#*cricket.

— SUMMARY

cricket comes from a semi-rich household in new york with severely strict parents; she’s always been full of vitality, but they hoped for a well-behaved girl who stands straight and tall and smiled when she needs to, not when she wants to. they try to fix her - replace her selfishness with altruism, replace her vulgarity with tenderness - but she has sin-laced smiles and a rebellious ember in her heart, coughing up ashes in her eyes, and she refused.

she drops out of high school before she finishes it because of stress (or “just because”) and runs off to florida. she starts performing on street corners as a joke - the first time she does, she’s not performing so much as practicing a few magic tricks with random street goers, but they pay her for the entertainment, so she thinks, why the hell not. a couple months after she starts, she hops on board with a passing carnival troupe and travels across state lines to do cute little carnie things.

the next time the troupe come through miami, however - about a year later - she decides to stay because she wants to work on her own thing (and carnival life isn’t independent enough for her). nowadays, she usually performs on the beach or on the piers, and occasionally freelances for anyone wanting to hire her for their kid’s birthday party and the like, but she doesn’t make much; just enough to make rent on an apartment shared with two friends.

— CONNECTIONS

scarlet lennon. roommate and best friend. she first met scar when she returned from her carnival-going life, looking for books to help her figure out living on her own. she returned often enough that she and scarlet got to talking, and eventually she moved in with the girl to the apartment above the store. scar tries to get her into reading a lot, but cricket only agrees whenever the books have pictures in them.

artemis miller. roommate and best friend. cricket was introduced to artemis through scar, when cricket came to pick up a book from the store and artemis was hanging around. the two of them aren’t very similar, but somehow, they still get along excellently. cricket adores artemis, and she often makes art help her practice her acrobatic routines around the apartment - mostly by encouraging her to do silly dances and just loosening up.

the wasteland is in flames.

the camp’s bonfire is dying out, but the horizon burns with a damned, bloody red. this is not a celebration; this is a war zone.

mind drifting unconscious, cricket dreams that she has been eaten alive.

bone for bone, muscle for muscle. there is nothing of her left, save for the smell of flowers left under cool rain to rot. she floats, feeling as though she had left her limbs in a pretty coffin for a pretty girl, and instead she is a graveyard nymph; a flower-girl for death, dangling pretty and foolish and dead in the trees.

she can feel a ghost in her chest, but she is the one haunting this body. its legs are her legs, its claws her hands, its teeth her own. she feels its muscles tense and coil in her back, raising bumps along her spine. she is a horrid, hideous thing, bleeding ichor and poison; the ghost gnaws at the viscera and marrow of her.

          alas, it is just a dream - the reality is far less pleasant.

cricket’s head is pounding. dull at first, beginning as a gentle prickling, as though millions of invisible, glass needles are digging into her skin, piercing vein, muscle, sinew, nerve.

she slowly becomes conscious as the sensation escalates with every pale, reviving sense, until is is a mounting wave of blistering agony, poised to fall. and it does; this swell of torture falls the instant she opens her bruised and bloodshot eyes.

(she is dancing barefoot by the fire when they come. in seconds, her hands are firm on her crossbow, knuckles white as she tries to fend off the attackers. government officials; she stands atop a tree stump firing bolt after bolt, arrow after arrow, until something knocks her on the back of her head and she falls. the world grows quiet around her.)

the campfire has been reduced to ash, black and dusty, scattered and coughed up from inside her lungs. she cannot remember much, but she can remember bits of pieces. flashes of horror, of fighting, of tooth and nail, of blood and blood and blood.

their camp is cast into chaos: their sanctuary has become a battlefield. where minutes ago there had been joviality, now there is only fire and fear. she is knocked out for no more than a handful of moments toward the end of the devastatingly quick fight, but in that time, the officials clear out; the group is beaten and battered; the five are taken; the fire dies.

she feels as though she is being cleaved from darkness and shadow; her shivering body - once knitted from the skirts of the moon, dusted with the constellations trembling through the sky - is empty. inside her, a grave. she feels it rolling in her stomach when she sleeps, hears the whine of its hinges throw open as she wakes and refuses to stay down.

cricket reaches over in the space around her for something solid, something to wrap her restless, angered fingers around. she finds a body in the darkness, a corpse or an unconscious form, she can’t tell; still like a felled oak, solid and cold and unmoving.

she curves her spine and pushes off the plane of the person’s chest, spitting out a mouthful of blood on the ground; as though it could get rid of the dark tendrils wrapping tight around her mind, as though it could remind her that she was both alive and breathing, as though it would make her think she was still unbreakable.

(she is not. she is not the wolf she has built herself to be; not the witch she’s grown into. she is but a lost, wandering little red, her cape thrown to the fire and her braids coming undone and ragged against the soil, and here, the ground will devour her.)

she trembles as she stands, knees buckling beneath her, eyes trying to focus on the scene before her.

        within minutes, she hears the story: of the few who had been           snatched up by the officials, taken back to the cages inside.

cricket has not been with the group long; she barely knows the faces of the names who were taken. she should run, now, from this cursed group, because she should be afraid of the consequences to come.

she should be afraid, perhaps: ambushed at camp, a celebration having morphed into battle, haplessly caught on one side of a war with the tyrannical sectors. but she is cricket, and the forest swells with the rise and fall of her ribs: the velvet of a crow’s wing brushes across the flesh of her lung, its lithe little body flitting in her throat, pressing the throb of its chest against her pulse.

she should be afraid, but instead, her skin starts to buzz like live electricity, angered at the injustice of the attack - angered at the audacity of it. she bites her lip, splitting open a wound, her dark eyes hot with spirit.

          how dare they attack her?                how dare they. how dare they!

(about time i had some fun, anyway, she thinks, wiping the blood from her lip; she stands firm in her vote to go after what has been taken from them.)