the {reckless} and the |brave| :: topaz

in this city's callowness
we've lost our innocence
cheek to cheek but
my maps are changing
oh, don't forget

"I hadn't really noticed the eau de tuna floating around, but I think you might be right," Kiera says with a dissatisfied sniff of her own, skeletal hands absently coming up to pull her messy mane of dye-mottled waves into a haphazard bun at the base of her neck, the heat far too stifling to allow for a thick blanket of hair sitting over her shoulders. It's miserable out in the open, sticky and humid and the sun beating down so hard that she can practically hear her own pasty skin sizzling, but Kiera would still take her chances with Mother Nature over the barbed words and judgmental glares of the rest of Team One. It's people like them, she knows, who are the reason that the world is lost and in desperate need of salvation. They judge her based on her relation to the infamy of a person they've most likely never even met and yet ignore their own shortcomings, the very embodiment of hypocrisy. Kiera is beyond such pettiness and knows herself to be better than them, enlightened in a way they could never hope to be, but it still becomes hard to take their words with a grain of salt after prolonged exposure.

She likes Topaz Ross, though, if for no other reason than perhaps the fact that the crimson-haired Victor shares her caustic, dry humor and surely knows what it's like to deal with people saying unsavory things about her. With fame comes a certain measure of infamy, and vice-versa. Kiera sees it in the way people say his name with equal parts revulsion and awe, a sort of secret respect mingled with their derision. Misery loves its company, that much is true, and she decides she'd certainly rather be out in the hellish torridity with Topaz rather than inside taking part in a verbal (and perhaps eventually physical) smackdown with one of the Morenos.

"I think I recognize you from this morning, right?" Kiera half-smiles and nods in affirmation even as the bruised expanse of her arm twinges with an embarrassing reminder of her televised failure. "You're... the Dempsey girl?"

The smile dies abruptly on Kiera's lips and her posture stiffens defensively, so used to this chain of events that it's almost become second nature. People always identify her like that, "the Dempsey girl," her surname more important than any other aspect of her in the wake of publicized manhunts and wanted posters on every wall. She can practically script the way she sees this conversation going - looks that either tell of fear or hatred, pressing questions of what it's like to have Panem's Most Wanted on her family tree, snarky inquiries about whether everyone with Dempsey as a last name is a murderous psychopath or if it was just him (although most of the time when that happens she can smirk quietly to herself and think 'if only they knew.' If relishing in the feeling of a fleeting pulse beneath her fingers going still and the sight of pure water washing away a sinner's transgressions makes her wrong, she has no desire to be right). Kae never said it would be easy. He never said that people would understand, after all, if people could understand then the world wouldn't be in the shape it's in and need the guiding hand of an avenging goddess to save it from depravity. Still, Kiera might grudgingly admit that she is more easily wounded than she should be. Family is everything, a chink in her armor she can never seem to patch over.

"Yes, I am. Good old family reputation precede me?" she replies, the tone of her voice cautious and guarded and holding just a little bite. Perhaps she's being unfair, especially since it's probably a wonder Topaz The Uber-Famous Victor Ross can remember any aspect of someone who isn't a Capitolite or other Victor or some other influential force in the world - Kiera knows that her work is perhaps more influential than what most people can accomplish in their menial lives, but in exchange it has to be shrouded in secrecy and careful concealment. The acid leaves her voice in a weary-sounding sigh, spiraling off into the humid air along with the tension in her bones. "Sorry. The Morenos were giving me shit about my family a minute ago, guess I'm still a bit touchy. Don't worry, though, I swear I'm not going to stab you or anything. I'm perfectly sane."

That statement is debateable, but Topaz needn't know.

time it took us to where the water was
that's what the water gave me
and time goes quickly between the two of us
oh, my love, don't forsake me
take what the water gave me

Kiera's eyebrow arches toward her hairline in faint, somewhat skeptical surprise at the champion's response, the words pouring over her lips in a placating tone. "Hey, look. I don't care what the hell your family did; we've all got screwy relatives. I think I've got an aunt who robbed a bank, or something. Well, maybe that was a second cousin. But anyway, look at me. I killed two people personally, had a hand in the murders of half a dozen others. Legally I'm a criminal, too."

It takes a moment of brief, concerted effort for her to bite back the defensive response of Kae wasn't a criminal, he was an avenging deity! He was only punishing those the law refused to! that licks along the backs of her teeth. She's learned after several repeats of this conversation that no one ever seems to view the situation that way no matter how much she tries to shepherd them into the realm of enlightenment that she and her cousin used to inhabit together before he abandoned her to rule in lonely solitude. Maybe he'd had the right ideals all along, that most people were inherently predisposed to evil and ignorance and that it was up to those who could understand the world in a way others could not to purge them from existence for the greater good, but Kiera's opinion that people could always be saved in one way or another was the only point of morality the two ever argued about. Maybe some are more hardheaded than others, but enlightenment is always an option for those who seek it. Still, she gets the feeling that it might be a bit too soon to jump on her soapbox to Topaz Ross. Victors aren't used to being corrected, and besides, the copper-haired champion is the only person from Team One who hasn't treated her like a complete pariah after learning her name and the reputation that goes with it. Given this fact, she let's the older girl's comment pass with nothing but perhaps a small look of disapproval that ghosts across her features but is gone as quickly as it came.

"Okay, I take back what I just said," Topaz recants, causing Kiera to tilt her head questioningly, a fragile hope blooming behind her sternum that maybe she might actually be one of those rare people who understands, who realizes that it is the place of those who Fate has blessed with divine understanding to judge, but her statement ends in a joke rather than a pearl of wisdom. "I might have to judge you for taking shit from the Morenos; I mean, look at them! A house full of vicious Careers, and yet they've blown their chances at the Games twice in a row."

Despite the tiny sliver of disappointment Kiera finds herself laughing, a stormy alto that blooms over her lips and hovers in the humid embrace of the seaside air. The other girl's sardonic, dry humor strikes a chord with her, perhaps not a kindred spirit but close enough for now, in an environment so specifically hostile to her that any bit of familiarity is something she will cling to like a rock in the midst of a stormy sea. She would never say so given the knowledge that she would probably take it as an insult, but Topaz's razored wit, her solid logic and royal demeanor remind her more than a little bit of Kaelen in the most quiet and subtle of ways. Even though she's been on speaking terms with her for less than five minutes, it's the most comfortable Kiera has felt in the presence of another human being since setting foot in the muggy hellhole that is District Four.

"I said the Morenos were giving me shit, I never said I was taking it," she replies, her features settling into a chilling, eerie smile, the hereditary curvature of lips into something that has shot a bolt of pure ice down more than one person's spine. "People that talk dirt on any Dempsey, well..." Kiera shrugs offhandedly, grin widening into a sticky-bright, feral flash of her teeth in the bright sunshine. "They typically don't make the same mistake twice. I think Eris peed down her leg a bit before I decided to call it a fair warning and left."

She chuckles darkly again at the memory of the shock and trepidation etched into every face in the room when she'd come within a hair's breadth of handing Eris Moreno's ass to her on a silver platter. Although fear had been her cousin's weapon more than her own, it doesn't mean that she is incapable of wielding it with the same deadly accuracy when justice calls for it. Slipping from her reverie, she spares Topaz another, (somewhat) less creepy smile before stretching out willowy limbs and folding herself cross-legged on the blanket of verdant grass beneath her, fingers trailing absently over the blooms of the wildflowers springing up here and there - white yarrow, sweet alyssum, wild thyme and desert marigold. Despite never sharing quite the same love of the subtlety of poisons and plants she still hung on the words of every lesson until she was more than knowledgeable of the subject - until she plucks a few of them between her fingers and absently begins to braid the stems into a long chain. "At any rate, probably best I don't go back inside for a bit. As mediocre as the entire Moreno clan may be, they do have me fairly well outnumbered. You're welcome to join me if the heat's not bothering you too much. I've been looking for some decent conversation ever since we touched down in this hellhole."

Kiera doesn't quite convey the entirety of her hope for company, such an admission would practically be waving a banner of her own weakness in the air, but she does allow herself the silent plea that maybe the Victor is just as lonely as she has become.