Gladiator

Chapter 4: Flashback

9 years ago

Another fight, just like all the others. Her opponent would be confident, unsure why everyone else was taken down by this little girl so easily.

After all, what would make a six-year-old girl dangerous?

As the fight progressed, and they started tiring, getting hurt more and more often, that confidence would start to waver.

Usually, it was only when she had a blade to their throat that the confidence they had clung to disappeared completely, leaving them to realize how horribly and terribly they had messed up.

Today had been just more fights, more false confidence, more death by her hand.

She was walked down the hall, tracking collar around her neck and cuffs around her wrists, chains dragging from her ankles.

They had taken her to the washroom after her fight, let her scrub the blood from her skin, let her change her clothes.

Now they were taking her to the dirty, cold, lonely little cell she'd been trapped in for the last two years.

But something was different.

As they approached her cell, there was a loud bang that echoed through the hall.

She heard a voice of a boy, maybe a few years older than she was, screaming in a broken voice that the guards 'couldn't do this, can't just tear people from their homes, murder families for their own pleasure.'

Her own sadness echoed in her heart at that.

Mare could barely remember her family, but what she could remember was mostly good memories.

Her mother drawing the tree with her, the two pictures vastly different in quality but praised all the same.

Her father, teaching her to fly.

Her uncle, with his striped bucket hat that he wore everywhere.

She couldn't imagine how much worse it would be to be torn from a home she could truly remember, from a family who her knowledge of them was more than spotty memories.

She looked up as she approached the shouting, realized it was coming from her cell, and furrowed her eyebrows.

Who was in her cell? Why was there someone in her cell? It was hers, not anybody else's.

But then she was thrown into the cell as well, left to stare at the sobbing boy on the floor.

She shot a glance at the guard, but he just grinned evilly, seeming to say 'good luck, brat' with his eyes, before he turned and walked away, disappearing down the hallway.

She cautiously turned back to the boy, bubblegum pink hair falling around his face, pointed ears poking through the curtain on the sides. When he glanced up, his eyes were overshadowed by red and tusks poked out of his mouth, just like it did for any piglin when they were angry.

She would later learn that the natural color of his eyes was a warm brown, and that his smile was full of shining white teeth without the tusks, since they shrink down when he isn't experiencing strong emotion.

She crouched carefully next to him, placing a gentle hand on his back and wrapping the other around his shoulders, the motions a bit stiff since she'd never really done anything like this before.

The most experience she had was a fragment of a memory of her father, holding her mother close as she sobbed into his shoulder. She couldn't remember why.

He tensed for a moment, before sinking into the hug, tears soaking through her shirt.

When he had calmed down and lifted his head up to look curiously at the girl who had spent the last few hours of her life just hugging him as he cried and screamed and broke down, not bothering to tell him nice things that weren't true.

"Hi. My name is Technoblade," he whispered, voice breaking in the middle, but he made the effort, and that was what counted.

"Nice to meet you Technoblade. My name is Marcella."