Lalik Alençoão [wanderer; resubmission]

[WT]

Lalik Alençoão -- nineteen -- female -- wanderer

The thing about going on the run with your sort-of-girlfriend is that it fucking sucks, but it's also sort of a romantic adventure where you guard each other's backs and keep warm together at night and make out a lot for no reason. Staying on the run by yourself is just the first part.

Not that you can't handle it. Careers learn as much about survival as they do about fighting, and whatever you and Arcadia didn't know at the beginning, you figured out before ignorance could kill you. Maybe someone out there is a sneakier hunter or builds stronger shelters or bind wounds more expertly than you, but you manage a little of everything well enough to live. That's the thing, though: with Cady you had a purpose, even if it was only look after each other. Now you just live. A year and change in the middle of nowhere, with only the occasional trip into a District to steal new clothes or nice food, gets boring.

Looking over your shoulder every day is starting to bring back that old skip in your heartbeat, too, which might be worse than the monotony. You used to think you were done with this. The second time you knelt over your parents' bodies, clothes damp with their cooling blood, you laughed hysterically because you could finally rest. You still traced a path to every exit when you walked into a room, but you're pretty sure that counts as a professional skill.

Except then you weren't an assassin anymore. Arcadia never fully convinced you about the Capitol picking off members of your little band—why set it up in the first place, if they wanted all of you dead?—but she didn't have to. You knew her first. She guarded your name. Like hell you would stay leashed to strangers while she vanished into ocean spray. But you doubt the Capitol thinks personal loyalty is a good excuse for desertion, especially when your agreement was the only thing between you and two murder charges. The longer you stay out there, the more every snapping twig feels like the herald to a bullet in your skull.

Of course, if you want to stay away from Peacekeepers, there are better places to do it than District fucking Two.

"This is stupid," you tell the ferret in your lap for the second time in three days.

She says nothing and tries to stick her face in your plate, because she's a useless garbage-eating piece of vermin you only keep around because running her off would take too much effort.

"Off, you leech," you snap, raising the plate over your shoulders. When she chitters angrily you sigh, pluck out a piece of chicken, and throw it far enough to make her run for it. "Stay gone this time."

She scrambles back into your lap before you even finish licking cream sauce off your fingers. You roll your eyes and throw another piece of chicken, then eat one yourself. A meal this good is too rare to let her trick you into giving too much away; it's tangy with a sweet undercurrent, the kind of food you daydream about sometimes in the cold parts of winter when you get bitter enough to miss things like kitchens.

Trapping feeds you just as well as theft. You should resist the temptation to risk your neck in one of the most heavily armed Districts for no practical benefit. But you're also a runaway turned assassin turned solo survivor, with blood under your nails and a network of scars. Your pride can handle admitting that a girl from One misses luxury sometimes.

When the food is gone, you fling the plate into an alley and make yourself scarce.

---

You hate to stay longer than a few days in any settlement. Few people would recognize you, even back in District One; you're an inch or two taller now than when you first left, with rougher clothes and choppier hair, and you've grown into your ears and your wide eyes. You only go into the Districts for supplies, though, and you were always more the slice and dice part of the team than the stealth and subterfuge part. When you absolutely need to, you get in, find what you need, and get out before you fuck up enough times for all those eyes and hands to catch up with you.

That was the plan this time. Grabbing a new jacket and fresh medical supplies should take four days in town, maximum, with perhaps a few more lying low in the empty stretches of Two if the Peacekeepers look fussier than usual. So finishing off your list by shoving a fresh roll of bandages into the bottom of your pack puts you right on schedule, except for the part where you're thinking about not leaving.

You'd like to call it impulse. "Impulse" would mean one more in a long line of rash decisions you can't blame yourself for because it's not like you planned on the consequences.

After three days of arguing with yourself, you probably have to face the idea that you're giving up on Arcadia.

Or—not on her. Death isn't tough enough to take Cady down before she's ready. (You think you would feel it, anyway, the way your heart wrenched right before your parents threw Cadia's death in your face, the way you still lose a breath sometimes when you remember something she said to you.) But somewhere in the last few days, you've stopped debating what to do until you find her and started debating what to do instead.

You balance for a long time on the pharmacy rooftop, finality tugging like gravity on your heels. Either you sneak back to the wilds tomorrow morning to choose a direction, and you walk it forever, or—or.

Either way, no one else will ever know if you change your mind. But you can't go on only seeing a few days into the future, and there was no point in changing your name if you're never going to drag yourself out of the past.

---

You spend another day stashing your supplies in a series of makeshift drops outside District Two's mining villages. Letting your livelihood out of your sight this close to potential scavengers doesn't sit well, but you can't go hauling everything around town, and hopefully this maximizes the chance that you'll be able to snag at least one set on your way out if things go south. Besides, if worse comes to worst, you've built your life from scratch before.

Your best knives stay with you, under your best outfit: two under the sleeves of the new leather jacket, one strapped to your favorite belt, one in each of the old black boots you keep patching instead of replacing because you can't be fucked to sew sheathes into a new pair. The ferret also stays with you, despite your attempts to bait her into staying at the first few drops. By the last one you give up, because you have better things to think about, like how the hell you're actually going to pull this off.

(If the small weight on your shoulder makes you feel a little less alone in the face of uncertainty, you can keep that to yourself.)

Picking up your old trade in a District crawling with Peacekeepers, with no actual plan and only vague memories of Cady's occasional childhood stories as a map, may be the worst idea you've ever had. It doesn't matter—it can't matter. You made your decision.

District Two has to have organized crime, and it definitely has rich people. Wherever the team found itself, one or the other always guaranteed you jobs before. Time to see whether that's still true.


Looks like I tried to copy/paste the original bio a while back and deleted it in the process, and she needed an update (and a bit of a retcon, again--hope you enjoy living in five branches of the same universe, kid) anyway.

Apparently, I still revert to second person when writing feels too much like pulling teeth. It doesn't make it not feel like pulling teeth, but I guess it does something.

[Sunrise Rainier D2 // [Thundy]]

"You balance for a long time on the pharmacy rooftop, finality tugging like gravity on your heels."

oof, that's such a good line.

Accepted!