my fight and my flight are divided {ele/rook}

I'm pretty sure that my nose is broken. This time my nasal bones haven't been cracked out of shape thankfully, you really have a tough time sleeping when that happens. No, instead a sharp painful split just below the bridge is my badge of honour, which I wear with pride as I walk around the muddy streets of Nine, my open mouth swallowing air through a crimson smile. This is probably the most alive I've felt in weeks.

I can't see myself, but I know damn well I look like shit. The way people are looking at me, you'd think I was something that crawled straight out of hell. My eyebrow is busted up pretty bad. I took a sucker-punch that split it open wide, and the blood is stinging down into my right eye. Out of morbid curiously I keep prodding inside the gaping wound with my finger, wincing each time, before doing it again. It feels swollen, and the flesh below my eyebrow is hanging off. If I don't get it stitched up then it's probably going to get infected. Would be just about my luck.

Going to a hospital is a pretty stupid move when you frequent an illegal underground fighting pit. In fact, it's one of the rules that you absolutely shouldn't break unless you're in a critical condition. There's always questions that accompany the treatment, and it usually isn't long before a Peacekeeper shows up and the questions stop being questions and start to become demands.

The people at the pit, they know one or two individuals around District 9 who can help you out if you're in a situation like mine. Backstreet doctors, maybe former military, or med school dropouts - there's always a story. Word of mouth travels fast and if you get banged up, someone can usually point you in the direction of someone who can make you look less like you've got a tumor on your face.

Used to think this was all barbaric, couldn't make head or tail of why anyone would want to step into a cage and beat someone back and blue until their blood was on your knuckles and their head concussed down at your feet. The more I went to watch, the more I wrote articles about it, the more I became absorbed with the culture.

Then you step into the cage, because the curiosity becomes more than just that, it becomes a burning desire to find out what it's like. I wrote one article after the next, trying to understand why everyday people from Nine would want to do something as savage as this, but I never could. And I never would. Unless I did it myself.

And now I do.

The adrenaline, the rush. You feel on edge, something that you just don't feel walking around Nine collecting the same drab stories for the same forgotten newspaper. The passion for my work is gone, no one reads my work, my purpose in life is rapidly shrinking. To feel alive again, after months of wondering what the hell I'm doing with my career, of sitting alone in my apartment eating ramen and staring at my cat. It's something that I think I'm getting addicted to.

The scary thing is, I don't think I can stop.

The day is retreating behind the hills, the last remnants of golden syrup sunshine shrinking away behind long shadows and the oncoming night. Everything seems so still lately, the status quo marches on, and in the middle of it is me, a bloody, beaten, mousy little girl with a fat lump above her eye and her nose busted open like a tomato. No wonder people are staring. I'd stare too.

Suppose it comes with the family name, the blood lust. That's what dad would say. Your cousin was just the same. Bullshit. He was a fucking psychopath murdering asshole - that's a far cry from some recreational cagefighting. It's a slippery slope, Fridae. I can hear his patronising, unapproving dulcet tones ringing in the back of my head, and I remind myself of exactly why I moved out at sixteen and precisely why I'm living on my own now.

I reach the address, covering my face from a passing Peaceekeeper patrol before approaching the door and knocking firmly three times. I don't know if this Ken person is going to even let me into their home, but right now I don't have a lot of options, and he or she is the best chance I've got of being able to sleep semi-comfortably for the next few weeks.

What a fucking mess.