anachronism // d10 train blitz, seventh.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

t e r r a .

resting
on your bones,
bowing to your throne

Terra Montague wastes no time.

"Either of you ever killed someone before?"

She sits there dead-pan, the rattling of the train shaking underneath her thighs. On the outside looking in, it's a strange question to ask teenagers. Morbid, even. But not if you've lived a life like Terra has. Half in the middle of a war, the other learning to become a soldier, and in the strange place after called victorship being celebrated for it all.

Empty shells of buildings and vehicles race past them, fields deserted save for their skeletons. Elizabeth and Chant - she wonders if they'll rot and decay, too.

"Well?" she asks again after a moment. This time her hands rest in her lap. "Have you?"

table by ele

[kap]

Chant Bellami

Still shaken by the reaping as I boarded the train, there wasn't much of a friendly greeting from Terra, the victor who we shared a District and a train car with. The girl who I'd been chosen alongside was there with me, and Terra asked us a rather straight-forward question.

"Either of you ever killed someone before?" she asked. There was a moment of silence, her expression clearly serious: she genuinely must have thought that there was a chance that my answer to this question would be an affirmative one.

"Well?" she repeated herself. "Have you?"

I shook my head to tell her no before speaking.

"No, but I know that will have to change if I want to come back home." I wasn't asking for confirmation. I wasn't asking a question. I knew what my fate would be if I didn't kill someone. I wouldn't come back home. I wouldn't survive. I needed to kill to survive. Damn it, I just wish I had more of a reason to kill than such a selfish one as wanting to outlive the others in the god-forsaken arena we'd be going in to. I glanced at my District partner, and then back to Terra.

"Did you think you were going to make it home when you first went into that arena? Did you think you'd actually manage to kill people and go home?"

I asked her this out of both curiosity, and just to see if it would make her think a little bit. I'd always wondered how people's brains worked, wanting a look inside to see what made them tick. If I could see what made a victor tick, maybe it'd help me out.

-----

277 words

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

t e r r a .

resting
on your bones,
bowing to your throne

Ah.

So Chant is one of the lucky ones. Terra sometimes thinks about what her life would have been like had she not been plucked from the ashes the war had left. If she and Lachlan had found each-other, grown up together, been at peace before all of this. They are childish thoughts and she doesn't think them often, knowing better. But that doesn't stop the pang in her stomach, scar tissue pulling, from the knowledge that she could have had a happier life. A safe life.

But then she probably would have died in that arena. And Chant probably will too, she knows better than anyone that only children forged in the war's hardship walk out of that arena alive. She almost wants to smile, eyes darting from Chant's mouth to the teleprompter placed in front of her - doubling back, filling in gaps where her deaf ears and hazel eyes cannot.

"I didn't think," she says - truthfully. "I knew I was getting out of the arena alive."

It was intrinsic, as sure as the fact that the sun would rise the next day. So many dead bodies before her - what were another 23? The rest that followed, Project Goldwing her legacy? How about the ones killed in the 6th by those children she taught in One, Two, Four? Just another death. Just another aftershock of the war and what it did to her.

"But I didn't know that I'd leave without my hearing."

Ans she didn't know that she'd leave with the ghost of a friend haunting her forever. But neither her hands nor throat say that out loud.

"It's full of surprises. Know that first."

table by ele