Anatomy of a murderer / (t+z 94th vt)

[Hafen d4 ⚓︎ minie]

z a d a .

Torian Vice was just a little kid.

I was not sure what to expect of the incoming victor but seeing him in person before me made me cock my head sidewards in almost disappointment.

I wondered if this was what people thought of me when I had first arrived in one. A little girl, hardly a teenager…there was no way she had done the things they claimed she had done. However, I did, I was guilty as charged and Torian….well the whole world had seen what he was capable of on national television. He could not hide who he was the way I was able to and he did not nearly look as scared as I did when I was his age.

The district square seemed filled with people eager to meet the latest young victor, there was a line of district one fanatics waiting to either sing his praises or curse him out. More than few people that were not happy that district one did not produce a victor this year. The whispers of dissatisfaction that the Le Roux girl who volunteered did not come home were a song often heard. No one thought Xaahira was coming home, no one except our family. No one really chanted her praises. The exception being a few stunned that she had made it as far as she had.

Myself included.

I was not waiting in this seemingly endless line of people to ask Torian about Xaahira. Frankly I could not care less about what he thought of my cousin. From what was aired on television, it would have not been much anyway. She seemed too preoccupied with the tributes from twelve and hunting down that girl from eleven to do anything else. It was safe to assume that there was nothing he could tell me about her that I did not know already.

No, I waited in line to hear Torian tell me what it was like to kill.

It was not as if I did not know the sensation myself. The feeling of satisfaction when the corpse of a target dropped dead, and I knew I performed another job well done. However, everything I did was so impersonal. I never spoke to those I had killed (except for the bastard that was my father) and I never got close enough to them to see them as living human being. It was all just target practice really, and no matter how hard I tried to shake my military upbringing, it was possibly the only thing that held me together.

I thought of how hard it was for me to bring up my job around Blaine. He was the person I knew there would never be any judgment from and yet it was still painful. There was an understanding of life and death that I possessed like no other. An understanding of fragileness that we all possess. The moment you take a life, that is when you truly start to respect it. It is also that moment where you lose all sense of yourself. You had done the unthinkable and I would do the unthinkable over and over again. There was no point at stopping now.

When I reached the end of the line and came face to face with Torian, I smiled at him . There was no hostility in my stature. I did not wish him any ill, in fact I only wished that he could find a way to live with himself the way I had learned to live with myself. Curiosity if the boy was a killer at heart or just a survivor flooded my thoughts. I could no longer tell if I was still grasping on whatever strings to survive or if I had morphed into a monster. The kind of creature that lurks at night and the ones you will tell ghost stories about. I did not know if I wanted to be a survivor anymore because maybe I was just so tired of living like someone would always be around the corner to hunt me down.

Xaa got one thing right, it was a kill or be killed world.

”Hello, I’m Zada Mahdavi. Xaahira’s cousin. Congratulations are in order I would assume” I held out my hand for the little child to take. ”I was wondering if you would be willing to answer a few questions I have. I’ll buy you a drink…” I puzzled for a second. Most of the fourteen-year-olds in my family are already boozing it up at parties but I did not want to assume ”…a glass of apple juice maybe?”

ELEGANT