you never danced in the { dark } // chelsey, blitz!

Basil Anatola
"my mind's own home"

[attr="class","scrollHome"]He can’t get used to the silence. And, it’s not in a bad way. He thinks that - had it been under any other circumstances - he’d rather enjoy the silence. Indulge in it. Drown in it. Maybe even get used to it - but the day he gets used to it won’t be today.

He’s sitting by his window and thinking of home and how ‘quiet’ was a foreign concept back there. Home never really felt like home. Home was a battleground, a war zone, a place where you tread lightly across the creaking floorboards because one wrong step could trigger an explosion. And, no matter how carefully he treaded, he always seemed to get into the enemy’s territory. Do as you’re told, soldier, his dad’s hardened eyes always seemed to say, but Basil has never been good at following orders. He’s a mercenary at best. Home reminded him of this fact - it reminded him of all the places within him where darkness grew.

He wonders why he misses it so much.

Is it silent there, too, right now? Is dad sitting on the porch, staring into the black sky, knocking his head back to another beer? Is mom alone in bed, catching her first night of sleep since he left, where her nightmares are still better than her reality? Is Sage doing homework, eyes tired from reading the same sentence over and over again, ears still trying to hear his footsteps in that empty bedroom next to hers?

Basil can’t get used to the silence, and maybe he doesn’t really want to. Not anymore. So, when the silence is broken by the knocking on his door and the girl who asks “Want to cause some trouble?”, he can’t complain.

Instead, he smirks, closes the door behind him, relishes in the sound he makes, and says, “Always.”

Basil Anatola
"my mind's own home"

[attr="class","scrollHome"]She’s a bit like Roland, he thinks as she struts her way back down the hallway, except prettier, and with lips that smile a helluva lot more than Roland’s ever did. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy for him to follow her blindly. She leads him into the darkness and it’s like he’s walking down memory lane. The building’s walls melt into a cemetery’s gates, and the arms cradling the paints morph from the girl’s into his best friend’s. He can almost hear their footsteps crunching over the dead grass and the dead in general. He can almost see Roland’s face, turning over his shoulder, laughing about the stupidity of what they were doing - of what they did every night. Make way for the graveyard artists, the graffiti hooligans, the unstoppable duo that meets Death with an iron fist and a tin can of spray paint in the middle of the night. He shakes his head and shakes off his nostalgia. There’s no point in going back to that graveyard, now, if Roland can’t get out of there with him.

“The training center isn’t guarded at night. Or, at least, no one will stop you if you try to go in.” He cocks his head to the side as she talks, wondering why or how she’d know that. “I got a bit drunk there the other night.” Then, he laughs. A real one. He thinks that maybe this girl’s a lot like Roland.

As she tells him her plan, he leans against the wall next to the elevator door and crosses his arms, a smile still drifting on his face. “Well, if we’re gonna cause some trouble,” he says once she’s finished, “I’d like to at least know your name, first.”

Basil Anatola
"my mind's own home"

[attr="class","scrollHome"]Basil’s a mercenary - of sorts.

Maybe there is no war right now (other than the one in his head), and maybe no one has ever paid him to fight their battles for them - but, deep down, he knows that he would if it came with the right cost.

And paints and brushes more than cover the costs for him to sneak around the residence hall with some nameless girl after curfew.

Sure, he thinks about good and evil and all the gray stuff in between sometimes, and - sure - he even wonders about right and wrong and if there might just be some cosmic force hiding somewhere in the sky with the power to decipher between the two - but what’d that ever have to do with him? He’s lived his whole life in the gray - in the gutter - scraping his knees for crumbs and crap and not much else. As far as he knows, artists don’t have to be good to be good artists. They just have to survive, and that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. What he always tries to do. Desperate times call for desperate measures, anyway, right?

And these are very, very, very desperate times.

So he doesn’t question why Danny chose him, out of the other twenty-three she could’ve chosen, and he doesn’t question why now, either. As long as she’s got the paints, he’ll provide the entertainment.

It’s what any good mercenary would do.

He laughs when she mentions his home district as if it were a virus running through the water pipes, and then rolls his eyes playfully when she drops the knowledge of his artistic background. She’s got him following orders for now, but the thing about mercenaries is that they never stay on one side for too long.

“I’d tell you my name is Basil,” he says, “but it seems like you’ve already got me all figured out.”