rose red | {tobias/jacinta} blitz

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

a burn of breath; young vapor dies
a touch of mist slid upper thigh
paler flight, veiled white
skying sight

Lenox was less broken when she said goodbye to him, and he took some solace in that. He could work with better. His parents had cried, but they would get over his death, should he die. The one he wished he had more time with, though?

Farley.

She was angry, or sad, or bitter. No. None of that, and all of it. But something else, too. Something different. She seemed—

Heartbroken?

He didn't dare speak the words when they were in the farewell room, or ever before. Years of missed opportunities, he supposed, and now they would all stack up on his shoulders as he prepared to climb a mountain while wearing slide-on shoes. For now, he could handle the mistakes he had made; it was when the weight became too much for him to carry on that worried him, because that meant one of two things: taking parts of who he was and letting them fall as a way to lighten the load, or to be noble and brave and many things Tobias wouldn't have described himself as, and pushed forward anyway.

Stubborn, he thought, that was a better word for what he was.

Jacquelyn's eyes met him with little regard. He could see her going over the checklist she had welded into her brain, and he noticed the moment when she checked him off of it. He hadn't yet decided if that was something he should be grateful for or not when the woman spoke.

"This cart is brand new, you know? I've been this District's Escort for over twenty years, and never once have I seen this one. Must have high hopes for you and your partner, I suppose."

Tobias was too preoccupied staring at the contents of the cart, the walls of which were littered with lush climbing roses. There were entire bushels of red blooms above his head, rows of peach and yellow along the floors. A garden. A piece of home. Jacquelyn sighed after a moment, turned back to Tobias.

"I'm off to find Jacinta. Get some rest soon!" With that, she click-clacked away.

Only a few short minutes later, the doors opened again, and Jacinta walked through the doors.

"Beautiful, huh?" He asked. He lifted a rose of which he had picked to his nose, then extended it to the space between them.

"Pretty rose for a brave girl?"

[я𝑜𝓈𝑒]

Heroics were not part of her training, and yet here she is. She was raised to be not only prim and proper, but also cunning and competitive, and above all else, passionate and ambitious. A Salazar takes what they want — and she does. But maybe that doesn't mean she cannot be a hero, one of the "good guys" for once, if such a line exists between good and evil.

The fear of her possible death hasn't quite set in for Jacinta yet, but mostly because she refuses to feel like a coward. She can fire a gun and throw a hard punch, face almost any opponent, no matter their strength. It's in her blood. Even if things looked bleak for her, in some way, she would always figure out how to outmatch them. If she has learned anything, it is that everyone has a weakness.

But there is one thing, one enemy that she still can't face completely, still can't look directly in the eye: fear. So she doesn't think about it; she lets it be pushed into the back of her mind.

She is called into another one of the train cars. When Jacinta enters the room, her district partner is waiting for her with a red rose in his hand. Tobias LaChance is his name, she recalls.

"Beautiful, huh?" he says, bringing it up to his nose to smell. He extends it out to her, perhaps in a peace offering. "Pretty rose for a brave girl?"

"Thanks," she responds, taking the rose in her hand. She is careful to position her fingers in the spaces between the thorns. "I'm surprised you thought I was being brave; my parents called it stupid." And maybe they were right, but Jacinta can't afford to think about that right now.

A Salazar is self-preserving, and usually, she is. But not this time — what was she supposed to do, anyway? Stand there and let Jezebel take the death sentence?

"But I guess you're in the same boat as me. Why'd you volunteer, anyway?" Perhaps Tobias is like her, a kid just wanting to be a hero for once.

[dars]