AN: Forgot to thank all you lovelies for the reviews, so I'll thank you now! Kyu, I'm sorry these are so short I knooooow but this is being written for the kinkmeme and it only allows around 3,000 characters a post and since I'm trying to avoid a hundred part fill, the chapters will be extremely short. It's honestly killing me not to make them longer but think of them as short sweet and to the point. /

A solid smack against the back of her head made Julia's chin bang against the butt of her gun.

"Not like that. You'll dislocate your shoulder when that thing kicks back if you rest it against the joint. Like this." She waited with obedient patience as Mama adjusted her arm, nestling the worn smooth stock a few centimeters to the left from where her arm connected to her shoulder.

"Mama, it's heavy..."

Jul- (No, she had to remind herself, her name was Cato now. It wasn't as pretty as Julia.) Cato's upper arms shook weakly under the weight of the bolt-action rifle she held aloft.

"They don't come in child sizes." Her voice had a certain edge to it these days that made her shrink back whenever Mama spoke. Where there had been gentle chastisement before when she made a mistake, now there was a coarse chafe for her smallest faults. She didn't wear pretty dresses anymore either, just jeans and cotton shirts, and she made Julia rip up some of her dresses when she was teaching her to make tourniquets. She either shredded all her nice clothes or got them dirty sitting on the ground.

Mama sank on one knee into the dirt behind Cato and held her elbow to keep her from dropping the weapon, the other wrapping around her to guide the hand on the trigger. Six bottles of Sunset Sarsaparilla and one of Nuka Cola winked in the mid-morning light a few yards away, set on the roof of a rusted out shell of a car.

"Remember what I said about breathing," she prompted, silently directing her by expanding her chest against her back to remind her.

Ju-Cato complied, taking a deep breath as she lined up the sight of the weapon to train it on a Sunset bottle in the middle. Take a breath, let it out, take half a breath, hold. She held it even as the gun recoiled and battered her in the arm and chest, before finally releasing it in a whimpering exhale when she heard the shot loudly pierce the bottle and shatter it.

"Ow..." She tried to lower the barrel of the rifle, sniffling as the pinching sensation in her arm brought tears to her lashes. "Mama, I don't wanna' play guns no more!"

The arms around her took her by the shoulders and whirred her around to face the stern woman behind her.

"This isn't a game," she said, a voice like steel and her fingers digging white into Cato's arms. "You need to know how to do this. You need to learn to protect yourself. This world will try to eat you, little bird. Daddy may have been content to have you sell you off to some decanus, never teaching you how to raise a fist to a man, but that's not what I want for you. He can't protect you, your husband can't protect you, those old rusted walls can't protect you, the Legion can't protect you. When they crumble, you'll crumble with them if you don't learn this."

"That's a lie!" She stumbled away, wrenching herself free of the hands cutting into her skin, hugging the rifle against her and letting the tears fall unabashed down her face. "You're a liar! I want to go home, take me home right now, I want to see Daddy!"

Ammunition clattered to the dirt when Mama stood, throwing Cato a package of sharp tipped bullets.

"Go find him then. See how far you get."

She didn't get far.

By the time night fell, Cato was starved, dirty, and skinned from knees to elbows from trying to climb over jagged outcroppings around the farmhouse. Her clothes were dirty and ripped, her throat parched, her back sore from carrying the bolt-action rifle slung across it, and she had to cut clumps of hair out of her scalp with the pocketknife she'd taken when her long tresses got hopelessly entangled on a snagging tree jutting out the crags in a hill.

Mama had never been far behind, and when she finally succumbed to exhaustion, she was there to scoop her up and return her to the house.

She was sore and weepy the next day, but it wouldn't be long before she relented to the training.

Every day after that outburst, she was taught the horrifying actualities about her beloved Daddy, and every day after she learned them all, she was reminded. Until the knowledge of the Legion's practices, the rapes, the slavery, the crucifying, became bleakly woven into her mind amidst the memories of Caesar, her home, and the joyful childhood she spent with them, unaware of what went on just outside her sequestered little world