this will be the start /zen+storm
Jan 5, 2023 22:07:28 GMT -5
Post by ✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ on Jan 5, 2023 22:07:28 GMT -5
He was always going to travel.
That was the promise Soren and him had made each other, back when they were still in school and it felt as if they had their whole lives ahead of them. That was after the wedding but before the greenhouse and their lives began to unravel.
Zen leans forward in his seat, Gloria, an escort for District Nine was staring angrily out the window across from him. She hadn’t wanted to make the trip all the way out just to introduce him to young Adroxis, but Azazel had insisted.
He said safest to travel through Nine in pairs.
”Gloria, may I?” Zen speaks gently, tone like sunlight through a windowpane, ”If you dislike your district so much, why not simply retire?”
She blinks at him, then her mouth falls open, her eyes bulging like a fish out of water. Her response is almost too expressive, overboard for the question he’s just asked. There’s a denial building at the back of her throat, perhaps even an insult, so Zen leans back again and raises a hand carefully.
”It’s alright,” he tells her, ”We all have our wounds and perhaps yours are a little too fresh.”
An hour later, when the train doors slide open, they stand at the double doors together while Gloria wipes hurriedly at the tears streaming down her cheeks. Zen nods politely as she goes on about her pet nakom from when she was nine and then lets her point the way out to him, rather than bring her along.
”Rest yourself,” he tells her, ”I’m sure I’ll be alright.”
He usually is.
Zen makes his way through the district, stopping to look at things along the way just as a tourist might. He gazes into a shop window at gold silk fabric draped over a shape to show the flow of it and turns his wedding ring around on his finger, over and over, deep in thought.
He wonders what colour Storm’s eyes are.
Thirty minutes later, he’s walking through the Adroxis family’s front gate to a home that’s impressive enough in size to have been built in the Capitol. He brings nothing with him, though a porter will be along later with the samples he packed and his sewing machine. There’s a tape measure and a notebook in a shoulder bag, and that’s his essentials.
There’s a moment when he pauses on the walk up to the house, wondering briefly if he should be nervous about meeting a boy who has killed so many.
He waits for fear to spark, just in case, but like most days, the only feeling that runs through him is this soft silence.
Everything is muted.
Zen opens his eyes, then he continues on up the walk, takes a moment to adjust his gold-wire rimmed sunglasses and adjust his sleeves. Then he presses his finger against the doorbell.
