take to the sky — deadlock gang. [day 3]

His breathing is too shallow.

If there's one thing he's learned in this life, it's how to take a beating, and when to know that the damage is more than he can sustain on his own. He has spent his life being battered and bruised, teaching himself how to come back from the edge of life and use that weakness to his own advantage—he had done it in his private training session and he had done it in Twelve countless times, taken beatings from Peacekeepers so make himself stronger when he picked fights with other citizens, like the one's who liked to whisper about how Melody Thorne had lost her swan song, about how she had gone off the deep end and would have been better off bleeding in the street with her husband that fated morning.

Nico had been beaten bloody.

But he'd always come out standing.

Today, once again, he is worried that perhaps this time won't be like the others, that he will paint the earth with his blood and instead of leeching power back from the ground, it will just swallow him whole. He'd never felt like this before coming to the arena, had never felt so simultaneously full of hope and neither had he felt so absent it—his entire life had been about vengeance, had been about anger.

There had never been room for anything else.

Here, without that, Nico is learning exactly how much it hurts to feel, exactly what it is to know what hope for a real future feels like—even if it's not a hope for his own.

He sees Honey emerge from among the flowers, and the sight sends a pang through his chest—his Honey, returned to him. It makes him realize something else, the moment he and Francis stop running and sit on the earth beneath them Nico realizes that he hadn't had eyes on Jessica since he watched her put a blade through Berlin Batalanto's chest. "Where's Jess?" he huffs out, chest heavy and breathing shallow, heading whipping around as best it can to search the field of flowers for movement that might mean she was near. "We need her," he says, looking at Francis with hard eyes.