valerie strauss, d2 {cbd1}

It happened again.

Another Strauss orphan entered into the Games, and another Strauss orphan that brought shame onto the careful family foundation Octavia Strauss had begun to build.

Elizabeth Manford was weak. She felt too much, and that was her downfall. Deeply emotional and blinded by feeling – easy to manipulate into something new, in theory. But in the end, too headstrong to conform to expectation. Already too far gone.

Worthless.

The same mistake would not be made again.

//

And this is where you enter the story, somewhere around chapter seven – a semicolon, an interlude, part two. If Act 1 was the story of Octavia Strauss and her failings, Act 2 would be the story of Victor Strauss and his success.

It is so clear now.

To build a career, you must start from scratch. To try and take a child already attached to their feelings, their past, and try to reshape them into something new is an impossible task. Even their strengths eventually become weaknesses. Too messy.

But you. You are a blank canvas. You feel nothing, have gone numb to the world, pushed down your troublesome beginnings and learned to store your emotions in a small, locked safe in the back of your throat. Running on pure instinct, letting your primal urges lead you through life, you walk through life softly, quietly. There are no footprints left in the ground where you’ve been. There’s no sparkle in your eyes anymore – nobody really knows if there ever was to begin with. Nobody has ever tried to coax life back into them, either.

You are everything Elizabeth was not.

And so you remain as a ghost. A creature with no attached strings, nothing to weigh you down or stand in your way. It’s beautifully sad.

You are the perfect soldier for Victor Strauss’ resurgence – and that is why you will succeed where no one else has.