This is the moment you live for.
It lasts only a few seconds at best, but they always seem to stretch by into something much more substantial than that as you balance, perched on the edge of a single beam; the blue sky above and around you, endless and vast and beautiful; the ground hundreds of feet below, waiting to swallow and crush you, hard and unforgiving, save for the one small golden square that your eyes pick out with practiced ease.
This should be terrifying, and indeed, part of it still is. You have seen brothers jump beside you, confident and sure in themselves, only to end up with legs forever crippled and useless or skulls broken like fragile pottery. These grisly reminders only serve to fuel your anticipation and excitement further, however, as you dance along the dangerously thin knife-edge between life and death.
It is called the Leap of Faith for a reason, and as an Assassin, the irony of this is not lost on you.
You look down, eying the haystack so very far beneath you, and pause for a moment to take a breath, to position yourself just so...
Fluid and graceful, you give yourself over to the clutches of gravity, falling with arms outstretched before twisting your body around as the wind whips past, so loud that it drowns out everything else.
For a fraction of a second, you feel weightless as you drop through the sky.
The hay is there to catch you, as you knew it would, be it through faith or skill or simple luck, it doesn't matter. The air rushes from your lungs in something like a gasp, and when you breathe in, the scent of the old hay is musty and distracting in a way that urges you to push yourself up and out of the cart. The moment is over, you move on; there is business to be done.
a/n: Uploading some of my drabbles separately, because I can.
No really it's just easier for me to keep things organized this way rather than piling unrelated drabbles into one story.