benny braun | four | fin

you would only see the signs
the echoes in my head, they rhyme
I feel we never went at all
but tomorrow is another day

"Why don't they just call you Ben instead of Blu?"

The age old question he had answered a thousand times before in his life. He could have just said the same thing he always did, ("My first word was Blue,") but he had learned long ago that it wouldn't do him any good. However, he did love to hear himself talk, so he pulled the cherry sucker out of his mouth and smiled a nice, big fake grin.

"Why don't they just call you Boring instead of Harper?"

She didn't laugh. Actually, she looked offended. Why were people always offended by his jokes? Bexler had told him once his humor was too dry, that it felt more like insults, but wasn't all humor? Blu was just better at being up front about it, maybe.

Still.

Bexler would have laughed. Maybe, If he wasn't high. Who even knew when he was or wasn't anymore? Certainly not Blu, though he was one of the lucky few who knew the truth about his brother's side occupation. If he chose to indulge in the products he sold or not, Blu did not know. But he knew he sold them, and that was enough. Too busy thinking about boys and booze to focus on getting that fancy diploma from the peacekeeper training academy, if you asked Blu. He hadn't ever been quite as good at focusing his attention in the right places, which was a good thing for Blu, because honestly, Bex was smarter.

Shit, did that make him a bad person?

He plopped the sucker back into his mouth, smiling at the girl before he turned tail and left. It wasn't wrong to want to be the best, right? And besides, Bexler wasn't considered a career anymore. He wasn't even considered a peacekeeper yet. He was just a student who was narrowly pulling one over on that hot-shot new professor who claimed to be so great of an investigator.

Bexler had always been the one with more forgiveness, too. His heart ached for those who were too weak to care for themselves, which, Blue thought, was why he joined the academy in the first place. It was why Bex stayed with their mother when she was struggling so badly to stay afloat.

He guessed that has always been the difference between them: When times were tough, Bex endured. Blu found a way around.

He moved in with his grandfather when he was about eleven or twelve— around the time he started training. It was clear that he was talented, and no one was disputing it. But he also spent more time in his grandfather's Training Center than he did at their home. For every hour other people would study, Blu would study three. Late nights, early mornings, long days. Tiring days. Days he wanted to quit and his stupid, insufferable pride wouldn't allow him to.

---

"What are you doing here?"

He was twelve years old, fingertips dancing along the broadsides of the blade station. It came from a boy, two or three years older. Stronger. Better, probably.

"I'm training," Blue replied, not bothering to look up from the tempered steel's brilliant shine. "You're Braun's grandson, right? Figured he would've had you doing research for him instead of something useful."

Scarlet stare, eyes on fire glaring at the boy. "Don't associate me with that old man," He growled. He had half a mind to fling a blade at the boy to solidify his point. Doing his grandfather's research was something he wanted no one to know about. Wading through wave pools looking for barnacles and seaweed for the old man to put under microscopes to see if the vitamins he was giving them were having an effect wasn't something Blu was proud of. Especially when he could have been training. But, his roof, his rules.

"Why does he even bother keeping his name on the door? It isn't like he ever comes in and, I don't know, teaches?" Blu balled his hands into fists, pulse hammering against his neck. "And yet you still chose to come here for your training," He said. His wit would always out-measure his temper. He could have stood up after taking a beating and made some kind of sarcastic remark about how nice the weather was that day.

"Because of the legacy," the boy explained, folding his arms across his chest. Blu did the same, taking a step closer to the boy. He had to tilt his head back a bit to look him in the eyes.

"I'm that legacy," He spat, daring the boy to say anything else. When he didn't, Blu continued. "My grandfather built this building and trained my father, who was the best in the building. Then my father had me."

What the boy said next took him a while to remember, after the fact. His vision had been so clouded with anger and resentment and fury that when they asked him what happened all he could say was "I don't know," and then a few seconds later, "He was being a dick." But as the day went on, he remembered every word the boy had said, and he remembered the exact place on the boy's face where his fist had landed, the exact sound it had made.

His eyes looked down on Blu and he had scoffed.

"Yeah, and then your father got arrested. Didn't he?"

---

To his grandfather, training had taken a backseat to research long ago. He didn't leave the center high and dry, though, not by any means. He hired the best trainers he could find, each specializing in their own particular areas, and he paid them well to remember how important training was. But after Blu's father was arrested for drugs, which happened around the time he and Bexler were starting school, it took a toll on him.

"Thirty years of raising that boy," he had said, "and for what?"

It was a fair point. And Blu hated to say it, but his brother was on the fast track to following in his tracks. As it stood then, he had already sold enough drugs to go away for a lifetime, just as their father had, but maybe that was his reason for doing it. Who the fuck knew why Bexler did anything he had done?

He could still remember when the two of them were younger. Identical twins but they say Bexler was walking months before his big brother could, that by the time Benny had uttered the word "Blue, Bexler had a plethora of words to babble in his crib. They called him Blu because it proved he would get there in his own time, which felt more patronizing than it did comforting.

He could remember racing his brother, pushing himself to limits he shouldn't have been capable of just to keep up, while Bexler seemed to be only half-paying attention. Bexler had the body of an athlete, it seemed. Blu was just stuck with the mind of one. And just when he started to think, maybe, he was head and shoulders above his competition, someone like his brother, or the boy who had mentioned his father came to knock him back down.

---

It was a Monday. He was supposed to go to school and go train on Mondays.
Not do his stupid grandfather's research. So when he had woken up with a note attached to his door with the words, "Meet in the lab after school," he had been visibly upset.

It wore on him all day long, how his grandfather was now officially impeding on training time,
on how he would probably fall behind and everyone would leave him in the dust, on how this was all his stupid dad's fault for being stupid and Bexler's fault for not being around and his mother's fault for marrying a known drug head.

By the time he was setting his bag down in the laboratory, he was struggling not to spit flames from his mouth. He already had everything he was going to say planned out: a nice little speech where he told the old man exactly what he thought of this bullshit arrangement,
and where he told him he wouldn't be doing it anymore.

But when he saw his grandfather, he noticed he wasn't alone. A boy wearing a red hat was standing next to him, both of them with their backs turned away from the door, and that wasn't the only peculiar thing about the lab. Every time he could remember walking in to this place, the back wall had been empty of anything other than different samples of plant life that his grandfather would make him recite. But today, it was lush with silver and leather: a wall of weaponry.

"Grandpa, what is—" he started to ask, but his grandfather held up a finger, writing the last of his notes down before finally looking up at him.

"Hello, Benny," His grandpa said pleasantly. He hadn't ever taken to the name the way everyone else had. Still, for good measure, he piped up a quick: "Blu."

"This is Redford. He's been taking night classes at the center."

Blue crossed his arms across his chest, narrowing his eyes at the boy. "Can't say I remember seeing you," He admitted. His grandpa spoke again. "His parents have been paying for private sessions."

"Are you any good?" Blu asked, looking at the boy again. He was handsome in the sort of way that made Blu feel less handsome, which was a problem for him. The boy didn't speak, so Blu looked at his grandpa.

"Is he deaf or something?"

"Mute, actually."

"Oh."

He was still watching the boy when his grandfather began speaking again: "I've asked the two of you here for a very important reason. It's an experiment of sorts." Blu rolled his eyes, trying his hardest not to vomit. "No, grandpa. I'm done scraping seaweed out from under my fingernails."

His grandfather pursed his lips. "If you want to leave, Benny, you may. But I have a strong feeling you won't want to if you'll shut your mouth long enough to let me explain." He had opened his mouth to smart off, but his grandpa wasted no time moving on.

Fuck.

He hated being bested.

"I've been in contact with eight other highly prestigious training centers across the district, and together, we've devised a sort of competition for the best of our students." Blu's eyes flashed to the wall of weapons, before returning to his grandfather. "Essentially, the two of you will need to travel to these other centers, and battle with one of their strongest students. If you win, a trainer will present you with a badge. Once you have received 8 badges, you'll return here, and you'll fight someone of my choosing. Should you win that fight as well, you'll be named a Master-level Career, as well as the Champion of the tournament. But be warned, winning has its struggles. If someone in the competition should choose to try and take your title from you, you'll have to fight them in order to keep it."

He had Blu from the first time he said fight, but he kept quiet just to make sure he wouldn't change his mind about it. By the end, he was flushed with excitement. He looked at mute boy, who seemed just as intrigued. "I'm in," Blue said, and Redford pointed his thumb up.

"Excellent!" The old man said, gesturing toward the wall of weapons. "I'm offering each of you your very own custom weapon to take with you on your journey. Train with it. Spar with it. Get comfortable with it so that you'll know it as well as you know yourself by the time the fighting starts."

Redford seemed keen on a glaive with an electric yellow staff, but Blu was drawn to a sword and shield combo, silver, with accents of gold and, you guessed it, blue. He heft the set off of the table, moving it around to test its weight and balance.

"Perfect," he whispered to himself, turning to his grandfather and shrugging. "I guess this'll do."

Afterward, he had caught up to Redford, stopping him just outside of the laboratory. "What do you say we test them out now? Off record. You and me."

Redford grinned, unsheathing his glaive, and Blu offered his own cheeky smile in return.

"On three."

---