a game of pawns {{ zoë

His mother was not a fan of interruption. 

He'd learned that the hard way, when he'd dropped sword and replaced the blade in his hands with questions. Ice glares and stiff fingers, the only thing colder than the slap of her blade were her words. 

"Do not interrupt me, Lazarus. Again." 

Again and again and again. Her words are ice, chilled in the dead of the night as her blade sinks through victim. Her words are chilled, icy, freezing painful 

They chill him to the bone. Maybe that's why he throws himself into the fire in his dreams. 

Eventually, he'd learned to take the loose threads of a cut off conversation and sew his mouth shut with them. It was better that way, it was better if he let the silence consume him. 

He was 

Better than her. Stronger, faster, cunning, he was everything she could not be, molded through rebirth. She

She- his sister, they call her.

She thinks (he knows) that seventeen years of life, of sword fights and silence, that it should be enough to override his own training. Her entitlement is her own weakness, spread out around her every time he tosses her to the floor like trash. 

Seventeen years, it is much longer than his own training and yet. 

Seventeen years and she has been raised to harbor spite, not pride. Sword swings and clenched fists and split lips, Scarlet Stroms' downfall clings to every cell in her body, wrapped around her like a cloak.

She hates their mother.

He respects her. 

Time stops when his mother's eyes meet his. Silent, waiting, patient, unforgiving. She has never asked him to kill before, so much so that he has fallen into routine of prestigious training being used for mediocre tasks. The tasks he's assigned teach him to impale fear into others, not his own blade. Blood, he sees blood but it is not in the form of decapitation or death strikes. No, it comes in the form of slashes and gashes, broken fingers and split lips. It follows in the trail of fear, leaving a stench that he has grown accustomed to over time.

Blink. Time races forward and his fingers tighten on the profile in his hands and a his bones creak and-

Creak. Slam. 

"I'll do it." She stands in an archway, weight of the world on her shoulders and jealousy clinging to her words. The swords still threaded between her fingers, snatched from the ground he'd left her sprawled out on. Breath. She heaves air like she has been running her whole life.

Perhaps she has been, from something.

She wields beauty along with a blade, the only thing she can one up him in. HE must admit, she is flawless with it. Silent, unavoidable, deadly even.

But beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. He finds her ugly. 

"I'll do it." 

She says it again, pleading for something which is not her own. Jealous of the very thing she cannot have- respect. 

He glares, malice adorning every nanosecond in which his eyes meet with hers. For a moment, his jaw had dropped to the floor, but just as he was faster than her in a sword fight he was fast to destroy his own shock and turn it into anger- into loathing. 

"No." He says, spitting the words at her like a knife thrown to victim. 

Time doesn't bother to stop for her. It doesn't have the respect.

He turns to the one who called him here. Who chose him instead of his sister counterpart. 

"No." He says again, shaking his head. "I can handle this on my own. He is nothing." 

Silence. Words hang in the air, dangling by the threads of a cut off conversation and at that  very moment he wants to pluck one down and sew Scarlet Stroms' mouth shut. 

Silence. His mother never liked when they interrupted anything. Even the silence.

"I don't need your help, Scarlet. You'll get your chance. Maybe when you-" 

"Enough." 
Her words are ice.
Cold.
He freezes. 

"I may have called you in here before her Lazarus, but do not forget your place." 

His jaw tightens. Eyes drop.

"I make the decisions in this household." 

She rises from her chair, death and intimidation clinging to her body. 

"Not your father. Not Scarlet. And certainly not you." 

"Do you understand?" 

Time does not stop for him. He has lost it's respect as well. 

"Yes." There is ice in his words, but it melts to his own fury. 

Eyes rise from the floor.
Their mother smiles.

"Now, to the matter at hand."
Her lips are curled into a wicked smile.
"If your sister thinks she has something she needs to prove, then by all means she may prove it."

Anger. Fury. Jealousy. It spreads through his body like cancer, cracking his bones and warming his skin. Disbelief, shock, denial. 

He cannot believe this. He refuses. 

"You will both go." 

Disbelief, shock, his eyes rise and for the second time during the conversation his jaw drops. This time, he cannot find the strength to pick it back up.

"Mother, he is a shopkeeper. We don't need two of us to-" 

She silences him with a glance, ice in her eyes. 

Pause. Breathe. Regain composure. 

"If he is so easy to dispatch, then kill him, simple and easy. Whoever comes back cleaner wins, in my book." 

Tighten a fist. Scarlet Stroms' has won. 

He is a storm, fury and anger and shock and disbelief and he exits, tasting jealousy in the back of his throat, feeling it weigh heavy on his shoulders. Like a cloak. Like Scarlet's. 

He can vaguely hear their mother threatening Scarlet to never interrupt her again, but he finds no satisfaction in the scolding.

His sister is silent, calm, invisible. But he has learned to notice her even when she is unnoticeable, when she begs to be invisible. The hallway seems longer than it did before, when he was called into her office. Perhaps that is the anger, the jealousy in him. Perhaps this is what it feels like.

A mirror catches his eyes and he stops, turns.

He can hear her stop too, through the silence. 

He does not know what stares back at him. When he had been dragged from the darkness into the light of their mother's icy kingdom he had started to like what he'd seen. Strength, durability, deadly. He was everything they wanted, everything she wanted him to be. 

And now, with each nightmare he grew more and more unsure of what he was looking at. 

A split second and he sees the blood shooting from the bullet wound in his head, dribbling down his face like a mask. A spit second is all it appears for, enough for a single blink.

He draws his knife and stabs it into his own reflection in the time it takes for the image to appear and dissipate. The glass crumbles, falls to his feet, reflecting the images of a boy once dead. 

"God, you're one miserable, jealous bitch." He says to her, hands resting on table, broken glass shards pressed into his skin. "But if we're going to do this together-" The word together pains him, a knife through his heart. 

"Then we have to have a plan. I'm sure you've seen that the surveillance around here has shot up recently. They're out looking for trouble." 
Calm, patient, the words of a dead man are surprisingly subtle.

"Looking for people like us." 

He tosses the profile to her feet. 

"Read it and meet me downstairs in thirty minutes. We can discuss more there." 
He begins to walk, dragging every bit of his indecency behind him, attached to strings of a cut off, broken conversation. 

Stop, his head turns and he smirks.

"If the way you fought earlier is any proof, i'm sure i'l be the one coming back cleaner. Just try to keep up." 

He leaves her with battle scars.

"Bite me." 

She hisses at him, words dripping seventeen years worth of poison as they fall, dead, to the ground, accompanied by the glass he'd left shattered scattered around her feet. Scarlett Stroms was born of poison and venom, bones laced with toxins and eyes laced with the fury of a forgotten childhood. She is arsenic, mercury, every toxic chemical known to man stuffed into one being. Maybe thats why he avoids her, disappears once he's done striking her down with words or sword or knife or sentence. 

Scarlett Stroms is dangerous, lethal, and for all the time he's been living reborn, pure, he's managed to avoid the poison leaking from her lips. 

With the slap of a hand and the words of don't forget your place he feels the venom Scarlett Stroms leak into his bloodstream, lace through his system and with every breath he feels the lungs of his reborn reality slowing and slowing and 

Bite me. Biting her would be biting the same bullet that had split his head and crumbled his first life. He's already done it once, he is not doing it again. 

These bed springs creak as a broken boy sits down on them, fists clench teeth grinding. He puts palm up and the sunlight reflects off the glass pieces in his hand, pressed lightly into the poisoned flesh of a boy reborn when he'd broken for just a moment. Broken souls and blood droplets, the latter drip from his pores as he plucks shard from skin and sin from tragedy, placing them in a cup on his bedside table before grabbing bandages from the bathroom and wrapping his hands once twice three times around, cut and dry before curling his fists. 

Three steps away from him and his mirror sits, hanging from the back of his door. 

He steps towards it, examining himself in the light of the day, in the light of his darkness. 

A scar runs vertical down his right cheek, accented by the red marks of his mother's fingers. He doesn't know where he got it, can't pinpoint the memory that its permanence is laced within. And its something of an irony that he cannot remember if the vertical rip of a knife on his cheek came from an enemy or his own family. 

Family. His teeth grind, and as his eyes glance up from ground to mirror he catches glimpses of his naked self, tears molded to his cheeks and hands covering what was (or wasn't) left of his own privacy. Broken, shattered glass mind and the hanging threads of a cut off life and he can still hear the words of his first interaction with Scarlett Stroms in the back of his mind- 

"Mom wants you downstairs. Get changed first" 

Shake and stumble and tears down his cheeks and he-

He'd been stripped of his essence and bathed in the rivers of hell, memory shattered and crushed to dust and scattered to the winds of a broken house fire. A nameless boy had died and in his place Lazarus Stroms had stepped forward, knife in one hand and flame in the other. 

He runs a hand through the gold locks on his head, feeling the scar tissue of his past life greet his fingertips. 

Breathe.

He reminds himself, again and again over and over. He reminds himself just like on the nights when he's chewed up by fire and spit out as broken shattered glass to breathe. On those nights, he throws his slumber to the darkness

(he had more than enough slumber during the short time that death had claimed him for) 

and in its place he takes the night by the horns and rides it until just before daybreak. His mother leaves their household nightly, sword in hand, moonlight dancing amongst the dried blood stains of its sheath. 

(He'd asked her why she didn't clean it, once.)
("It is a reminder of those who we're too slow to realize whom they we're dealing with.") 

When he'd first been reborn, he'd been afraid of everything.
Of life, of death, of his mother, of his sister, of even his father.

But as his hands gripped metal and his mind gripped the lifestyle of a warrior his fears dropped dead, bullet holes shot through their skulls and he stood, fearless, of nearly everything in front of him. 

Standing atop a pile of bullet-hole stained skulls, the only thing he could possible fear was the most unavoidable of all, the night. 

Because it reminded him of the eternity of a coma, of the void grasping at the edges of his soul and of bugs wriggling in and out of his body, flesh peeling mind ripped from its hinges. When he'd looked out the window during the first few months, he'd seen nothing but death staring back at him. 

And every time, every time he looked up at the stars he could have sworn that they we're nothing of the sort. That they we're the flash bang of a gunshot before the bullet hit skull and its victim collapsed and

Breathe

During the first few months, he hadn't been able to tell himself to breathe amidst the battles he fought. And so he'd lay, cowering in the darkness, moonlight lighting up his fears like wildfire. 

Too frightened of his mother's pride to ask for help. Too afraid of the fury of night to face his fears. 

In truth, he'd gotten the idea from Scarlett.
The only thing useful she'd ever done for him was something she hadn't even meant for. He'd stolen that from her, too.

Dead-nights and through cracks in the blinds he'd watch his mother slip out with sword in hand and blood-dried sheath and then, when the door's creaks reeked of silence Scarlett would slip out into the night as well, returning only when the night's life had dwindled, moments before his mother came back. 

Sleep didn't come in the first months. Even if it had, he would have been too afraid to accept it. 

And so, when he'd studied and calculated exactly how much time he had to leave and get back an infinite amount of times, he'd done it himself.

That night, the stars hadn't seemed like gunshots and the moon hadn't looked like a shot through skull. Maybe thats when the addiction to the night started.

Scarlett Stroms thought of him only as the pawn to his mother. He had been an open book, and their mother had torn his pages out and rewritten them herself. But even the most obvious books hold secrets within their words. 

He abandons the mirror when his fingertip feel the scar tissue on the back of his skull one too many times. 

Navy blue jeans and gray shirt, black jacket draped over himself
(his mother told them dark colors hid blood the easiest) 

Their house of cards is a house of secrets, built on lies and deceipt and kept together just the same by the two. He tucks a gun into his jacket and a tanto into the other side.
(its sheath is clean- pristine. He hopes to change that, today.) 

Mother said that the last thing a target sees before they die should be your eyes. He'd thought he'd seen Scarlett roll her eyes behind their mother's back, but the open book beside her had taken note.

After all, he was their mother's favorite.
Until today, he guesses.

Black glasses hide the eyes of a warrior fallen from grace as he descends the stairs, eyes scanning the room around him. Crawford, the name rings no bells except for the imaginary chimes of their target's funeral. 

Arms crossed, foot tapping impatiently. The minute hand draws close to Scarlett Stroms' thirty-one minute mark before he hears the words of an arsenic body behind him. 

"Don't get cold feet, kid." 
She taunts, he feels poison course through his body. 

Her knife flies and snaps at his neck, empty death threats dripping from its blade. 

"Hope you're up for slicing a man's neck clean open." 

She's grinning and he can think of more than just one neck he'd like to slice open. 

Glass-shard fingers catch the door and he follows suit, calm demeanor of a broken mirror quickly catching the girl in front of him. 

"I stopped getting cold feet the moment they brought me back to replace you." He says, striking deep at something he knew was her weakness. 

"I've done what you couldn't do in a third of the time. Remember that." 

He leaves her in silence, realizing that the only antidote to Scarlett Stroms poison was fighting fire with fire. 

Over the past few months, there'd been an incredibly prominent spike of Peacekeeper activity in their district. Not that many of the broke farmers around here we're capable of committing any serious crimes. Still, amongst the light of the day their mother had called them into her office, hands resting calmly, folded over each other menacingly. 

"I'm sure you two have both noticed the recent rise of Peacekeeper activity." 

They nodded, compliant. Pawns.

"I called you both in here to tell you that, if you are caught, no one in this family will come to defend you." 

Gulp, eyes hit the floor. 

"So, until the tightened control on this District loosens up, I recommend you both keep your, midnight excursions, on a tight leash." 

Shared silence, shared shock. Neither had been good enough to escape the night that was in front of them. 

"Leave." And like pawns on a chess piece, they'd followed the orders of a Queen. 

He counts the coats of white as they make their way through the District Square, taking side streets when necessary. 

"Ten of them just in the past two blocks." 
He makes note of the amount. He's sure she'd been counting, anyways. 

"Just don't get caught. Might want to keep the whole eye-popping out thing to a minimum, today." 

He glances at her, grinning. 

"It's sort of becoming a trademark." 

Crawford. Fortunately for them-
(Unfortunately for him) 

His store is deep in the side streets of Ten, past the wandering eyes of Peacekeeper patrol, too far away for citizens to come without needing to. Lazarus Stroms cracks knuckles and neck, adjusting his glasses on his face. If his file was true to its information, this kill would be no problem for either of them. 

He'd just have to get to him first. 

As they near the store, feet shuffling up dirt, he throws a plan out at his... acquaintance.

"Listen up, temptress. When we get in there, try and draw him out with...-" 

He looks her up and down.

"Whatever you want to call it that you use. Never know, he could have a gun behind the counter." 

He pats the tanto in his jacket, feeling for the sheath.
(it would not be spotless after today) 

"I'll lock the doors and dim the lights, then we can get it done quickly." 

 Breathe.

He nears the door. 

"Ready?"