sigils of helios — deadlock gang. [day 1]

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

( This dream isn't feeling sweet
We're reeling through the midnight streets )

     Francisco Bloom is everything.

He is the glorious summertide, filling the space between his clothes and the bare skin below with warmth. He is the azure blue sky that spreads above his head like an upside down sea, aviators adrift across its smooth and ivoried tides. He is the wind trails and their caressing softness on his cheeks, each caress a reminder of simpler and freer times. He is the hollow ache in his own bones, the lighting rush in his own lifeblood. He is the heavy gaze which drinks in the kiss between Exover and Saturn and spits the contents out with an irate flutter of eyelashes because it’s too bitter – too acidic. He is the red from Nico’s severed arm and severed leg. He is Myrcella’s skull – breaking over and over in the back of his eyelids – that cracks like ripen pomegranate from the market, like watermelons served amid april heat.

     He does not want to be everything.

But, Francis has seen, felt, tasted, smelled and heard everything so it cannot help but become a part of him now, each sliver of a sensation intrinsic to his entirety. It’s a dreadful feeling.

It’s even more dreadful to carry this feeling but he tries, he tries as he clambers over worn hills and dense thickets, gasping and trembling. Clutched between his arms is Nico, adorned in red and gore, breaths shallow. “It’s going to be ok.” He uses his best efforts to equip a clarion voice – like Myrcella’s – but it comes out shakily.

     Francisco Bloom with his wooden bones and branchy ribs, all prone to breakage.

He already has fracture lines webbed across his form — some thin and shallow, whilst some runs deep and hollow. They are a part of Francisco that he hides, beautifully, with flowers but never heals or closes over themselves. They are his mother's death, his father's negligence, and his name, thundering across the reaping post. They are Nico’s agonized features and Myrcella’s demise. They are Exover’s lips, not over his own. They are the worn and fresh memories of each welt of destruction and peril the world has flicked upon his skin.

He feels the cracks grow as he settles Nico down upon the soil and under Jessica’s dark shadow. Her reticence has made Francis forget her for a moment, but those chiseled features of her scream insults at him for even daring to forget. Jessica stands glorious, a hidden expression across her face, with no urgent wounds or deep scratches.

“Look after him, okay?” He pats Nico’s shoulder and trusts the beast to withhold her appetite.

 “I’ll look around and see if I can find some water to clean the wounds before it gets infected.” Those few hours in the medic station have risen to the occasion brilliantly.

     Shaken, his footsteps venture and venture.

The world is haunting blues and barbaric reds and dim brown, bleeding into each other’s territories of pigment. Then it becomes all mirthful yellow.

Lyrics : Lorde — Ribs

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

( I hear the sounds of the season
And lose all sense of time )

   Once, the sun had a lover, 

a beautiful nymph that wore fine spider-silk and danced with the rivers, her laugh the call for flowers to blossom and her feet could create green-moss wherever its soles touched.

   She revered the sun,
   worshipped its light.

His eyelashes, glistening like wisps of gold, were where her lips often lingered over. And, his body was Polaris in guise of sharp bones and golden flesh that she was guided by.

But, she was a barely palpable creature, a trick of the light, an iridescent rainbow after drizzle. She was bird-boned, with wide eyes and an abundance of softness, a soft creature. For all these flaws and shortcomings, the sun left her, mounting on his bright chariot before he makes his way up to the blue sky. She pleaded and pleaded for him to not leave, with furies of freshwater tears and sobs that browned the springtime grass,

   but the sun had already made a decision.

Heart broken like flower-heads, she sat alone in a meadow and gazed at him for the days to come. In the long duration of those days, her hands on the meadow soil branched out into roots, into an entanglement of roots, into a web of roots that had completely embedded her to the soil below. Her hair spread out, becoming one with the soil, but her head was still held high – skyward. Soon, she became the sunflower who longingly looks at her estranged lover who was always in the periphery of her sight but always unreachable.

   Her heartbreak multiplied.
   It blossomed, like bruises.

This is a field of her sorrow, Francis muses as his fingertips rake through the sunflowers’ soft stems and the soft petals.

Everything his eyes drink in glows yellow – glows blonde – glows like Exover’s eyes and glows like the lights on Nico’s face that night on the rooftop. It glows like the star linings attached to each thread of hair on Myrcella’s head. He clenches his eyes shut distastefully at recalling the horror. But, it’s the only vivid memory he has of the bloodbath. Everything else exists in shambles – all moving in ecstatic motion. Slung on his shoulder loosely is a carpetbag, full of the items from the house earlier and a gift he was pleased to have received.

“Never let them see you sweat – Z”, the note attached to it read in ornate cursive.

His knuckles have only begun to hurt; it is too soon for guilt. But not too soon for grievance. Francis gasps in a breath as his legs give out from underneath and he falls, onto the bed of sunflowers. Here, sprawled across the cool soil and draped in the shadows of flower petals, he believes he is a descendant of the heartbroken nymph from earlier. Here, that sole belief is the one that truly makes sense. Everything else is dreamlike, whimsical, senseless. Riddled in a haste by heartache that comes like lightning, Francis breaks into sobs, tasting saltwater on his tongue. “Exover. Nico. Jessica,” He croaks. “Myrcella.” He breaks.

He sobs and sobs, sore knuckles rubbing at the eye sockets until he sees a wilted sunflower come back to vibrant life. Aghast, Francis quickly jolts up to a sit but the flower is unhurried and gentle in its unfurling dance. Fear creeps up his backbone at the sight of the honeybee that it releases and hands frantically sway at it. But the creature has a purpose that refuses to be stalled by Francis’s fear.

   It rests on his chest.

Where he expects a sting lies a lovely broach, the jewels on it ablaze under the patches of sunlight. After a fingertip caresses its surface, he spots a note in the sunflower’s bud and reaches for it.

   “You are never alone, remember that. – Bea.”

He cannot help but softly beam his ivories at the words, despite the tears and despite the heavy weight that has yet to be lifted from his heart. I am not alone. Jessica and Nico’s shadows – one lanky and one lethal – approaches and somewhere in the ghostly distances ahead of him is Exover and in the sky above is Myrcella, rightfully returned to where she has always belonged, and the comforting pulse of the earth below is his mother’s.

   He is not the nymph.
   He is not alone here.

Lyrics : Hollow Coves — Coastline

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

( You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in fields of gold )

   Everything is serene.

It’s him and the quiet symphony of flower petals against flower petals, shadows dancing in circles and whimsical patterns over Francis’s resting form.

   Songbirds chirp from afar – or it is the wind?

He promised to scout for water but laying down has made him overly aware of the weariness down in his ivoried marrows. The world moves in a motion so ecstatic that it’s near impossible for his delicate bones to tail behind.

Francis breathes in the pollen dust, the green scent of the earth below, and the nutty aroma of ripen sunflower seeds. His fingers splay out across the dirt, letting his palms kiss it over and over. Brown hair lets the soil and the shadows perfume it.

   I am a part of you,

he presses his cheek to the field and the roots buried like relics underneath it,

   accept me as your familiar.

A strange ritual, but one of his own making and liking. It blooms a flower of soft bliss amid the field of mourning buds in Francis’s head.

This field feels like stumbling upon a colored photograph hidden between a greyscale album.

His mother would have loved it, nurtured it, grown it to a continent that have sunflowers at every turn and corner. This golden and beautiful meadow would have been Mia Bloom’s kingdom, where each day is a celebration and each night is a vigil.

But, he’d been warned that all that glistens is not gold and he knows beauty that have a thicket of thorns underneath.

Francis's careless reverie is interrupted by the hiss of a silver parachute, unraveling its contents to Francis. Whatever is nestled inside it gleams. He reaches out for it and is pleased to discover an assortment of five knives, lethal but beautiful. 

The knives' designs are an ode to Francis – flower accents on the bronze handles, the petals engraved onto it unfurled and curled into each other intricately – and its edges promise blood and the tear of skin. Whoever had gifted them have been keeping a close eye on him. The thought equally haunts him as it does charm. He sets the throwing knives in the carpetbag along with the other items.

A few inches of his lasso's end come away under a knife’s teeth. He ties it around the black, frayed hat in a loose loop. The storm within him calms for a few moments’ worth as fingers dig up a few sunflowers from their roots, their color and scent a homelike comfort.

   He could live here.

He could sit in the yellows and be a secret from the rest of the tributes; most of them haven’t seen him. He could eat seeds and drink the beads of moisture on the petals, as avian as he was born to be.

   The plan sounds bulletproof until it isn’t.

A helpless Nico completely under Jessica’s mercy emerges in the back of his eyelids and he sighs, exasperatedly, knowing he has to leave. Eyes stare down at the dug-up sunflowers, their green stems tied to the lasso thread around hat's circumference, orbiting the black cowboy hat. It is as beautiful as he has thought and made it to be – a sunflower crown, a sunflower heirloom – and he wastes no time to rest it tenderly atop his head.

   The flowers stare longingly sunward,
   much closer to their lover than before.

He has never been a drinker but when Francis closes his eyes, he lets his skin drink in the shadows before he has to return to his allies. The calm shadows of the sunflower shoots, crisscrossing over his body, have an almost palpable texture; he imagines them to be akin to cool velvet.

It isn’t Francis’s fervor to search for his allies that makes him rise to the feet. It’s the rustling of sunflower stems, and the rustling between those sunflower stems. The sound comes indistinctly, muted and dull, first somewhere ahead of him and then nearby and then behind and below. Underground, he realizes with an electric jolt, hand reaching for the pitchfork. Francis raises the dirt-encrusted claws, suddenly vigilant and startled.

   The sound precedes.

   It inches closer and then withdraws.

   It ticks only to tock
   away, away, away.

   A few moments later, it returns.

The noise halts as a creature erupts from the vacant soil between two sunflower rows, blinking at Francis. He finds himself static and, unwillingly, let himself be studied. Its fur is a gradient of brown and golden with a pair of wide eyes to match the color. The furred head tilts at him in nonchalant scrutiny. He knows it means no harm from the frantic wag of its black tail.

“You’re just a little thing.” A smile ushers the tension across his countenance elsewhere, ivories bright in the creature’s direction. “Come here.” Francis fishes out his lasso, and wishing for precision, he hurls the looped end towards the pup.

Lyrics : Sting — Fields of Gold

( Francis is sponsored 5 throwing knives;
tries to catch a word with his lasso )

kvR4C3G1hF1-2

( unsuccessful :(  )

1-2

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

( Spirited away, away, away )

Yellow petals kiss his face as a draught combs through the field. The wind smells of moss and ferns, like the earth has taken a breath and exhaled outward. Spring sits frozen and static here, undisturbed, granting bloom to each flower – even the ones trellised over his rib-bones.

Francis smiles at the thought of an eternal spring, an everlasting spring where the flowers do not have to fight for the sun.

   But winter is the sun’s now lover,
   and he is jealous of the nymph.

So each year, in the few months where he is permitted by the sun to rule the skies with snow clouds and blizzards, he’d make it his clandestine vendetta to bring peril to the flower nymph and her growth. His cold touch hurt her senselessly, and his cloak of snow storms and overcasts forbid her from looking at the sun. Her quiet cries are muffled by the loud mirth of his storms. Winter, albeit his translucent beauty and magnificent crown of icicles, is a cruel mister.

   But the nymph does not give up;
   she grows ,  grows  and   grows,  

because her heartbreak has become a part of the earth below, etched onto its surface in the form of sunflowers and buried down in its innards in the form of strong roots. No matter the Winter’s malice, the nymph persists, she endures.

Her broken shoots mend themselves after Winter meanders elsewhere, and the petals she’d shed are reborn, enshrouding her whole and lovely again. From her own ruins, she becomes anew with stronger stalks and brighter petals.

   She takes her grief and recycle it,
   into a masterpiece, into a miracle.

The remnant – or a ghost – of the nymph’s laughter is in the wind that laces its invisible fingers through Francisco’s brown threads. He tucks the stray strands of dirt-streaked hair in, deterring his eyes from where he’s missed to capture the creature. A few moments quicker, and a more accurate throw, and he would have caught it.

But, Francis is no Myrcella Hudson.

The mere thought of her comes as a haunting would, a tremble in his brittle bones and a chill down his floral spine. She’s dead. He watched her skull give away under the girl’s horseshoe and ran at the sight of crimson. Francis doesn’t remember the murderer’s face but he’d ask when he sees a girl with a horseshoe and dried blood on her hands. He’d ask when he sees a girl, more haunted than he is. Or has she made friends with her ghosts? She would have to teach Francis how to,

   before she becomes one herself.

Resolute on returning to his allies, Francis kneels down to caress the field one last time – feeling the way the dirt moved against his palm’s lines, the cool of the dirt.

   Are you with me?

He echoes a silent query, asking it through the calloused fingertips, to the field.

   The field answers with a flicker of gold.

Buried under grains of brown soil and earth, glistening with a steadfast rhythm like a small breath, is a treasure beckoning Francis to it. With a newfound fervor and matching curiosity, he brushes the dirt away and disentombs the object from its grave.

The armor is spun from pure gold; he knows from how its edges dance with sunbeams and how its surface seems timeless – free of rust, immune to decay. The floral designs etched onto it are akin to the ones across his knives, a brilliance of flowers entangled to and encompassed by each other.

It feels like a second skin on Francis, accepting his physique with a rightness that should feel mysterious and eerie, but instead, fills him with a sense of magic and the mystics.

   This is his armor, bred by the
   sunflowers for their true heir.

Crouched like a runner bracing for a race, robed in amber and crowned by gold, he is amber dust, an essence of the nymph, an extension of this field.

He lets a breeze kiss him again before moving away, away, away, back to the blood and the beast, Nico and Jessica respectively.

Mid-path, another parachute lands and wilts ahead of him, opening to a leather book and pen.

He muses about the unwritten letters he could pen to Exover and the black-inked studies he could make of strange floras as steps carry him back to the mouth of the field. Nico and Jessica are near, more than whimsically mere shapes now.

   “I didn't find any water.” 

Lyrics : Spirited Away — The Name of Life

( Francis is sponsored a leather book and pen; 
equips armor & not in this post yet but he tries
to catch a word with his lasso )

xr2iOBnX0t1-2

( successful )

1-2

[ruby wolfe [d2] kaitlin.]

This arena is like nothing he has ever seen before, just an expanse of open and nothing. It’s almost as beautiful as it is horrifying, the realization that he is out of his element. He sees Myrcella from the corner of his eye, all glass and grace and something terrible, and thinks that she could make herself a home anywhere, that she could take anything that is put in front of her and use it to her own advantage. Nico wonders if he will be able to do the same—he has a bag filling up with things he doesn’t know if he has need for, just grabs at things and shoves them in the pack without thinking about it.

He can help but ask himself:
have I ever had so much to my name before?

With every attack the he lands, Nico is grateful that his alliance has taken him in—that they have not turned their backs on him and showed him the same unkindness that he had been shown the rest of his life. He hadn’t been sure about Jessica, had thought that makes she was more snake than girl and that when he gave her his trust, she would take him life from him in turn. The last time Nico had given anyone his trust was so long ago that he can’t even remember it, can’t remember the moment where he allowed himself to bring someone new into his life. Doing it now, doing it here—soon there would be nothing left of him, this much he knows is near certain, but with these tributes at his side, at least for as long as they would have him, he thinks perhaps death will wait.

But then the pain is blinding.

He looks down, an arm gone.

Then he can't find Myrcella--
until suddenly he does, and wishes he hadn't.

In some ways, her death is as terrible as her life; maybe in another life he'd have thought it was beautiful, the girl who couldn't fall suddenly on the ground, blonde hair spilling out around her, thick red blood seeping into it and staining it and the ground around her like a bucket of paint spilled over. Maybe if he were someone else, he'd go to her, would ignore the pain where his arm used to be and get to her no matter what. Maybe if he were a better person

But Myrcella is gone.

Dead.

And the living are hungry.

Something inside of him breaks when Ronan descends on him, blade swinging something horrible and ferocious and suddenly Nico can't stand anymore.

As unkind as a plague.

That's what he had called himself.

Standing there before the Gamemakers, with the callous smiles on their faces, delight and horror in equal breath as he explained how he had not eaten anything in four days and still come out alive.

Perhaps he should have been kinder.

The pain in unimaginable, something even that he’s never been forced to endure. It’s a kind of excruciating he doesn’t think anyone would be able to prepare for. He’d let trainers kick him blood in his private session and been awarded and ten he knows just because of his ability to survive—but this?

He doesn’t know how to survive this.

He vows to do it anyways.

The pack on his back is heavy with every step that he takes, but even with blood rushing from his body and the world spinning in chaos and confusion, he still wants to win, still vows that he will win this bloodied crown and wear it. A barbed wire thing, it will spill his blood anyways. Every time he reminds himself of the goal, of the dream, his steps get lighter.

The pain is blinding, but Nico doesn’t care.

Just lives and lives and survives.
It's all he knows how to do.

He just leans heavy on Francsico, though he barely remembers when the other got to him, barely remembers when he wrapped his good arm around his shoulders and allowed him to begin carrying him away from the bloodbath where so much of his own blood had been spilled. The ground must be covered with it now, thinks that it's probably staining the back of Jessica's top where it rests between I don't need your help, something terrible in him wants to say, hates that he must lean on him this way. I'd rather die. But he can't find the words, can't bring himself to spit them out at these two people who should have left him for dead, who had every opportunity to leave him to the fate of lone wolves.

Nico can't see straight, can't think straight, but when Francis first leaves Nico feels his absence in his bones, feels like it is light leaving his world. This is what he wanted, isn't what he planned--but he should have known that things never go to plan in the Hunger Games. He'd wanted to protect Francis, to make sure that if it wasn't Nico who would wear the crown at the end of this, then at least this boy from District 5 might be able to.

He tries to throw him a smile anyways.

He thinks Francis might already be gone when it finally touches his cheeks.

Absently, somewhere in the back of his head that is ignoring the pain, he thinks that Jessica is probably rolling her eyes at Nico's weak smile. He can almost hear her shaking his head, though he can barely bring himself to open his eyes and look at her to know for sure. He needs first aid, needs it more than anything, but he's not actually convinced that she'll give it to him so he doesn't ask for her help.

Not that he would have anyways, if he's being honest.

He doesn't know if he'll ever ask for help.

He can't tell exactly how much time passes before Francis finally comes back, but it's the sound of his voice that makes him try and push to a full sitting position, his voice saying I didn't find any water, that motivates him to truly try and see through the pain.

He doesn't have much ope anymore that the crown of barbed wire will be his, but the sight of Francis, sunflowers tangled around that hat of his, is enough to remind Nico that there's still a game to be won, even if he wouldn't be the victor.

The pack survives, he thinks.

He'll make dame sure Francis is never alone again.

[lance]

Pride cometh before the fall and a mind focused solely on survival and a skillset that had placed Myrcella Hudson as supreme amongst the twenty four had placed a target on her back so large even the girl from Three could nail the bullseye.

Oh, they'd fought all right, even if her marksmanship was less than stellar and the boys were more dead weight than useful. But she'd given the boy who'd landed a crack on her wrist an arrow in the neck to remember her by, served as a rear guard standing strong as two alliances had rightfully deemed the teamup of her and Myrcella the largest threat in the entire arena and had formed a coalition of their own in response. And it didn't matter how good she was, she couldn't fight off eight all on her own - especially when four of them had hid in the background, close enough to contest but too far to deal with - and with Myrcella dead in seconds and Nico crippled beyond repair by those that had smelled weakness in a green boy from Twelve, there was no point.

She was strong. She was smart. But she was not stupid, nor was she suicidal.

And so one became twenty four, and her greatest asset and biggest rival alike was dead as a doornail mere minutes into the fight she had been training her entire life for.

What a waste. And oh, it was, but with that obstacle removed? There was truly no single person who she feared enough to stop her in her tracks.

All she'd have to do would be to navigate the politics between the alliances, survive the fight of group on group until the real test of her versus the world was smacked before her on a metaphorical desk.

They limped away from the meat grinder that had threatened to take their lives, Nico supported by Francisco and her taking up the rear, bow in hands and head swiveling in all directions in case of a sudden attack. But no other competitor, tribute or muttation, had shown face by the time they'd reached a bed of sunflowers, and it was there that Francisco had decided that that would be their resting spot for the moment. “Look after him, okay?” he had asked towards her, and after his declaration that he was going to find water a wry grin crossed her face.

"Don't worry, pretty boy," she'd responded, taking a glance at the boy who, in a matter of moments, had lost half the limbs gifted to him at birth. "He's not going anywhere."

She half expected Francisco not to return, knowing full well that Myrcella had been the friendlier of the two of them and that any ally with a lost limb was more of a liability than an asset. But he did, after a while of silence and brooding on her part, and declared that they must move on.

Easy for him to say, she thought, noting that the boy from Five had emerged suspiciously unscathed from the conflict ahead of them. But he is right that water should be our first priority.

Mind games amongst mind games, even amongst those she had allowed into her circle of trust - but for now, she decided that she'd give the benefit of the doubt to the flower boy and his haphazard companion.

She'd watch after them, all right. At least, until it was time to put a blade in their backsides.

With any luck, that would become necessary later rather than sooner.

[ruby wolfe [d2] kaitlin.]

The pain is almost blinding, makes him see stars whenever he closes his eyes for longer than a moment, but even with all of this blood he refuses to be someone that needs his alliance more than they need him. He knows, somewhere in the back of his head, that maybe this is the life that he was always destined for, that this is the way his death was always supposed to come.

He had been raised by a lone wolf, a feral and hungry thing, one who never had enough blood in her mouth no matter how desperately she fought for it, clawed her way through District Twelve in the hope that maybe one day she would find the justice that she deserved, the bones she was owed.

Yet, it had been Nico who kept her alive, had been Nico time after time who put food on their little round table and made sure that she ate it. Before he was old enough to get tesserae, it had been Nico who ventured out past the fence that never flickered with the electricity it was supposed to, had been Nico who learned through trial and error how to set little traps to try and catch squirrels and small birds, had been Nico who plucked strawberries from the wild bushes in the grove just beyond the fence that backed up to his very own neighborhood, had been Nico who pledged not to eat a single of the shining red things because he knew the value of each and every single one--and he had never been able to afford the cost of even one.

For the first time in his life, Nico wonders if everything that has happened to him, if everything Twelve threw at his was not to make him a victor, was not to make him something horrible and cruel so that he could wear a crown of wolves teeth, but rather so that he could bare his own canines to protect the people that needed his protection. It had started with his mother, who couldn't be bothered to put bread past her own lips most morning. Then it was Ten, with her fast fingers and faster heart, falling into ruin and horror before she could learn how to walk. It had been Nico who taught her how to run.

For the first time, he wonders if his legacy of bloodshed is not to be for his own glory, but for theirs.

It's why, even through the pain, the sheer agony that's ripping through every part of his body that he can still feel, he can't just sit there and watch on as Francis walks away, can't just sit there once Jess has tended to his wounds as best she knows how--a scowl clear as day on her face to match the one on his own. He needs to protect them, with his own blood if he must.

They were creatures of the same kind, if not the same cloth, and every time he looks at her he's glad that she is in his pack--that he is in hers.

She is a blessing and a terror wrapped in one.
He thinks surely there's a metaphor somewhere in there.

He also thinks she'd hate that.

"You can go look for some plants to eat," he says to her with a huff when Francis isn't paying too close attention to the pair of them. He knows that he should eat something too, but doesn't want them to watch as he struggles to scour around where he is to find one of the plants he'd been taught was safe to eat, to find one's that would save him.

Or, not save him.

Really, he'd learning how to be a shield.

"If I die it's just one less thing for you to worry about anyways," he says with a half-hearted shrug, the movement pulling on his wounds.

He wonders if that might make Jess laugh.

He hopes it does.

He doesn't know how they're going to get him to their next location, knows that he's going to have to learn faster than ever to bear a pain that even he had never been able to prepare for, but he's learned with quick wit and sharp determination how to take everything else this world has thrown at him, how to live with what it has taken away.

He can survive this, too.

nico collects 1 bundle edible plants,
& 2 bundles medicinal plants!
uses 1 medicinal

[ruby wolfe [d2] kaitlin.]

Grave-eyed children.

That's what he had called his fellow hungry in District Twelve in the back of his head, the thing that he had taken to calling himself once he realized that he and every one he knew was destined to make a home six feet under sooner rather than later.

It was part of why he had gone beyond the fence in the first place. That very first time, it hadn't been because he thought he could hunt wild animals like he'd seen some of the older kids do, trade them for whatever he and his mother needed--no. That first morning, slipping under the fence he was terrified would suddenly come to life with electricity and take him from this world, he'd gone to the woods because of the stories. He'd heard little whispering from older kids and their parents about the vastness, about the danger; it was a different kind of danger to the life that they all lived in the Seam. In the Seam, hunger was his greatest enemy, his biggest threat, but Nico could learn how to tame his hunger.

In the woods, there was no safety.

He'd only seen them a couple of time from up in tree branches, the monsters that still roamed the wild wood; bears rumbling around, thick blood drying on their muzzles; wolf-like creatures red around their ears and grey coats, snarling at everything that crossed its path. Out in the forest, it was like a completely different world, where danger was real and present and would never be something that Nico could master--only something that he could force himself how to live with. He would step through the forest, brushing his hands over branches hanging low, and know without a doubt that if he came upon a pack of one of those wolf-like creatures, that would be the end. They would close in one him and trap him between their jaws, ruin him until he was just another part of the vegetation surrounding him. They were wicked and wonderful in the same breath, and it's while Nico is rummaging through the ground around him that he finds it: the skull of a beast long ago gone.

He'd never been able to get himself to try killing one of those monsters, never been able to take from this world its terrors.

Grave-eyed children, he remembers.

Hungry, breathless things, with no fire in their eyes and no want for death in their hearts, they were doomed to that life anyways. And yet--here Nico kneels, one hand gone, all his body weight leaning on the hand that he has left, and he knows that he was never one of them, that he never would be.

He clutches the skull that he's just found, covered in a thin layer of earth and dust, like Nico had wondered if one day his own body might become those years ago in the wood.

He plucks the black cowboy hat from his head, stows it away in his pack, not quite ready to let it go, and slips the skull over his own.

A crown of death fit for a king.

nico equips his horny headwear & other armor xo

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

( Spirited away, away, away )

filler post ! 

Lyrics : Spirited Away — The Name of Life

( Francis does F/A on Nico, stitches his wounds
and stares at his cheekbones excessively.
He doesn't speak to Jessica but
steals occasional glimpses of her. )