need 4 speed / roadhogs, day 3

Post by napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ. on Mar 19, 2022 11:18:45 GMT -5

There’s a rush of thoughts in his head when he finds the cans of juice, none of them saintly.

He stumbles upon it by what seems like pure chance but Rafael isn’t too sure once he reads the labels they have. However, if he has to make a wager between Cricket Antoinette’s mercy and pure luck, he knows which one he’ll choose. They want you dead, a hushed voice says in warning tones. He steals a secret glance at Nowles and Fatima over his shoulder for what seems to be the hundredth time. All of them, the voice seethes in what can only be described as his mother’s tone of frost, spiderwebbing through his head.

Protect yourself, Esmeralda warns, against all odds.

“Against all odds,” he mutters, looking down at the bottles. His fingers quiver. He can do it. He can drink one, hide another, and empty out the third. The sand shall devour it with delight, Fatima and Nowles will die. And the promise he made, an oath swore in front of a whole district, shall come to half-fruition with their deaths.

And isn’t this what Rafael is? Treachery cloaked in skin, a snake to his very bones and marrows? Take out the competition, Esmeralda tuts impatiently. And we’ll take it all. Everything. The district, the electoral office, the very legacy of the Salazars—it would all be theirs for the taking. With a new Salazar victor, Jacinta will be finally out of the picture and leave Valentino vulnerable. It’s everything his mother wanted, her game in glorious crescendo, and he is the lynchpin, he is the heir he forever wanted to be.

All it takes is some grit. That, and a bolt in the heart of his guilty conscience to silence it forever.

“But,” he whispers in a low tone, “but I can let them live, kill them later.”

Pathetic. Weak-boned. Saving a kill is never the wise move, especially if said kill can invent some junk-abomination to defeat you first.

He knows what he must do.

He has the upper hand here, so use it.

And yet, his eyes keep drifting to where the two are playing, their forms gilded by the dying sun. Nowles, fiery and iridescent, is doing something stupid and Fatima appears rapt by the performance at hand. It’s small moment, but the last few vestiges of what can be tenderness in Rafael’s rotten soul magnifies it.

It’ll get him killed, so he crushes it to smidgens.

But he doesn’t empty out the cans.

Weak, Esmeralda scolds.

It’ll get you killed, it’ll get you killed, it’ll get you–

“Shut up,” he cuts her off.

At least plot something. Tear them apart.

“How?” Rafael huffs. “They’re playing sisters in a game of death. So much heart,” he openly mocks, even as a part of him crumbles. He has never known that sort of bond, will never know it. Rafael feels incapable of it somehow, as though a part of him born for love had been engulfed by venom as a price for his ambition. Is there for a chance of redemption then? Is there a way to rectify yourself when tenderness is the reddest flag to you?

The answer sinks under his bones.

The answer bares itself in the cautious glance they send his way as he approaches them.

Tear them apart, his mother urges once more. And this time he doesn’t have the mettle to his bones to refuse her.

He hands Nowles a can first, tells her that Fatima has already drank. And then, as night descends upon them and Nowles go on a search for more junk, he offers Fatima the last bottle illicitly. “Nowles wanted to keep it to herself …” he makes a smile through cracked lips, “but I thought you have it.”

It’s a cheap trick, a weary attempt at deceit.

He leans against the scratched hull of the ship, almost as if in quiet mulling, but it is only so that the shadows can cloak his features. The metal is icy against flushed skin.

”Tell me, Al-Min,” he begins, looking anywhere but Fatima’s face, ”how far do you think a person’s legacies makes them? How far …

How far does yours?”