where's your self control . jupiter , day six

[pogue]

Precision- he drives the dagger directly into the iris of Safina Roy just so she can't see him for what he is, the echo of his own voice bouncing off the sands of the arena floor. Heaving breath, ragged heart, there's what feels like an eternity written in the spaces between when he feels the blade enter her scalp and when he feels it exit out the back, blood and skull fragments exploding onto his forearm as he coughs up something silver and iron.

It's over, not before it starts but as soon as they recognized each other for what they were- rotten and vile and toxic and-

I know it. I know it.

KILLER. The word imprints on the front of his mind as Safina's cannon rings out, as her last words turn to jumble and slurred sounds, as the life slips from eye to silver to ground in crimson, as she falls into his form. He catches her against all of his best wishes, the last shred of innocence and humanity threaded into the minuscule action of a boy claiming his second life. Even as he curls his fingers into her back and forces his gaze to the horizon ahead, plumes of heat rising from the ground and distorting his view point. 

KILLER. He lowers Safina to the ground and abandons her where she died, selfish and ruthless and cruel and human, bared fangs pulled back down his throat with the blood and the sand as the adrenaline suddenly dissipates from his veins in one cruel swoop. There's a dagger in his hands that he pulls from her face as he does so, the medal suddenly feeling like treachery to his flesh as he examines weapon, chain wrapped around his forearm, bloody extension of rotting corpse. He writes his words as a eulogy and a confession into the sand as he stumbles ahead, step by step and heartbeat to heartbeat before keeling over completely mere feet away from a fresh body buried into the ground, cannon still echoing, boy still dying. 

His stomach bleeds out in waves of scarlet, cloaking the lower half of his body as he lets out something guttural to the air and the sky, the cannon finally dissipating and in it's wake the howls of a beast half buried ripping up into the clouds. It's pure instinct, pure pain as he does so, black spots dotting the edge of his vision and it taking everything in him not to collapse into the dust and join Safina wherever she may rest.

His first kill was a shock to the system, blood and guts and everything in between spilled out to the ground below.

This one feels.... empty. Nothing. Familiar. 

The thought terrifies him more than anything he's ever faced before, locking eyes with the body of Safina and pulls the needle  from his bag, shaking hand and terrified soul of a boy who knew nothing more than death and destruction, how to deliver it but never to understand it. 

K I L L E R.

He carves the word into his stomach in lace and pin, metal of the needle up and down and side to side until flesh meets flesh and exposed muscle falls back beneath the surface of his skin. He waits for it, too- the guilt, the conscience, anything to prove to himself that what he's doing i still wrong, that who he is is still awful, that what he's done is still unforgivable.

But it never comes.

And thats the cruel part, that even after all of what he's experienced he can still sit her and cloak his gaze in red and let it simmer- eighteen years of bloodlust and rage bubbling up to the surface until he cannot feel anything but, until it cloaks him in something sick and twisted and predictable.

Until his life doesn't feel like his own-
Not that it ever was.

He rises slowly as the day breaks above him, sunlight plunging itself into and through the void and illuminating his kill with new eyes. It's some form of pride and torture, that they left her there for so long just for him to see what he'd done, just for him to rise and growl and spit out the final words to a girl his equal, shattered mirror buried in sand. "Whoever it is-"

Waiting for you, "- wherever you ended up." 

"I'll meet you soon, but he's not just talking to Safina.

"I hope it's what you desired." 

How noble, 
how cruel.