Main theme: Enemy by Imagine Dragons and J.I.D
Theme: Deception by Lucas King
Chloe Lamb stared down at the two children at Sienna Khan's sides and smiled.
They were small and frail, weak and emaciated. Their skin was like thin cloth covering their bones, pale and sickly. Their slumbering faces drew quick breaths in and out, as sharp as knives and as quiet as mice. The clothing covering their small frames was baggy and worn with misuse and dereliction.
Jax and Gillian Asturias made for sickly little children, weak and skeletal. They looked like they could be blown away with just a puff of air, or a subtle change in the wind. Their eyes were sealed shut, their forms looking like they were locked in an eternal slumber.
"They sleep a lot," Sienna said to her, a calm look over her face, almost sad even, "After what Cinder did to them... they're weak, and they need care, and I..." she looked back to the shuttle that they had landed in, parked near the centre of Vacuo where the sand wouldn't swallow it whole, like it had so much else in the long history of the city's existence. Chloe wondered if there was someone else on that ship. Someone that she didn't know about. Sienna looked back to her, "And I can't provide that for them," she sighed, "Vacuo is their home, isn't it? They should be here, while they still have something of a home to return to."
Chloe looked down at the two children once more. Even if she hadn't known about who they were beforehand, she was sure that they would've been accepted into the Gemini Home for Strays and Lost, one of Vacuo's most prominent orphanages and children's homes. These two were much like all the other children that had come and gone (and mostly stayed) in the walls of this place; wounded and broken, damaged, in need of repair, and soon to be granted a new purpose all of their own.
The Gemini Home was well-regarded for its garnered reputation at finding homes for these orphaned children. Their partnership with the Exodus Troop probably helped in creating that reputation.
Chloe was glad that she came here.
When the Second Great War began, she had been amongst the first of Vale's citizens to flee the kingdom and depart to each corner of the planet in a grand exodus. Rebirth had become a shooting ground, and she had been eager to get out of the way of the fighting.
But she still wished to do her part for the cause.
So, she travelled to Vacuo, and took up a job in one of the world's most famous orphanages. There, she became a mother to the children there, clothing them and feeding them and giving them more care than they had ever been given in their lives and teaching them the way of all things, how the world worked, and feeding them the most wonderous of stories.
She became their protector, their guardian, their hero and grateful mother, and they became her wonderful children.
Funny. Right before the war began, she had been a simple prostitute on the streets of Vale. Funny what three months and a change of heart could do to a person.
It probably helped who had saved her from the most dreadful of situations as well...
Chloe tilted her head at the children. They cooed in their sleep. Not too far away, a patch of superheated, still cooling lechatelierite shifted through the sands outside of Vacuo like a sharpened island floating across the ocean. These glass islands, made from superheated sand turned to slag then glass during the violent bombardments, had become commonplace in Vacuo, even only a week or two after the Surge had come to an end.
They needed the care of a mother, and she would give to them, in the current absence of their true carer, as was the same for all the children in this new, temporary home of theirs.
Chloe smiled.
"Don't worry, Miss Khan."
The Daughter would be pleased to see her children returned to her.
"I will take good care of them."
In case no one here remembers Chloe Lamb, please go check out the first (or second) chapter of the first phase of Ascendancy.