#atroposbun

[whenaltsattack]

FFXIVWrite 2020 Prompt: Crux (Atropos)

CW: Violence, blood, death They couldn't see her eyes behind the low visor of the slouched hat she wore. They likely weren't even looking- the barrel of her gun was still smoking and the crowd of people had started to break into small pieces, like the sparks of a fireworks rocket. They wouldn't be able to see that her eyes were wide, too much white showing, shocked.

The gunshot had been so loud.

She had been warned that it would be like this, her first job. That everything would be too loud. Too bright. Too real. That the gun would kick like an angry chocobo and her shoulder would ache. That the stench of gunpowder would make her want to retch. She'd been prepared for blood- blood was an old friend, the coppery-rich smell of it a companion from her earliest days. The time on the shooting range had only been a weak approximation of this. Wet work, they called it. Accurate, if lacking in imagination.

Assassination. That was the other name. That was a name with imagination. Too much imagination- conjuring images of a rogue's gallery (haha) licking the blades of sharpened knives that flashed in the dark.

"Wet work" suited her better. It really defined the crux of the matter. Wet. Work. Messy, bloody, piss-stained, shit-covered, viscera-stinking WORK. A job. Just a job. Anyone could do a job. Millions of people on this star did jobs every day. Keep it in your mind, Atropos. This is a job. Wet. Work.

The man's body slumped in the souq and she walked towards him, crouching down next to the body and riffling through his clothes to find the small seal he carried on a gold chain, pinned in one of his pockets. Checking the seal, she snapped the chain cleanly and tucked it into a pocket before standing and leveling her gun down. The next blast of the big barrel erased his head into a fine mist, eliminating his identity from this world and spattering her with the remains of what had surely been a brilliant criminal mind.

She turned, wiped her face clean with a shrug of one shoulder, and walked into the alleyways that led away from the souq.

[whenaltsattack]

FFXIVWrite 2020 Prompt 17: Fade (Atropos)

They say all things fade with time.

Sometimes, time just gives them more ways to hurt you.

Atropos sat at a workbench, steadily running an oiled cloth over the barrel of a rifle. The polishing motion was all muscle-memory at this point and it allowed her mind to wander. Usually, the orchestrion would be on, playing at a moderately high volume, something for her thoughts to latch onto so they didn’t go to the dark places, the places kept behind walls so thick she could barely hear the screaming.

The weather of Ul’dah was a lot like Rabanastre. When the nights got cold like this, she could feel the deep, deep ache in her back. Tonight, it was bad, and she was forced to stop her work and stand, raising her arms over her head (she was tall enough that she could almost place her hands flat on the ceiling when she did so) and stretching back, back, back, until her hands landed on the floor and her ears brushed the rug. A kick, a flexing of tight core muscles, and the slow backbend would end with her on her feet again. Then she would stretch side to side, twisting so slowly she could feel every muscle. The scar burned before the hurt started to fade away.

The memories, though, the memories didn’t.

Running, bent low to the ground, using one hand to occasionally give herself just a little more forward momentum. Bombs falling around her, throwing earth and stones into the air before they came pelting down. Her back to a piece of fallen magitek, a pair of bladed knuckles in her fists. The commander, a flint-eyed Roegadyn man of maybe fifty summers, looking over at her with his gaze shadowed under his helm. It was just the two of them, out of a score.

“See you on the other side, ****” He might have said. The words were faded out, half-imagined. Her name for that mission was long, long lost.

She nodded, then waited for him with his sword and shield to move out from behind the wreckage and attack. One breath, two-

The tell-tale whirring of a magitek cannon was the only warning she had and she leapt up and forward as far as her legs could throw her, the piece of plating she’d been hiding behind exploding into shrapnel. A piece a handspan wide caught her just below the ribs and she hit the dirt face-first, the wind knocked out of her. Coughing, choking, she’d pulled herself into a ball then forced herself up to crawl through the blood and the shit and the mud and the bodies. She couldn’t rise- she didn’t dare. But she could no more lay down and die than the pieces of men and women around her could pull themselves back together and walk again.

She couldn’t remember how they found her, it was all faded into black after that. Empty black and a deep scar that ached when the weather went cold.