Doing prompts from the 30 day challenge. This is in Chicago, I know that was a very tight timeframe but whatever... You know when Nine says that he goes jogging around Lake Michigan? Is it just the part around Chicago because the whole thing is about 56,000 km in circumference...
Yep this is a shortie. So will be the next one.
/-/-/-/-
Prepared
We had been so prepared. With guns in each drawer, brought to us by this country's wonderful lack of laws, I had trained and trained and trained, Sandor had set up an entire network of spying on the city, we had a two story penthouse, perfect for defense and offense. We were hiding in plain sight.
It was my fault, I wasn't a good little boy who did exactly as told. And someone else paid the price.
Had I went along with everything, we would be in a different position. We, the garde. Me.
But soldiers
If there was one thing I found out from watching too many movies, it is that soldiers are prepared. Always.
What does that make me?
/-/-/-
I roll out of my bed, flicking my eyes away from the photograph before gently removing it from the frame and tossing it into the trash with telekinesis.
Again, it's a shock seeing me on the mirror, heavily muscled and much taller than I can remember being. Girls must think I'm hot(ter).
Maybe that's some of the preparation in here, what came from sitting in a cell.
I ignore that memory.
When I come to the kitchen I find the pack of Quakers Instant Oatmeal and wish Four was here to make it quicker. Seriously, the three minutes to prepare it are too much. It should be instant, no preparation needed. Liars.
Four comes out, half asleep and in a T-shirt that covers his flatpack.
"Someone came out late," I smirk. "Could've heated this shit."
He gives me a look that says that I'm crazy. Crazy is the new sensible. It's not like being sensible works in the face of lack of judgment.
"You wanna be a tourist or not?" I offer, the smirk not fading one bit.
He groans. What does he have to be annoyed with?
After another half an hour of convincing him, begging him, and then him concluding that I do in fact have feelings (no real ones that he knows of) he agrees.
We come down the elevator in silence, me clenching and releasing tension in my fists, almost giddy with excitement of being in Chicago, not just seeing it from 100 floor up.
When we get outside, it's funny, looking at Four's face, him looking around the city with the new eyes of someone who has seen too little.
Oh the joys of the weak-minded.
I ask the question that I didn't think I would, "How prepared were you for the war?"
He looks up at me confused. I must say the fact that he has four inches to look up is the funnest part of this.
"I had my first Legacy, the Lumen," I nod, betraying nothing. "I was training. I had Sam and Sarah. So yeah, I guess prepared. The Mogs didn't come with a warning though and Six wasn't part of preparation either."
His eyes cloud over, and I immediately know what he is thinking of.
The image of bruises and cuts comes over me, and I shove it out immediately, focusing on the waters of Lake Michigan.
It's weird to be here not jogging. It's almost spring.
We walk in silence, me faster and ahead, him walking slower, sinking in the choppy grayness of the rainy day.
I don't spend time looking at it, a sight that is too familiar and brings too much up inside of me.
Eventually he jogs to catch up to me, and again we walk in silence when we come back to the city. It tires out neither of us, and I start thinking about training before my mind wanders elsewhere.
Looking at him, the wide-eyed innocence of not knowing, it is hard to imagine how he was prepared too. He seems so willing to just drop everything, everything!, for a girl.
He lets his emotions take so much hold of him, it's a risk. And he never learns. He did not learn, not as I did.
And that is where the similarity ends.
Maybe I had been more prepared than him, but the same things brought both of us down. Yet we learned different lessons, and that is why I am still the better soldier than him.
I smirk at everything and nothing, at least I had more reasons than that, although that was...
In any way, the present trumped preparation as did emotions. Had I not is a different reality, one that would not have happened.
Whatever. Past is past.
It only matters in preparing for the future.
/-/-/-
Do you know how badly I want to do a one-shot about the Five from my other fanfic? One with her and her past lover, in 3rd person omniscient based on one of the songs I love?
I'll try to get the first chapter of the Swan Lake AU up tomorrow.