Insurgence [h.s]

nine

There's a sort of longing in watching the winter sun draw its path beyond the window, day after day, while not being able to do anything that might make reality better—anything that matters.

It's been a couple of days since Alouette's talk with Harry—and a couple more since the one with Jackson. She still hasn't heard back from him, and it worries her. She knows, theoretically, that no news is good news—no news means he still hasn't explored all the places she gave him a few days ago, it means there's still a chance they'll find her sister. But no news also means that she's still missing—that wherever Amina is, it's not with her. It means she might be in danger. It means she's scared.

And there's nothing Alouette can do about it. She can't give her her rabbit plushie to hug, or tell her to close her eyes and count to ten slowly, so that the dark might disappear by the time she opens them again. She can't sit her down on the bed and explain to her that the world is a scary place, but that she doesn't have to be afraid because she's not alone. She's alone, now, and so is Alouette. They're so alone it makes her sick—so alone it would make her cry, if she still could.

She doesn't have a solution for this. She's been thinking about it nonstop for days—even weeks, maybe, though she's completely lost the track of time—but she couldn't come up with anything, because there's nothing she can do. And she really, really doesn't want to think about it, but when Harry disappeared, not even the Palace could locate its President—if she hadn't brought him back, she could've kept him forever. What chances do they have to locate her sister?

The night is dark, beyond the window. Northfair's lights shine their rhythmic glow against the black sky, hiding the stars. The beauty of the city of lights seems daunting, tonight—like a picture a little too bright, a little too perfect to be real.

Alouette has been in her bedroom for so long that just looking at the walls enclosing her makes her feel suffocated. Over the past days, she's only left it to knock on Jesse's door, though it always stayed shut, and he refused to see her. She doesn't know what to do. She's isolated, and she's scared. She's so scared, because she doesn't know what will happen next—her future is not her own, and neither is her fate. When she chose to leave the safety of her father's organisation, she wanted freedom. She wanted to spread her wings and see where they would take her, wind catching on her feathers and carrying her higher and higher in the sky. She took risks—she let herself drop to the ground because she trusted those wings, because she trusted they would always pull her back up. She was wrong. What she didn't consider is that not every bird is made for freedom—once it spends too long in a cage, there's no hope of it surviving in the wild.

She's lived her whole life in a birdcage. She's eaten the food merciful hands slid between the bars, she's drunk the water they poured on the bottom of their cage not caring about the way it drenched her wings and made it harder to catch flight, she's sang a song when they asked her to put on a performance, and throughout all, she's been foolish enough to mistake ownership for kindness. And, when they opened the door of her cage and let her hop out with a curious tweet, she was so blinded by the light of the sun that she swapped her cage for another without a second thought.

This is her—not a queen, not even a pawn on a chessboard. Just an average-coloured bird chirping in a birdcage in the corner of the room, a stray unable to feed itself that someone might've found in their garden half-covered in snow and imprisoned for its safety.

Now she feels like she can't breathe.

She jumps off the bed and she's out of her rooms even before she realises what she's doing.

The corridor is empty and her feet pat silently on the floor, made slippery by her white socks. She gets into the lift and slides her newly acquired card before typing down the floor number. The doors close, and she forces herself to close her eyes as well.