Pacifier

🍒Isabelle🍎

When i awoke I breathed in the smell of my brother, his bed sheets smelt just the same now as they had when I was just a child and I had spent almost every night in his room. When our parents had been killed I'd found it hard to adjust but when Lyra had been murdered that had been when our lives really changed.

When we'd been pushed together, even more reliant on one another than before.

But this morning it wasn't Johnny who was sleeping on the other side of the bed, it was Camille, and when I pushed myself up slowly I saw my brother in the armchair by the window. Sleeping too.

He'd probably sat up watching us most the night, watching over us like some guard dog, dedicated and loyal eyes always half open on us.

I knew what it meant though, Johnny sitting there like that, me and Camille laid to rest in his bed. It meant that something awful had happened, something I wasn't sure i wanted to guess at but which I couldn't stop thinking about.

Dread, that was the emotion which filled me, it soaked through my body, travelling through my veins with my blood.

Dread to wake up properly, to slip from the sheets and head downstairs where I would find out exactly what had happened last night over a cup of coffee and a bowl of cornflakes.

I didn't want to find out for fear that the truth might be too much to bare, but at the same time I was desperate to know. I needed to know. Even if it was truly awful I had to know. Not knowing wouldn't make it untrue, it would just make me naive and I didn't want to be that anymore.

In my heart of hearts I didn't want to be that anymore.

And yet when I did slip from my bed to the floor and then out the bedroom door into the hallway I was stopped dead in my tracks by someone who could tell me everything, someone I thought i wouldn't mind hearing about the end of the world from.

"Where you off to so early little one?" asked Van, his voice was hoarse and sleepy sounding but it made me jump out of my skin. Despite how scratchy and warm he sounded when he let out a yawn.

"Shit," i breathed, wincing when I looked up at him, hand on my heart, meeting his gaze and hearing him tut at me as he shook his head. He was only teasing but he wasn't smiling the way he usually would have done and he looked like he hadn't slept all night.

More than that he was stained with grief, the same way that my brothers slumped sleeping figure had been too. It was a shadowy sort of look, grief, they probably didn't think it was the sort of thing I would recognise but it was. It was a look I was more than familiar with having grown up in the balcony where everyone I knew knew what it was like to lose.

"School?" i asked, chewing the inside of my cheek, looking up at him with my head cocked, knowing his answer before he made it clear to me, hoping it would be different, knowing full well that it wouldn't be.

"Not today love," he breathed shaking his head.

"Why not?" i asked, thinking that if I asked him sweetly, innocently enough I would get a real answer but I didn't. Really get an answer at all.

Just another tired look. Just another sigh before he spoke, low and soft and sort of hopeless.

"Cmere Iz," he breathed, his arm already coaxing me into his body, his hand finding my hip without looking. Like he knew me that well. Like there were little strings between us pulling us together.

He pulled me in close to him, both his arms wrapping around me, holding me close to him, firm and steady. And when he bowed his head, pushed his lips to my forehead and let them linger there for a moment too long i knew. Something awful had happened.