that broke through the awkward quiet. She always was.
“What were you doing with him?” A pair of fingers too smart for their own good reached for her own bottom lip, punctuating her question, making it deeper than her words implied.
I could swear my blood ran cold. |
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[Flashback] Peony Moon 
by Seven Xu on July 26th, 2011, 3:33 pm 
