BLCK CLD | { peggy / slade }

Call to arms, storms were coming. His eyes were the fairest reminders that things would be okay. Recklessness and romance; pretty smiles and pretty people with their clean teeth and fingernails: Slade Kinsey was no exception, and he knew it.

Finally.

He knew it.

He swung his sword playfully to and fro, staring past the Training Center's wall of windows, into black clouds and static lightning crackling across the sky.

There was a time when he would have been well on his way home by now, but currently he was feeling particularly inspired by things that could have potentially killed him.

Death was leaving him a gentle reminder of its presence, and he welcomed the chaos.

After a long length of counting his heartbeat with the claps of thunder, he finally looked away from the wall and at the others in the room. Only a few times could he remember the Training Center being this empty, with only a few determined souls pushing a bit too far for their own good. Two young girls sparred across the way, already well beyond their years. He guessed they would claw each other's eyes out for a spot in the reaping in a couple of years.

A bulky boy lifted weights, sweat trickling down his forehead as he stared intensely at nothing in particular. A look that could kill, thrown around so carelessly, so weightlessly. He had obviously missed his chance at the reaping, and Slade guessed he now spent his days exercising the remorse of a lost life out of his system.

And then, there was her.

Bombshell blonde, dainty yet fierce.

(Inspiration.)

She held a dagger, tossing it from palm to palm as if it weren't something made for murder, but a child's toy.

"Sticking it out through the storm?" He called to her, gesturing toward her with his sword.

"Fair enough. People like us are storms by our own right."