Honourshill

Note: The characters, places, situations and events of this story are developed materializations of my imagination and therefore belong entirely to me. Distribution of this story is only permitted with my written consent, and any use of the aforementioned factors must be approved of also. Keep your hands the fuck off, basically. Thanks :)

Disclaimer: Brand names, songs, organizations and other general ‘stuff’ have all been underlined. If a word is underlined, then I claim no affiliation or relationship with whatever it may be, and do not claim to own it. Quotes are credited to their owners, as well.

Dedication:
For my family, because they loved me so much that I could have never become this character. And for Tashy, because she is family.

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Prologue

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After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb - Nelson Mandela

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Arundel, 2002

“Ayah?” Mom called out. Her voice carried in through the open door of my bedroom. I was sat alone on the dusty floor of the near-empty room with my long legs spread out before me, the rest of my fourteen-year-old body continuously struggling to catch up with my stilts.

It was mid-June, and warming nicely. Long threads of primrose yellow stuck to the back of my moist neck, my hair thick, lengthy, down around my shoulders. I wondered if it would be hotter in Caroline. I wondered if we would be there long enough for it to matter.

“Yeah?” I offered by way of a response. The tone of my voice, lazy and low, suggested I wasn’t in the best of moods. The shadowed look on my face confirmed that I wasn’t.

Mom’s voice sounded as if it were coming from the bathroom. If I concentrated, I could hear the trickle of a running tap. “It’s time to go. Are you ready?”

A tired sigh parted my lips, and I let my shoulders fall down against the floor, the wood panels cool on the backs of my arms. I left it a deliberate minute before I replied. “Not quite.”

Not nearly half as ready as I should have been. We were moving again, and I wasn’t ready to move again. I didn’t think I would ever be ready to move again; I had presumed our original move to Arundel had been permanent. I hadn’t thought it had been stupid to presume that, because why else would one move away from home except to set up an even better one somewhere else? I had thought the fresh start my mom had promised us both two years before was supposed to be just that: a fresh start, one new start to help us move on. Not one of many new starts. Not a false start. I was a home bird, and I couldn’t begin to fathom how I could make a third house a home.

Through the clicking whirr of my thoughts, I heard the faucet being shut off. Footfalls I recognized to be my mother’s began down the hall. I closed my eyes, pressed my fingers to the backs of my lids, and let out a shaky breath. When I looked up my Mom was standing in the doorway, arms straight by her sides, shoulders too stiff to belong to a person who claimed that this move was a good thing for us both.

She didn’t offer a smile, and no hint of one touched her eyes. “Ready?” she asked, when she knew I wasn’t. I got to my feet anyway, taking my time over it, and avoided her eyes as I bent to the carrier case set by her feet at the door. I lifted the holder to eye-level, my arm muscles objecting, and peered inside. My beautiful grey Beveren pet rabbit, Bunny, stared back at me. I poked a finger through the caged gate and stroked her right ear.

“Let’s go then,” Mom instructed, and she turned her back on Bunny and me. I noted the poignancy of that move with a sad smile.

The walls of the house were bare now; the few photos and paintings we did have now carefully boxed up in the back of the moving truck out front, and the rooms seemed bigger without the features that made them homely: comfy furniture, light clutter, a real family. The front yard I used to let Bunny explore under my watchful eye was littered with spare boxes and bubble wrap. While Mom collected it all and packed it into the trunk of our car, I hovered on the porch. The day before I had been sitting on this very terrace with my friends, trying not to cry and failing as they told me how much they would come to miss me. I had known them all—Jacklyn, Brenda, Sara—only twenty months, but the difficulties I had had to face over those twenty months had knitted us together until we were one big, all-healing bandage for my deep, still-scarring wounds.

We’d promised to keep in touch, double-checked we had the right emails, phone numbers, and addresses, but the aching, swollen feeling I had in the pit of my stomach told me our friendship would dissipate before long, just as my friendship had done with the girls I had left behind in my last town, my hometown, and those had been the girls I had loved and known for life. Even when our lives were slow and almost-unmoving, somehow we still became too busy to keep in contact with one another.

I was beginning to think that if my Mom was going to move me away every time I truly got settled, then it wouldn’t ever be worth truly settling at all. It hurt too much to put down roots that would all-too-soon become severed anyway.

“Ayah,” Mom prompted, and the strain in her voice told me this was getting to her, all of it. The stress of moving, the stress of my response to it, the reluctance with which I took every step towards the car. I didn’t understand why she insisted upon leaving if she knew I would make it so difficult for her.

If I looked hard enough, I could see that the hassled, annoyed look she kept in her eyes barely masked the ghostly, hollow look that always sat there, even when she smiled. So I tried not to look that hard. Her grief showed every time she rose slowly from a seat, every time she put only two meals on the table at night. My own grief stared back at me every day in the mirror, gripped my ankles every night that I slipped into my bed to sleep. Those times were already too much without falling into my mother’s eyes.

I put Bunny’s cage into the backseat, struggled for a long minute to secure it with the seatbelt, then climbed into the front, dreading, as I did, the long, silent drive that stretched out before us. We had moved from Baltimore, our home, to Arundel, and were now heading towards Caroline.

And as we drove away, just as I had done when we left Baltimore, I left a little part of myself behind.

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A/N: I’m back. Finally. And am ridiculously nervous about posting this story, because it’s been sitting at the back of my mind in semi-vague formation for maybe a year now, and has been moved to the front of my mind for tinkering for several months. But I won’t babble on any more, because I’m sure I’ll do enough of that later. Mwa!