He should have fled, left her there in the abandoned factory turned warehouse for dead. Instead, he saved her life when she wanted to die and choose her over himself, by his own free will. He had a name, a past, a home he could return to if he would leave her side and never come back. He does not, for he still chooses her over himself. He gives her a name, a true name, and with it a purpose to cling to and live for other than Master with her blood-stained hands.
Master returns to claim her, and she follows him, for he had always chosen her beforehand. Without someone to aim her, to point her at the next target in her life, she would have become nothing more than a broken girl without a purpose or reason to live. But with him by her side, she could become his puppet, his loyal dog, his weapon that does as he commands it. Even so, there is a crack in the blade, a bruise on her cheek, a jam in the gun's slider, and confusion in her heart as she races forward towards both of them with the last of her strength. The puppet's mask shatters along with her still-beating heart as she makes her choice too late, her new Master's name falling from her lips along with her dying consciousness.
She awakens by her old Master's side scarred in both body and soul, but able to function the same as before. He commands her still, for even a broken blade can do damage if used correctly, and he knows her better than herself. Even so, he acknowledges the chips on his puppet's once-flawless body, and calls her 'redeemable trash', as any gun collector such as himself would know, a gun covered in rust with broken parts could still be repaired into perfection. Subtly he tells her to go forth and redeem herself by being as she once was, as she had been in the time spent by his side away from her other Master. A weapon, chipped and dull but still beautiful all the same.
Unlike a weapon, she chooses the new pair of hands that will wield her, and direct her through life. Instead of a blade, she is now a bullet in the magazine, that which will spin forth on a path of its own design, for she is also the gun the releases the bullet. Her new master is merely the hand that aims the gun and loosely guides it on its course. He helps her flee from her old Master even though both know the only path they may continue to walk in the future was one of death and bittersweet dreams.
They dream together for half a year, but awaken when death's ghost visits them underneath its falling flowers, cherry petals pink from the red blood staining the pure white souls of the dead carried upon the falling petals. Her former Master stands alongside death, with voiceless angels that follow his commands like puppets on the stage. They battle the fallen angels, her Master waiting at the end of their curtains fall. She stands before him as a puppet, as a weapon, as a girl with a broken body and heart, and makes a choice of her own. The puppeteer falls, and the puppet stands before the body, frozen upon the stage until its strings fall from the sky releasing her body.
The puppet's final dance now over; it leaves the stage with scarred heart and body, its strings trailing over its shoulders around its arms and hands. It takes two words from her helper "Let's go" to make her dead heart beat once more. Not as a puppet, as a girl with a wish and a will of her own that she departs from the stage. Six months later she stands in a sea of familiar colors, now with the shapes of rolling green hills, the white of fluffy clouds above, and the piercing blue of the sky above, so far and yet so close. Her eyes close as she remembers the choices she has made over the pain filled years, her hand raising and feeling the warmth of the sun that made the colors so vibrant behind her closed eyes. Her hand closes on the fleeting dream, now complete. She had made her choice. She was home.
