Luan II

Luna was sound asleep. She even seemed to crack half a smile. It was a rare sight to see her sister both happy and sleeping.

Luan was not happy, nor sleeping.

Luan was sweating. Cold sweat. It was early in the morning, and she had just awoken from a nasty dream. A nightmare. Thankfully it wasn't real, but Luan was still adjusting to reality. She sat up straight, and her blanket had limply fallen off of her shoulder after she sprung up. Her heart was racing, but it started to calm down at the sight of Luna, who was fine, in good health, not in danger. Luan can relax.

Luan let herself drop back onto her bed, without any regard for her comfort or warmth. Her blanket was splayed across Luan's body haphazardly. Luan let her arms fall beside her, wide open in defeatedness. She stared intently at her ceiling, at no spot in particular. Her eyes gazed into the void.

It was too early in the morning to get out of bed, but Luan's head was too full and restless to go back to sleep. The images of her nightmare replayed in her head. It was a dark, macabre dream. During the day, Luan would arrest macabre thoughts immediately, and halt them as soon as they started. Maybe she had been having too many dark thoughts, and that's why they all popped out in her dream all at once, like a Pandora's box of repressed anxieties. Thoughts are like laughter, sometimes they have to come bursting out. Luan didn't stick to her own advice. Luna had been her go-to sister for her troubles, but she's been avoiding her since the uncomfortable talk last morning. Luan had been so preoccupied with Luna's well-being that she neglected her own.

Luan tried to piece together her nightmare. What had it meant? All her sisters were stood on the side of a steep mountain, pushing up a heavy boulder. Luan didn't help, she just played pranks on them — and she couldn't stop herself. She made her sisters trip with banana peels, and floored them with pies to the face. All the while, Luan laughed maniacally. Eventually, only Luna was left standing, pushing the heavy boulder by herself. Luan looked on from the top of the mountain. When she turned around, her parents stood there. They were disappointed, and admonished Luan for annoying her sisters instead of helping them. "Why can't you be more like Lincoln?" they had said. She turned towards Luna, and saw Lincoln helping her push the boulder. Luan had felt angry. Suddenly, where she was standing was no longer the top of the mountain, but the bottom. Angry, she threw her last pie towards her brother, but it instead hit Luna in the back of her head, causing her to fall. Lincoln couldn't hold the boulder on his own, so it rolled back over Lincoln, the Luna, then her other sisters. Each of them turned to face Luan before being crushed by the weight of the boulder. The boulder gained momentum as it rolled over them, heading straight to Luan, who couldn't move. When it hit her, she woke up.

The images of her dream were graphic, and disturbed Luan greatly. She replayed them in great detail and in slow-motion, not because she wanted to, but because the images deeply disturbed her. She couldn't force these thoughts away as she usually did. These weren't thoughts, they were images. Those were much harder to get rid of.

Luan kept staring at the ceiling, stoically. The images replayed so many times that they started to lose their shock value. The anxiety didn't leave Luan's body, however. She tried to switch focus to other images that she had stored in her head recently. She saw the tear she had wept away with her hand, which inspired her with resolve last morning. She saw the mundane scenes in which she had observed her family throughout the day. Leni on the phone. Lola yelling at Lana while they were playing. Lori and dad sitting on the couch. Lynn and Lucy playing in the garden. Mundane scenes. Normal, non-threatening scenes. Yet, Luan felt anxious about her family, but no matter how hard she deliberated, she couldn't figure out why. She switched to a different image. She saw how she had placed her hand on Luna's thigh to comfort her the previous morning. Her anxiety made place for an entirely different type of anxiety, one that seemed less displeasurable, but equally debilitating. Her view lingered on Luna's thigh, and her hand placed atop it. She felt something she didn't feel when she lived it. Replaying it now, she picked up on something she didn't notice before. An energy.

Luan stared away from the ceiling, and turned gaze towards her sleeping sister. Luna's head had slumped in her direction, and some strands of hair had fallen across her face. She seemed peaceful. Her mouth had fallen open, and deep breaths flowed in and out across her sultry lips. Luan stared at Luna for some time. The new type of anxiety remained. Luan felt her heart beat irregularly. Involuntarily, her gaze was fixed at Luna's lips. Luan remembered how she had never kissed anyone. She knew Luna had. She wondered what it felt like.

Luan placed a hand on herself. Maybe she could deal with images in the same way that she dealt with intrusive thoughts. Luan started touching herself, and sure enough, the images faded. The feeling remained, and intensified. She focussed on the feeling, the energy. The question what it would feel like to kiss someone. She didn't imagine herself kissing anyone in particular, but she imagined. Luna's parted, sleeping lips were the most readily available image. Luan stared, wearily, and thought to herself. If only someone would want to kiss her, in spite of her braces, then she would know. Her mouth fell open in anticipation, inviting potential kissers — but no kiss came. Still, the idea, the fantastical image, of being kissed enveloped her.

It was not something she usually gave much thought to, nor yearned for. With her comedy business, she was too busy to be chasing classmates. Despite her uncouth sense of humour, Luan was fairly mature for her age. She could have a laugh with most people, but she couldn't talk about the deeper intricacies of life with boys her age. She never felt smitten with any of them. Luan figured that maybe romance just wasn't her thing. And yet — as she fantasises about being kissed now, it seizes her, and makes her heart flutter. It was a wholly mysterious thing to her, romance. She just knew she had find the right kind of person to share her first romance with, and she hadn't encountered them yet. But a girl can dream, and dream she did. She dreamt with her eyes open, a pleasant dream this time. Entirely hazy, with no discernible visual figures, but with very distinct feelings of being touched, of intimacy — of love.

Luan's entire body clenched. Half-unconsciously, she had pleased herself throughout her train of thought. As she came back down to earth, she stared hazy-eyed into the distance in a warm and pleasant afterglow. When her eyes refocussed, she realised that she had been staring at her sleeping sister the whole time. Luan turned her face to the ceiling again, with her cheeks now blazing red. Something had bothered her more than usual, but it felt good to fantasize. Her eyes fell shut, heavy with an intense relaxation. Her thoughts had numbed away into nothingness. As quickly as she roused, she fell back asleep.

...

"You're missing breakfast, Luan."

Luan groggily opened her eyes. She sat half-upright to look towards the voice that awakened her. She saw Lynn leaning against her doorframe with her arms folded, and a smirk on her face. Luan grunted a non-word at her.

"Usually Luna's the one sleeping in, but now even she's beat you to it."

Luan turned to Luna's bed, and found it empty.

"Ugh. Cut me some slack, Lynn. I've had a rough night." Luan strokes her head. "Don't you ever have one of those."

"Heh..." Lynn's smirks changes shape, and she averts her eyes from her sister. "I guess you could say I had a rough night." Lynn pauses and stares, reminiscing.

"Rough how?"

"Never mind. I'm not here to chat, Luan. I'm here to get your butt in gear, no matter how rough your night was. Dad's gonna give you an even rougher day if you miss his breakfast cooking."

Luan rubbed her eyes and yawned. "You're right... I'll be down in a minute."

Lynn smiled. She stopped leaning and unfolded her arms. "You'd better make that 30 seconds," she said, before turning to leave. "Or I'll come drag you out myself."

Lynn left. Luan scrambled to get dressed. She frantically put on her skirt, shirt and socks. As she searched for a hair tie to fix her ponytail, she noticed her video camera lying on her bedside table. It stood out to her fore a simple reason: it shouldn't be there. Luan had lent it to Lucy, ande she was still meant to have it for a while longer. Had she returned it already? With her hair still undone, she sat on the edge of her bed with the camera. She started it up, and went to the recordings to make sure she had wiped it before returning it. As Luan navigated through the little menus on the fold-out screen of the camera, she saw that there were still recordings on there. Ugh. Luan made a mental note to ask Lucy whether she still needed the files, or whether she could erase them.

Luan's eyes fell on the dark, mysterious thumbnail of the most recent recording. The time and date indicated that it had been recoded last night, and very late at night, too. Curiosity struck. What had Lucy been using her video camera for, anyway? Luan hesitated for a little while, but eventually decided to watch it. If it was very private, Lucy would have made sure to erase it, right? Luan pushed a button on her video camera, and the recording started to play. The screen was dark. The video had been shot in a dark room, and there were very little details. Luan couldn't make out in what room it was filmed. Was it even a room in the house? The silhouette of a person could scarcely be made out, but appeared to be shot from the back. The silhouette convulsed rhythmically. Had Lucy filmed some sort of seance? Or pretend dark ritual? What was she up that late for? Luan bumped up the sound. Mangled, low quality breaths emanated from the camera. Eventually, Luan could hear recorded voices from the scene.

"Lincoln! Lincoln!" a voice sounded through the speaker. That voice, Luan thought. It sounded like...

"Oh, Luna!" Lincoln's voice confirmed it. Luan knew she was looking at a silhouette of Luna, together with Lincoln, in a dark room, on what appears to be — a bed?

All at once, the realisations hit Luan. The realisations hit her like a thousand tonnes freight train — like the rolling boulder from her dream. She was watching a tape of her brother and sister — having sex. Luan got a pit in her stomach. Her face turned red. She sat still on her bed. She shakily held the camera in her hands before her.

"Ah! You're the best sister! The best!" Lincolns voice cries out from the recording, followed by the lewd sounds of frenzied passion and uncurbed impulses.

Luan grasped at her chest to contain her violently beating heart, but it only made her fingers gingerly brush over her sensitive breasts. Her heart thumped louder. She listened to the pleasured moans of her siblings, getting evermore louder and more reckless. As she listened, the sinful sounds echoed through her skull and embedded themselves into her memory alongside the dark, low-resolution spectacle from the camera screen. The sounds crescendoed. She watched Luna's silhouette convulse faster and faster, and, eventually, collapse.

Luan realised the truth now. Lincoln hadn't forced Luna. He had persuaded her. Persuaded her to do something so perverted — with her own brother. If she had not just seen it with her on eyes, she never would have believed it. She would have stubbornly insisted that Luna would never agree to such a thing. But she had agreed, and Luan had seen it.

Luan thought back at her conversation with Luna. She remembered how she had looked at her. She remembered her shrieks when she suggested Lincoln had forced her. She remembered every time she had seen Luna and Lincoln together. Always like two peas in a pod. Inseparable. She remembered how Luna always preferred to spend time with Lincoln. How she preferred Lincoln over her sisters. The pit in her stomach stung. How she preferred Lincoln — over her.

Is this what it took to be loved?

In the final second of the recording, the camera seems to have been jerked down violently. The video ended, and the camera booted back to the recordings menu. Luan sat, staring, motionless. After a while, without a committed thought, she started the recording again. The same spectacle appeared before her eyes. She looked, this time less with shock, and more with wonder. A sort of wonder that made her mind wander, like it had done last night. Luan imagined new things. New feelings, new sensations — more intensely than imaginations she had made before. As she looked at the shady silhouette of her sister, she wondered how she felt. She wondered what kind of headspace had made her crawl onto Lincoln. She wondered what was making her convulse so wildly. She wondered where her lustful screams were coming from, and why she didn't seem to care someone could hear them. Then, she wondered how she would react if she knew she had seen this. She knew she wasn't supposed to see this; This recording should never have gotten into her hands. However, she could not unsee it now. Images had a tendency to haunt her mind and incessantly replay in her head. And one such image was doing just that: Luna's sleeping lips. The same lips that she had stared at so intently a few hours ago. The images beckoned Luan.

Still gazing at the camera, a hand slipped down beneath her skirt. The rhythms of Luna's body flashed before Luan's retinas. The feelings of imagining what it would be like to be kissed rushed back to her all at once, and magnified. Luan's body was warm all over. A strand of hair had fallen on her wet lower lip, and it pulsated at the hastening breaths of Luan's open mouth. Luan imagined things she didn't know she could imagine. Her body craved stimulation more than every time she had used her toothbrush in the shower combined. She didn't know what had gotten a hold of her, but it made her seize upon herself. Her mental font of happiness was being rushed full, overflowing before long. The vibrations hit her like a tsunami. Her fantasies had completely taken over. Luan's moans synchronised with Lincoln's. Luna, Luna!

"Luan!?" Lynn yelled from the bottom of the stairs.

"I'm coming!"