solare | district 1 career | FIN

He was told very pointedly that he would have to do whatever he could in order to bring pride to his family. The only boy and oldest of five girls, Solare had always been the favorite. There was no question about it. His father had treated him as the heir to the family, an almost cliché thought that would cross most peoples minds. Solare didn’t even deny this when he was questioned about it. His father was a career once upon a time, just like his mother was as well. It was how they met, on the battlefield.  Proverbially of course, but that didn’t take away the effect of it.

At least, Solare didn’t think so. 

He thought you could find anything on the battlefield. He was a hopeless romantic in that sense. Sensual and empathetic to most of his classmates for a long time. Sometimes he had expectations placed on him by his family that he had never heard of before, but that didn’t mean Solare was afraid to rise up to the occasion. He had been a preening peacock for the district to see, and his parents thought nothing less of him.

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It had never always been like this. Solare could easily recall a time when he was younger, when he was afraid of almost everything. He was a shy boy, needless to say, scared of everything including his shadow. When he was born, he didn’t realized he was ushered into a family that had a rich history in one. A family of old money that had transformed into part political and part honor driven. Held to a standard that had spanned mountains. 

He was placed on a pedestal that he thought he would be destined to fall off of. 

He wont be picked up, put aside by someone in order to save for later.

He would shatter, and it would be beautifully tragic. No one would cry for him, because his family did not know how to cry. Their parents never taught them.

He was taught to be callous, ruthless on the battlefield. 

But that was not something Solare was good at. He believed in fairness, unlike his older brother, who constantly mocked him because he would always complain about wanting a fair fight. They always insisted that nothing would be fair in the games anyway. Why should he show any sort of mercy to him?

And Solare would always tell him that it was just common courtesy. 

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The more he talked about things being fair to him, the more his father would punish him. You see, his father had close ties to the academy in one, and of course, all of his children had to be taken care of. Solare had a feeling that this was the case for most of the parents in one. They all thought they had special preference, but in actuality, they just said they did in order to quell the spirits. 

After all, they were dealing with children of bloodthirsty ex careers.

But they would have to clean the saliva from their mouths, because now it wasn’t their time to shine anymore. It was their children’s time, and to make it perfectly clear, Solare enjoyed the aspects of training as a career. His body was always in pique shape, and he enjoyed the thrill of being able to handle weapons. 

Some people said that he did have a killer instinct in him, but it was buried beneath his pride, and his pride was married to his yearning for everything to be fair.

You see the pattern here?

Most of the other careers chided him for being so stuck on the fact that there could be no disadvantages to either side. However, Solare didn’t see a problem with it. He felt that everyone should be able to fight with the same amount of capability. 

He rarely got his way, and sometimes he impressed people when he found ways to rise to the occasion and take on the obstacle in his way. It would impress quite a few people actually, which Solare could tell anyone that is what he wanted to avoid. The more he stood out from the crowd, the easier he was to notice. That was what he didn’t want. Attention, to be thought of some great deity from another world that could do anything and everything at the snap of a fingers. 

He did not want to be put up on that pedestal.

He did not want to fall.

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Even now he still kept to himself when he could, made a stink about things that seemed to be unfair, and sometimes would lose fights just to keep himself under the radar. His temper would always get the best of him to be honest, one time even throwing a knife at one of the trainers because he didn’t like the way he was looking at him. Solare was lucky that the knife had missed.

He enjoyed the week away from the training academy. 

But by the time he came back, he felt the weight of the world pressing on him again, there was nothing held back from Solare.

He was placed on the pedestal, because no one held back from him. They gave him every disadvantage they could give him, and he found some way to rise to the occasion and fight his way through them all. Some of the other careers were even impressed, because even the objections from Solare had stopped. There was no way to get around it, and even Solare knew that it was a fight that he wasn’t going to win.

So he sat there, touching the sky and holding his breath.

He knew the fall would be long, so he held on for dear life.