✎ academia ✐

☞ vi ☜

When Scarlett spots her brother outside of the classroom right as the dismissal bell rings, she is struck by two things.

First—for a moment, he looks like Father. This is unsettling. The Song-Wildes look nothing like their father. The resemblance is very slight, if it goes noticed at all. Their eyes are only a touch lighter than their mother's, their hair more a deep, nutty brown than her jet black. Mother's line of Songs all seem to share the same face, if only bent and stretched into different proportions to suit different skulls. Scarlett and Beau are no different—they look exactly like Mother, who looks exactly like her father, who looks exactly like his father before him. But in spirit, and in remnants of heart, Beau has always been very much Wilde—powerful, politically-inclined, and terribly bored by everyone else. Now more than ever, at the precipice of adulthood, he's starting to properly look the part.

And that's only because, second—he's upset. Few people would notice, but the smile he's sporting isn't going on as effortlessly as it usually does. His eyes are colder. He's twisting his signet ring, slowly, as he does when bothered. Which means anything could be at fault—Beau is easily bothered when things aren't as he likes. It might be Scarlett's responsibility, perhaps he's been waiting for her a long time. But he'd be glaring at her if that were the case. No, it must be something else. She'll be forced to tiptoe around it for the remainder of the day lest his mood sour further.

"What are you doing?" She asks, when he takes her bag off the floor and hauls it over his shoulder.

"Abandoning my little sister to fend for herself," He deadpans with that sarcastic head-tilt. He doesn't look at anyone, doesn't bother to trade small talk with passing acquaintances, just stares out the window and twists his jaw around. Oh, he's really upset, Scarlett notes, as he hands her her crutches and adds, tersely, "Use these correctly."

"I have been."

"Doctor says otherwise. If you keep at it, there'll be permanent damage."

"So? It's not like you'll ever let me ride again."

"You wouldn't either if you saw it happen."

"You didn't see it either, you weren't even there."

    Admittedly, Scarlett remembers little of the accident anymore apart from the rush, the wind, the jump. One moment she was mounted on a sprinting horse, and then suddenly she was laid flat on the ground, blinking the fractured sunlight out of her eyes, feeling only dazed at most when the situation was unknowably more dire.

    The first thing she heard when the ringing dulled down was an absurdly shrill scream.

    "Scar," Grayson wobbled over once he calmed himself enough, voice gone high-pitched and trembly in the way it does whenever he's ready to cry (it's no wonder he's her best friend, honestly—Scarlett cries never, but Grayson cries all the time). He approached with unsteady steps and an arm outstretched. "Scar... Scarlett, sweetheart, don't move..."

With a Talent for perpetual painlessness, how could she have known?

Scarlett sat up. Her cracked femur pushed through her skin like a knife from within, and blood gushed from the hole that used to be her knee.

"Oh," She said.

People screamed. The horses gruffed. Grayson wailed, covered his eyes, hurled into the nearest bush.

Scarlett lost consciousness and, thereafter, was banned from any and all forms of both athletics and athlegics for the remainder of her academic years. Beau made sure of that himself.