A\N: Just a muse. Enjoy!
It's hard to write after fighting.
Tenaya's hands are used to forming fists, to grappling with an opponent, or at best forming a blaster to shoot her enemies down with. Her mind is used to thinking of angles, trajectories, the hidden quirks of personality that can be exploited. Even sparring is the polar opposite of the delicacy of writing.
But she likes writing.
There are four notebooks already hidden under her bed. One for each month she has been alive. Her first poem is this:
Prowling cat
Golden stream
Inside
Giving me wings
Making me
Fly.
It is a beginner's poem, no less beautiful for its awkward grace. Her poems later became masterpieces, at least in her eyes. She enjoys writing. It cuts through the tangled knots of feelings and unwinds a single cord. Sometimes she needs it. Other times she simply wants to revel in the word-pictures, the rhythmic heartbeat of poetry.
Tenaya has heard that, once upon a time, there were creatures called Bards. They roamed the world, giving nothing but stories and taking nothing but shelter in reply. Tenaya sometimes wonders if, when the world is healed and Venjix is defeated, she will travel as the bards did.
It doesn't enter her mind that Venjix will win.
A memory returns to her as she sets pen to paper, and she slowly begins to shape the letters.
Darkness
Shapes forming
From only sound.
Hand in mine
Running
Running.
The song of gears
A war cry
Behind us.
Falling
Behind the curtain
And praying
In my brother's arms...
And then
Silence.
Tenaya traced the letters.
She and her brother had been running through an abandoned city. Dillon--Dylan--had pulled her down, behind a torn curtain. The Grinders had searched for them, and Tenaya had heard them, the way she would hear if there were monsters under the bed or not.
And then there had been silence.
And Dylan had told her, softly, to move slowly.
She pulled out another notebook. This one was earlier. In her first few moments of life, memories had pressed in on her, waiting to emerge.
Missing
Something
A weapon
A sword
Beside me.
My other half
Where are you?
And why do I
Miss you so?
Her brother. He had always fought beside her, she remembered. He had pinned the victim, using his brute strength against them, and she had whistled her hunting tune, throwing her voice so the victim thought there were hundreds of people backing Dylan up.
How long had they used that trick? How long had they been fighting for their lives? They weren't thieves--they had done what necessity dictated.
Why had they fought?
Tenaya shut the book. Her brother...
She knew it was him. Dylan. He was Dylan, and she was stupid to deny it.
But she had to be sure.
She looked at the blood on her arm. She could know.
Her DNA was the key.
She stood silently, walking out the door.
She never saw her notebooks again.