syth iparis; district two. fin.

Tangled up in her bones, I reached out my hands and sprawled my fingers out into the air. They tore through it like nothing- because it is nothing and here, there is a hollowness colder than the void in her chest expanding to the very ends of her.

She is a stain- on my insides and outsides. With her fingernails, she carved her name into the walls of my chest, my veins, my bones, my heart. She seeped through to my skin, spilling her name in ink across my shoulder blade. This misery is scrawled into my flesh- ARA- because it wasn't enough for our love to show only on our insides. (I'm a ruin- inside and out.) The letters are so elegantly written but they cannot look more than wicked to me.

And etched into her skin to match is my name- SYTH. Matching tattoos to hopelessly bind us as one- if only it was that simple. She placed her hand on my chest, rested it there gently

and she tore through my flesh with her fingernails and reached within me. She pulled out my heart in fistfuls and I stood there and I watched my own reflection flicker in her cold and empty eyes. My gaze only left hers for a moment to drink in the match against my heart. I watched the flames crawl up its surface, but I wasn't screaming until the numbness of the new found hollowness finally eluded me, and I was left to gasp and throb on the floor.

When I was young, my mother told me I could pretend- but if that held true, why could I never stitch together my own twisted fantasy and let it fall in a dark veil over my eyes? They were burned and scratched and scarred. It was she who captivated my gaze and I paid the price, so dearly, I did.

Her lips burned into mine- I thought her kisses were sweet; I had mistaken the burn for the fire of the passion between us, only to find that it was the venom blazing through every fiber of her very being. But scars are not deceptive; even my eyes could make out the starkness of their truth.

She had steel skin, but I saw it break once- she bled ichor. I once swore it to be gold as the sunset, but my mind recalls midnight; liquid obsidian; demon blood.

But I wouldn't hurt her back, even if she gave me the knife herself and told me to snip snip snip away at her veins. I was raised a career, brought up to be ruthless and without fear. My mother taught me to take an eye from the man who took an eye from me; she taught me to keep forgiveness in Pandora's box.

I felt the blackness in a sinister rush; I saw the crimson trickle across my vision until a red sea stretched for miles and miles. Vengeance is justice and justice is just- yet I felt my stomach crumpled within me at the thought of hurting her. I would have found myself crossing swords with myself if I were to take the knife from her unfolded hand and drive it into her back.

I have steel teeth; she has steel skin. Our fists would collide with each other until our knuckles were stained in bruises; our skin would become a manic oil painting of blue, black, and violent violet.

You cannot fight fire with fire.

I was born and I died.

(A part of me did.)

Innocence was washed out from everything that makes me human. I never had teddy bears or pacifiers- that possibility was ripped from my grasp before I existed. I never had dolls, only a pocketknife to play with.

Childhood?

I had none of it.

Perhaps there was once a blue sky, but they painted it all gray; perhaps there was once a sun, but they blotted it all out with their hands.

My days flickered past me. They seemed longer in the moment, but daring to scrape my gaze backward, they were almost ridiculously ephemeral. I remember peering out all of the weapon manufacturing factories my father owns sprawling out beyond sight on the way to school. I can recall how the air tasted in my mother's art shop- all dust and paint fumes.

Sometimes I wonder how something as simple as childhood eluded me, how it slipped through my fingers like fine grains of sand- but then my eyes will trace along the blades displayed on the wall in the academy, and I will remember.

Career is burned onto my forehead. I was brought up with iron strapped down to my knuckles and fire ablaze in my chest. My mind often wanders and I think I am too soft to follow my parents' hollow legacy, but my fists beg to differ.

I never liked to fall so easily in line- even before Ara and all of her twisted defiance, it was a sport to rage rage rage against the strictures set in stone all around my bones. They tried to confine me to the ground, but my heart was born for the burning skies.

The roar of stomping feet and shattering bottles was sweet in my ears. It's bitter nostalgia now, with the ghost of Ara's lips drenching every last bit of it- and yet I bathe myself in it. (I can't let go of the memory, nor can I bear to keep it.)

["You're soft, Syth. You're nothing like how you were raised to be- or who you think you are. I see you, stripped and barren down to the bone; I know you better than you know yourself. It is pathetic."]