☠Milo Periander☠
In the beginning of a game, Milo thinks, nothing he's done up to that point matters. It's a restart, a chance to begin again. He starts to miss the inner workings of the previous game, beginning to think this new world could never match the last. Nothing can ever be as golden, as silver, as sleet and as slow. Nothing can be better than what he'd done before.
He stares into the ice like his reflection is colder than he is. The distorted blue takes the orange color of his hair and blurs it, like some old photograph dirty and torn at the edges. His palm lifts to meet the surface- so much coldness, frost caressing skin.
Then, he stares into the reflection's eyes. Blood sinks down his cheek from the corner of his forehead, a crimson color that'd normally stand out on a face, but camouflaged into a tangle or red hair and igneous eyes. Perhaps he can't even see the wound in the ice mirror, but it stings, throbbing to the beat of triangle tings echoing across the frozen room. Perhaps Milo shivers too hard, and the entrails of his spine have begun to coalesce into snow; perhaps he shivers not enough, and the beat of his heart sedates.
His fingers sift to blue with his hand stuck to the wall. In the reflection, he blinks, and it's as if he doesn't recognize a single inch of the man before him, the man trapped in the periwinkle. He breathes in (watch the lips, they catch a drag) and cracks his jaw. It's the first time since awaking that he stops questioning if he's real.
Milo Periander is alive. And his first instinct is to die.
The commotion of killers rages on behind him, the solemn sound of blades tearing skin drifting around, the melody to a harmony of screams drilled into the ice like mosquitos to amber. His eyes can't move; none of him can move; Milo wonders if he's hurt enough to bleed out completely. His knuckles are charcoal and crimson, the imprint of them painting the ice wall as he punches it, mirror mirror, shatter like glass and not like steel.
A taste of saliva on his tongue. The subtle twinge of a headache. A twitch of the nose and drip of sweat blending with blood, and the constant cry of thoughts pouring from his head like percolating scarlet from scars. He takes a step back, and his reflection has never seemed so far away.
He wonders how it would feel for a sword to inter his chest. We abuse ourselves, he thinks, watching the pearl palace transform into a vermillion cell. He questions if an arrow through the shoulder could be so bad, poison in his lungs not a fear, not undesirable. I abuse myself, hand on frozen hand and waiting for it to stop.
In the beginning of a game, he imagines, it's impossible to see the end. And the end is all Milo craves to win.
☠Orville Stud☠
The arena is a redwood forest. And it's on fire. Somebody's screaming and it sounds like they're above him, in the canopy, though a terrified glance up quickly melts as it informs Kirk that it is only a trick played by echoes. Someone really is screaming, though; somewhere.
There was a swath of the trees south of his family's place and further south of the silicon mines. It bruised the underbelly of Three. He went there once for education. Neal and he went down there with the school. They packed every class of every level onto a train passing by empty after taking a load of coal up the other way, and they spent the day weaving through redwood clusters looking like miners. Let him tell you, nothing makes you feel small like a really big fricking tree.
Or a crate. Kirk is crouched before the one meant for him - or at least that is what the label would suggest, shouting his name out in a font so white and clean that it transcends dimensions. He has to reach up to touch it, his shivering fingers gracing the laminate and disappearing over the bright type. It's smooth. He checks again, but it's smooth. Even when he stands now, his head of shaved carrot does not threaten to poke above the top of his box. It's huge. It looks like something one would make and sell for the entertainment of children, but it's huge. It entertains, intrigues, him, so he guesses that makes him a kid. Shuddering both from fear, and the not-quite-frozen ice which has seeped through his sole and is starting to tickle his toes, and also small. So, so small.
