ORPHIC

light my world on fire

There's no touch or feeling

Pleasure or pain

Anything like the way you're runnin' through my veins

^.^.^.^.^.^.^.^.^.^.^.^.^.^.^.^.

LUKE

I wince as the overlapping sounds of dishes cluttering against each other and frustrated groans reach me two walls away from the kitchen. It's like we were preparing for an army to come over for a meal. Which, having seen Harper devour her way through two meals, wasn't completely inaccurate.

With the way Mom and Dad are gearing up for dinner, any stranger to them would have been forgiven in thinking that the Pope was coming over.

I would rather be caught dead than choose between the importance of the Pope and that of Harper, but I know with strong conviction that she would not care about the china we would eating on.

She likes food enough to not care what color the plates are.

"Mom," I say softly, peeking around the corner, not wanting to interrupt her vigorous cleaning of the crockery, lest it send her over the ledge of sanity she has been tethering, not so carefully, along.

"Yeah, honey?" she looks up, her stubbornly always makeup free face caked with a light layer of flour.

Encouraged by the good mood, I inch closer to her side of the anarchic kitchen counter.

"Hi!" It comes out more terrified than I want it to but having been on the other side of her dinner-gone-wrong anger sessions, it really is a safer bet to just be even politer to her than usual throughout the evening.

"Good evening, baby," she smiles and goes right back to getting that non-existent smidge of dirt off.

"Why don't I do the rest?" I have to physically pry her fingers off of the cloth and the plate while fighting off her glare and deepening scowl. "You go get cleaned up."

"Are you saying that I look bad?" Her hand goes to her hip and my insides shrivel up.

"Never!" I shake my head wildly enough to mess up my hair completely. "You look like an angel."

"Saved yourself from a grounding there," she says, rolling her eyes and share the same mischievous smile. She also shuffles away, making me cheer up significantly.

With the day she has had, and does everyday of the week, as far as I'm ever concerned, she's God incarnate, to hell with angels.

"If I hear you say that Lucifer was an angel too anytime in the next two days, that grounding is going to last at least a week," she calls out on her way up the stairs and I grin.

"Make fun of your dark circles after two days, got it!" I yell back and get a soothing laugh in response.

I hear Tristan as soon as he emerges from my room, having done God knows what to my duvet arrangement, and it takes him a long while to get to the kitchen, taking the stairs barely half at a time.

Shortcake. I chuckle lightly.

He really takes after Mom who is almost half a foot shorter than Dad and me. In the looks department though, he scored big. His eyes, her hair, the most adorable mix of their features possible, all major factors in making him the cutest kid in his class.

Hell, in the world, in my extremely biased opinion.

He skips over to the kitchen, drags over his stool that's there for the precise reason of helping him climb up onto the counter, and hops on. I spare a glance towards him before getting back to chopping tomatoes.