Cadet at the city of Metropolis' prestigious military academy, Dusk Lancaster on the outside was a man to envy. Yet, behind his uniform, a beast having lost his compass thrived on the thrill of bloody duels, whilst the orphaned shoeshine boy he once...
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February 23rd 549 days to the miracle. Back in Sterling St..
At the crack of dawn, as the city verged over the edge of early morning dreams, bracing itself for a new day, last of the inclement night’s flurries petered out into droplets of dew. Feeble beams of light permeated the house.
Quarter past six. Damp spread havoc on the bathroom walls.
“Seriously!” the girl muttered, patting the faucet. Although they’d just brought someone to fix it, the water heater seemingly had gone out of service again, just like the fridge on the fritz. Such was the case with public housing after all, where nothing lasted more than a couple of months intact; there always was something requiring repair.
The bite of cold water extinguished any dregs of temptation she had, to sleep a bit more. The cold reawakened in her the pain, the frostbites, and hunger of the past. The days and years she spent on the streets, together with him. Over twelve years ago. Before they met the Madam.
Dusk was eight years old, and little Frost five or six, the Madam couldn’t tell for sure. The girl’s birth records were lost in the midst of a hundred other nameless number at the orphanage. Just as no one there neither knew whether she and Dusk were siblings or unrelated at all, nor where the troublesome two came from to begin with. The person to have first received them into the institute, it was assumed, had already went into retirement with no trace of her whereabouts. And so Madam Yalda, was left with no more than telltale snippets from the backlog of archives as to their origin. The boy and the girl had no family of their own, street children who made their bread slogging away day to night. Dusk was a shoeshiner and Frost sold trinkets to passersby—or so the Madam was told by some of the staff. Either way, they were glad to let go of them both, two less mouths to feed.
The boy they called Dusk, for they saw something both gloomy and charming about him, just like that transcending hour of the day. Whilst the girl they named Frost, as her eyes gave one the false impression of her being of cold mold, though inside, was a fragile nature those eyes belied, like the delicate frost of a late autumn morning.
A lot since then had changed, come and gone, around her and within her. Frost no longer was the little girl walking the winter and summer streets, praying strangers to buy some of her gingerbread or one of her straw hats handmade. Now at the prime of her teens, she’d blossomed into a rose amongst roses. Even if, she hardly saw herself a beauty, holding yet, on to her innocence, and insecurities. Though conscious, of that one thing about her, maybe in the face or body, she wasn’t sure, but it was something of which she’d grown aware, in the way men lately her age and older, at her would leer. Perhaps those hazel eyes smoldering beneath her bristling brows, giving her a sultry look that she never intended, which she hated.
Her pale face she dipped into the water, and looking back in the mirror above the sink, she contemplated her raw reflection with a grin revealing her braces, and dimples. The acne spots from that last outbreak she had, seemed to disappear. Today was a fine day. And so today, her auburn hair she did into a fishtail braid, the way she liked it the most. Braiding it into the intricate knots till she’d get tired of doing it, stopping midway, brushing her teeth or adorning, before she’d go back doing her hair, carrying on the morning routine.
At the other side of the bathroom, was Dusk.
Using the bathtub for a sink—which Frost understandably wouldn’t share—the clipper changed pitch each time it touched his face, shaving off the weekend’s stubble. Before his hair—which in contrast to Frost’s was of a dark greyish tinge—he combed into an Ivy League cut.
His upper body bare, exposing the chiseled lines across his scarred torso, old and healing still, scars of the knife, all over his body and arms.
At just over twenty, on the face of it a far cry from the frail shoeshine boy of his past, Dusk had grown into a man of sturdy and athletic build, matching his well-defined features. The jawline strong and prominent, lips thin but firm, the nose straight with a somewhat low bridge, and the eyes hard, a lighter shade of his hair. And yet, beneath it all, the handsome physique and the guise of invincible youth, long dormant illness had lurked.
Twenty-five to seven o’clock. Dressed in his black Gakuran-style uniform, a plain suit with a short standing collar, buttoned neck-to-waist. From under the bed pulled he out a pair of shoes, and a sheathed double-edged dagger.
