sins of the father / perdita & cyro

Learning how to kill does not come naturally to her. It's easy throwing weights around, training her body to be more solid and capable of taking hits. But holding a bow in her hands, watching an arrow rip through a target, this feels like a kind of death.

She has never felt more like a murderer.

This had been her sister's specialty, but now she's the one standing there. And she thinks about the first boy she loved, and lost, and how Calypso had fired a shot straight through his calf. The horrible thing is that she understands the preference.

It's so much easier to kill something from a distance.

To watch it fall, and give up, and to know that you have won.

Easier, and crueler, but there is little choice now. She knows what she has to do. Time is running out, and she has prepared herself to the best of her abilities. She keeps playing the game she always has. Throwing herself into cages, and trying to break free.

'I did not volunteer to die.'

So she assumes that everyone around her is just as hungry to survive. Twenty-three enemies, and she underestimates none. Twelve of them chose to make this war their own, and she was among their ranks. Now there's a gun in her hand.

There will always be a gun.

"Eleven." It feels distasteful to reduce the boy standing across from her to his district number, but she doesn't know his name. She doesn't know how to ask for it. Her voice is cautious, but kind, with no ill intentions. "What do you feel?"

It's an impossible thing to ask, let alone to a stranger that has simply crossed her path. They are two parts of a shattered whole, destined to meet again in some horrible way. With his axe in her chest, or with her eyes looking up at his face in the sky.

But things are coming to a close, and for just this moment, she does not want to be alone.

"It's all about to begin.
Are you afraid?"