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She sees the snow before she sees anything else, she feels the biting cold before she feels anything else. It must be winter. The snow, there's so much of it. Flakes falling, full of individualism as they come crashing to the ground. As does she.
For a moment, however short, she can feel herself smile, but there's a lump in stuck in her throat alongside so many words she has never said. Things she wants to lay bare but ultimately never will.
Apologies, 'thank you's, questions...confessions that are juvenile. They are now left gone, left fading and floating around her, for better or for worse.
For better, the woman attempts to convince herself, For better.
She first feels it against her cheek, then pressed against her lips and for some reason it doesn't feel nearly as foreign as it should. In all her shrivelled glory, she supposes that things like these are supposed to feel romantic.
Unfortunately, the hope she feels pouring from one mouth to her own pathetically dies and is promptly reborn as love-lorn guilt.
After it happens, and it happens so quickly, the flakes stop falling and everything begins to move backwards. The train.
She hears the words, teasing yet tentatively hopeful. A bone is thrown, the ball's in her court so to say.
All she can give in return is a reluctant string of rejection that the other must have seen coming because there's a smile on those lips, a sad one. It must end like this, for neither of their own little fates and prophecies were weaved in a way that would eventually string them together and patch them up.
"Effie..." She hears it distantly, a voice that angers her to tears.
"Effie?"
The footsteps in the snow are audible and taunting, she watches him walk away.
The train.
She spent two decades on that goddamn train. The snowflakes rise, everything moves forward while she moves backwards through time. She's still here, pinned up hair and freezing.
The train.
"Euphemia!"
She jolts awake. She's 12 and she's trying to catch her breath.
"You're crying." Her little sister comments, weirded out and concerned judging by her little face. She's been told she looks unsightly when she cries. Eyes meet. Prosie.
Effie touches her cheek with her pale hand. It feels wet.
"Are you feeling unwell?"
Thoughts swirl like snow, but it's summer time. "No, but I can't remember what I was dreaming of."
Youthful, blue eyes wander around her room and eventually arrive at the large window; the sun is rising as she stares past her family's property, as if the 12-year-old girl is searching for something that must be far beyond all she knows to be tried and true. Eventually, the small pale hand finds its way to the little necklace she's wearing — a pearl necklace gifted to her by her mother — Effie clutches it as she realises that what she's looking for isn't there, oddly enough the young girl feels her heart ache for reasons unknown.
Whatever treacherous feeling must this be, to make her feel so incomplete and uncomfortable?
"Mother said we need to get ready for the reaping."
Ah, right. Today, they'd be watching the reaping at a party her uncle organised.
Effie's eyes are still cast to the window as Prosie climbs off her older sister's bed and leaves the room, all while the peculiar feeling spreads through Effie's body like little sparks that become a defiant fire acting against her childish nature. The nodding of her head comes naturally and absentmindedly.
A young jabberjay looks out the window of her cage, the first cage of many more to come.
May the odds be ever in our favour.