the queen is naked and no-one sees her amber eyes {stare}

The sun was going down, and for the past seven hours he'd been putting up missing posters all around their section of the district, and getting nothing from it but useless words of sympathy. Mother would beat him if he returned home without his sister. She was the one who'd made him do this in the first place.

("Get off your ass and do something useful for once! At least your brother has the discipline to spend his time training.")

What did he care anyways, one less sibling meant one less person Mother would use to shame him with. He could already imagine her barking more orders at him, because everything he did was "your obligation to the family" and by "the family" she meant her. Her and his sister.

Alex slammed the remaining posters into the nearest trash can. He was tired of being her fucking servant, of being ordered around at every whim, of agreeing to her demands just because it was easier to leave the house and hang posters instead of listening to the endless fighting.

("Living in the lap of luxury, you lazy bum, with plenty of food and a soft bed to sleep in. Think of the poor kids in the community home, with no one to love them or care about them like we do.")

He'd spent most of these seven hours wondering if no love at all would have been better than the idea of "love" his parents had, for each other and for him and his brother. If it was really so wrong to not care about his own blood relations just because he'd never liked them. If the times they all pretended to be happy outweighed the screaming matches.

("Of course we love you, you're part of this family. How dare you ever question us?")

But there were no answers in the streets. No answers in the square. No answers in the vapid row of shops his parents would buy gifts for his sister from.

("We already give you so much more than you could ever deserve.")

No answers in the Training Center too, most likely, but it was worth one last try. And if that didn't work, well, maybe the answer was at the bottom of a bottle of moonshine.