serena belgrave, district three | cbd2

She doesn't believe in variables.

There is a simple equation that follows her every decision. A sum of personal cost is considered, and the tax of possibility is weighed — and when all statistics have been recorded, an outcome is given. Something that is definite.

She knows how this war will end.

Control is not something she can lose. Even with her auburn curls falling out of place, the creases in her once designer clothes — her posture could rival her father's in his prime. She tries not to let herself remember what it was like to stand at his side. To stare up at him in awe as she always did. He was her folktale hero, a fable of a man destined to meet his ill-fate.

Her love for him had been a feeling, not a fact. It is of little use to her now in the present. He is dead, and her mother is long gone, and she wasted two years of her terribly young life in the Detention Center undergoing a punishment that has left a tangible effect on her. Nothing can change what happened — but what happened to her changed everything.

Order fell out of balance, her future shifted and the world made less sense — but she simply wrapped herself in a death grip to the point of almost breaking. Always to that point, but never once pushed all the way over the edge. What will she leave behind when all the pieces of her come tumbling down? What does anyone ever leave behind when they go?

Only energy, stardust, and dreams that can no longer come true.

Pointless things.

It's not a secret, how even her own brother feels about her and her snarky attitude. How little her enemies respect her. She is obnoxious to them, a genius without the humility to make herself admirable. She does not blame this on what she has suffered. She was this girl before her losses were calculated. She was always going to be this girl. Too proud, too lonely.

But she was never meant to be an orphan, to be fighting a battle without the chance to learn the goal and the cause. There is so much to know, and so much more to lose, and that is where Serena Belgrave is truly underestimated. There is nothing she cannot learn, nothing that can break her in a way that matters.

Not when she is fully prepared.