sumner de vere, district four | finished

They called me terrible.

Feral.

Tricky.

A problem child.

All the things you'd call a girl from the streets. Little nobody with no real name. All skin and bones, hair so dark and long I thought I could disappear in it. Alone. Always on my own. Trying not to be scared. Old enough to fend for myself, but too young to understand what it meant to only have myself for protection. My hands were only so strong.

I called myself clever. A survivor.

They didn't seem to care. I was a pest, and then I was an orphan, and that was all there was to it. A thing made to keep fading, watching my hair grow longer and longer until I could hold it in my fists, wrap it around my knuckles and press them to my lips. And scream. Because that was all I could say. The only language I was ever able to learn.

Because I couldn't stand the world. It didn't deserve to hear my sobs.

No memories of my past, only glimpses. A woman holding me close as it snowed around us, finding her in that early daylight, running for hours, feeling terrified, pushing over garbage cans to find something to fill me, anything to keep me going, onward into this existence I knew nothing about. A player in a game that I never learned the rules for.

And I was nothing to them, but I was something — to me. Never yielding, always learning, faces and names and so many powerful words; sharp as a girl could possibly be, severing anything that wasn't of use to me. Because I wanted to live. To be — so many things. Things I didn't really even know. Treasures for the forgotten like me.

Alive.

Free.

"Okay."

That's what I told Clover when the tall man came to the orphanage, when they shut the doors and he promised to adopt the last child standing, when we looked at each other and saw only enemies in the place of friends, when I didn't hesitate to ball my hands into fists, to wreck every last piece of this cage that had formed around me for all my life.

When he asked me to fight with him.

Until it was only us standing there, above the cowards who wouldn't face us, the fallen licking their wounds in the stunned silence, and this terrible promise between us. To have a home, and a purpose, and a reason to use this rage that had been burning inside of us for so long. I took a step forward to strike him down, this friend I had known for a quiet while.

"Stop. Both of you."

And now here we are; at the prologue of this story. The terrible beginning of a terrible girl — my beginning. I own it with all of the wickedness in me. I am a nobody who became a somebody, who stole the name of a rich man with too many debts to pay and too many shadows lingering over the glory he used to call his own, desperate for a way out of his undoing.

Two children. Two chances. One victor.

"Will you stand with me?"

He speaks so gently. Always has to me.

My brother. Clover.

"Always."

Until one of us fails, and the world abandons us again. Because we both know it will. I've known the darkness, and the hunger, and that endless itch to be free for many years now — and I still remember the promise, and the deal we both made in silence. To be siblings, now and until the end, until our swords are at the other's throat. Until the crown is between us. Slick with our blood. Red.

I'm so tired of losing. I name myself champion.