Proven

Chapter 1 - Two months ago

 The air slices through my hair as I leap forward to attempt to land another punch. Emeryn, just as easily as the air flows through my hair, dodges out of my way causing me to fall forward onto my chest; knocking any air in my system out. I struggle to get a breath in as I rush to get up, to continue the meaningless fight. I know that my father is watching. He doesn't know that I know; but I do. After 5 years of assassin and spy training you start to become quite aware of your surroundings.

"Ready to give up yet Faye?" Emeryn remarks snarkily. She's standing in front of me in her usual starting position for when we fight. She cocks her head at me while smirking obnoxiously.

"God," I think to myself. "can she ever just shut up?"

"Never, Em–" I answer as I push off the ground and stand back up, taking a shaky but deep breath, still recovering from falling.

"Good. 'cause I'm not either—"

Emeryn basically pounces towards me as she finishes speaking and tries to land a punch before I dodge to the left just enough to get out of her line of contact. I lose my footing slightly but regain my composure, leaning forwards and grabbing Emeryn's arm as I do so. I make a small, but safe dive to the floor, dragging Emeryn along with me. Once we both make it down, me making a slightly less painful fall to the floor, I am able to more or less pin her to the floor; one knee on her chest and holding both of her arms above her head with one of my own hands. She groans in pain as I dig my knee into her solar plexus.

"Shit–" Emeryn curses under her breath as she squirms under my grip trying to break free.

"Not so cocky now, huh?" I boast, smirking slightly. I feel a wet sensation on my neck and bring my free hand up to investigate the feeling. Looking back down at my hand I see a candy apple red smeared across my fingers and realize that my chin is bleeding. I assume that it's from when I fell onto my chest; I had smashed my chin against the floor. I ignore it from now and wipe the blood on my hand off on my pant leg before looking back down at Emeryn. "Are you finally done?"

"Yeah– yeah just let me up," She says somewhat sounding defeated. We had been sparring for over half an hour without any winner at this point, so I would get why she would be discouraged.

I bring my knee to the side of her, pushing myself up. I reach my hand out for her to grab but she ignores it and gets up on her own.

I look at her for a moment, in silence, as she cleans herself off. I replay the spar in my head trying to think of anything that I could possibly critique or compliment about her fighting. It's kind of a thing that after a fight I try my best to compliment or critique the person's fighting skills.

I think back to her dodging; which ultimately resulted in my fall which caused me to lose both my breath and my footing for the rest of the fight.

"Your dodging is getting better Em," I nod my head towards her, my eyes falling at her hips. "Although I would recommend utilizing your hips more when trying to quickly dodge an attack. You seem to have more of a jump when you dodge but if you were to use your hips more you would be able to move quicker and more effectively."

Emeryn nods slightly before walking towards me.

"You should probably go get that checked out Faye; that looks hella painful," She brings her hand up to my face, gently tilting my chin up to inspect the bloody area. "Not to mention the amount it's bleeding."

I start to notice the wet feeling now trailing farther down my neck, closer to my collarbone. "It's fine; I don't want to make a big deal of it right now–" I slightly cock my head towards the entrance, where my father is standing. Not enough for him to notice but Emeryn's eyes travel over and notice him.

"I don't want to make him think I'm using it as an excuse to get the fight over with." I mumble quietly.

Emeryn's lips press together forming a thin line. She nods a little at the sight of my father and retracts her hand from my face, wiping the small amount of blood on her hand on her leg. "Alright, makes sense." She acknowledged. "Just– get it checked out or clean it up soon." And with that she walks off the sparring mat, towards the locker rooms.

As Emeryn leaves I look down at the mat and see a small spatter of blood from my chin. The adrenaline starts to wear off from the fight and I start to feel a sharp pain under my chin and groan painfully. The pain is nothing I haven't felt before but that doesn't make it any less painful; just makes me care about it less. Looking down, I sigh quietly while walking off the mat to the bench beside it; where my bag is. I sit down, the cool metal of the bench pressing against my bare thigh, shocking me slightly as I sit.

The faint creak of the rusted, old metal can be heard as another group of girls walk into the gym and to the other sparring mat. I watch as one of them, a blonde girl with short hair and a tank top on, says something and the rest of the group follows with obnoxious laughter. I scoff to myself softly as I lean forward to grab the first aid kit out of my bag. From the first aid kit I grab some Isopropyl Alcohol wipes and a wrap of gauze. I pull up the camera app on my phone, using it to see what I'm doing. The split in my chin is slightly worse than what I had originally thought but once again, better than some of the other injuries I've had here. I pretty much zone out as I clean the pieces of dried blood off of the cut, mostly just replaying the prior fight with Emeryn in my head, deciphering what I could've done differently or better.

I don't exactly know how long it had been when the crash of the entrance door closing pulled me out of my train of thought. Looking up towards the door I notice that my fathers presence is absent. It's almost as if a small weight had been lifted off of my chest; even though I know he's still going to lecture me about my poor posture and footing later on in the evening. I check the time on my phone and realize that it's almost 18:00. Realizing this, I quickly throw some butterfly stitches onto my cut and pack up my bag before heading to my room to shower and change before dinner.

Walking out of the gym I pass the group of girls at the other sparring mat and glance at the blonde girl.

"I swear I've never seen her here before–"

Ignoring the fact that I've never seen this girl before and I basically know everyone at this academy, I continue walking towards the entrance door. Once in the hallway I notice that it seems more empty than usual; but given it's almost 18:00, it makes sense. On the way to my dorm I put my headphones in and turn on my playlist.

By the time I make it to my dorm it's already 17:50 so I have to be quick with cleaning up so I can make it to dinner on time. I lazily lob my bag onto my bed and walk into the bathroom; taking my hair down and quickly jumping into the shower. While in the shower, the water that is running into the drain is tinted a dark red, a mix of the blood from my chin and the red dye from my hair washing out. I only take a quick shower, rinsing off my body and quickly washing my hair. Before running out the door towards the mess hall, I throw my hair into a messy bun and grab a hoodie and a pair of leggings, putting them on before grabbing my bag, and heading out the door.  

A/N

Okay- So there's the first chapter of my new original story, Proven. The total word count was 1,447 and for a first chapter I think that that's pretty good. Lmk what you think of it bc I am working really hard to get this book to be amazing as I would love to at some point publish it!