spoliarium | sol + cilla

[gamemaker kelsier]

S O L

He sees her everywhere.

In every step he takes, she is there beside him, trudging along or running along ahead, disappearing inter the ether, blood blooming through the white of her t-shirt, making her sprout rings of bloody death. He doesn't know what to make of this because he's sure she's haunting him when she promised that she wouldn't.

He goes to the training center to make sure he stays fit and able. His mother demands that he become the family sacrifice one day to please the gods and make them wealthy one day. He has no one to spar with because he only ever used to spar with Luna and even if he hadn't killed her the cancer would have killed her by now. So he spars with shadows and ghosts, knifes slicing the invisible flesh of an invisible friend. Always, he always elicits invisible blood, coming fast and blooming, beading along the cut and dripping down the arm.

He goes to the training center in the mornings and works at the morgue in the afternoons, routinely burning bodies and sewing shut the mouths of those that are for burial. The bodies are always cold, always lifeless but he watches them closely to make sure that they don't blink. He doesn't want to burn anyone alive but at the same time if they are pretending at death then maybe it's what they deserve. He lights their bodies aflame before they can make the decision to breath again.

Once, Sol read a story about a girl who was not dead and her parents buried her thinking that she was. They put a bell with a string above the dirt above her coffin and if she was still alive, she could ring it and they would rescue her. The day after she was buried, they fund that the bell had toppled over and the string dragged down into the earth. When they dug her up and lifted the casket's lid, they found her lifeless, the inside of the lid gouged and bloody, and all of her nails torn off.

He is unafraid of being buried alive. It could be peaceful.

His mother flutters around him these days, sensing the deep pain that he is in over the sudden loss of his girlfriend and unable to do anything. She changes his hair colour and style once a week at least, sitting him down and snipping away until she has a style that she favours. He sits obediently, silent to all of her questions. Sensing her son's sadness, she dies his hair the darkest black she can find, leaving his hair unruly and a mess on the top of his head.

It suits him that way but he doesn't care to pay attention, he likes to sit in his room and take the long braid of hair out of his t-shirt drawer and lay it on the bed beside him. He likes to stick it out from under the covers and pretend that she is only playing around, only hiding. The bed is too flat, the covers do not move with her breathing. She is not there.

Her ashes are in a medium sized velvet bag and it is in the bag of his closet. The bag is heavier than expected. A human body weighs a lot in ashes. He knows that he should spread them somewhere but he cannot bring himself to it. When he enters his room nowadays it feels like walking into her arms because she is present, buried there, in the back of his closet. The velvet bag is a heavy maroon colour with silver trim, the drawstrings heavily braided silver cord. It's pretty, like her.

He put his sword through her heart.

He trains with a wooden staff, hitting the dummy in front of him with expert precision, expressionless, uncaring. He pretends that the dummy is a body and that he can hear it's cries of pain but he ignores them, enjoying the growing blisters on his hands, whacking at the dummy for hours and hours until everyone else is gone and his hands are bloody.

He should stop, but he continues hitting the dummy, smacking it into pieces through sheer force, moving onto another one when his target breaks down in front of him.

N o b o d y
covers for the
M A T A D O R

[cass]

C I L L A  R O W E

She's no fool.

There is this guy in the training center; she’s watching him right now, her eyes were the only thing watching what he does. They were the only thing that trailed him at every twist and turn. It was probably the quizzical, perhaps even a perplexed raise of the eyebrow that gave her thoughts away. You could not mistake it for anything else; she was watching him. Leaning up against the boards behind her, one leg bent, following the path of comfortableness, it is also resting against the wood. Her arms have moved across her chest and she folds them tightly together, and she looks at him, an eyebrow slightly raised, lips momentarily parting as she sucks in a sharp mouthful of air.

She closes them, but opens them once more, allowing for another sharp intake as the dummies limbs are shattered. There is no rhythm, no technique, and no sequence to each of his movements. It’s all anger; it’s all frustration, rage and helplessness. It looks a lot like the way she often feels, all those emotions – guilt, pain, suffering, hurt, anger – being performed in front of her. At first she had simply grinned, eyes flickering past him, raising her own practice weapon to strike at a target.

People often came here and did things like that, growled and howled and screamed at targets, blaming their parents for this cruel life. As though the training was all their parents fault and she supposed she had to agree with them. She hated her mother for being so ill; she hated her mother for using that illness as a bargaining trip, wriggling that seed of guilt so far into Cilla’s soul that she had no choice. And she often hated her father for watering it, letting it sprout and eat her all up. But she had never taken it out on some poor, unfortunate dummy, as she had seen other children do. So she had assumed the same anger had taken ahold of the boy standing in front of the dummies.

But she was wrong.

It wasn’t until she had thrown the third knife that she had realized that his movement weren’t all in anger. She had become awfully good at sensing such things since her brother had gone ill in the head (well that was what father said – just because he had an imaginary friend didn’t mean he was a lost cause, but father said an eighteen year old boy shouldn’t be that way) she had learnt how to read people more then ask them. Her brother tended to show how he felt rather then say it, he tended to turn all questions onto her, manipulating the conversation so that he could make her feel even worse. Not intentionally, though. It was how she had begun to look at him, then to look at father and then to look at mother, watching their eyes, and their movements. It was how she had figured out that father was simply using guilt to get what he wanted.

The sincerity in his words had faded long ago, and now it was just desperation to please his wife. Get into the arena, sacrifice your life, die child, die. There pleads for her to become their little victor sounded more like a chant for her to die.

After the first dummy falls, a mutilated pile of nothing she moves. She takes up a staff of her own on the way to the boy. When she reaches him she stares, generally it was just a matter of yelling and getting your way in, but she felt that this was not the way to handle it. And in all honesty she didn’t know the best way to get his attention to her.

”Oi! Kid!” She said, shouting each word, sharp and clear. She wasn’t sure if that would get the response she required, so she raised her stick and in one sweep hit the boy in the legs, taking them out from underneath him. ”Dude come on.” She sighs, wiping a hand through her hair, and squats so she is level with him. ”I don’t know what kind of pain you are in, but mutilating that poor dummy won’t help.” Biting her lip she glances away, and then with a quick grin she turns back to him, eyes sparkling, ”Come on, fight me, take it all out on me, I can fight back.”

And then she straightens up and grins.

[gamemaker kelsier]

S O L

The faceless enemies in front of him do not scream as they should. It is dissatisfying and remote, to fight them, to bash them into smithereens. He can feel the leaking liquid taking over his bones, making each jarring hit rattle his veins until he's all out of order and leaking himself. His hands bleed from broken blisters, staining the training staff and making his hands slick. He only grips tighter so that the staff will not slip out of his hands. He is raising the staff for yet another hit, his rhythm stiff yet broken, like a drum out of beat, when suddenly someone deems it fit to steal his wind.

Gravity catches up with him fast as wood is tangled up with his legs and his knees give out to the pressure of being knocked forward. The breath is caught and held automatically in his throat as he struggles to react, still gripping the wooden staff so tightly that he can feel splinters entering his palms. His eyes widen slightly in alarm as he feels himself falling backwards and the ceiling running away above him. He bites the tip of his tongue and tastes blood before he remembers to loosen his jaw in order to take the fall.

His back hits the mat with a thud and the staff jars against his chest in one of the most ungraceful movements he has ever made in his life. For a moment he cannot quite compute what has just happened. He had been attacking the dummies with such ferocity that he had not heard or realized that anyone was sneaking up behind him, or even trying to get his attention. He mostly just ignored everyone these days anyway and they usually knew not to mess with him when he was in one of these states, knowing exactly what would happen to them if they did.

He would turn feral on them, attacking them with nails and teeth instead of wood and blade.

As it was, he was trying to remember how to breath again, the wind having gotten trapped in his throat.

As it was, he was struggling to remember how he was meant to interact with people that were not ghosts, haunting him still. He'd always been polite growing up. Telling regular people that weren't ghosts to go away was rude, so was throwing things at them until they evaporated.

The anger was still burning in the pit of his stomach and it made the decision of how to act for him as it rolled itself like ink through his body and turned his vision a deep shade of blood red tinged with black. Gritting his teeth, he jumped up in one fluid motion, using the muscles in his legs to push against the mat flooring and give him momentum.

fight me, she says. Take it all out on me.

And he thinks, ok. He does not need to be asked twice. He ignores the fresh pain in his back and the old pain in his hands, shifting his weight so that his left foot is forward and his right is back, holding him stable. He'd just been whacking at the dummy, relying on his anger to destroy it but dropping technique altogether. His body slowly realigned itself like pieces of a puzzle being clicked into proper place. He was deadly at the worst of times, as shown by the pile of dummy remains at the edge of the mat. At his best he was nearly unstoppable.

The grief counselor he went to a grand total of once after Luna first disappeared insisted that violence was not the answer and it was a bad way to work an emotion yet, the way to deal with anything was to face it head on and stand tall. Sol preferred to face it with a weapon in hand, getting ready to smack it into oblivion. He didn't need anyone telling him how to feel, trying to make him feel anything.

He wanted to yell and bleed and hurt and scream but all he had ever been taught to do was hit.

Springing forward, he did not wait for her to give him an open, attacking with the staff as if it were an extension of himself rather than a piece of wood.

N o b o d y
covers for the
M A T A D O R

[cass]

C I L L A  R O W E

This was not one of the greatest ideas she had ever had. In fact she would have written it down in the top five worst mistakes, coming in at number three, just above her decision to try bleaching her feet white and coming in just under the choice to train in the training center seven days a week until she was eighteen or dead. But then sometimes they bad decisions you make can turn into the best ones. Not all of them lead to misfortune and terror. He seems shocked, if not stunned by the fact that he was no longer in the air, but on the ground. It was then that she noticed his hands – just a glimpse, but they were clearly cut, red and bleeding.

Sheesh this guy was in a bad mood, if he was angry enough to do that to his hands and not even think about it, who knew what was running through that mind of his. And then all at once he was a feral animal; there was some kind of light in the depth of those eyes. It glowed, engulfed them and then he was on his feet, that staff swinging at her. There was something beautiful about the way he moved, there was elegance and grace and as it moved she was almost too surprised to react. All at once those motions had changed from angry, uncoordinated and ungraceful, they’d taken a sharp turn into something she couldn’t keep up with.

The first strike she blocked and her left foot slipped back, oh shit, he was good. He was strong and he was completely comfortable with the staff. Her instincts were all screwed up with this weapon, she could wield it well enough, she had trained and practiced using it, but her choice of weapon was the bow and arrow, or the half length twin samurai swords. So when it came down to using one weapon she was the ungraceful one.

It felt odd gripping the staff in two hands, she fumbled over the staff, trying to gain some kind of rhythm, but as her fingers slipped she knew what was going to happen. The boy moved like lightning, the staff an extension of his arm, it moved fluidly, so much unlike what she had seen just moments ago that her eyes widened in surprise and wonderment, there was a flash of movement and then there was pain. The staff collided heavily with her chest and she stumbled backwards, the air being slapped out of her lungs in one great big hit.

Father had always told her she was built for ranged weapons, it was why she had chosen the bow and arrow as her primary weapon, after she had mastered that weapon she decided she wanted something else, she wanted a weapon she could use to fight with in close quarters, she tried the sword, the spear, the axe, the staff, but not fit. It was after she had held a half-length blade in her non-dominant hand she decided she liked the feel of it, it was then that she learned she was ambidextrous. She decided shed use the half-length twin samurai swords.

Her hands slide over the staff, she grabbed it with her left and then her right. Unsure of which hand to use, she wasn’t given a chance to decide.

She wasn’t even given a chance to catch her breath, before he was spinning once more, staff moving out, and there was no time to react once more. Again there was pain and she grunted, her leg collapsing under the weight of the blow that was delivered. A gasp escapes her lips and she moves, this time it was just instinct that saved her from another smack to whatever he was planning on hitting. The staff moved upwards, and his met hers with a loud clack.

Cilla grinned at him, ignoring the sting on her leg and chest. This was enjoyable, not at all what she had expected. He was tougher, stronger and better then she had thought he would be. He wielded the staff like an expert and she knew it was his choice of weapon. It was not hers, so she was swimming out and away from her comfort zone where no one was going to save her. Oh if father could see her now he’d growl at her. If mother could see her she’d tell her she was useless. She was supposed to be making the family proud.

She let out a small laugh, holding the staff tight; fighting against the pressure he put on it. This was the kind of pressure she liked, not the one her mother drowned her in.

She raised an eyebrow, challenging the boy to do better.

[gamemaker kelsier]

S O L

He must have been born with a staff in his hands for the way that it seemed to belong there. Truly, he was the shining pupil of the training academy, the mayor himself had stood by and watched with an impressed expression on last exhibition day. He had stood under the hot sun that day, feet moving in patterns that they knew off by heart, hands doing the thinking for him. His mother had often claimed that they'd never had to teach him, he just somehow knew what he was doing with that piece of wood. It was a lie of course, while he definitely had amazing instincts for weapons, he had worked incredibly hard to achieve the things that he did.

People do not remember the all of the time he spent training and they spit in his direction, blaming his hard work on talent and luck. He doesn't care because he can still beat the shit out of them and when he is beating the shit out of someone or something he isn't thinking about anything but the problem in front of him, it's as if everything else floats away. All he can think of is the best way to take the enemy down, a rush of adrenaline washes over his limbs and everything becomes sharp and unbidden. he can breath again.

He is a boy who has been taught that all feeling, all emotion, all of everything can be solved with a staff in hand, by winning the games. They are a generation raised on the idea that the only correct way to gain glory is to kill twenty-three other children in a game made for the entertainment of the rich. They are gladiators, killing machines unable to recognize the fact that they all have the same enemy because they are a generation raised on propaganda and war. He embraced it, the feeling of power that comes with it. The feeling that he is invisible even as he knows with cold, hard certainty that he is not, wishing that he wasn't.

He responds to her block with a soft grunt and spins on his heel, raising the staff over his head and bringing it down with a perfectly executed whack across her back, sending her forward and knocking the breath from her. That was one of the strengths of fighting with the staff, taking the breath away from your opponent was a simple feat with the length of wood. He does not stop to let her get her wind back because to him this is no longer just a spar. This is a battle.

He feels her body react under his hit and it is wonderful, much better than beating up a lifeless dummy. To elicit pain, to feel pain, it is a beautiful thing to him. He has felt so numb for so long. It feels like he is walking through amber every day of his life, like he can't breath until he is fighting.

Sol dances back, stalling his attack, wondering if she can get a hit in as well, wanting to feel the jarring sensation of taking a hit from the staff, wondering if he will get a bruise, hoping she might break him just as he broke the dummy down to bits. When the blow comes it is the other end of her own staff biting at the left side of his collar bone. He hardly falters beneath the weight of the attack, accepting the feeling of his bones shuddering, knowing that it didn't kill him. If it doesn't kill it doesn't matter and he can think about it later. He allocates the pain into the section of his brain that does not deal with immediate problems.

Stepping forward, he feints, bringing the staff down in an arc as if to attempt to sweep her legs out from under her, flipping it up in the last moment to slice it hard across her right forearm. He doesn't pay any attention to her taunts, completely focused on the task at hand, zoned out and tragically deaf.

He has not spared like this with anyone since Luna disappeared. His brain keeps that little tidbit of information from him because it is not immediately important and will only serve to distract him from his current purpose. His training has made him into an emotionless thing, uncaring and unfeeling, the perfect example of a career. The perfect example of a psychopath, which is something that he quite possibly is.

N o b o d y
covers for the
M A T A D O R

[cass]

C I L L A  R O W E

She would never say she was the best at using the bow, she had immense power, strength and skill and could hit any target she aimed at, but she would never claim she was the best. The bow had come easily to her, the knocking of the arrow, pulling of the drawstring; it had all felt so natural in her hands. When she sucked in her breath, held for a fraction of a second – the tip of the arrow resting against her lip – before firing. There was so many reasons why she preferred that weapon. There was power in the way you used it, the feeling of firing something, rather then striking. It was ever bit as graceful and magical as using a sword. Her parents didn’t agree with the weapon choice, however, they said a bow was a coward’s weapon, to be used by someone who wanted to run, who didn’t want to fight, but rather flee.

She did not see it the same way. The bow was a weapon that required just as much skill as any other, and it seemed that it was the weapon she cared for the most. It felt right in her hand, the arrows felt comfortable over her shoulder. It was the weapon she had wanted to use, but her parents had been ever so persistent. When mother got sick she used that to her advantage and she pleaded with their daughter. Cilla tried not to fall for it, but her father soon started to join in and before she knew it she was being manipulated, warped and told it was the only way to make her mother proud. That to change weapon, to stop being a coward and be better was the dying wish of her mother.

And she fell for it.

Not once did she stop using the bow, but she was forced to find another weapon. It was how the twin half-swords came around. And it was why she was struggling in her fight with this boy – her struggles even worse, aside from the fact that she was heavily out-matched, more so because every weapon she used required to hands. Her hands did different things every time and to unify her movements into one solid strike felt odd.

He grunts with the block, but he doesn’t remain blocked for more then a few seconds. Once more her eyes widen with evident surprise and awe has he disentangles himself in one smooth movement. He moves, twisting the staff, and Cilla is given no time to move before the staff collides with her back, her cry of surprise is cut off as once more the air is torn from her lungs before she can stop it. There was no way in hell the staff could be anything other then this boy’s weapon of choice. He used it so well, and she was greatly inclined to ask him to teach her, but she bit back anything she was willing to say, after all they were fighting, not chatting.

It was his intensity, the way he moved, all taut and serious that shook her out of early need to joke and muck around. Instead she tried to match his intensity, but no matter what she did, she’d never equal his strength. However she is given an opportunity to get in, under that defense and she takes it. Stepping forwards, lightly on the balls of her feet she moves the end of the staff, letting her body do the work, her mind reacting to her limbs after they moved. She struck his collarbone and a triumphant grin flickered onto her face, fuck yes! She had finally dealt a blow, Cilla was certain it would be the only one she would give him.

The triumphant grin quickly disappeared as he moved; he barely reacted to the blow she had given him. He danced backwards before moving in once more, a deadly animal, fully aware of everything happening in this battle, but nothing around him. He feinted, aiming low for her legs, she stepped backwards, and raising her staff, not realizing it was a faint until it was too late. The movements switched all at once and her exposed arm suffered from her stupidity. He struck hard and brutal, hitting her forearm.

The hit was so hard she felt the pain; she felt the skin split underneath the movement and she gasped. She could feel the blood, and the numbness that quickly pulled the pain away and adrenaline took control.

Cilla looked once more at the boy, she could feel the pressure in her hands, the rubbing of the staff was already leaving marks, but she was not going to give up, the circumstances told her that she was going to lose, but hopefully not just yet. Oddly enough she as finding being beaten rather enjoyable.

[gamemaker kelsier]

S O L

Words have escaped him for weeks now. He has stood passive while they have paraded themselves past his lips, taunting him, trying to make him chase after them. He hasn't been able to speak even one word since the day the peacekeepers held him in their grasp, silver chains forcing him to speak. There are scars in perfect circles around his wrists where the metal had dug into his skin. For all rights and purposes there might as well have been a scar around his throat too, holding all the words he might have said back. However, he had nothing to say. He couldn't see the sense in saying anything useless just to fill a silence that he was comfortable with.

So everything he said and did was done with the heightened sense of hearing and seeing, of paying attention. He was good at watching the people around him, at finding out their strengths and weaknesses. He had never been much of a speaker before hand anyway, more of a wallflower that was noticed one day by a botanist and picked from his stem. He was wilting these days, slipping down into a mass of nothing, drying up and closing his bud to hide away from the rest of the world.

This was his element, this fight. His breathing was even, unafraid, his movements nearly beautiful. He was a dancer without his partner, the girl who had always held the other staff before long gone. Why had she left him. Why had she gone away. This one that he fought now did not know the correct moves she was not the girl he had trained with for so long, she was a stranger.

Why did you leave me he wanted to ask, but instead he swung the staff again, slicing it across the girl's left arm, splitting the skin open, drawing blood. It beaded along the cut at first, slow and steady and then it came quicker. Most people thought that a staff was not a good weapon because it couldn't cut and therefore it could not kill. That was a silly thought, a staff was as deadly as any blade, as dangerous as any blunt object. One just had to know how to wield it.

Sol knew how to wield it. It was evident in the way he moved on to lightly tap her left soldier and bring the other end down on her waist, the tap being a small but efficient decoy. He had forgotten what a delight it was to play with another human being, to guess at their reactions and almost lead them into the position he wanted them in like a horse being led to water. He let himself fall into the fight, or more aptly named, the destruction of it all.

He spun, one final time and decided to end it. There are many ways a staff fight can end, but usually it is with the staffs locked together in an unbreakable position. Or if he had the upper hand it was with the staff held flat against the waist from behind. That was for a spar. There were other ways to end the fight as well, with broken bones and other broken things, such as promises.

He had killed before, he could do it again.

He stood behind the challenger, staff under her chin, arms holding her steady. The wood was horizontal across her neck, with one sharp tug he could break her. This was the moment when he was meant to release her, to step away and thank her for the fight. This was the moment when he would have kissed the back of Luna's neck, even as she was thrumming with rage at being beaten.

The moment to let go was passing fast. He was standing there silent for too long, his hands were tightening around the staff, he could feel the tension in his shoulders, telling him to pull, to finish it. His hand shook as he stood there, staff pulling her chin up. The anger was there, telling him to take the kill, it was his, it belonged to him. He needed to take the chance to kill her before she killed him, before she died from anything else. He had won the fight fair and square, it was his, it was his, it was his kill.

Do it.

N o b o d y
covers for the
M A T A D O R

[cass]

C I L L A  R O W E

Shit.

That fucking hurt. The staff sliced across her left arm, splitting the skin, and once more blood flowed. That fucking hurt. But she couldn’t even be upset with him, she couldn’t even stop and get angry, all she could do is watch and react as best as she could. But she was more or less watching the way he moved then anything else. He was rather distracting, the anger and frustration and pain in each of his movements couldn’t even hide the beauty, because it was beautiful. He danced with that stick; it was a deadly dance of movements, when he moved there was purpose behind it. It was like the way she moved with the half-length swords, spinning, flourishing, and using each as a separate entity and as a combined unit.

She loved watching people fight, she loved fighting, the way she could watch a body react, the way people hesitated, or responded, their muscles, the movement of the legs and body as they twisted and turned, brandishing their weapons. It was like a sunset, every person a different array of colours and styles, no one was the same. It was any wonder people who trained as much as she did weren’t professional dancers as well, she had watched people dance, and she loved it herself, but when she didn’t have a weapon she had no drive, it felt as though the sense of purpose was gone. Half her being was missing. Most people assumed that the bow wasn’t a graceful weapon, but the drawing and knocking of the arrow had to be fluid, not clumsy. You could spin, duck and weave, flip dance and move just as much, just like any weapon.

Cilla did not speak when she fought, she let her actions talk for her, and today they screamed about her inability to match the strength before her. But she didn’t mind their cries; she was far too swept up in what she was watching. It was easy enough to ignore the pain in her chest, legs and arms; it was easy to ignore the blood that dripped down both her wrists, to her elbows and onto the floor.

Then all at once the dance changed, the tempo shifted, she felt it – sensed it all at once. This was the end point and she’d have been lying if she said that was disappointing. The boy moved, the staff lightly tapping her shoulder, too light of a movement to fool her, it wasn’t strong enough, it didn’t bruise, nor did it hurt. That was when she knew that he still had more to come, which was nothing but a trick. She tried to react this time, and draw herself away, but he was faster, the staff moved, slamming into her waist and then he spun, and suddenly he was behind her staff under her chin, pressing against her throat.

She held her breath, head tilted upwards with the pressure of the staff. She seemed to freeze, knowing this was the killing blow, with one movement of the staff he could snap her neck, end it all. She had seen it happen before, careers taking it too far, ending another’s life simply because they could. But she didn’t feel fear, even as the seconds ticked on, and the span of time lengthened she did not feel afraid.

Cilla wasn’t angry she had been beaten, she wasn’t upset at her loss, and in fact she was pleased. She had witnessed something remarkable. So she waited, blood-turning directions as her hands hung downwards, staff on the floor where she had dropped it. It pooled at the tips of her fingers and the cuts stung. She felt the staff tighten around her neck and she raised an eyebrow.

”Easy there. Settle down cowboy.”

It was then that she decided enough time had passed, in one quick movement she spun around, the staff rubbing painfully against her throat and pushing her face almost into his chest, but she tilted her head upwards, pushing her arms in to give herself some more space. The back of her neck was still pushed up against the staff and the muscles ached from the strain, but she didn’t mind. Cilla eyed the boy, a small grin stretching across her lips.

”I know I’m good looking and all, but if you really wanted to get up this close and personal you just had to ask.” She teased.

[gamemaker kelsier]

S O L

The scent of apples is what brings him back into the moment. It's faint, hardly there but silently sweet. The girl who he was preparing to kill smells like apples or at least her hair does and that makes him think of Autumn and of leaves falling. There's an apple tree in his front yard. The moss grows so thick underneath it that he can lay underneath it and not need any cushioning. When the time to harvest the fruit comes his mother bakes a variety of apple flavoured things like pies. She cans apple for the winter months so that she can make crumble and he can have it on his oatmeal in the mornings.

He begins to loosen his grip when she turns in his arms so that she can look at him. The scent of apple lingers. It must have been her shampoo, breaking into his senses. He hadn't noticed it before because he had been so intent on attacking her. Now she is pressed up against him, smiling through any fear she might have. Smiling still, how does she do that? Her proximity sends him stumbling backwards. He lifts the staff over his head so that he has something between them, something to guard himself with. All the fight is gone though, it is no longer a terrifying weapon but a walking stick.

He attempts to tighten his grasp once again but the staff is slippery from blood. It slips out from between his fingers, slick with the dark liquid. He hadn't noticed even for a moment, the way the skin of his hands was all cut up, not realizing before what was happening to them. He'd only done this a couple of times before but never so badly that the blood hadn't dried before he'd finished. They were raw and red, blood still seeping out from the numerous lacerations that the wooden staff had given him. No wonder he had found it slippery.

He sits down heavily in shock, the enemy in front of him completely forgotten. He stares at his hands and finally notices the way that they have been trembling for the past few minutes. They hurt. He cannot curl them into fists because moving them is painful. He is glad for that, to feel that. It reminds him that he can feel pain, that it is a possibility. It hurts though. It hurts a lot. It's worse than when he was a little boy and he skinned himself on the pavement, tripping over his own feet.

What was he doing? Why was he fighting this strange girl and how could she be silly enough to request a fight from him. People knew to stay from him, he'd always been odd but he'd been even odder since Luna died. He'd been lost, even to himself. He still was.

It was as if someone had reached out and switched him off. Sol sat staring, empty-eyed at the floor space in front of him, hands resting where they had fallen into his lap. This was how he most often was when he wasn't being violent. Even before Luna had come along, he'd been a vacant thing, waiting for someone to come along and fill up his hollow bits with something or other. Now that his hollow bits were filled to the brim with pain it was even worse, it was like hurting all of the time and not even remembering what it was like not to feel pain at all.

He shut his eyes, unable to look at the blood spattering the mat. He didn't like blood all that much. He was getting over the distaste for it of late because the amount he found himself bleeding but seeing another person's made him feel sick on the inside which he probably was. He had been ready to kill the girl that had hair that smelled of apples. He could have done it easily, the part of him that was cold and numb had been ready to do it as if it were no problem at all. He'd wanted to do it, to feel her neck snap. Why should she get to live when Luna was dead.

He was going to be sick.

He wanted to sleep, his body ached and so did his mind.

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[cass]

C I L L A  R O W E

She wonders what is going through that head of his. Why he was acting that way, what on earth must have happened to have him mutilate all those dummies. And why he had said not a single thing. There must be a million thoughts racing through his mind, or there was one big ball of pain and anguish, preventing him from doing more then reveal it through his actions. She knew what that felt like, but she had never had the strength to let it all out in one big intense game of beat the dummy. She’d always had to do it slowly, an outburst here, a punch to the wall there. Pent up anger seemed to boil through every one of her limbs, but it never wanted to leave all that quickly either. Cilla was good at resenting others, at hating; it was so simple to hate then love another.

People said hating required more energy then loving, but from what she had observed loving required your entire being. And placing your life and everything you had into one person seemed to be a lot more exhausting then hating and avoiding. It was why she was probably just one big giant ball of hate and aggression. Tiny little cracks here and there where she showed a flicker of that emotion once every now and then. But her parents would always say something or do something and the bottled would be filled once more. She’d tried to let it all out, hitting things and throwing things, but after a minute or so she’d feel foolish, as though it was a useless attempt to soothe a burning soul, like butting would on a fire to kill it instead of water.

Perhaps it was because she just hadn’t found her release yet.

This boy clearly had found one. It was evident, the bits and pieces of dummy lying everywhere. From the way he had fought her to his actions before, it was clear that acts of violence helped soothe whatever pain he was in. Well, maybe he believed that they helped, when they didn’t, because he didn’t look any better, in her opinion.

The way he looks at her isn’t the kind of glance you’d receive from someone who thought of you as little more then prey. He looks like he still wants to go through with it, to kill her, but she knows he won’t. Then all at once he stumbles backwards and the pressure is released. The unexpected movement sends Cilla stumbling herself, the sudden release in pressure around her neck causing a sharp, unwelcomed spike of pain to flare in her head. She glares at him, rubbing a blood-covered hand across her neck, soothing the ache that persistently jabbed at her skin.

The staff slips from his fingers and her glare softens into a look of worry, he stumbles and then sits, landing heavily on the ground. His eyes seem glued to his hands and Cilla moves forwards, she had glimpsed them early so she wasn’t at all surprised at what she saw. Her own hands were red and saw, but his were in a state of mess. There were lacerations, blood and wounds everywhere. Blusters had formed and popped and sprouted blood. It seemed that the adrenaline of the fight had allowed his mind to not notice what was happening to his hands, but now with it over there would be pain.

She moved away, to one of the first-aid kits that lay around the place. They were required, seeing as it was extremely common that people lost fingers, received deep wounds and lacerations. She grabbed a bunch of bandages and some cream, and then she moved back to the boy, he now sat staring at the ground, hands hanging in his lap. He looked lost, he looked so sad and hopeless and she yearned to ask him what was wrong. But she didn’t.

She sat down beside him and didn’t hesitate to grab one of his hands. ”You know you should take more care of your hands.” She spoke softly, the words barely more then a whisper and she wasn’t even sure if they were heard. She rubbed the cream on the skin, knowing fully well it would sting like a bitch, but she didn’t stop. After that she began to wrap a bandage around his hand, a small frown forming on her face as she concentrated. His blood covered her hands, and mixed with her own. Her hands were already bloodied from her own wounds, but she ignored them in favour of tending to his.

[gamemaker kelsier]

S O L

You know you should take more care of your hands she said to him, voice barely louder then the sound of a bird flapping it's wings. For a girl made of edges hard enough to stand and take so many attacks the softness of her movements and choices now were surprising, unheard of in a career. Certainly he himself was not like this. He barely knew how to care for himself let alone someone else. The feeling of her skin against his own was too warm, too lovely, too caring. His own mother had not held her son's hand in such a gentle way for a long time. He shivered from the contact, tugging his hand away.

She wouldn't let go no matter how hard he pulled, desperate to remove himself from the gentleness of her touch. It was too foreign for a monster like him. The care in her hands was poison.

He knew he should take more care of his hands because his father had always told him that hands were the most descriptive thing about any human being. You could tell a lot about a person by the state of their hands. His mother's hands were soft and callused on the thumbs because when she peeled potatoes she held the knife against her thumb to steady it. His father's hands were big and callused from a life of hard work and labor. His own hands were a patchwork of scars. They were crooked things, each finger bent out of shape from cracking his knuckles so often and from breaking them in combat training.

Her hands were gentle, they gave her away.

He sucked in a breath as she applied the antiseptic to his palms, fingers curling inward involuntarily. It felt as if she were putting vinegar on them, that she had covered them in acid and soon his fingers would be worn down to stumps. He tugged harder but she held firm, wrapping bandage around his hands. The white bandage turned a dark red colour almost instantly, blood blossoming across the starchy white like blots of ink. It was mesmerizing and he stopped struggling, focusing on the beauty of the red clouds forming themselves, trying not to think about anything else. If he could focus on something hard enough he could forget for a moment what he was.

The blood reminded him of the girl's blood that had dripped down her arms, turning her fingers into drain pipes, spattering the mat flooring with blood. He wasn't meant to do that, make other people bleed. His mother liked it when he did that, said it meant that he was strong, that if he was reaped he was sure to win, in fact why haven't you volunteered yet, she would say. He'd used Luna as an excuse before. His father understood why didn't like it. He worked in the morgue too, he saw the after effects of too much blood being lost. He told his son that he didn't like blood either.

As she worked on his right hand, Sol picked up one of the sticky bandages that was lying on the floor beside them and opened the package, ripping it with his teeth. Intently, he placed it over the cut he had made on her right arm, pressing it down so there was no stickiness on the laceration itself, just bandage. He made sure that it was all stuck in the right spots by tracing the outline of the square bandage with his finger, only dropping his hand back into his lap when he was certain that it was stuck firm.

He stared aimless once again at the far wall, looking past her, eyes not seeming to register her presence at all. He was still, holding his other hand up patiently like a little boy being tended to by his mother. He could smell that apples again. Reaching out, he lifted up a tendril of her hair to check that it really was her that smelt that way and not just insanity making the scent of apples appear in his nose. Bringing the hair to his face, he sniffed deeply. Apples, again. It was a strong smell. So he had been correct. Satisfied, he dropped the hair and flexed his fingers, the rawness of his knuckles feeling tight after clenching the staff for so long. He clenched and loosened them again as she worked, as if to exercise the joints.

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C I L L A  R O W E

He’s like a feral animal (wide-eyed, snarling, foaming and all, like those mangy cats that walk in the shadows, searching for their next bit of prey, like the dogs that sulk where no one can touch them, but growl and snap when you try to aid them), clawing at the cage he has been thrust in, because he doesn’t understand why he is there, he doesn’t understand how to deal with what is happening so the only thing he can do is fight. And fighting is what he does, he claws, snarls and growls and using up everything he has got in one futile attempt at freedom from whatever plagues his soul. He’s trying to fight what is good for him, simply because he fears it. But she’s not sure whatever he fears about it, or if he fears it at all.

For whatever reason it is he does not like my help, when she touch his hand he pulls away, but she does not. However she is as stubborn as a rock, the only thing that could pull her away would be a ten-meter tall wave. So she keeps bandaging them, fingers steady, arms taut and strong every time he tries to get away. Cilla will not let him hurt himself even more, she will not let these wounds get infected and fester. If they did that would be on her soul, if they got worse she would wear that guilt for a long time. She had seen what had happened and for her to do nothing about it would be a sin, and she would suffer it. She cannot let him walk away, not after me being part of the cause of such wounds.

Cilla can’t say mother instilled such things into her heart, because she didn’t. She was as rough as sand grating against her skin. She was never gentle nor kind, she was demanding and somehow Cilla mistook that for the love and attention that she needed. So when mother yelled she got happy, because those outbursts were the closest things to affection she ever received from her.

She can not say she got my gentleness from her father either, he only had a heart for mother, only had warm hands for her own, when he looked at her brother and Cilla there was a few sparks of interest, but never really love. He only ever took an interest in them after their mother got ill, what she wanted he gave, so when she asked for their children to be victors he was sure as hell going to give her that.

The boy finally seems to react differently, instead of trying to pull himself away and instead of trying to be little more then a nuisance he does something else. For a moment she hesitates, eyeing him wearily as he picks up a Band-Aid. He removes it from the packaging and then places it on her arm. She follows his movements, inwardly wincing at the wound, it wasn’t that deep, but it was there, and it hurt and this guy was putting a Band-Aid on it. As much as she didn’t like the idea of having to pull it off later she accepted his help, knowing that this was the first bit of interaction he had given her aside from coldness. Cilla guessed it was an improvement.

Besides she’d treat her wounds at home, at least it meant that her father would not talk to her and mother would be delighted. After all she was bleeding, which meant she was practicing, which meant she was trying to fulfill her parents dreams.

The boy pressed a finger against the Band-aid making sure it was securely on and she looked at him, offering him a smile, but it seemed that such a tough act of putting a put of plastic on an arm was enough for the guy, because he didn’t look at her, but returned to his original position of staring straight ahead. Trying her best to push down that little lump of annoyance that rose in her chest she grabbed his other hand. The bandages were tight, but not too tight and by the time she was finished they were already glistening with his blood.

She was ready to leave, but he was still sitting there, with those sad, dead eyes. Reaching forwards she gently touched the top of his bandaged hand, ”look I’m here every day so if you need someone to talk to or anything come find me.” She doubted he would, but the offer was still there. She grinned at him, drawing her hand away, ”dude, you have totally got to show me how to use the staff, though. You’re amazing at it.” A response was hardly expected, and she wasn’t disappointed when he said nothing.

She couldn't say she understood him, but she got it in a way that it made sense. As though she knew what he was going through, even if her experience was different.

[gamemaker kelsier]

S O L

When she gave him his hands back he didn't know what to do with them. No one had ever given him back something that they'd taken before. They stole bits of him easily, as if instead of a boy he was simply a a platter at a party, a tray of food to be taken and passed around until he was empty and suddenly useless. He appreciated it, although his hands were now covered in white bandage. He felt like a mental patient who was given mitts so that he might not scratch his own skin off of his back. It was an apt description. He hadn't begun to do that yet, but he might soon.

He doesn't know how to thank her for the hands she has chosen not to take with her because his tongue was stolen from along with his heart and vitals weeks and weeks ago. All that is left are hollow spaces, incapable of doing anything useful but being so noticeably empty. He opens his mouth barely and shuts it again as if that singular effort was already far too much. He gives up on that, not having the strength to speak let alone form a coherent thought that wasn't about Luna.

Nodding slowly, he stands up by putting his hands out to either side, careful not to put them down and rest his weight on them. He holds them out as if to balance, standing up by pushing against his ankles and using the floor as momentum. The result is slightly graceful but the bandaged hands make it look ridiculous. He doesn't seem to care, just as he doesn't seem to care about the girl he's left sitting on the mat. She is a fixed point now on his timeline but of little consequence now in a brain that is vague on anything and everything that doesn't have to do with it's own grief.

He's involved so thoroughly with his past that the present and future hardly seem to matter at all. his eyes move to the clock and he moves into action. He has a night shift tonight at the hospital and it starts in an hour. He has to get there quickly so that his father won't have to wait for him to arrive. He has been unreliable as of late in everything but his job, knowing that his father would finally realize that something was amiss with his only son if he didn't arrive precisely ten minutes early.

He picked up the staff, running his hands along the wood almost lovingly, getting even more blood on the white bandages that the girl had so carefully applied. He carried it almost reverently over to the clean up station and took an old cloth, running it along the wood, collecting the blood. He worked carefully, far more carefully then he treated his own body. It had been drilled into him that the weapon was far more important than the soldier wielding it, that a tribute was nothing without it. Never put a weapon back dirty, they said.

He thought about what the girl said.

She would be here everyday.

That was important to know.

His brain decided to remember it.

When he was done, he placed it on the wall and walked away, without a backwards glance. The night greeted him with a gust of summer wind as he exited, telling him to get moving. Get moving or you'll be late it said. He broke into a jog, feet moving at a steady pace and then his lungs bounced against the space where his heart was meant to be and he began to run as fast as he could until each breath was a challenge and his rib cage hurt.

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