longer.blue

Before we begin regularly posting, a recap.... Part 5 of 8 The Skye Sisters Saga with Raine Skye (@@romanticraine.bsky.social) and Billie Skye (@billieskye.bsky.social) Billie I didn’t move at first. Just stood there, watching the mess spill across the polished wood like she’d emptied the contents of her head straight onto the table. Our father’s journal sat in the middle, heavier than it looked, like it wanted to pull everything toward it. I rubbed my thumb against my palm, the itch of smoke still clinging to me. I sank into the chair opposite her, legs folding in tight underneath me. My fingers twitched, looking for anything to do with my hands but grab that journal and open it. No cigarettes this time. No drink. Nothing between me and the weight of an emptied bag. My eyes locked on the journal, then Raine’s and her silent, tight-lipped nod and back again. My fingers curling around the worn leather, dragging the journal closer until it sat squarely in front of me. Heavier than it looked. Heavier than I wanted it to be. I dragged the journal closer, flipping it open like I didn’t care if the pages tore. Ink blurred, cramped script filling the margins, dates and names bleeding together. My eyes skimmed past most of it, too fast, too restless, until one word snagged me mid-breath. Taken. I froze. The letters stared back, ordinary ink on yellowed paper, but my chest pulled tight all the same. Too close. Too familiar. My stomach lurched. The word sat there, plain as day, and I hated the way it felt, like it knew me. Like it had been waiting. My thumb pressed into the paper, then snapped the page over with a sharp flick, too fast, too hard, like I didn’t want the letters brushing against my skin. “Doesn’t look like much,” I muttered, voice flat, trying to bury the crackle under it. I leaned back in the chair, smoothed my palms down my thighs like I could wipe the word off me, and pretended to keep reading. I didn’t have to look up to know Raine was watching me. She always knew. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Raine I sat, crossed legged on the floor next to the coffee table, studying every move Billie made. We may have been apart a lot of the last years, but I still knew her better than everyone. Every tell she had, every move she made, every deflection she put out there. And that’s exactly what she was doing right now. She’d asked for everything, all of it, out on the table. And there it all was, literally spread out over the old wood. She’d hesitated and frozen for a the briefest of moments one one page before quickly brushing it off as not much. My eyes narrowed and my lips pursed tight as I leaned forward, taking the book from her hands and flipping through it to page after page* Well, several of these not muches did their best to kill me on multiple continents, so I’m leaning on the thought that dad put all this in his journal for a reason. And I’m guessing there’s something in there that means something to you, whether you want to admit it or not. And honestly, this journal is just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t even know how it fits in with the bigger picture that seems to be in our face at the moment. *I was rambling again and I knew I was on very thin ice with my baby sister. If I went much further, experience said her fight or flight was going to kick in and the last thing I needed was her running. There was a reason we’d both ended up here, in York, at this moment and a united front was the only way we were going to find out why* +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Biillie ~I let out a short breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, leaning back as she flipped through the pages. My fingers drummed against my knee, restless. “Yeah, well… maybe Dad had a flair for dramatics. Runs in the family, doesn’t it? I don’t really remember our parents.” I reached for the glass of water on the table, anything to keep my hands busy, and took a slow sip. My eyes stayed on Raine, narrowed but tired. “If there’s a bigger picture, fine. Lay it out. But don’t act like every flinch I make is some hidden code you’ve cracked. Not everything has to mean something.” My eyes rolled back at her before I sank further into the chair, pulling my knees up. “You wanted me to look. I looked.” My hands gripped the armrest, trying to relax, but 'Taken' kept echoing. I was taken. The word clung like smoke. I looked at Raine. She was wearing that same nursemaid, stand-in adult, caretaker expression she always wore when she looked at me. Poor, fragile, delicate Billie. She’d never been there in my darkest moments, only after, when I was already broken. “What almost killed you?” I laughed, a raw, jagged sound, the kind of laugh that belongs to someone who’s danced too close to the edge more times than she can count. “You have no idea about almost being killed on multiple continents. Death has had its teeth in me since I was a wee girl.” I stopped, the words catching in my throat. I never wanted to admit out loud that the nightmares were true. I reached for my cigarettes, flipping one between my fingers as I paced. “Mom and Dad… they’re gone… because of me…” Heat rose in my cheeks, the room pressing in close. I stopped pacing, chest tight, breath stuttering, tears streaking down as I shook my head at Raine. “I told you I never wanted to come back. To this country. To our homeland. You must’ve said you were coming here. You must’ve planted it. Put the idea in my head. You...” The word snagged. My lungs burned. “You…” My voice cracked, breathless. “I need some air.” My hand was already on the bolt, yanking it free, and then I was gone, straight for the stairs.~ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Raine Every word that fell from my baby sister’s lips tore at my heart and soul. Through it all, through all these years, I’d held it in, held it together, kept things I knew to myself, tried to protect her, carried it all on my shoulders. Even this, even all this, I had tried to handle and keep to myself. Hell, I still would have if she hadn’t texted me asking about mum’s old portrait. If I hadn’t been less than two hours away from her, I could have let it go. But no, I’d come running. And she’d been smack in the middle of whatever the hell this was. I’d brought her here when she’d demanded answers, ready to give them to her. I’d upended my bag on this coffee table and dumped my disaster of a messy life out all over it, ready to reveal all. Somehow I needed to reveal all. I needed to not be alone in this anymore. But somehow I’d never felt more…dismissed? Dismissed as an exaggerative storyteller with an overactive imagination telling stories about parents she didn’t remember existed. That somehow I’d just created this whole situation. That it was some figment of my imagination that I’d just planted in her head. The door slammed behind her as she ran out of the room, her bag on her shoulder and it felt like someone slammed the breath out of my heart. Even when I had always felt alone I knew somewhere out there I had my baby sister. But in this moment, sitting in the middle of the floor of the Guy Fawkes Inn, I felt like I’d had my wrists slashed and the life of me was bleeding out on the floor. I’d tried to pour my soul out along with the contents of my bag on the table and it had been dismissed out of hand. I’d revealed I’d had attempts made on my life and she’d brushed it off with a passing question she didn’t even want an answer to. Tears began to stream down my cheeks and my heart clenched in my chest. I tried to pick myself up off the floor, my body feeling like it weighed a ton, no energy left in my body, my breaths coming hard and fast. I raked my arm across the table, sliding everything back into my bag and shouldering it once more. She might not want to deal with any of this, but whatever was out there, whatever had been going at the pub, was still out there. And the last thing I needed was for it to swallow her up with it. I wiped at my eyes, not even caring that they burned from the mascara that I was sure had run into them at this point, pushing open the door to my suite and heading back downstairs, into the completely empty streets of the now black York night, with no sight of to be found anywhere.* +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Billie The door thudded shut behind me with a finality that felt aimed, and York’s night closed in like wet wool, sharp enough to sting but thick enough to taste. I drew on the smoke I’d lit on the way out, the ember a tiny coal against the cold, and set a hard pace through streets that should have been familiar. Each footstep carried too far, echoing like something with its own intention. At first I told myself it was the late hour and the echo of old stone, the kind of quiet I’d known in London alleys or San Francisco fog, but this quiet had form and weight, as if it followed on purpose. The mist gathered low, seeping across the cobbles until it began to rise and curl, silvered by the lamps until it looked almost deliberate, as though the city were threading a curtain around me. Light turned thin and pearled, the way it does when an old reel starts to run, and suddenly the fog became a screen, replaying the nightmares I had spent my life refusing. Black woods and root-dark hollows. Branches clawing like antlers overhead. Lantern-dim clearings where figures waited, eyes reflecting a light that wasn’t there. A child, me, running until the mossy ground turned to shifting shadow, tripping on roots that twisted like living things. Cold hands closed over my mouth. Laughter like broken glass echoed inside my skull. Every nightmare I had ever written off as a childhood fever dream bloomed in grotesque, perfect detail, a private cinema I could neither shut off nor look away from.