[P] cinderblock gardens

[Theodosia]

let our eyes show the
fire in our hearts tonight

She can feel the eyes on her back, scraping over each open wound like daggers, can hear the whispers of the cadets at her back -- she knows she is poised on the edge of a knife, so thin is the line she walks between Champion and Halcyon, between the camaraderie she once craved and the respect she must earn now. Her future is a series of winding paths in a maze, tangled in a snarling mass of vines, and somehow just the sight of Marisol scratching at a Halcyon border map (an expected action -- solid earth beneath her feet when she isn’t quite sure where she is treading) is enough to chase away the exhaustion constantly nipping at her heels.

When she clears the doorway, she shuts the door behind her with a more decisive ‘snap’ than she quite means to, staring for the briefest moment at the wood and wondering if it might be that easy to block out her own doubt in herself.

“Yes,” she answers back even when she knows it is a blatant lie -- the wounds are still fresh enough to be tender, but there is no time for recovery, not when there are whispers of war on the winds, not when a ghost threatens to consume everything in his wake, not when the scars of the disasters are still so fresh in her mind. There will be time to rest later, she tells herself, and she knows herself well enough to know that she is lying.

She steps forward to peer at the map laying across the desk with pale, keen eyes, and their shoulders brush in the limited space of the office -- there is a deep hunger gnawing in her stomach, an inferno between her ribs, an ache in her chest that she can’t quite place her finger on, words on her tongue that she dares not speak, and so she swallows them down like razor wire.

“Where would you place me?” She asks instead, staring down at the map as though it might hold a secret to how to manage straddling her two worlds, or how to navigate the minefield that only seems to grow between the two of them by the day. She wonders if Marisol can hear the question between her words -- am I still useful here? -- even as she waits to be told that the Halcyon is no longer her concern.

She thinks that hearing those words might gut her in a way knives never could.

credits
@Marisol