A/N: I have this head canon, sort of, that North was the golden child and South got the scraps during their childhoods, and in the end, it messed her up something fierce, emotionally and psychologically. So I more or less wrote this to play with the idea. If you get a chance, let me know what you thought!

Trigger warning: mentions of child abuse.

Making Peace with Dystopia

Know you never wanna face your fears
Know you never wanna drown in tears
Holding on, you're my dystopia.
-"Dystopia" by Polarheart

Crying doesn't suit her, doesn't suit any soldier in their faction, really. Typically, emotional outbursts present themselves as anger, as a seething passion that boils on the backburner for too long – a lapse of time so thoroughly repressed and prolonged that the resulting, inevitable, fire rages like the intensity of the sun. It boils her veins alive, turns her heartbeats to crashing bursts of thunder and her sanity to piles of ash she cannot recollect no matter how delicately she attempts to scrape it together. And that's where the problem lies; not within her rage—(her bitter, blood-curdling hatred that's been slapped across the plane of her mistakes and her missions and her lies)—but within her place in her brother's shadow.

Twins are not equal, they are just similar.

They were born to a family that saw them as two halves of the same coin, and at some point they came to prefer one half over the other. Their love is genuine and rooted deep into their foundations, into the very structure that defines their almost identical genes, that he never defined her by the social, intellectual and personal expectations of their parents. He never told her, "Be more like me." He never looked at her with scowling disappointment. He never said, "I'm the favorite child, you know." But there is nothing that defends against those that favor North's charismatic charm over her own stubborn negligence.

It's not his fault. God, how she knows that none of it is his fault.

Yet when he takes the lead or saves her life and she has to helplessly watch him get hurt, when she has to sit through lectures and anticipate another day of being scolded while he receives the praise, when she has to perch for hours at his bedside after his surgeries in broiling anxiety and apprehension, she just naturally, reflexively, instinctively, begins to hate him as much as she hates herself.

It frustrates her because everyone is just as acutely aware of her inability to avoid fucking up as they are his inability to leave her the fuck alone. They are literally two sides of the same coin and there is no separating them when every mission, every minute of every hour on every terrain, is run by the discord between their apathy and empathy.

Anger suits her in a way crying never has.

North doesn't comprehend her as easily as he assumes (thinks) he does. He thinks he can solve her issues by guidance and thinks he can shield her from ever getting hurt and he thinks that she's incapable of handling herself in the field. For someone so gentle – so unbelievably goddamn opposite of her – he's an overprotective overcompensating overachieving prick. It pisses her off how he never acknowledges that he's such a pain in her ass. Because he mistakes his caring for their amity, justifies that so long as she isn't dead he still has plenty to live for; it makes her feel guilty. That he fights for her and she fights for herself. That the bullet hole scars on his chest are a reminder of how her selfishness and his selflessness have nearly killed them both.

Anger suits her in a way crying never will.

Because she does cry. She's not a heartless, emotionless bitch, she's just one hell of a determined woman. Her plated exterior layers her frills and layers her fringes and layers her soul and sometimes it feels like she's suffocating. Sometimes it's too much to suppress and there's no room left in the cavern of her chest to hide all the self-pity and the loathing and the fear. The fear that North will always, always, always be one step ahead because he takes charge. Because he puts himself out there with only her safety on his mind. Because this kind of methodology is how he predicts her and counters her and gets the leg up each and every single fucking time they're paired in the field. He's been shot because of her slip in efficiency, has nearly died because of her egotistical desire to be the top of some trivial leader board.

Because he is always that one step ahead.

And that's what earns her tears. Shame. The shame of never being good enough, the shame of having to live her life proving to everyone else that she's her own being, that she doesn't need North to baby her and that she does truly love him for how wonderful he is. The shame of living in his shadow. The guilt of blaming him for something that is not his fault, that is so genuinely fucked up and out of their control it's become a derailed series of unfortunate events pending on one giant catastrophe.

It's almost unreal how much she loves him for his kindness, his aptitude; how much he loves her for her agony, her fragmented existence.

How much she wants to kill him because of it.

Because he receives an AI before she does, doesn't bother to flaunt it around her. It's almost insulting how he won't allow her to interact with it, this childlike computer program that fastens onto the soldier and doesn't ever leave him alone. It absorbs his time, is rightfully terrified of the venomous sister from a distance. Just another factor to agitate her, to get under her scarred skin. She deserves to have an AI too, and she deserves, at the very least, to be in the same league as her brother.

As her own goddamn twin.

Even when she had surpassed him on the leader board for those two short weeks, after they had completed a mission together and it was an absolute breeze. And he let her take the credit because she had genuinely invested herself in running the operation correctly. Even then, even right fucking then, the Freelancers knew it was North who had really succeeded; because now they all just assume, assume she's incapable of running solo ops and that by that logic there's no way she could have possibly been so successful without some extensive assistance. Without her brother at her side.

And she can never seem to achieve such a goal. She trains in private endlessly, consumes her time with the simulation room and skipping meals and dodging concern from the other Freelancers, scarcely rests. Prides herself on achieving personal records by seeing how many fingers dislocate in the first hour and leaves no session without a laceration. Sets herself on a path of self-destruction that behaves like one gargantuan circle, from rage to pain to hate to rage. But he advances further, leaps ahead on bounds with Theta at his side, keeps her situated firmly behind him in his goddamn shadow. What he calls protection, she calls suppression.

Anger has no place in her life but there's nothing left for her to cope with.

Perhaps it is the weakness from her self-degradation that allows her to break like shattering glass with a stone; why she cries in the silence of her solitude, why she'll be mid-punch on the training floor and suddenly collapse into a hysterical heap the very following moment. She's starving for proper food and recognition and sunlight, knows that every moment she spends lounging around idly will further regress her attempt at catching up, at surpassing, at being equal to her brother.

This break, in particular, follows the events of another one of his successful missions and she had been ordered to remain behind, because now she's no longer in the top 5 and the others are afraid she'll slow them down. That North will jump in the line of fire again, this time won't emerge from the day with a heartbeat. That she'll fuck it all up, that she isn't competent or even that spectacular of a soldier anymore, that the Director has no worth for her when she isn't lingering at the top of the board.

And she has to prove she isn't defined by North, but by her own accomplishments.

It's three in the morning, she hasn't eaten in four days, instead fuels herself with hours of armorless, rigorous training in the simulation room, beating out her frustration on concrete blocks to feel the pain of being alive, to feel her bones cracking under the pressure and to feel the hatred surging through every jolt of fire in her blood.

Anger is all she feels. It blinds her, it engulfs her.

And because of it, she breaks apart the seams. This obsession torments her and eats her alive from the inside out. She doesn't ever realize it's happening either, just quietly submits to the pain and the overwhelming sense of despair, pushes herself back to her feet and keeps training, breaks her bones and splinters her skin and progresses into an angry, sobbing child who pounds her fists on the concrete slabs begging for their parents to stop dressing her in stupid outfits just to look like him, pleading for the Director to let her catch up, let her have one fucking moment when she can be the better of the two.

Because twins are never equals, they are just very, very similar.

She screams as her mind tortures itself with all the various, inexplicable ways she's messed everything up. Remembers all those days when their parents would tell her, "Why can't you just be more like your brother?" To be like him to be like North to be like that goddamn flawless epitome of perfection that is only seven minutes older but seven thousand leagues above her level. Falls to her knees, her horrifying screeching muted to her own ears, her fists bleeding and her very essence tumbling downwards into a spiral. Shattering. Scattering.

Be more like North be more like North why can't you be more like North.

"South?"

She nearly vomits at the sound of his voice. But she's too weak, too tired; exhausted from trying, from failing over and over and over. "Don't," she whispers, "please just do me a fucking favor and…don't."

But his arms are already enveloping her, bringing her up to his chest, keeping her stable. The bastard. Isn't listening, thinking again. Thinks he knows what's best for her, thinks that this can be solved with a little bit of sibling affection and a stupid fucking hug. But she's grasping his sleeves, grounding herself in the reality that's gradually ebbing into a quiet darkness; in a twisted, deplorable sense she needs him, needs to have someone who still acknowledges her when the rest of the world has smudged her into his shadow.

"I hate you," she utters, again and again and again, for every time she's broken because of him, for every time he's saved her and for every goddamn time he's loved her for everything that she is. Her tears burn gorges of fire over the contours of her cheeks. Her weakness, her exposure, it makes her feel like an incompetent child. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you I hate you I hate you I absolutely fucking hate you, Emmett!"

"What's gotten into you, South?"—she ignores him, pushes away—"Em?"—he catches her again when her broken wrist gives out and she collapses under her own weight with a startled cry—"Ember, please, stop this!"

"North, what's wrong? I sensed distress."

"It's nothing Theta, just – just shut down, please."

"But she's hurt. Let me alert the medical team, she needs—"

"Get that fucking thing away from me!" she snaps, startling the AI unit into dispersing with an acute yelp. "Don't you get it, Emmett?" comes her next question, quieter, the brevity in her voice failing with the rest of her weakened figure. She gradually collapses onto her side, curling up into a fetal ball as the pain finally, thankfully, registers. Pathetic. A pathetic shell of a pathetic person, lying pathetically on the cold metal floor. Sobs like a child, scared in a bed room, bruised from ruthless malevolence because she fucks up by breathing and her brother is perfection in all his flaws. "What don't you understand?! Go away. Leave. Me. Alone."

He doesn't move, doesn't blink. Just stares.

"You were always the favorite child; the well behaved son, the pride and joy and love and soul of the family, the goddamn pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. Too bad Mom and Dad couldn't have had another like you, huh? No, they just…had to go and have me instead. The disappointment, the shame, the disgrace." Her chuckle is unnervingly humorlessly, dry, stale. Broken. And he swallows his own heavy heart. "I always loathed you for it. And God knows how I loathe you for it now."

She can see the morose in his features, the same symmetry in his appearance that reflects hers. Reflects the years of unmatched age, of progression and of learning. Reflects their childhoods spent in the sand or in a yard playing with inflatable soccer balls. Reflects the nights spent sharing rooms as teens to cope with her night terrors, their stress, his fear of solitude, sometimes with backs pressed together in particularly cold weather. Reflects the evenings spent behind locked doors after she would try to hide the swellings on her arms while he never realized, never thought to consider, that they would ever raise a hand to her like they had never done to him.

Because I'm the perfect child. No one would dare hurt a prodigy.

"I'm—"

"Don't… Don't you ever, ever act like you care about me if you aren't going to use my goddamn name. It's just a big, fat, fucking lie. I know it is. It always has been, always will be."

"I don't lie, Ember. Not to you, never to you."

His fingers find her shoulder, but she shifts away with what little strength she has left. And then he reaches out again fully this time, wraps both arms around her broken figure, brings up against him with every bit of strength focuses in comforting her, in holding her the way he used to when she was in pain, protecting her from the shame and animosity and the torture throughout their childhood. Knows that she's hurting and that it's all his fault for never, ever allowing her the space she so desperately needed – still needs – and for defining their lives by solecism, by moments when he should have stood up for her and not to her.

Her life is its own dystopian society of woe and anguish and ultimate ruin. And in a way, he pities her for this hellish endurance. But for everything that he is she isn't, means that for everything she is he couldn't ever hope to be, and no perfected splice of DNA will ever consume her own unique being, her own self-worth. Because he's valued her since she first kicked him in the womb, since the day their mother received an ultrasound to find that they were developing while holding hands.

"I hate you for loving me so goddamn much when no one else ever did."

And she means it, just like every time before.

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