(Past Thomas/ Maven ,canon divergent)
"A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays."
For Thomas, death never comes. He is constantly evolving in a cocoon of pain as he drifts by in fighting and run...
'Something wasn't dead. But alive, it wasn't either.'
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The pistol is cold steel and steady, smooth against the palm of his hand. Scratches run along the pistol grip. They tell stories of fights, spilled drops of blood and soaring bullets ripping through flesh.
The first was the hardest, oh yes, but pulling the trigger seems so easy. The face of the man is staring at him but Thomas cannot look back. He pulls the trigger again and again and AGAIN.
It sings and screams, a promise of obedience in the hand of its owner.
His crooked scarred fingers brush over it like a lover at night, caring and careful. They check it the third time in a row. They linger along the trigger and remind him of the times he pulled it.
What's your name? People ask.
Thomas, the ghost of a boy answers.
Just Thomas?
Yes. Just that. He lost the rest of himself in the pile of corpses. Somewhere along the way. There are dead eyes and whispers. Something telling him of a hand reaching out for his, of stolen glances and a laugh. It's a story belonging to another Thomas. A boy with hope and light, a boy with kindness. But it's as far as the horizon and as unattainable as catching fog with fingers.
That's all there is to the world. Guns and fog, blood and corpses. And ash.
He learned it the day they left him to bleed out. The day his breath stuttered and his heart stood still for the slightest of moments.
Ash is the snow of his world. It is the first thing the ghost remembers. Soft fluttering, caressing him like the fluttering sounds of wings. Wings like the dark ones, a flock of crows. Ash and crows. A dead plane and rotting flesh. Beaks burrowing mercilessly in faces he has known.
Eyes wide open, blood crusted over a small freckled nose. The shining eye of a bird, a tilting head. A beak burrowing with a SMACK SMACK deep into the open eyes. Thomas watches HE WATCHES he knows he will be the next.
When you have lost your worth, the world eats you.
This knowledge still cannot stop his hand from sliding into the pocket of his coat. There's a piece of paper, resting below the beating in his chest, the place where his heart has once been.
There's a face on that piece of paper. A face the dead boy knew. It's the face of a prince. The face of a friend. The face of a...
Stolen smile, lingering, glancing, careful, but it's there, and it MEANS something-
His strongest memory of him is fire. It burns through his skin . And then nothing more. Until he's healed and still more dead than alive, and they put him in a place where everyone knows they will die eventually. And the ash flutters like snowflakes and the crow's beak burrows in- CAW-
