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Jul. 5th, 2025 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
medalsCHAPTER ONE
Before you, there is him.
Four years old, red hair curling against the rosey-hue of his cheeks: this is your brother. He was born loved in a way that most children only dream of. Your mother cried with relief when she saw his face, your father barely knew what to do with himself for joy.
Your brother was born and so was hope. Then they named him Kieren, little dark one, without a thought. Mistake one.
When you are born, he sits outside with your nan, idle, anxious hands tugging and pulling at a rabbit meant for you. When you are born he listens to the agonised screams of your mother, watches your father pace for hours and twists and pulls the rabbits ears.
You are not easy to birth. Nineteen hours, forty-five minutes. You are born small, and you are born silent. Your first sensation is the choke of air into your tiny lungs; the sting of a slap to your back. You cry once and then you are placed into your exhausted fathers arms, then your even more exhausted mothers, and then, finally, you see your first glimpse of salvation.
You squeeze your brother's pinky finger tight. You do not let go.
Your name is -
You learn to crawl, and then walk, and although you have learned words and sounds, you do not wish to speak. This is how time passes: you whisper to your parents, but most of all your brother. When you are a little older still, you learn that tip-toeing means you make less noise, so you do that.
There is something wrong with you. You are aware of this from the moment you know to be aware of anything. There is something wrong inside of you, your synapses are wired all wrong, your insides sit uncomfortably inside of you. Other children do not like you. Sometimes, when you watch your parents whisper to themselves about you, you think they don’t much like you either.
You are strange. Quietly, just to yourself, you think that you were not meant to be born. You think you were not meant to be slapped back to life, or conceived at all. You are six when you formulate this thought on your brother’s bedroom floor with your face buried in your knees. You are six when your brother kisses the crown of your head and tells you that you are his most favourite thing to ever be born.
You are six when your parents decide you need help. But: no therapist knows what to do with you. You switch between ten different specialists up until you turn eleven. They give you special clogs to help you walk, they encourage you to try and make friends, they ask why don’t you try a club? A sport? A hobby? Why don’t you paint with your brother?
You aren’t meant for those things. You want to be invisible so badly and what use is a hobby to someone who can’t be seen? You think, desperate: please let me disappear; please stop looking at me; please take me and put me in the dirt where no one will ever see me again.
No one does.
You can’t kill a child, after all, no matter how strange.
You are eleven, still. You haven’t said a word in three weeks. Your parents are at a breaking point. This is the longest you have not said a word, and some days you also try to stop breathing. You hold your breath until your face is purple, lungs screaming for air, head floating from lack of oxygen. It feels like floating, briefly.
Your brother sits beside you at the beginning of the fourth and places a CD case in your hand. Scribbled on the front is BADASS HEAVY METAL MIX CD VOL 1. The CD itself is missing, but only because it’s in the small player. Your brother puts the earphones over your head and says: “It’s okay to be loud, sometimes. It’s okay to scream,” and hits play.
Your brother is the kindest person you know. In the whole world - which, at eleven, is only Roarton - he is the only person to love you, to understand you, to hold you with continued patience.
He is the first person to show you that even strange people can be happy.
You listen to it over and over and over.
You don’t think you’re meant to be loud, but you could be for your brother. Sometimes you must be uncomfortable to make another person happy: this is love.
You stay strange, but you learn to mask this better. At twelve, you emerge after the summer with a new resolve to try and be normal. You pierce your ears, you paint your nails, you start speaking up in class. You learn how to make your voice loud, to be funny, to be seen.
None of this easy. None of this makes you happy, but it does make your family happy and that’s almost the same thing.
So you’re twelve, thirteen, fourteen - you have one friend, at last, and you love her. This is your first love; this will be the truest love you will ever feel. Her name is Lisa, and she’s beautiful and funny, she’s bold, she lights up an entire room the second she enters it. She chooses you to be her best friend and it becomes easier to be seen if Lisa is the one being seen with you.
You turn fourteen, and everything is good until it isn’t.
Your brother has a best friend too, and he loves him terribly. Your brother is strange like you, too, you’ve learned, and people do not like him. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t give a single flying fuck because he has Rick, until he doesn’t.
When Rick leaves for basic training, you sit with Kieren while he goes through the remaining memories he has. You watch your brother cry and it makes you feel hollow: what kind of sister can’t stop their brother from crying? What kind of sister can’t make all the bad go away?
Months pass in long, stalled stretches, and then all at once there is a sudden pause. You’re sitting in the living room when the door goes, and Janet Macy comes in a sudden flurry, eyes red from crying, and struggles to say Rick’s been killed in action. She says it and leaves in one breath, because she isn’t supposed to be there. Kieren isn’t supposed to know.
You watch your brother slowly get up, climb the stairs, and hear the slam of his door.
You are fourteen, and something is wrong.
Your brother spends days locked in his room. Then weeks. He spends his birthday in bed, mourning in a way that neither you nor your family can really understand. November rolls towards its end when he finally emerges, kisses you on the forehead and tells tell mum not to make dinner for me.
Something in your guy screams don’t let him leave. Something inside of you urges you to grab his hand, to hold him in place, beg him not to go.
But you do. You let him go.
You’re fourteen, it’s one day, two, three, it’s four days and he hasn’t come home. You tell your dad about Kieren’s den, you tell him where it is, and you pace the living room over and over, chewing the skin behind your nails -
You’re fourteen and there is so much blood.
You weren’t aware a human being could bleed so much, that a person could look so limp in another persons arms. You hear your mother screaming; your father is sobbing as he falls to his knees with your brothers body in his arms, clutching it close to his chest.
You are numb. You are empty. You have no words for the feeling which settles inside of you. The closest thing is agony, closer still is misery.
In the days after, a new feeling takes over: you become angry.
CHAPTER TWO
You have three weeks of anger. It is a slow three weeks, the clock hands moving in slow, sluggish tandem. The air feels thick, your lungs filled with lead as you breathe and stumble through the days and the hours in the aftermath of your loss. Your hair becomes limp, eyes dark with brutal emptiness. There is a void in you that grows, swallowing you up bit by bit, the chasm so large it threatens to become a vacuum to everyone else around you.
You almost didn't go to the funeral out of spite. You sat up for hours staring at your black dress and your black shoes and your black everything, wondering if you could barricade your door to keep the world out.
Kieren's gravestone reads:
WE LOVED SO DEAR
GONE IS THE VOICE
WE LOVED TO HEAR
You think he would hate it.
This is something you think about often. You visit his grave most days, at first sitting on the fresh dirt with your legs crossed and your face wet with tears. Then you set sit with your face dry, and then you sit with your face blank, not really seeing. You read the epitaph over and over and over and over and over and over and over -
Broken record. Broken heart. Scratched disk, skip it over, you can't go back, you can never go back.
Lisa tells you that it gets easier, but what does Lisa know? She's never lost a brother.
On the third week you have to go back to school even though there's only days until you stop for the Christmas break. You don't bother to do your tie. You barely brush your hair. You walk from class to class with Lisa guiding you, your hand held tightly in hers. She is your bodyguard, your guiding light, your anchor to the living world.
Two days before you went back to school, she held you under her single duvet as you cried and told her you wanted to die, too. That you didn't know how to live without your brother. She held you and wiped your tears and soothed your hair and she told you: if you can't live for you, then you live for me. I need you, you stupid bitch.
So, you lived.
Four days before Christmas Eve, two-thousand-and-nine, you have a dream. The dream goes like this:
You are standing in the middle of a field, staring up at the old farm. There are no sheep in the field, there are no cows, there is nothing except stillness, except quiet. You are staring at the building with your hair whipping about your face, and it is so cold, but you're not shivering. Behind you, you hear: Jem.
It sounds like Kieren. You can't turn around. You're too scared to turn around. He says your name again, closer still, and you can't turn around no matter how much you want to, because you are terrified.
Jem, he breathes at your ear, voice distorted like his vocal chords have been shredded up. You shake with terror. Jem, you have to run -
And the world goes blinding white, sirens screeching in the distance, tilting sideways and -
You wake up to your mother shaking you, face close to yours, scrunched with an expression you've never seen before. Your mother is terrified, and there are sirens blaring outside, the sounds of people screaming in the street. You whisper, "mum?" and she hisses, frantic, "you have to get up Jemima, now," and this is how the end of the world begins: in your bedroom, with your mother, and your heart racing.
Here is how the apocalypse goes:
Year one, you are still angry, but you are also terrified. No one knows what they're doing, help stops coming and in the wake of abandonment, Roarton becomes more insular that it ever has been. Year one, the Human Volunteer Force is formed from the angry and the disillusioned, the brave and the bitter. They ransack overturned army jeeps for guns and ammo. They strip the bodies of unforms, they burn the flesh and take what they can.
You are still fourteen, almost fifteen. You help your mother hammer nails into a bat. Your father teaches you how to use the chainsaw he's only ever used once. You sit in church pews and listen to the book of Revelations, to the men in camo tell you how to barricade your homes, how to ration, how to rely on them to survive. You are fourteen still when you leave the house one morning and walk yourself over to the Legion - where they have set up base - and you say: I want to sign up. Lisa is behind you, with her shoulders squared, her jaw set.
Here is another thing: Rick Macy's father hated your brother, and he hates your parents, and you think he probably hates you too. Worse than your brother (a queer) and your parents (weak), you are a girl. He stares you and your best friend down and says this is for soldiers only and you say then make us fucking soldiers.
It's Gary who puts his hand on Bill's shoulder, and whispers in a low tone: we could use the extra hands, Serg and Bill says, voice like venom, then you can train 'em.
Here's the other thing: Gary didn't like your brother either, and your brother fucking hated him. You meet his eyes across the pool table and you think good.
Your first mission is one month after this. You train as you go. There's not enough time to do anything except show you how to load a gun and how to shoot it. A knife is intuitive, or it comes later. You save Gary's life, little fourteen-year old Jem Walker, with your heart pounding and your ears ringing. When it's done you are passed around by cheering men, thumps on your back, and finally, Bill Macy with a pint that he hands to you and says, with what looks suspiciously like respect: good lass.
Across the pool table, Lisa grins at you and your heart is still pounding, your ears still ringing.
Year two is filled with bullets. You are fifteen, almost sixteen. You are the best shot in Roarton. You are the deadliest force in the entire valley. You have put your entire soul into becoming a good little soldier, the perfect little killing machine. You don't even flinch at the sight of a dead body; you breathe through the smell of burning, rotting flesh like its nothing.
On your sixteenth birthday, your parents are also at the Legion, watching you with uncomfortable eyes, like they're watching a stranger. They watch as the HVF lads sing you a happy birthday and hand you a red box, poorly wrapped.
Inside is a silver Smith & Weston Colt, and a box of bullets. You ask where, and Gary says, above the noise: found it on some dead southern captain's body when we was doing the rounds.
You stare at it for a long, long time, mouth split wide into a smile - and you realise, as the noise rises: you haven't smiled in a long time.
Year three goes much of the same. No help comes from down south. Your supplies are dwindling. The dead gravitate towards Roarton like a moth to flame, filling up the woods, the old farm, the surrounding countryside.
Year four, the TV's come back on. Not properly, but the news. You gather around the old TV in the Legion and listen to the bastard government tell you they have been working hard on a solution. On a possible cure. That they are implementing phase one very soon. No one knows what that means, but you're all certain it's bullshit. A week later, there's a soldier at the Legion, though, and he attaches medals to all of your chests and commends you on your bravery, and your loyalty to your country.
Bullshit.
Year four, again, again, again. You're seventeen, almost eighteen. You're standing guard outside the Save n Shop while Lisa is inside looking for supplies. Tins, biscuits - shit that no one's been able to get outside the village in months. You're talking to her on the walkie when it goes quiet. You call her name, again, again, again. She doesn't answer, you will never answer you again because inside, inside is -
Here is something no one knows: Lisa was your first kiss. You were sixteen, and you were both exhausted from five days of constant patrols. You both lay under her single duvet stinking of smoke and cider, delirious from lack of sleep and she kissed you, and you kissed her back. She tasted like cigarettes, like sambuca, like girlhood and love. She kissed you till you both passed out in each others arms, fully clothed and exhausted, and she never kissed you again, because she fucking DIED in the -
The overhead links were blinking at the time, weren't they? Greenish hue, electricity barely back on. You could hear the distance groaning, the horrible squelching of flesh between finger tips, between teeth. You had a full gun: you shot a rotter in the head as you called Lisa's name. You shot another as you turned the corner and saw her boot, attach to her leg, attached to her torso, on the floor, head covered by two crouching creatures stained black with dead blood, their wheezing so fucking loud as you choked out: Lis? And then one got up at stared at your, so you shot her in the fucking chest, and you turned to shoot the other, but there was Lisa's beautiful face, her head cracked open, and the rotter stared up at you and you were so blinded by fucking anger you cocked your gun, and, and, and
And it was Kieren.
CHAPTER THREE
You lie. You tell them: I ran out of bullets.
They never find her body.
You are eighteen, and there isn't a cure, but there's a treatment. Your parents tell you: they have Kieren. They tell you: he's coming home.
They don't understand that your brother is dead.
At your dining room table, there is a shape that looks like your brother, but isn't your brother. He smiles at you and you can't look at him.
In your brothers bed, you stare at this thing as it sleeps with your brothers face, twitches in its sleep like its human. You know it isn't, because when it snaps awake and stares at you, its eyes are mottled green-grey, pupils starburst decayed. You ask: Are you a demon? You say: my brother was a kind and generous person.
The thing says: I'm sorry, and this makes you angrier than you have ever been.
They find Rick Macy. They bring Rick Macy home. Someone sees the thing wearing your brothers face in the open, and you are no longer a hero, you are no longer Bill's Rambo of Roarton, you are cast out, and you are so fucking angry, still.
You tell Kieren, about Rick. Everything after comes in waves, like a blur. You're sitting on the couch of Lisa's parents as Kieren tells them how she died. You are watching Kieren pretend to eat. You are losing some of the anger in bits and pieces as you watch the thing that is your brother try to remember how to live.
For the first time in a long time, you remember what hope feels like.
And then Rick dies, and then Bill dies, and then there is a funeral for them both, and before you know it a year has gone. Somewhere in between it all, you lose the anger and all that is left is fear.
Kieren has a friend. You almost forgot this. He has a friend, and she leaves before Rick dies. She goes to join some undead commune, and a year after she's gone you're all watching the news waiting to hear if she's done something stupid like the other undead people in her commune seem to be doing. You're sitting on Kieren's bed as you read her letter, as your parents tell you there's no mention of her on the news, and you have to back to fucking school, because you never fucking finished it. Kieren does your tie, and you tell him he can do anything, go anywhere, that he has a future. All the things you don't really believe about yourself.
You stick out like a sore thumb in school. You're nineteen, everyone else is sixteen, fifteen, fourteen. The three people you do know are fourteen still, because they died five years ago. You long to belong to something again. You miss your best friend so much it makes you sick. The irony is, you are invisible. You got what you always wanted, didn't you?
Someone tells the class: Jem was in the HVF, and suddenly you are seen. Suddenly you have friends. Charlotte is so much younger than you, but she's nice, she's popular. You tell her about the HVF, the war, you can pretend for a moment that you feel the hero everyone says you are. You are floating on a dream until Kieren comes in, and she realises what he is, and it begins to crumble and crash around you.
There's a drug the undead take, called blue oblivion. Someone takes it during show and tell in school. Charlotte hands you a machete and you are pushed into the hallway, staring down a fourteen year old rotter and it's nothing, really. Except that you are terrified; except that you have been having nightmares for months, except that you can't fucking move, frozen in place, crotch and legs hot with piss and you only unfreeze to beg for help, because you are seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, and you don't remember how to switch this off anymore.
Charlotte stares at you from inside the class room, victorious, smug.
You killed so many of the undead, how were you to know one of them would be her fucking dad?
The rest of it is a blur. Kieren's friend comes back. She brings a man. She brings a movement. You think Kieren is in love. You think you are in love. You kiss Gary in his car and he kisses you back. You put on a vest, an arm band, you are told you can be a soldier again, like it will erase the fact you pissed yourself in front of the whole school, or that you keep having nightmares, or that you feel like you're going to implode in on yourself.
There is a chasm between you and your brother. You are being led astray, pulled away from him and you're too fucking blind to see it. Are you scared of me now too, he asks, and you can't look him in the eye.
The Undead Liberation Army are in the graveyard; they're chanting; they're praying for a second rising. You have the colt in your hand, and out of the ether comes your brother, rapid rotter, set loose. You don't know this, yet. Your dad tries to talk him down, you have your gun pointed, there is shot, there is your brothers man on him, bullet hole in his back, and it's all a fucking blur, isn't it?
Amy dies - your brothers friend. There's another funeral. It's themed, it's lovely. You think you were really shit to her and she didn't deserve it. You think you've been really shit to a lot of people who didn't deserve it. You're sitting in your room, and your brother hands you a bracelet and -
Fuck. Wait. You skipped the most important part.
So they put a band on your arm again, and the gun back in your hand. You're on your first patrol with Gary, again. Dejavu. You've been here before. You split up, you're in the woods, it's dark, it's dark, all you can hear are ghosts, and footsteps, and you cock your gun, terrified and pull the trigger to kill the monster.
It's not a monster though, is it?
Turns out you can kill a child after all.
You tell your brother: I think I need some help, Kier. You're sobbing in his arms. He's bare faced. Your life is falling apart around you now. He holds you tight and he says, softly, kinder than you deserve: Then let's get you some help.
CHAPTER FOUR
Six months later, you are sitting at the train station, and a man sits next to you. He says: I understand you're attending group therapy. I'd like to help you get better, somewhere free of judgement. You're not sure why you say yes. Maybe because it doesn't seem real.
Eudio is like a dream. Like a holiday you don't deserve, except you have to attend therapy three times a week, and you have to attend college, and you have to let yourself be intimate with strangers. This is the catch, because there is always a catch. As far as catches go, it doesn't end up being the worst.
You live a life away from Roarton. You get better. You make friends. You fall in love. You make a new contract, then another. Sometimes you go home, and then you go home less, and maybe it's the coward in you, but eventually you never want to go home at all.
You're in love, three years later. You're in love and he says: if I leave, come with me. So you say yes. Here's the catch: you are in love with a monster, and you know this. You get better just to get worse. You know when you leave, you will never be better again. You think: that's fine. I think I deserve that.
When he says it's time to go, you say okay. You make peace with the future, hold your breath, take his hand, and go.
CHAPTER FIVE
You lose him somewhere along the way. You wake up naked in the woods, reality bending in front of you, like black spots in your vision. You stumble through the dirt and leaves, hearing voices, hearing whispers at your back. Ahead of you, you see Henry Lonsdale. You killed him, remember? You shot blind in the woods and killed him. He talks to you, except he's American, except sometimes his face morphs into someone else and you realise with sudden clarity that you have lost your fucking mind. Not-Henry tells you this, too, as he leads you through the woods, towards a wall, and the voices stop, and you see that it isn't Henry at all - it's just a beautiful boy, who thinks you're a fucking lunatic.
You live in a nightmare, but you make it work. You forget, eventually, that you are meant to be somewhere else with someone else. You have other shit to worry about, don't you? Inside you is a monster made of ozone and it wants desperately to explode out of you, to inhale the air of everyone around you and make them feel just as miserable and empty as you feel. You have to keep this at bay, so you fuck and fight your way through the town as is the towns custom.
Eventually, you learn to make a life here. Eventually, you learn to sort of like it.
Eventually you kiss the boy who thinks you're a lunatic over and over, and then you kiss another, and you want to bring them together because you think, drunk on love, that you could be happy here.
In the town, there is a man who calls himself God, and the man he loves. The town has festivals, sometimes, and he fucks you at one, in front of a live audience. You call him dad, because that's the scene. Later this becomes daddy, and you mean him and the man he loves, too.
The man who calls himself God invites you into his home, and inside he has a pet who roams the town like a stray cat. You are nosy, and you are bored, and the man who calls himself God lets you wander around, lets you look inside every nook and cranny until you see everything you're really not meant to see.
You say: nice room. The room is a cage under a bed. Inside there is a mask, inside there are knives, there are things that weren't meant for you, but you saw them anyway. He calls you little sister, and you think I already have a brother, but you don't say it. You haven't seen your brother in years. Three, four, five - god knows how long. So fucking long. You miss him so much, you ache, you have someone sketch his face, and then you go back to living.
He says: the closest word for sister in my language is rabbit. I think I'll fuck you like one.
Your knees go a little weak, because you are, of course, a fucking lunatic.
In the months after, you are sitting on the edge of of a table talking to a boy. The boy loves the man who calls you sister, and he doesn't like you much because you're a little thoughtless, and very selfish. He tells you a story about a man in a mask, about dying, over and over, and you swing your legs back and forth and feel guilt for the first time in a long time.
You say, because in the town you are all connected telepathically, to the man who calls you sister: whatever you're doing to your boyfriend, keep me out of it. You don't mean it. You realise this much later, that you didn't mean it. You and he have a secret now; you have something ugly and private between you, and you never got better, did you? You got worse, and worse, and worse, so you keep his secret. You keep his secret because you love him, too, and you've always been a loyal sister if nothing else.
You don't know what age you are anymore. Your brother is called Gray, and you love him. You would do anything for him. You think, because you are wrong now, that he would do anything for you.
Your brother kills his boyfriend. Your brother kills another man. The entire town goes to shit and you have to live with the knowing that you probably could have warned the boy, probably could have stopped it. You didn't though, did you?
You feel guilty though. It eats you alive. It claws its way inside you, until you let the boy slide a knife across your throat and bleed you out like you're nothing. You die full of regret, full of wanting. You wish it hadn't been him. You wish you'd had the guts to do it yourself. You wish it had been your brother, you wish it had been Eddie, or Billy, or the man who thinks he's God, or House. You wish you'd died in the arms of someone who gave a shit about you.
You come back, because there is a God in the town, and she brings the dead back. She is a cunt. She is evil, she is spite, but she brings you back. You come back even more wrong, but it's fine.
A year goes by. The man who calls himself God leaves you. You mourn him with your brother, and House. House leaves you soon after that. You mourn him too, and your brother begins to unravel. He tells you: I'm going to kill you one day Jemima, I'm so sorry, I'm going to fucking kill you. He fucks you while he says it - at least, you think that's when this happened. He fucks you with a knife pressed to your cunt, and then he fucking leaves you too, doesn't he? History repeating itself: you're just a sister mourning a brother, and you're angry.
He comes back, too. It's almost funny. Record repeating the same song. You're still angry, but you're tired, too. You forgive him, because that's what you do when your brother lets you down. You'll do it again, and again, and again, probably until you're dead for real.
Life goes on.
Weeks. Months. Your birthday goes by again. It's June, and it's God's birthday in town. Things in town have gone to shit, for the most part. The locals hate you, they don't trust you - any of you - and still you all go to God's castle, and -
You don't want to remember this.
You have to. You don't want to. You have to. You have to, you have to remember the hands in your hair, the taste on your tongue, the tears on your face as you watched the boy who thinks you're a fucking lunatic violated, as you were violated, as you slipped inside his head to whisper I love you, I'm sorry. You don't want to remember this. This is the last thing you remember.
CHAPTER SIX
You wake up with a hangover. You did that the first day here, too. You wake up in your brothers arms, cheek pressed against his chest. At your back, Eddie snores gently into your hair.
You don't want to wake up yet. So you don't.
Your name is Jem Walker-Johnson and you are not a good person, you are not better, you are rotting, maybe. But you are filled with love, and you're loved, and god, what a fucking mess, eh?
You have been grieving again, you remember. You've been grieving for a long time, but this grief is a new grief. Your husband who is also your brother is grieving with you. Your heart who is not your brother grieves in his own way. You are always grieving something. Sometimes love is just grief dressed differently. Sometimes it is feeling the ache in your chest and hoping one day it will get easier. Sometimes it seeing the ache in someone else and gently holding that too.
You have to wake up, Jemima. There is no happy endings in this life, but you don't live life just to get to the end; you live it to experience all the in-betweens. You live it to love, to be loved, to grieve, to laugh, to cry, to know you're alive for however long you've got.
Drift off. You deserve to sleep in a little. Just this once. But you have to wake up, Jemima. You have to.