BLCK CLD | { peggy / slade }

[dars]

Call to arms, storms were coming. His eyes were the fairest reminders that things would be okay. Recklessness and romance; pretty smiles and pretty people with their clean teeth and fingernails: Slade Kinsey was no exception, and he knew it.

Finally.

He knew it.

He swung his sword playfully to and fro, staring past the Training Center's wall of windows, into black clouds and static lightning crackling across the sky.

There was a time when he would have been well on his way home by now, but currently he was feeling particularly inspired by things that could have potentially killed him.

Death was leaving him a gentle reminder of its presence, and he welcomed the chaos.

After a long length of counting his heartbeat with the claps of thunder, he finally looked away from the wall and at the others in the room. Only a few times could he remember the Training Center being this empty, with only a few determined souls pushing a bit too far for their own good. Two young girls sparred across the way, already well beyond their years. He guessed they would claw each other's eyes out for a spot in the reaping in a couple of years.

A bulky boy lifted weights, sweat trickling down his forehead as he stared intensely at nothing in particular. A look that could kill, thrown around so carelessly, so weightlessly. He had obviously missed his chance at the reaping, and Slade guessed he now spent his days exercising the remorse of a lost life out of his system.

And then, there was her.

Bombshell blonde, dainty yet fierce.

(Inspiration.)

She held a dagger, tossing it from palm to palm as if it weren't something made for murder, but a child's toy.

"Sticking it out through the storm?" He called to her, gesturing toward her with his sword.

"Fair enough. People like us are storms by our own right."

I GOT SOME SECRETS I FORGOT TO MENTION HAVEN'T LEARNED MY LESSON

[D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]]

Stardust—I walk these walls, I walk these streets and feel these sheets like the world is not crashing and burning. Being oblivious was a strength until my early teens. There was an innate feeling of being unstoppable, of catching stars and not burning your hands in the process.

But now, I can't seem to erase the pictures prominent in history from my mind. The buckets of hope, the war that was won and the war that was lost. Fray is a fragile name, a single thread that is slowly losing its rigidity.

Put it through the eye of a needle and I don't think it would even be able to fix the hole for your thumbs in your sweater.

I shake my head.

It's not anger, it can't be anger because anger is so much more painful that what I feel. Perhaps it is passion just waiting to be channelled into something bigger. The trainers always tell you that your feelings are nothing but fuel for the fire; careers get so lonely that we pretend that it works.

Liars have karma coming for them, that I'm sure of.

But still, I do it anyway because I'm somewhat content with the placebo effect it brings.

Knife between my fingers, give it a twirl,

inhale, throw.

It lands in the stomach of a figure on the opposite side of a room. Sometimes I don't think I'd care if it was a person on the receiving end, not a dummy.

Murder seems closer than ever—it's how kids seem to stay young these days.

"Sticking it out through the storm? Fair enough, people like us are storms by our own right."

"And one day, we'll find our calm." I tell him, eyes following the point of the sword back to his hand, his hand up to his face.

Limbo.

"I hope so, at least. I don't want my life to be bound to this place.

Sometimes I feel like people like us are meant for more."

{ table: dars }

EITHER YOU HEAD OR YOUR HEART; YOU SET THE OTHER ON FIRE