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Once upon a time, there was a land of ever summer.
The days were glorious and gold shrouded from dawn until dusk, and no misfortune could touch it.
But the gold was not true.
It was all show and no substance; beneath the glitter and gleam the beating heart of Beechwood was hollow. Dented plate, impressive only to fools who did not know better. Slowly chipped away, it revealed the rot beneath as the queen died and decorum with her, plans and princesses unravelling.
Th e youth were drunk fools, and torched the place. Rag stuffed bottles razed it to the ground. A blaze, fiercer than any seen before, burnt the opulence away. Singed the spun gold curtains, melted the fine oil paintings. Ivory elephants were crushed into fine powder, mixing with the ashes of brocade tapestries and vellum manuscripts.
Silver smoke spiralled into the perfumed air, exploding up into the night sky determined to be seen. As if no one was ever not watching the Sinclair's palace, perched atop its bronze beaches, regal flags fluttering. An emblem of old wealth, and all it entailed.
Few knew it more than the humble taxi driver. A gallant boy, keeper of secrets, l ittle more than an extended servant. For most of them, anyway. One girl saw him for who he truly was, and he her. They indulged in private kisses at clandestine meetings, and it was her he stole away to in the midsummer night.
Driving his wild steed through the still lake waters, glimpsing the wild flames as they roared to the heavens. A savage dragon in dire need of slaying; white knuckles clenched on his boat wheel as he sped towards certain danger. Snorting sparks of fury into the darkness, the fire howling back in defiance as he leapt from the boat. Hose pipe unravelling behind him, hissing water jabbing and poking at its weak spots.
Sweat ran down his brow in rivets, breath scalding, choking on gas as he pinpointed the fragile belly beneath.
Windows shattered and walls cracked as he slashed and parried and cut. Taming the beast until it was subdued, just enough to save his princess.
Mirren will never bear witness to her mother’s disapproval again.
It is liberating in a way; gaining even when she loses. All those cutting glances that tore at her self esteem, words dripping with disappointment because she could never live up to her mother's high hopes. Always tripping at the last hurdle, dust stinging her eyes, mother turning away in annoyance.
And oh, even now, as she feels her soft strokes threading through her chopped hair, she senses the familiar undercurrent. The disappointment that her daughter dared to keep breathing after she forced her into the world. The shame that she was not made in her image, only a weak replica. An arsonist with bad hair; not as pretty, not as smart... but a good artist. Even Mother could not deny that, having patched up Mirren's portrait like she did. She tries to remember its image through her drunken haze, all smoking shadows and singed edges before she threw it from the window... but it is all relayed to her in vague sugar hued tones. A loving repair ruined, in her family's eyes. In Mirren's sightless ones, it is her best work yet.
She knows the contours of her hero's face. Remembers it time and time again in her mind, clinging to the perfect picture. His curls, his dimples, his eyes that truly saw her, when no one else did.
It is all different now. In the darkness, his familiar touch anchors her. He is not scared to trace calloused fingers across her ruined skin; he always saw her beyond the blond exterior anyway. Someone who actually wanted her.
Ebon traces her fingers over the rough, coarse bumps of her masterpiece. Scorch blackened canvas leaves soot clinging to her nails, thick on her fingers, and she inhales sharply, goosebumps rippling across her skin. Ebon's breath hot on the back of her neck, exposed now her hair is jagged.
Ebon, her saviour, and who fucking cares about his personal income or family lineage when he saved her? He saved all of them. Worth more than his weight in gold. She could shower him in jewels to show gratitude, pay his debts and buy his love, be the doting partner just like her mother moulded her to be - but he wants nothing from her, and she him.
Nothing but this easy gentleness of two bodies together, his lips pressed to her pulse point as her hand trails to the always present pot of paintbrushes. Some spiked with old crusted paint, others new and feather soft as she swirls it into slick paint. What colour, she does not know, but she can imagine a bright vibrant yellow that promises sunshine. Ebon describes it to her, drawing a vivid picture behind her eyelids. Traces of similarity to her long loved summers, but better.
She never asked for this, never envisioned it, but she will live and make do all the same. She will not hide and wilt into the background now. She was invisible before, to those about her. Now, they are invisible to her. Their condemnation does not matter when she cannot see it. She is deaf now, as well as blind. She has her moral compass to guide her on a journey of touch. Art, through the most physical of means; its purest form.
She has a permanent exhibit in the local museum, gifted in pity, kept open with success. Reported on in industry circles, it is carried on the lips of commoners to all fifty states and sometimes even across seas. A tangible portrait of wealth, however one defines it, and the precarious line between life and death.
A whole collection of newspaper cuttings, and confidential medical notes, and redacted police reports, feeling the thick strokes of black marker pens amongst typed paragraphs.
The real world; the grit of sand on sunburnt hands, a pile of ashes on a silver plate, the blackened hosepipe that finally tamed the flames. Twin dog collars, melded together. A singular black pearl, from her grandmother's necklace.
A lock of hair, cut from her shamed mother's head in solidarity. Twined together with one of Mirren's own, identical silk strands interlocked.
An olive branch, of sorts.
A start.
Johnny had always felt lesser.
Not enough.
The cherished male heir - born a few days late.
Good at tennis - but not great.
Just like his grandfather - in all the worse ways.
The fire is his karma, divine retribution for attacking an innocent boy. Blood on his hands, long before the burns. In the rehab centre, he scrubs and scrubs; Lady Macbeth. He is lucky to still have his hands. You can still play tennis, the physiotherapists tell him, there's a wheelchair group that meet every Thursday...
He sinks under the pool, muting the noise, letting the water revive him. It strengthens his remaining leg, cures him of the rattle in his chest, and he concentrates on nothing but the repetitive stroke of his arms dragging his lopsided body through the water. Droplets flecking his hair, chlorine tinging his lips, goggles pressed against his eyes permanently wet.
It cleanses him; the old enemy of fire.
Washes away the pain of the seven year old child who had to be the husband, the parent, the man of the house. He ruled with a feather light fist, always hiding. Pills from mother and knowledge from Will and his love of boys from himself. The way his heart beat faster at every bare chest and sideways smile. Stuffed deep down, the Sinclair way.
Even Ed doesn't know the worst parts. His Mother would certainly never tell him, and Johnny doesn't want to relieve it. How there was never a nanny despite piles of cash, for no one could know the house was a mess and the food half spoiled and Johnny was the one raising Will while Mom disappeared.
Abandoned and suffocated in turn, never knowing what which day. All he knew was to rely on himself. Be a mirror image of Grandfather in his youth, and then he will crown him victor of all his cousins. The eldest male heir inheriting the lot - and he knows it's sexist, he knows, but he needed that win okay? Even if it was all a magician's illusion, the thought of Beechwood being his kept his world from collapsing.
Gat argues with him, talking of colonialism and classism, but what is Johnny supposed to do? Not use the vast piles of gold in his bank account? Let it lie there and lose its worth? He can do good and still have fun.
He used to carve out precious selfish minutes for himself, when Mom turned a new page and Will was tucked in bed... a party, a tennis meet, a hook up. Let the boys and girls flock to him, forgetting all that waited back home. Now all he has is time. Stretched out before him, as empty and grey as the rehab centre. No longer able to run, volleying life's curveballs. He's out and down. The life and soul of the party now sucking all joy from it.
He can't hook up with a guy, fuck he can't even get a boner -
He channels his rage and fear and grief into the pool, tunnel vision on the timer on the far wall as he swims a length, and back, shrugging off his physio's help.
He remembers slipping under the storm waves when saving Will, the ease at which he had submitted to the crushing current around him. He was never good at swimming, not compared to Gat. Now, he has less drag and even more dead weight, yet despite it all feels free.
The water laps at his wounds, licking and sucking the pain away, gently nudging him further. Crawling and kicking, floundering in its embrace, but Johnny persists anyhow. He is exhausted, body heavy but spirit light, purifying the toxins inhabiting his insides, purging him of all evil. He can start again. Be better. Leave the tennis club, fix the blackmail Mom committed in his name... and come out to her, because fuck who cares if their grandfather is homophobic?
Johnny was already not enough before he lost a leg.
He just hadn't wanted to admit it, because inheriting Beechwood would make all his mistakes worthwhile. But it was never his to have, definitely won't be now they've burnt it down, his future plans gone up in smoke and he is glad.
There's a swimming team for amputees, his physiotherapist suggests. A good gateway to the Paralympics if you show the aptitude. Breathless and dizzy, body warm from exercise and the man's praise. Heartbeat thundering in his ears, and Johnny nods, wanting to chase the thrill. Bottle the feeling in him and keep it on nights he can't sleep from phantom aches and regret.
Perhaps there is more. Just there, hovering at his outstretched fingertips.
Maybe not glory, but salvation.
For better or worse, Gat's voice was once a rallying cry.
Only recently discovered, that voice once silent had begun to shout the unspoken issues corroding the Sinclair estate.
Now every whispered word that pushes past his lips are hoarse, laced with pain and the lingering remains of that putrid smoke. Almost incoherent, only understood by Mom and Cadence in those first days. A permanent croak, rattling in his too tight chest.
It turns out his brown skin was not any less fire resistant.
Dark skin still scars milk white. Some of the third degree burns are as black as soot, even darker than before. Leathery, too - a cow hide left out too long having escaped the inevitable slaughter, and shipped to the best hospital in New York for recovery - because the Sinclair's will never not take advantage of a good press opportunity.
They can try to ship him away back home like a dirty secret, but Gat remembers it all. How hot shards had blinded Mirren, how a beam had crushed Johnny, how he had laid there fighting for breath in Hell itself, laid sprawled on a cashmere carpet with all those injustices finally laid bare. The soft fur was a luxurious funeral shroud to lay upon as mahogany tables burnt around him, but it should have been a true kashmiri rug, handmade with pure silk. He was dying on a manufactured symbol, and the injustice was not lost on him, even as he had called for Cadence until he had no voice, his consciousness giving way in the face of such heat.
He had given and given and given - and the Sinclairs took it from him. His identity, his dignity, his sense of self worth. The worst of it was, he didn’t even notice for a long time. He buried his head in that golden silk sand, let himself play pretend. Tolerated, not feted. He was indulged like a pet, given the scraps off the kitchen table and he thanked them for it. A slice of the life of the 1%, forgetting a slave cannot be a prince. Only remembering on his return to New York, where the boys from the boroughs laughed at his half inherited airs before they dissipated in the first winds of fall.
Unable to fit in in each world. The upper society, the lowly hood, he straddled the both and toppled down. Lit the matches to burn the fence and hurt himself in the process.
They do not see a brown boy now. They see only a burnt boy, with charred skin and ugly blisters, and wounds that weep through sterile bandages.
Cadence is the antidote. Her soft hands, her even softer lips, when they brush against his as the doctors change his dressings.
For a long time he listens to the stories of others in the burn unit, the doctors and nurses and surgeons that fight to save lives, working overtime underpaid. Croaking questions as the skin grafts are assessed, filing each answer carefully away.
He talks to them all.
The receptionists who have too much paperwork, the humble cleaners who polish clean the corridors surgeons stride down. He learns of ground-breaking techniques and innovations, all accessible if they only had the funding. They never have enough either - time, money, respect. Gat will give it to them; he will make sure others do too.
He will not rely on Sinclair money, a gift with strings attached. He has a meagre inheritance from his father, the man who gave him his dark looks and sense of justice. Perhaps he will take a gap year and go to India. Back to the roots Harris Sinclair would make him deny. Or he will apply for some minor college on the other side of America and climb the ladder of journalism himself, no debt to anyone except the Government. The future is for him alone to decide.
He will reject Tipper's prestigious scholarship, a bribe wrapped in altruism, and carve his own way... but if Cadence wants him there, on that island, one last time, he will go.
For a little while.
Beechwood itself has been transformed, hasn't it? Just like the four of them. A new creature, mutated.
And it is not too long until Cadence's eighteenth birthday, when she too will be free.
Gat will wear his earring. He will wear blue, while the rest wear yellow. He will wear traditional Indian dress, and drop every pretence of fitting in with the Sinclair's; it was a sham from the start. He will endure it for Cadence, whose touch will erase the poison of her grandfather's gaze. Harris shares it for all of them, now. Mirren with her clouded eyes and Johnny with his lost leg; even Cadence herself is not immune from distant disdain.
It is too much to hope his head injury has knocked some kindness into him, but Gat will make a sanctuary with Cady in Cuddledown, carving out a safe summer haven. A separate existence from the castle and its ailing king for a few weeks, until they make their grand escape. Hands gripped together on the boat carrying them away, kisses tinged with promise.
India ceased to be subordinate to an empire long ago.
The stories Cadence could tell, if she could only figure out how.
Invisible ink fills pages in her head, the fountain pen in her hand too heavy. Words on the tip of her tongue she can't quite convert. A shapeless mirage dancing before her eyes, of summers long past. Blinding in their intensity, pulsating neon flashes that grind her teeth to dust. Caught in a vice, her head squeezes tighter, and tighter still, until her watering eyes pop and her hot blood bursts and her broken brain dissolves into gelatine grey matter.
The seizure locks her limbs, teeth rattling in her empty skull, bladder emptying all over her Burberry joggers. When she comes around, she cannot walk, she cannot talk, she cannot think.
She wants to claw her own foolish brain out, rake chipped nails into the useless organ, but can only lie limp in bed and swallow a cocktail of pills waiting for the storm to pass.
Only with the heavy haze of painkillers in her bloodstream do the memories come, as relentless and unforgiving as the flames that burnt Beechwood to the ground.
How Ebon had rushed up as she ran out, cerulean blue of her dress burning. Aflame around her ankles, her skull half cracked, blood pouring down her sweating face. Two dead dogs on her conscience.
The hot air buffeting against her face as he battled the flames, spraying furiously on the stinking gas lines. Black pearls sticky in her burnt hands as the passengers on the water taxi, the revellers on the party boat, all ran to help. A community, pulling together to rescue their own. Even though they should despise the Sinclair's, looking down from their gilded castle.
When Cadence wakes, cotton mouthed and head heavy, she swallows more pills dry and lurches to her notepad. She can't bear the glow of electronics, instead torments herself with endless black lines on white pages, waiting to be filled. Each anecdote she could spill of the whole affair is more outlandish than the last. Sandcastle competitions, lemon hunts, those damned black pearls. A harbinger of doom for the last great American dynasty.
Those three infamous sisters, rivals, who measure love in material items and dote on the father who dictates their every move as they birth a domino reaction.
Cady the unlucky heir, inheritrix to the madness. Is that what her life will be? Forever drunk on Dom Perignon, arguing with Mirren and Johnny over which grandkid gets the Steinway or the Rembrandt, who gets the house in Boston, a myriad of other material things that do not matter, not truly. She spurns it all with a flick of her wrist.
She is counting down the days until she is eighteen and some of her inheritance is in her own arson branded hands. There will be no forced obligations to pander to her mother anymore, or her aunts, or her grandfather. She can take her money and flee with the other Liars.
She will live with her father, embrace her Eastman name, and summer in an altogether different place. Perhaps she will hold court at New York with Gat, Mirren and Johnny travelling to stroll Fifth Avenue, lunch in the Hamptons and frolic around Coney Island.
New traditions for a new age. Or they will go further. Across the country. Across continents.
She will go to Las Vegas, and fritter thousands away at the betting tables. Marry Gat in an sahri, serenaded by a singing Elvis. Utterly crass, but oh, a good story. She will go to India with him, visit his father's grave and the Taj Mahal, wherever or whatever he wants. She had never had anything to want before, everything handed to her with a pretty gift wrapped bow.
She wanted Gat, and now she has him she won't let him go.
She does not want Beechwood, a reputation and legacy to uphold she never asked for. It is a poisoned chalice; Eve's apple. She will return for this one last summer at her mother's ordered behest. See the remains of Beechwood, built anew. Her work. Cadence does not have the artistic flair of Mirren, but neither do the architects. The essence of those childhood summers will still remain with the Liars presence. She, and Mirren, and Johnny, and her Gat. The four of them hold Beechwood close in their heart, more than their mothers. The true meaning of family.
It would be easier for her grandfather to say they had died in that fire, because the Sinclair's do not suffer consequences. They are a mess of patchwork skin and misted eyes and missing limbs now.
A ruined generation. The exalted grandchildren, a stain on the Sinclair name. Stripped back, human and touchable.
Their old selves were flayed and burnt, and they crawled from the ashes reborn, truly gold this time. Glorious and impenetrable in their truth.
They have broken the circle, survived the trial by flame. Immortal in their martyrdom.
Maybe that is why Harris turns his attentions to the Littles. These four are a failure now: perhaps they always were.
But the Liars will not let the younger ones make their mistakes. Beechwood is being rebuilt, and the family with it. No longer will it cling to its former glory. Grandfather wants it modern, and so the family too will be dragged into the twenty first century by its youth.
And perhaps Harris will come around when the common people proclaim his grandchildren an inspiration. Pioneers, unashamed, true inspirations for the masses with their story.
Cadence will write it all, with undeniable evidence. An expose from the heiress herself of everything she stands to inherit, and the good she means to do with it.
Her grandfathers protégé, his father come again. He revolutionised the printing press, and she will utilise technology to reach beyond the confines of Beechwood.
She will make her own millions, and when Grandfather disinherits her, it will make no difference.
She will still have her Liars, for they are broken, but not beyond repair. Cracked, but lovingly glued together.
We were Liars.
No. She scratches the sentence out, starts anew.
We are Phoenixes.