show me how {ruth}less you are // zoe

I wasn't mad.

Not really. Well that's what I keep telling myself, as my fingers rummage through the draw ripping out sock after sock. Each. Bloody. One. had a hole in it. Perfectly cut, by a blade that was not my own. I'm not mad. I'm not mad. I'm not mad. Another sock, another hole. I grind my teeth, jumping to my feet and slamming the draw shut.

Fuck it, I'm mad.

It had to be one of the kids, playing some joke on me. I'd started to notice them a few weeks ago. At first I had thought nothing of it, maybe it was some freak accident. but as the weeks continued it had started eating away at me, slowly building until the pressure became too much. When would they learn? Why did they constantly dig their way beneath my skin, causing at itch that was impossible to scratch. Always there.

Storming from my room, bare feet slapping on the cold cement, I march into the dinning hall. Eyes blaze with fury I stop in the entry way. Meredith had died only a few days ago, stabbed willingly in the back by her district partner. Watching I had felt an anger that was indescribable. Not about her dying, her dying had been the best thing to happen in the last month or so. But watching as she pressed herself against the boy, knife no where to be seen, begging for his knife in her heart. That- That- had turned my blood to fire.

A pure and utter disappointment.

A tarnish to the family name.

One that would stay with them until another Strauss was reaped.

I wished that Killian, Octavia and myself had never laid eyes on the pathetic child. Never allowed her into our home. The amount of times in the last couple weeks she had rubbed the family name in the dirt had been enough for me to break. To unleash an anger that I had spent years and years learning to control. Unraveling before me.

Pushing Meredith to the back of my mind I force my boiling blood to simmer. I needed to forget her. Just like I preached to the children. Push her so far to the back of my mind that she would be buried, never to be seen again.

Eyes scan the hall. Children sat at tables, eating quietly. Doing absolute nothing productive. Eyes spot the nervous Ruth in the corner, at the table, on her own. She was always on her own, I noted. She always seemed to be hidden away from the rest. Doing enough to stay out of my radar. But doesn't allow herself to slip so low that her name is scribbled onto a vote slip, to fight to the death, to earn their right in this household.

She had potential. Not like my dear Isabelle, but more than Finn. Though, to my disappointment, he had managed to earn back a little respect after that fight where I had pressed my knife into the flesh of his hand, scarring it for a lifetime. Prowling closer I come up to stand beside her, "get up. It's time to spar." I demand, already walking away, down the hall towards the training center.

A fight is exactly what I needed.