#thraed

then, to summarize: you weren't alone. you never were. we both know this. although perhaps, anna, your reflection has never been like mine. perhaps it has never moved so independently, or been both so like and unlike you. did you ever peer into a reflective surface and not recognize yourself? i have begun to wonder, as of late, if i just was seeing mabel martin as she was in the mirror. not me. or perhaps more me than i ever was. you are telling me about your time in the house, the house that is yours now more than it was mine, the house that wants to keep me. both of you are aligned on this. both of you want me as your hoard, but when i think of you keeping me, i think of something safe, whereas the house makes my teeth grind against each other down to the jawbone.

how hostile i am to it.

yet you seem amicable with it. did you walk among its halls, yanking the black cloth down from the mirrors and trying to see yourself again and again? were you worried that you might find sharp teeth or an inhuman glint to the eye? or were you so certain in what your reflection might look like that it didn't worry you at all? were you that brave or foolish? i can imagine you being both, considering what you did for me. how you walked below the hill for me, and gave up yourself for me. there was a bargain, but it was one you barely seemed aware of. you gave yourself up like you were worth nothing, and that was, i think, one of the things that angered me the most about it. how fast you simply consigned yourself to a prison just so i would be free.

things trap us, anna. i have been trapped my whole life, by sally, by the school, by the hill. whenever i looked in a mirror it was like i was trapped again, but this time by what i was not, or what i lacked, my body containing nothing of mabel mayapple martin even as the exterior looked just so. i do not think i am the same as veratrice. i am no bundle of twigs given life and breath and even blood. but there was something made about me. there was something made of me, or in me, and i think my reflection might have been trying to tell me that all along.

i think reflections keep secrets. they are our true selves through a sheet of glass, trapped, yearning, trying to claw their way towards us. trying to kill us, in my case, because neither i nor her have ever done anything by halves. i can at least appreciate her commitment, and see it in myself. perhaps we are only unlike in other ways, anna. what would you do if confronted by both of us? would you recognize which one is me and which is her, or would you say that we are both equally mabel martin, that i wield that name even if i was not born with it? perhaps you would kiss us both so gently, and so sweetly, that we might become one thing, an entire person rather than two halves split like an apple. it is so easy to patchwork things together under the hill, to sew things together until they twine into each other.

and you are now of the hill. you rule the hill, and you rule everyone under it, and only on occasion do we venture up into the house, your steps gentle in its halls, and mine brittle like every long-lost daughter. you cover the mirrors again for me. when you look into them, do you see your arm as whole and no longer bone? do you imagine that your mouth commands less, that it might laugh more lightly and easily, that you are not king?

i think you like being king anna of the hill. i think that, like anyone, there is a part of you that likes settling into power, especially when you wear its mantle as easily as the wreaths of my flowers i weave around you.

that's the funny thing about chess. a pawn can cross the board, traversing dangers and everything bent against it, and it can become almost any piece except for a king. a pawn can never become a king. at best it can become a queen, who is still ruled and still caged. they cannot switch sides; they cannot do anything except grow to fit a more grandiose cage. what does the pawn think, i wonder, when it crosses the bard and becomes something else? when it transforms? when it no longer has to skitter among the walls and in the undergrowth, snaking among leaves and keeping its belly low to the dirt, praying that it is too small to notice? in the grand scheme of the game, pawns are often nothing more than bodies to put between one threat and another.

perhaps that is our power -- that we are to be underestimated, that the hound of the sun and the hare of the moon both see us as nothing more than tools to wield against each other, and aurora silver too. perhaps her most of all. i believe that, given enough time, we could gain grudging ground against those below the hill; i believe, concurrently, that we could gain nothing with aurora silver. but for right now she is not our focus. we want revenge. you, and i, and the too talkative bundle of twigs as well.

we have been caged again and again. by purpose. by leashes. and soon we will not be, or so i hope, you with the voice of god and me as your champion. the only thing that will bind us is each other, and anna, i think that is something i can live with.

that is an eventual end, though. for right now we are still rats, still pawns, still things that crawl and slither among the dirt, blanching away from anything like sunlight. if we spend long enough down here, anna, what will our revolt become? will veratrice's twigs rot as the moisture builds in them? will we become cave-things, eyeless and sallow, writhing in the wet and the dark with only each other for solace? that might not be as terrible as it sounds. i would kiss you nevertheless, anna, and hold you and touch you even if you became something else. even if we both did.

no matter what, then, this is about transformation. we will become something other together. does that frighten you? i don't think it frightens me anymore. veratrice is ahead of us, moving through the tunnels with a twitching in her fingers, listening for the sound of the king, the scream of him among existence, his voice alone bending everything to his will. the whole world here, underneath the hill, turns upon the king's will. that is what i am worried about. why would he let us run? why would he not merely trap us? what machinations are we playing into? is our revolt just a game between the hare and the hound, anna?

has all of this happened before, and will keep happening, because we both know how time both is and is not a simple progression?

i should try to think of things less that we cannot change. only what we can control, which is ourselves. ❝ i could never imagine what our king being aghast would have looked like before you arrived, ❞ i tell you. i mean it. it was outside my conception. my voice lowers. i want this to be just us, just ours, and you never know who might be listening, or how the walls bend closer to absorb our words and echo them again miles away. ❝ we have made ourselves vulnerable, anna, haven't we? you and i? ❞ your hand made of bone, cool to the touch. ❝ you make me vulnerable. i'd revolt a thousand times over for you, no matter how many times he tries to strike us down. ❞

i want to kiss you, anna, when you look at me like that. i want to press my lips everywhere -- the bones gripping my fingers, the visible pieces of your skin, the familiarity of your lips, to listen to the way that your voice sighs when i press my lips against you. all of this. the revolt, perhaps, is that i chose to love you with intention. i chose it. i let you rule me. i choose it again with every moment we spend together, with the fact that i would be your champion against every slight against us.

hi again, anna. it's me. mabel. mabel martin, i mean. i hope.... i hope you're doing well, and i hope sally isn't being too much of a -- too much of a handful, or however... how do i put this? the old and the sick and the unwell are your patients, and you tend to them with the same care that sally once tended to the garden, i'm sure. we've never met or anything, so maybe this is presumptuous of me, but i can imagine the care, you know. i think you have careful hands, anna. i think you --

oh, to hell with it. the charade and the gentle reassurances, playing at safety and security like the house on the hill is some kind of shelter. maybe it will shelter you, but you insist on looking, on seeing. and so you asked a question and i cannot lie to you any more than i can claim that i am safe here. there are so many elsewheres, anna limon. it is a dangerous question to ask. are you unwise? are you too curious to preserve yourself? or are you simply finding yourself too alone, among the creaking of the house as it slowly digests whatever parts of you it wants to keep, the bubbling of bile in its gut? where do you think you will be able to see me, anna, when i can barely see myself now?

i look at myself in a piece of glass dirt-stained and pressed into this wall, as if it is some unwelcome gift from him, a sliver of myself visible at a time, and i see a flower blossoming out from my cheek, a vine curled around the thin bones of my neck. i am full of holes, anna, and things grow out of me, and yet you want to see me plainly. how would you react? i think i am something of a monster, and this is not particularly disturbing to me. i have known this for years. i have known the terror that i bring with me, or that the growth of me is odd and unnatural. i am warning you, anna, nurse anna, kind and good anna who tends to things, that when you see me, i do not know what you will do.

i can dream, and hope, and engage in all the meager comforts of my mind, but i know better. i know what i am. i'd like very much to see you, anna, but i sometimes think that we should see each other in passing, as two strangers on a street. have you ever had that moment? have you seen someone, perhaps a girl who wears her hair tied back, and watched the slender arch of her neck, the smile at someone or something that most certainly isn't you, even if you wish the look on her face was because of you? maybe that’s the best way for us to see each other in passing, as visions there and then gone.

maybe i would frighten you. maybe you would touch the greenery growing from me, the vines through my veins and the flowers blooming from my lungs and my gut and you would recoil. rightfully so. i am a warning, anna, about the things that exist under the hill. i am a beacon and even though it seems like you want to pursue me, perhaps you should be running the other direction. things grow here. those things are not good. and i grew up here, in the soil, the same way as the plants in the garden, as the house with its foundations set deep into the earth, and that means that i am bound here.

even when i left, i never truly left. you may have to leave pieces of yourself, but most of you can descend back out of the woods, back into the world of you and your dirt people and your simple little lives. 

THIS RIBBON BETWEEN US, TRAILING FROM MY CAREFUL FINGERS TO YOUR WRIST. silk, rippling as i wind it around your wrist of bone, cool to my ever-burning touch. rose-red, or blood-red, and both are quite fitting, i think, between us. if i wanted to, i could keep us tied together like this. this could be the leash of our love, anna, if i wanted it to be, but i do not think it needs to be. i need no such marking. you did not see what your doppelganger did, the rope of hair around my throat, pulling me towards her. do you want the same thing? have you thought about it?

a king rules, after all. and ruling something is setting boundaries, like how this realm reaches out into the one above and where it does not, and the cage that was once made for luna thorne. what is different is that i did not promise to stay, anna, or to be by your side, but that i promised to love you. an easy thing, i think. i love you. i love you. this is just a fact, as simple as gravity. 

you taught me about the bones in the arm using your own as an example, so now i know that i am pulling the ribbon carefully through the ulna and the radius, wrapping it around again and again. i cared little for anatomy before i met you. as you know, i liked physics. perhaps i wanted an understandable world, or i found it funny how you could try to explain everything through equations and principles. to make everything organizable. how quaint it sounds now. i can organize nothing of my life through anything so linearly applicable as time, but i can think of it in terms of you, saint anna, king anna. before you, and now with you. these are two points in my life. both are equally clear, but one matters more.

this ribbon. the memory of a wound. which wound? the loss of your arm? the poison eating away inside of you until you died of it? the times we lost each other, one of us drawn back beneath the hill and the other clawing at the dirt? the way that the king’s will pushed you down into the earth, crushing you under it, and how we had to run through the tunnels, the rats in the walls, my hand in yours, our desperation wound between us like wire, like the cord of a old-fashioned telephone, something holding us together since the first time you left a message for me, heard from the inside of a hollowed-out bone? 

❝ i suppose so, ❞ i say softly. i am wearing flowers in my air, braided there by your careful hands, and now you are wearing a bloody ribbon, wound through your bones by my steady touch. ❝ i think red suits you, anna. i think you wear it well. ❞ like that, i lift up your hand, bone cool to my touch, my hand too warm, on fire with it, and press a scorching kiss to the center of your palm. the fire only ever catches on me. it never spreads, it never shifts, and it never stops burning. i never stop burning. 

i will never. not with how time winds its way around us. before i was cleansed with fire, i was already burning, and the fire has never been lit, and so it goes. we have wound ourselves underneath the hill, the vermin that we were, the rulers we now are.

@thraed​ : ❛ How do you know that? ❜ hill house

hi, anna. it’s me. mabel, i mean. you probably know that already. anyway, i got your message, about the dream thing, and — can i ask, which me? no. that’s wrong. i mean: what did she look like? i know that’s a weird question to ask, because you’ve probably only seen the photographs of me that sally keeps on the mantelpiece. and those were from when i was very young. very, very young, and as far as i can remember, there were only three of them, so.

anyway, um, what i’m trying to say is… the dream version of me. did she just look like that photograph, or did she look like —

what? what? what? i’m not listening, i am not listening, i know you’re wrong, i know that it was always me in the mirror, it was always me, it was always me, it was always always always

you should be careful with mirrors. in the house, i mean. or, you should always be careful with mirrors, because they’re liars, but especially in the house. i would keep them covered. make sure the light is good. don’t look at yourself for too long, or let one mirror catch the reflection in another. and maybe don’t hold any photographs up to them, if you’re thinking of doing that for some reason. i just don’t think it’s be a good idea.

anna, i don’t think i’ve been myself for a long time. i don’t even know what myself is. i’m eating flowers down here, anna, and drinking the sweetest wine, so sweet that it tastes like pure honey, sweeter than all the things i ever ate up above and it’s like i’m a child again, it’s like i’m the child in that photograph who used to eat sugar straight out of the jar. oh, anna, are you as sweet as this? so sweet that it would make me sick? can i grow sick on you? if i drank you down would you be cool clean water or would you turn to syrup in my throat?

in fact, a lot of things aren’t good ideas while you’re staying up here — up there, i mean — with sally. i wish i had left you a list, but i didn’t… i didn’t really know. all of this was very sudden, me leaving, and the reception’s terrible here. sometimes your messages just cut out, or they skip between words, and it’s like someone’s cut up what you’re telling me and sewn it back together wrong, this patchwork lopsided thing made of your voice. 

you haven’t answered me. i know you’re probably busy. that’s okay. taking care of someone is a full time job, after all! i just, well, i keep whispering messages into rocks and letting them slide from my hand into the river, or i throw them from an acorn into the dark and hope that it rolls out to stop at your feet, and i don’t think you’re receiving them. or maybe you’re ignoring them, and you don’t turn over stray rocks or you crush acorns beneath your shoes but i need to tell you. i need to tell you, anna, so desperately, that —

have you ever known there was an infestation in your home, anna? have you ever laid there in bed and been able to hear things scratch and move in the walls, biting at drywall and wood and making everything rot around it? what if that’s me, in your dream? like a termite spiraling into the skull, working its way closer to the soft wet meat of the brain? sometimes i feel as though what i do is i worm my way into someone’s life, and then it begins. the ending, i mean. it begins there.

it might not even hurt. you might not even notice. they trepan to release pressure around the skull still. some people, i think, would be surprised to know that we still simply drill holes in the skull like that, that our best option in this enlightened age is still to just drill in, deeper and deeper.

that’s all you’ve ever done, though. we, i mean. that’s all we’ve ever done. drill where we shouldn’t. watch the pressure come out, or go too far and strike something vital. would the meanness in me as it pushes through the bone, hurt you or save you?

if a dream-me says something, don’t trust her. i wouldn’t even trust her, even now, even when her sharp teeth no longer hurt me.

can you not pick locks, saint anna? did you never learn how to? maybe it wasn’t a necessary skill for you, living as you did. maybe you did not feel as though you had secrets to unlock everywhere, in your own house, in the back rooms of your school, in yourself. or maybe you do have locked rooms. i think you do. i think we all do. i know something about what it is to keep a secret in your mind, to lock it away like a house, and i know something about burning down those houses too.

then again, i think we both know something of necessary destruction. 

you should know by now that you need no key. the heart is not such a complex thing. it is an organ with two chambers that pumps blood throughout the body, and i am sure you know more about it than i do. surely there has been some dissection during your time in medical school. once, some greying animal organ set in front of you that you had to slice in half and pin down the pieces with labels. the heart looks simple like that, a reflection of itself, one half and then the other.

you have half my heart, i think. if someone were to open my chest and push aside the vines and the flowers and not recoil back, burnt with half-real fire, they would find half my heart gone as much as the half in me still beats, because you hold the missing piece in your hands. i’ve seen, again and again, how delicately you hold me. i don’t know how to understand it. you insisting on sewing up my wounds when i barely feel them.

you have a healer’s hands, anna, even with one made of bone. even if the tearing of my heart was bloody, and aching, and when you left me — when you went back to the house, or when i was trapped in the house instead — i screamed my anguish into the ground beneath my feet. i have never felt more like a dirt person than that moment, more helpless and unable to exert my will upon anything except my own pain. something was missing from me.

that’s a popular line, isn’t it? i fell in love with you and you stole my heart. incoherent. trite. distasteful. i say this in three ways to make it true. you did not steal my heart, anna limon. i gave it to you. then you split it in half like an apple, and took the half you liked best with you. how else could i have spoken to you through the electrical buzz in the house, the wires and the hum of it? how else could i simply know you, even when i didn’t know you? when i made you up, and imagined what it would be like, to have a girl who would try to make up me in return?

❝ oh, anna, you don’t need a key to my heart, ❞ i say. ❝ that would be ridiculous. can you imagine the inconvenience? ❞

that look on your face again, anna, the one when i’m being intentionally contrary, pugnacious and waspish. i will not apologize for it. i am exactly what i am, unapologetically so. but to make you mind less, my hand finds yours. my hands are always finding you — in the dark, when i am without you, and here, when i am with you instead.

despite myself, my voice gentles, not echoing as it should here under the earth. i never knew what i would sound like, being gentle. now i do, which is your fault alone. ❝ you already have it, anna. there’s nothing left for you to unlock. i and the house may both have locked rooms, but most of them would unlock if you merely asked for it. ❞