"Slip"
Life is precious.
Intellectually, this is something that Lizzy has known for as long as she can remember. But she hadn't understood it until the winter when she was ten.
Life is fragile, too, and she'd thought that was a truth she'd learned at the same time.
But now, as she holds the life of another human being in her hands for the very first time, she knows that she hadn't.
Lizzy appears stoic as she stands by her mother's side and faces the man she'd tracked down for drug smuggling. She'd found suspicious, double-bottomed containers in his home and one of his friends had been convinced to turn on him after being caught in the act. He had to be the last man involved in the operation. But still…
A life.
This is her determination, and she gives the appearance of impassivity as she tells him what he is accused of. Shock is plain on his face, before panic sets in. After that, it doesn't take much:
He resists. She draws her sword. And the carriage ride home is spent wrapped in her mother's coat to hide the blood.
She had held her chin high in front of the officers who had arrived after the fact, but now the tears are rolling down her cheeks as she does her best to quietly blot them with a handkerchief. In the quiet of the carriage, her mother has soft words and warm arms, but Lizzy can't help but think about that feeling of standing on a precipice, that feeling of choice. And of action. She wasn't in the wrong, she wasn't, but the consequences remain. (Why do people make the decisions that they do—why—why—why—?)
And that night finds her locked in her bathroom at home, sobbing and shaking as she throws up.
The kind of people who seek this power over others must be monsters.
a/n:
…or possess very strong convictions... (Two lives. A little over two months ago, I decided two lives with a small group of eleven other people. And yet some people have the stomach go into politics and decide for a nation. That…responsibility…just the thought is enough to make me feel like running and screaming. It's so incredibly, inconceivably heavy. A weight enough to topple a mountain, let alone little old me.)
Aaaand, whoops, I realized that I accidentally set the Phantomhives' deaths a year earlier than in canon... I guess that'll just be a part of this AU. *sweatdrops*
"Slip," as in to depart; to fall; to lose one's purchase