#if you want info about hellhound's early childhood; her brother; and the unseen then here u go }

[huntershowl]

drabble 001: rotting city

 some people find refuge in the embrace of another. a parent, a brother, a lover. some people find refuge in courage. some find it in habits, healthy or unhealthy or somewhere in that sloshy gray area in between. some people don’t find refuge at all.

PERSEPHONE AISA used to believe she found her refuge in family. not a complete one by any means. a voidblooded child on the streets of a city corrupted by the clawing hands of moral decay would not be safe on her own. but she wasn’t on her own. she had her twin: LETO AISA, quiet and sensitive with a creative soul. they took new names when they left home. new names to symbolize new lives. new names for a fresh start, away from their barbed-wire parents, their gilded-cage life. leto was not good at standing up for himself. he was empathetic, his words falling flat when he tried to sound tough. he didn’t want tofight – he wanted to draw, paint, create beauty out of duskwall’s dust and grime, make something within its crackling lightning wall that was beautiful rather than bloody… but the two needed to eat. they needed somewhere to sleep when it rained. they needed to stay alive in the midst of gang wars and hungry eyes searching for voidblooded children like them to traffic who-knows-where. so persephone picked up the slack. they’d shared a womb, but they didn’t share everything: she had all the fire. quick to temper and slow to forgive, persephone did whatever she had to in order to keep her and leto safe: steal, con, hurt people, a spirited little anklebiter with a cunning mind and fast hands. she was the first to pick up a knife. she was the first to draw blood. but that didn’t mean she was ruthless. persephone did her best to solve problems nonviolently. she wasn’t good at words, but like leto, she was empathetic; it was easy to see when hurting someone wasn’t an appropriate solution, when they were more hurt than she was already. an exchange of money or information was a better use of both her and the antagonist’s time. logic, already primitive in a child’s mind, was frequently overruled by the pair’s emotions. and when the two hit aroadblock, they chose an option that would change their lives for the worse, forever. duskwall was already ruled by a handful of factions: gangs, mostly, peppered with a few secret societies and larger crime syndicates. none of these were more insidious than THE UNSEEN. if the name didn’t reveal enough, the unseen was of a debatable size – no one knew how many people were in it, who was and who wasn’t on their side, in their pocket, on their payroll. they were rumored to have people in the government, influencing the lord governorship; people in ironhook prison, controlling who was and wasn’t put away; people in the bluecoat police force, the imperial military, the goddamn factories. despite its apparently insidious size, there had never been an information leak. now, that wasn’t to say everyone in the unseen was – well – unseen. its leader, SANYA TRISKEL, was comparatively very fucking seen. they lived in the largest mansion in the city. bigger than the lord governor’s, bigger than the suite the emperor stayed in when he came to visit duskwall. they were a public figure who wined and dined with duskwall’s finest, attended nearly every opera, and installed gramophones in their most frequented establishments so that they could listen to jazz whenever they wanted to. they weren’t from duskwall’s mother continent, the imperialist country akoros. they had been born in iruvia, a continent southwest of akoros whom the imperial military had not gotten their colonizer fingers on yet. sanya immigrated to duskwall at an unknown time and somehow managed to become the most powerful person in the world. one arm was made from an unfamiliar white metal, something light and strong that glowed with yellow light. their eyes, an amber-gold hue, split into two irises when they were angry ( so the rumors went. only an unlucky few had ever seen them angry and lived to tell the tale. ) they ruled the unseen from the public eye, their fingers wrapped around puppet strings attached to every continent in the known world. duskwall was certainly under the unseen’s heel. knowing all of that, persephone and leto decided to try and ask for the unseen’s help when they finally ran out of scraps of luck. no more benevolent bakers. no more unguarded awnings to sleep under. no more money, no more water. there was only one direction to turn. the contracts were short and uninvolved, at first. eavesdrop on this conversation. report to this messenger. pickpocket this man’s mailbox key. run this message to that client. their orders came from different people every time, as that was how the unseen worked; no one knew each other’s names or faces, only the right thing to say. as time went on, though, their jobs became increasingly more precarious. persephone broke her arm trying to escape a client angry with the news she brought him. leto was reduced to tears over and over again, and they had no one to tell that it was too much. they couldn’t ask for help from colleagues whose names, faces, and locations they didn’t know. nobody talked to sanya, of course – such a huge organization meant that very few members of the unseen interacted with them directly. the twins were teenagers – thirteen or fourteen, she couldn’t remember anymore – when they finally decided to escape. the unseen had proved too dangerous to stay in while planning a future for themselves. persephone spent days charming the booth worker at the floating city’s airship docks enough to get herself and leto tickets off of the continent altogether. no more duskwall, no more akoros, no more unseen. besides, other people had left the gang before. some had retired, some had quit, all without much fuss from the gang at large. the twins had no belongings other than a few keepsakes from home: a small framed painting for leto; a mostly-empty bottle of cologne for persephone that smelled like a pine forest; the clothes on their backs; each other. leto, with his nubby black horns, persephone with her smoking hair. the night before their departure, they sat in their assigned room in an unseen safehouse and drank clean water from a shared pitcher. ❛ where d’you think we’ll end up? ❜ leto asked, scratching at the base of one of his horns. his skin was drying out now that it was getting colder, and the horns area itched like crazy. one of his paintings sat drying next to them, its corners weighed down by rocks. duskwall, but with a sky lit by brighter colors than the shattered sun would normally allow. ❛ i don’t know. ❜ persephone was still having trouble hiding her ritzy brightstone accent. it was the quickest way to peg someone for a runaway kid, the quickest way to get yourself kidnapped for ransom and thrown back home. she had to speak slowly, if she talked at all. ❛ maybe … mm. severos? ❜ ❛ you just want to pet the horses, seph. ❜ ❛ i also wanna eat all the fruit. ❜ ❛ all of it? ❜ ❛ well – i mean – yes. but they can grow more after that. ❜ leto smiled, covering his mouth with a hand to hide the grin. persephone hated that the world had made her brother so self-conscious. she cracked a smile back with an involuntary little chuckle. this … this was the happiest she’d felt since before they’d joined the unseen. it was her and leto. nothing could stop them. the last thing persephone remembered from that morning was the cool breeze of a hopeful dawn, before she and her brother were dragged away with sacks pulled tightly over their heads.

––––––––––– HELLHOUND, THE HUNTER doesn’t find refuge in much of anything. once persephone became a sleeper, anger and grief arose in her place to form the shape of a woman fed by liquor and fury and unhealthy loyalty. she and leto haven’t talked in almost three years. it’s better that way, to hellhound; if leto hates her, he won’t share the cloud of shit-hits-the-fan bad luck that seems to follow her everywhere she goes like a hungry stray. he does not know what has happened to turn persephone into hellhound. if he knew, he would be killed. it’s as simple as that.  attachment is weakness, as far as hellhound is concerned. the deeper a bond becomes, the more vulnerable both parties become to demons and prying eyes; if you care about no one and no one cares about you, then the only person your enemies can go after is yourself. yes, hellhound has a brother. i heard she doesn’t give a damn about him, though. they haven’t even spoken once in three years.  better that way, she repeats when the longing threatens to eat her alive. better that way, better that way.