Wherein the Beast stays with the bigger, more fearsome predator. Her rose withers.
Blake Belladonna is fifteen years old when she and Adam Taurus board a Schnee family Dust Train; carrying a huge amount of powerful crystals, cut and uncut alike, dusted and polished. Her eyes go wide at the sight, tracing the colorful lines across the beautiful elements. She reaches a pale hand out and touches one with the tips of her fingers; it is smooth and cool to the touch, and she frowns. So much power held within such a small rock, all belonging to one company. One greedy, cruel, selfish company.
"Blake, let's go," Adam urges her from the other end of the train compartment.
Her gold-dusted eyes look to him. They spot the charge in his hands – red, red hands, so much blood on them – and she knows that he has finished planting the bombs. She finds herself asking him, "what about the passengers?"
He pauses in his movements, then picks up a red crystal. Red, red, red.
"What about them?" He asks in a tone that answered the question. She looks away in shame, thoughts wandering.
Her thoughts wander throughout the entire fight that follows; her body is honed and entirely focused on defending her partner, following his commands, doing as she's told – a tool to be used and sharpened. Her mind never once stops thinking about what if. What if she left? What if she followed through with her plans to run away, here and now?
What if she could survive on her own?
The fight ends and she doesn't even think about it. Adam saved her, as he always does. He's saved her life so many times.
They are at the end of the train, and she looks at the last compartment longingly; she looks at the metal rods holding the two compartments together, she sees how easy it would be to break it. Break the metal holding the train together, break the connection he had on her soul. Break the chains on her heart.
He looks at her, holding that charge in his red, red hands.
She thinks about how, if she stayed with him now, she would have just as much red on her hands as he did. She would have all of the lives of these people on her hands. Blood for power.
He holds out a hand to her, an expecting look on his face.
She thinks of his red hands and how she wants nothing to do with them – then she thinks of the news she had watched just a few months ago. News that Adam had showed her as proof that all humans were inherently bad. News about the Schnee Dust Company itself. She thinks of how the little girl dressed in all white and as agile and beautiful as a dancer, so graceful and fluid like an angel, had killed her own father and run away from home. Blake thinks of how it's been months, but nobody has heard of that girl since the night she left. Blake questions herself, questions how in a world like this – in a world where little girls murder their fathers and leave home without a word, where a murdered father's child-son could take over the company at such a young age and implement much worse, much more violent rules for her kind – well, in a world like this... How could she possible think she could survive on her own?
She reaches over and grabs his hand. The red leaks off of his and onto hers. Slowly, slowly, but surely.
She knows in her heart she is stained.