Cricket had always prided herself on her ability to maintain some sort of balance. She operated on a delicate axis within herself, spun from her selfish desires and the fibres of her wild hair, round and round, round and round. Yet, for all of that, she could still remember the little girl she was on Saturn; even back then, she didn’t think she was ever fully whole. There was always something missing, some part of herself that wasn’t stitched up quite right. She lost pieces of herself as she dragged on from day to day, dropping them from her careless, shaking hands and pretending she was still fine without them.
(Truthfully, her balance was a facade for ignorance.)
As she stood against the bitter winds of Pluto that day, she reminded herself of who she was, what she was, where she came from. She thought of every sin she’d ever committed to get where she was now, every sleight, every shadow consumed. She was Cricket, a city unto herself. Her laws were cruel and self-serving, crafted for survival. Some days, she thought that was why she was all fucked up inside. People like her were toxic, even to themselves — she was never supposed to make it.
And perhaps she wouldn’t, in the end. Cricket scrunched up her brow as she walked a little further, mind still reeling. “Hey, where are we — ?” she started, folding her hands across her stomach. She’d turned to look behind her then, back to the recruit she’d been following just moments ago. However, her introspection seemed to have led her to wander off, and only then had she noticed the lack of the other’s presence. “Ah, hell.”
how did you and your brother turn out so different?
“Honestly, this is the last question I’d know the answer to. I mean, our parents treated us differently, so it probably started somewhere there. We hung out with separate crowds all the time, we both liked things that the other didn’t, and we just… didn’t lead lives that involved each other, you know? So — well, yeah. I guess it isn’t that we turned out so different, but that we were never the same at all.”
Everybody seemed sort of distant as of late. To be fair, it was almost entirely his fault. What with weapons being introduced, roommates being reassigned, and new faces beginning to flood the base — he had fallen back into his reclusive state in attempts to stay out of the way. Today had been the first day he’d actually left his new room. He told himself he was going to go look at some of the weapons, but instead he found himself tucked nicely away in the library amongst the books. He sat quietly and read up on things he already knew, hoping he’d be left alone. Yet a voice sounded from directly beside him and he jumped slightly, glancing over.
Cricket hadn't been looking for him, not really. She'd just been in the library, walking down the aisles, eyes casually glancing around each large shelf. She hadn't been looking for him, because that would imply she was worried — and Cricket was never really one to worry about anyone aside from herself. (That's how it was supposed to be, at least.)
Still, despite her inner denial, she couldn't help the smile that spread across her face when she saw Alek, sitting tucked away on his own. She figured that meant he wanted some time and space to himself — but she rolled back her shoulders and sauntered over regardless. "I said, it's nice to actually see you around again," Cricket chirped, customary grin gracing her lips.
He remembered her frizzy hair blowing in the wind when they went puddle jumping after a storm long ago. He remembered watching her grin; it seemed like the most genuine thing he’d ever seen in his short few years of life. He remembered how he wished she’d smile all the time. Her brown eyes peered into his, and it was the first time he’d been able to fully understand that she was his sister; that parts of her were in him too. He remembered the sound of her laugh, and he remembered the mud spattered on her little dress and on his little pants. Most of all though, he remembered how his parents had offered him a new pair of pants with a playful roll of their eyes and a boys will be boys, while they glared at her with contempt. Would it kill you to act like a lady? they’d asked as mother dabbed at her dress with a damp cloth and pulled her hair back in tight braids.
They’d always looked at Cricket as a hurricane, and he was the quiet after the storm. But Finn knew what they didn’t. He knew how dangerous the silence was. He wished he was a hurricane.
One day, years ago, he had come home from school to find his spot beneath the tree messy. Someone had dug up his prizes, little bones of his creature conquests and knives he’d grown out of, then that someone had tried to cover the hole back up with soil. But he could tell. The dirt wasn’t as meticulously packed as he had left it. At the house, Cricket’s shoes had been covered in dirt. He had always wondered if she’d done it. He’d always wondered if she knew about his darkness. He wondered why she’d never told.
He envied her, the blonde with her crossbow sitting feet away from him. He envied her shaking limbs and her cracking voice and the eyes that couldn’t focus on his. She was so human. He wished he were human.
He supposed that if he were human, he’d hug her and kiss her forehead and tell her that they’d be safe together. But he wasn’t human, and she didn’t need him to protect her, so he kept their cold distance.
"She didn’t tell me," he said. For some reason he couldn’t place, he was angry about it, but his face remained a blank slate. He was always so angry; he’d learned to disguise it. "Got a letter, just like you did. Didn’t know you’d be here," he said, looking down at his feet. "Wanted ta get away, y’know?"
Cricket never really knew how to explain the dead weight in her chest, the need to chase a home away from home, looking for something easy, something whole, something simple. Everything she had wasn’t quite enough, just like she wasn’t quite enough. The day she left for Starbound, she’d contemplated on leaving behind a vague note but had, ultimately, decided against it. As she looked to Finn now, seemingly completely uncaring, she wondered what choices she could’ve made for these circumstances to be different.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t want to see her brother again — as aforementioned, some part of her would willingly admit to caring for Finn — but the air around her felt thick, and her hands were still trembling at the fingertips. Calling it nervous tension would be an understatement; she was almost frightened, for he was a ghost in the life she’d left behind, and she’d never thought she’d meet him again in her current state, with decayed hope and increasing disquiet. She’d never feared him before, even with everything she’d seen him do — but she was scared of so many things, nowadays, and his sudden appearance merely added to the stress.
Still, although she was his older sister, she had not once really acted as such. She’d always viewed her and Finn at an equal standing, and their parents put Finn before herself — where was the room for her to become the elder sibling, in such an environment? She rarely felt protective of Finn, and there were even lesser occasions in which she’d been worried. Mostly, Cricket had regarded him with a tense indifference as they’d grown up, coexisting side by side rather than truly living together. This shouldn’t be different to how it would be to run into a neighbour or a classmate, given their history — but it was.
It was different, because Cricket had the urge to yell. To tell him he shouldn’t be here, that it was dangerous, that he didn’t know what he was getting himself into — but she didn’t, because he had never seemed to need her protection nor her concern, and she hadn’t the right to start now. “She probably felt it wasn’t that important,” Cricket sneered instead, though she tried to suppress the malice. The blonde had always made her distaste of her parents and her previous lifestyle fairly clear — but she’d changed over the course of just a few weeks, and she felt it inappropriate.
Yet, with the familiar presence of a life long left behind, she was quickly reverting to her old ways, for better or for worse. At his explanation, Cricket hummed to herself, turning away and back to her crossbow. Her voice was clipped. “Yeah, I get it. I – I wanted to leave too, obviously. It’s just surprising to see you, is all.”
Finn had never fit in. Not really, anyway. But he was always good at playing pretend. Everyone laughed off his dark side. He was just a rebel without a cause, just a boy who liked to brood. Even his parents couldn’t see that he was a monster. Nobody saw who he really was, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Except for maybe his sister.
Everyone thought they were opposites, Cricket and Finn, because she was so reckless and he seemed so measured, so put together. But he knew; he saw the similarities between them every time he lost control. Every time he looked into a victim’s eyes, every time he followed a scared girl home, he felt his heart race. He was giving into his needs, which made him just like Cricket. He thanked the God he couldn’t believe in that his sister was so much better than he was. Their family — hell, the universe — didn’t need more than one monster.
The hunting knives they had on the base were far better than the knives he’d bought himself back home. These ones were so sharp that they cut through the fleshy dummies like butter, and they were so light that he could throw them at a target from a hundred feet away.
He had taken a break to shower and eat before going back to the training room. It was late, and only a fraction of the recruits were still there, mastering the weapon of their choice. He sharpened his knives absentmindedly on his whetstone as he scanned the training room. He hadn’t met many of the recruits, and it was an instinct to size them up. One question swam through his mind: could he take them?
The lanky brunette towering in the center of the room, the terrifying women practicing hand-to-hand combat, the blonde in the corner cleaning her crossbow….
The blonde. He slipped his knife in his pocket and sauntered over to her. He couldn’t help the way his face softened at the sight of her, his sister. The siblings weren’t close, but he felt certain that if he was capable of love, he loved her.
"Had us all worried when ya ran away, y’know," he said quietly once he was a few feet away from his sister. "I’m glad you’re here though. If anyone’s brave enough ta lead this rebellion, s’you." Of course, he couldn’t be certain that that’s why they were recruited, but he felt like it was the best explanation. And it was true. He could see why she’d been chosen; she was fire, she was light, she was determination. But he couldn’t imagine why an institution that had seen the good in her had also wanted him.
As the blonde got on with her task, a sigh escaped a lips, pale hands running over weary eyes; but they froze in place at the sound of an all too familiar voice. Her head turned slowly, carefully, cautiously — her hands trembled, knuckles tightened over her crossbow.
“— Finn?”
Cricket could remember rolling out of bed as a kid on Sunday mornings with her dress rumpled up at the hems, staring up at a blue bruised sky and wondering if all families were as insincere and broken as her own. She often came to the conclusion that it was only them, the Winnoways, a house of beautiful monsters, stitched up incorrectly at the seams. Mother and Father would always stare at her, eyes the black of gasoline pools, sadness in the wrinkles of their face as they look at her, her lips stained red with sin.
When did we lose you?
(You didn’t lose me: I was never yours.)
She was meant to be a dusted marble bust hiding in a white, white house. A thing of beauty, a relic. She was meant to be much more than she was, meant to be every last bit of what she wasn’t. Her mother threatened once that Cricket would one day leave them in rubble; everything would collapse at her fingertips. (She knew that to be true, at least.) She would set fire to an empire, but he would build it back.
The thought of Finn, her brother, reminded her of lost childhoods; of extinct suns and endless expectation — of the bitter taste of regret and resentment on her tongue after a family dinner, where their parents spoke of the two of them like he was the summer and she the winter. They didn’t know, but she did, though she never made move to enlighten them. Never made move to let them know of their golden child’s lesser side. They lived in blissful ignorance.
But the truth was simply so: she and her brother were both wildfires to match, and tonight she sensed someone would burn.
For the longest time, she couldn’t manage any words. When she’d left Saturn behind, he was among the last people she’d ever expected to see again. She and Finn had never been close, and she rarely made an effort to acknowledge him — never spiteful; just not bothered. Part of her knew she cared for him as her sibling, but it was a very, very small part, locked into the echoing walls of her chest. Yet, as she stood there then, confusion and fear and anger all melting into her expression, that part longed to make itself known.
“I called Mom. Thought that’d be good enough,” she started instead, trying to play off his honestly shocking presence with casual disinterest. But the way her voice cracked, the way her eyes wavered and her whole body shook was a horrible giveaway to the tempest within. She was too busy, too occupied with quelling this storm to choose her words with care. “What – what are you doing here?”
She had been an island unto herself since the day she was born.
She always thought it was something in the Saturn air, something in the artificial, abrasive breeze that cultured her to be isolated by nature, like a breathing product of selfishness. She was brought into a home, the Winnoway household, somewhat innocent and small — yet she found herself to be crooked along the way.
She wrecked people, armed with her cruel memories and fierce apprehensions, armed with the bitter thought of her parents’ icy disappointment, armed with her Cricket-brand cruelty. It was easy for her to tear into others, careless and thoughtless, taking responsibility for nothing. It was second nature to burn what she touched before she could measure the damage, because it was easier to walk away with ash on her hands than to wait until it had its turn to burn her.
Somewhere along the way, she found herself in Starbound.
It should’ve been the entire antitheses of who she was, of what she believed in. She was chaos, open fires, gasoline and reckless abandon, she was careless and thoughtless and selfish. She was Cricket. She existed to serve herself, not the friends she made to toss aside, never her overbearing parents and still not the other member of her so-called family. Yet, somehow she had ended up here, wiping down her crossbow after a practice session, working toward a purpose that could not be described as self-serving no matter where she viewed it from.
If someone had faced her with this version of herself just weeks ago, she would have laughed in their face. But she had lost that Cricket in blood, in the weight of loss and grief and understanding that had been placed on her shoulders in no more than a month. It felt like an out of body experience, as though she was trying to placate two versions of herself, sitting uneasy and unwelcome in her gut — but it was undeniable that she was here, thinking and training hour after hour. Sleep had begun to evade her, leaving her tired and wondering what the odds were of making her way out of this all in one piece.
(At the moment, her odds were slim.)
She looked down at her hands, attention fully focused upon cleaning and maintaining the various selection of bolts and arrows before her.
Ten sleek arrows rest in her quiver, each gradually nocked into her crossbow and cocked back as quick as she draws her shallow breaths.
One,
She can almost feel her parents’ eyes burning black into the skin of her neck, watching as her fingers twitch; her lips mutter empty words, furious and focused all at once.
Rebellion won’t be tolerated in this household, Cordelia.
It’s a damn shame she’s so good at it. (A natural.)
Two,
Some days, she used to pretend that she was worth more than her parents’ ideals. She pretended that all her value laid not in her poise, nor in her gentleness, nor in the fragility of her smile.
She pretended until her parents’ dreams were made into ghosts, lying still and cold under her skin.
Her anger grows thicker with each arrow she lets fly, with each silent curse she sends to the festering, incessant presence in the corner of her mind.
Her left leg is still throbbing beneath her.
Fucking hell.
Three,
There’s a part of her that’s still scared, still wary. When she first came to Starbound, she’d never have imagined that it was as dangerous, as big, as it really was.
She’d never have thought she’d be a part of something meaningful, though she’s not yet sure she wants to be.
But beyond the fear is frustration, fury, ferocity; how could she have been so blind, all these years?
She wants to wrangle someone with her bare fucking hands.
Four,
Whatever ‘good girl’ side her parents had tried to build in her was anxious and agitated when the recruits were first introduced to the assortment of weapons.
Every other side of her screamed to pick one up, to finally get to do something about all she’s felt helpless about.
It takes a little longer in her recuperation process until she’s allowed to begin training; her fondness for the crossbow comes instantly.
(She finds a knife she likes, too, for it’s not a bad thing to prepare a plan B.)
Five,
She’s acquiring a bloodlust for knowledge and understanding, for spotlights against shadowed corners of ignorance and for colours against the unenlightened monotone.
The metal buckle on the strap of her quiver raps against her chest, like a dull, metallic heartbeat.
She was the creature built from poisoned, rotten love. Built from conditional devotion, from a system which placed her upon its head as a broken crown.
My Cordelia, her mother used to say, her pure white lily, growing downwards from the sun, with waterlogged roots and sticky yellow pollen upon her fingertips.
It stained her.
(She thinks it’s this memory that brings out her affinity for poison.)
Six,
She’s conflicted and confused; she’s never cared for the serious and solemn, but she’s been forced into it again and again. Attacked on Venus, forced onto Earth, trained into a warrior — she’s getting stronger, yet she also feels herself growing weak.
(Although in many ways her mind and body have been developed, part of her has been hollowed out, too.)
She’s cracking at the edges.
Seven,
So she tries to wash herself clean, scrubbing her skin red and raw.
She will rebuild herself, in her own image.
She lifts her gaze and readies another arrow.
Eight,
She is a ruler of her own empire, now, with a name that sears like a torch; like a fire left alone in the wild, or a gasoline lamp shattered under her feet.
Cricket, not Cordelia — the commander who condemns unwanted emotion to death, who combs lightning out of her hair and sends kamikaze troops from the pit of her stomach to the echo of her voice.
Cricket, the girl who is making an ancient civilisation out of herself, a population of one paved with empty streets and shuttered windows.
She’s growing into a country at war with itself, tossing coins with her heart on both sides.
Heads, battle is coming. Tails, she’s already lost.
Nine,
Anger boils beneath her skin, taut and tense, tugging at her veins and tying them round her head until it throbs.
“Not a clue! But the same goes for pretty much all the other weapons here — so if I’m gonna start from scratch, might as well try something I feel I’ll like, you know?”
+ Modern compound crossbow; adjustable ammunition type, optical sight. Medium weight for the perfect balance between easy mobility and sharp accuracy.
+ Arrows and bolts; a wide selection of lengths and weights. Tips are often coated in a variety of poisons, found in unlabelled vials in a pack fitted to her quiver.
+ A stainless steel dagger; small enough to place in a leather sheath and hide somewhere on her person, generally fastened around her leg on the outer thigh or calf.
“Hmm, I guess that’s true. I like how this feels, though — so we’ll see how I fare with it.” She nocked a bolt into the track and weighed it in her hands, turning to the other recruit and giving him a lopsided grin. “Cool, I could do worse. And I’m Cricket, by the way; don’t think we’ve met properly.”
"Wouldn’t want to accidentally end up pegging someone in the head, would you?" Elodie smirked slightly, picking up a throwing knife and tossing it in the air, catching it by the hilt. "I like these ones. And the guns. Oh, sure, not like I’ve got anything better to do."
“Yeah, that’d be pretty bad,” Cricket grinned, watching as Elodie toyed skilfully with the knife. “Okay, that’s impressive. Or — maybe I have low standards, I can’t be sure. Have you already spent some time on this stuff?” She finished gathering her arrows, though her hands shook as she held them; she couldn’t tell if it was from excited nerves or her lingering fear of everything. “Great! ‘Cause, honestly, I’m not all that sure where to start.”
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