original // destination nowhere.
When he had a moment to fling himself down to the ground and suck in what he could through his lungs, he contemplated the rusty soil and all the feet that had trampled it previously.
War has a funny way of connecting you to people you never want to be connected to, just like how it has a funny – he thought it was funny, with a hint of bitterness – way of ripping you out of people’s lives, of ripping people out of your life. What do you know? You’re just some momentary spark of life, no more significant than a firefly on a hot summer night. Against the massive history of the earth your life doesn’t measure up to be anything.
He thought it was bad when he watched his brother crumple to the ground, all pain and screams and finely splattered blood creating impromptu paintings across the canvas of his dirt-stained uniform. He thought it was bad when he felt rough hands drag him upright by the little concave just below the bones of his shoulders and force him to fight on for the sake of something greater than a human life.
Somewhere hidden beneath the ground was what he had been looking for. Except he didn’t know what he was looking for, because it had all been taken away.
Air, his lungs cried silently. He had not known it was possible. Air, infiltrated with the metallic taste of blood, of lead everywhere, of the slowly eradicated freshness that he had associated the outdoors with as a young boy. Air was the victim as much as any mortal body. He was only helping as part of the oppression, sucking it in and taking it over, spitting it back out as something no longer oxygen.
The thought was troubling to him.
He held his breath as he heaved himself into a wary standing position, tried to remember what he was running from and realized that he wasn’t running from anything. In fact he was running towards something and it had taken him this long to realize, as pain blossomed all over his body in great bursts in time to his heartbeat, that he had been running towards his own grave.
eternity // a predisposition.
A Predisposition
When we have lived in the same house for a hundred years, separation is inevitable. At first, it picks us apart one by one, slowly, but for a short amount of time, letting us get used to the feeling of utter abandonment – a feeling that none of us have experienced for ages. And then it comes like a storm, and we are all blown away from each other in an explosion, left to wander the earth hopelessly searching.
The first time we were really separated was during World War II, strewn across the continents like litter. We thought that was awful, but not even a century later, an ambitious child plucked off the cherry on our sundae and revealed all our carefully hidden weaknesses in one easy gesture. And just as we recovered from that, we were ripped apart again by the only force that we consciously allowed to change us –
Love.
And it was painful.
ENNUI // the heir and the spare.
The thing was, instead of having done it wrong, the parents started things off exactly as they were supposed to. Second cousins, arranged marriage. She was pretty as a girl and beautiful as a woman, lively and attractive and now strong and virtuous. He was intelligent and highly refined, a good ruler and a popular public figure. They were engaged on Midsummer’s day, wed six months later in a dainty snow-strewn ceremony. She looked like a fairy princess, the Sugar Plum Fairy, all dressed in white, silver lining her great furry mantle, and he looked every inch the prince: stately, solemn, proud, calm, golden-haired with soft, boyish eyes.
Marriage itself was a pretty thing between them: kisses exchanged at breakfast, socks folded neatly by her own tender hands, whispered prayers accompanied by wistful glances at her stomach on his part. They were courteous and politely affectionate.
The heir came as everyone had hoped, one warm August evening, and that was where everything began to go wrong.
Having done their first duty to the family – providing a boy to carry on the name – they were now obliged to look for a suitable wife for him. A French princess or an Italian duchessa was looking like a good choice at the time, so at the tender age of four, the heir was betrothed to a girl who barely knew her own name. The Russian line would finally prosper now, in the capable hands of the czar who did everything the right way.
Seven years later, the spare arrived.
The spare was a pretentious little todler; he crawled around, made a mess, decorated his own face with a curly moustache modelled after his father’s. When the spare was six years old, he shattered all the glass windows in his room with uncontrolled magic alone; his face was horribly cut up, and three hours later, the cuts had healed and he was sleeping peacefully in his nurse’s bed. They grew alarmed at todlers showing signs of magic, but, eventually writing it off as a powerful storm instead, attempted to ignore any further discrepancies. They were the ones who did things correctly, so an abnormality was not an option.
Trouble came again, but not until the heir was happily married and settled for a time in St. Petersburg. Five years he had been married. Five years, and no issue. Rumours began to spread, diffusing around the great country like a plague. Something is wrong with the Prince, they would whisper. I suppose it is difficult with that Italian servant walking around the palace… The heir could not conceive. Unrest stirred within the courts at Moscow. And meanwhile, the spare also waited, waited for the dreaded word.
The spare’s sixteenth birthday was marked by a profoundly unsettling silence. No celebrations at the palace, now. Three days after the sombre affair his mother said to him, You need to help your family. And so the spare was sent off, packed light, brought too many fur coats and too many pairs of shorts. Help your family, for your brother cannot.
Mama, but, he is doing fine…
He arrived in Switzerland as someone flammable. He stopped being the spare and started being Stepan Savelijevich instead.
HP // 50 sentences: misa.
source: 1sentence prompts from livejournal; theme set epsilon
i. Motion - She never could sit still; when she studied, her finger tapped an ostinato at the bottom of the parchment, and when she slept, she rolled and tumbled across the bed, waking up in the morning with her head at the foot and her arms dangling from the edge.
ii. Cool - Misa didn’t like the cold much. She was forever going about during the winter months with her scarf wrapped snugly around her neck, draping down her shoulders, and never left her boots in the snow.
iii. Young - For someone who had finally reached what she considered the “upper years” of school, Misa was still surprised at the castle that hid so much from her.
iv. Last - After Tam, she swore she would never like a boy again.
v. Wrong - Misa hated being wrong, like most girls. Unlike most girls, she didn’t get the last word. Unlike most girls, she simply blasted the offending righteous person to smithereens.
vi. Gentle - Misa was rarely gentle. She saved them as special moments for people she really, genuinely loved.
vii. One – Her first love was the one who got all of her, her trust, her love, her heart. The only one.
viii. Thousand - She didn’t like to do things in excess, although she once had, simply because now she barely has the energy for anything.
ix. King - Misa believed in women’s rights. She hated men who always got the upper hand.
x. Learn - Contrary to popular belief, Tam did not teach her everything she would know about love. Years later, she swallowed back the sappy things she wanted to tell Lockie and Alice.
xi. Blur - Her sixth year passed by in one of these, so quickly that she hardly realized where she was headed until she collided head first with a wall of N.E.W.T. review booklets.
xii. Wait - Among other things, Misa was impatient.
xiii. Change - She used to be shy; she was cheery and fun-loving; she is pensive, uncertain.
xiv. Command - For all that she liked to order people around, her commands were usually harmless and fussy. It was when she needed someone to do something that she was quiet and calm.
xv. Hold - Misa was a solitude sort of person for many weeks, but during those days she never forgot the exact feeling of him, and she wondered if in the future anyone would want to hold a girl like her.
xvi. Need - As with most difficult teenagers, Misa pushed things away when she most needed them.
xvii. Vision - Her eyesight was 20-20. Her hindsight, weirdly enough, never was.
xviii. Attention - For some reason, as a baby, Misa never had to cry for attention… the attention was there until she started crying.
xix. Soul - She believed that everything had a soul. Of course, this belief was never voiced, and no one ever noticed how lightly she stepped on things.
xx. Picture - At night she saw things with her eyes closed much clearly than she had during the day, with her eyes wide, under the bright sunlight.
xxi. Fool - It wasn’t until a few hours later that Misa realised what a fool she had been to call it quits, to go running after the one thing that would never make her feel better and embrace it with all her might.
xxii. Mad - Some people thought she’d gone a bit bonkers with her books, that she was trying to do a Ravenclaw and become a hermit.
xxiii. Child - Misa has a kid brother. He is mischievous, smiley, and always cheerful. Her worst fear is having those things taken away from him.
xxiv. Now - She settles down in her office. She probes things in cauldrons and prays that they kill people.
xxv. Shadow - Once, there was a visiting ghoul in the house. It followed all the happenings of the house, and would have made it its home, had Misa’s father not panicked and ordered a team of ghoul removal experts to take care of it. The incident emptied all of his pocket money and robbed him of the ability to buy her candy.
xxvi. Goodbye - It wasn’t really goodbye, she realized as she peered through the glass in the door and saw Tam’s gleeful face waiting expectantly.
xxvii. Hide - Over and over again, she told herself that she was done hiding. That was years ago, but now she finds herself curled up in bed, unblinking, pretending not to hear any of the words floating around the room, the covers pulled over her head.
xxviii. Fortune - It was just her good luck to be stuck with an idiot for a husband and a madly grinning brother-in-law.
xxix. Safe - She thought that the war wouldn’t hurt anyone she cared about. She was right, in a way, but years later, Leon goes missing in the midst of another one.
xxx. Ghost - Misa often wondered what they did all day, milling about alone or in pairs, discussing, always discussing, fading in and out.
xxxi. Book - At first, Misa hated books, but when people started becoming what she avoided, she was surprised by how much they had in common.
xxxii. Eye - When she was little, in science class, she had blown up a model of an eye. After that she had an incurable interest in biology.
xxxiii. Never - The word didn’t exist in her vocabulary, mostly because even when it was uttered, it was used incorrectly.
xxxiv. Sing - If she was lucky and woke up early enough, she could hear Jamie singing in the shower. When he came out he always found her on the bed convulsing with laughter and dictating everything that came out of his mouth.
xxxv. Sudden - It was as sudden and unexpected as anything she’d ever experienced, but when Misa looked at him, that one time, she knew.
xxxvi. Stop - For a long while Misa wanted to stop everything and just exist. That didn’t work out so well for her, for her mother’s words and warnings hung over her head like angels and demons.
xxxvii. Time - It worked, didn’t it, she thought, it healed everything.
xxxviii. Wash - The first time Misa killed someone in a fight, no blood was shed, but she could see it on her hands, and she could never wash it off.
xxxix. Torn - At first, when she felt like she looked at Jamie funny, the feeling came with a sense of guilt.
xl. History - Misa has a history of causing fires. The thing was, she never wanted to, and feared them above all else.
xli. Power - The hungry feeling never had a pull on her. She hated being in total control. She hated playing god. She wanted to feel powerless sometimes, feel that someone was there to take care of her, but it never happened.
xlii. Bother - This was what she liked to call her brother, but never had a nickname been so insincere.
xliii. God - Before Hogwarts happened, Misa’s father privately wondered what would happen if he took his daughter to a church. The first time he tried it, she never made it out of the car; the second time, she didn’t blink once during the sermon, didn’t close her eyes, and had a load of Muggles muttering things about children and autism.
xliv. Wall - One night she realized that she would never be able to brew a love potion. The instructions, which had made sense to her third year peers, always confused her.
xlv. Naked - It was Ash, Misa suddenly sat up one night and remembered. The first guy to have ever seen her unclothed was Ash, and for a long time after that Misa wondered if it had been worth it.
xlvi. Drive - He liked to tell her to keep her eyes on the road. She did… most of the time.
xlvii. Harm - A strange thing about Misa was her lack of reluctance to harm others. Sometimes she felt like the end always justified the means.
xlviii. Precious - She used to think that her life was precious, her husband, maybe, her job, but – they put Lockie into her arms and all the answers fell miles short.
xlix. Hunger - It took years, but Misa finally learned to cook.
l. Believe - She did stop, for many weeks, to think that she could get out of this hole, but she did, and it was for the best.
