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𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐲-𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐫: ballad of a lost girl
╰┈➤ 𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀: love has lost the plot
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Are you able to mourn a home you've never known?
Aviva would tell you the answer is yes—she had spent her entire life doing exactly that.
She often wondered how long Silco had expected her to believe the lie that he was her father. Likely until she figured out how genetics worked—or perhaps longer. Much, much longer.
The truth was, Silco had never been her father in any real sense. Not in the way she longed for, not in the way that left a hollow ache beneath her ribs. He had taken her in, stitched her into the web of Zaun, but there was always a shadow of distance between them—a gap too wide for blood to bridge. She could feel it in every word he didn't say, every glance that lingered just a second too long before shifting away.
She had tried, though. God, she had tried. Clinging to the pieces of something familiar, desperate for a sense of belonging. But Silco's love was as broken as the city they called home, fierce and flawed, held together by wires and spite rather than tenderness.
Aviva mourned the life she never had—the one stolen from her before she even knew it existed. The soft laughter of a mother who never rocked her to sleep, the warmth of a father who would have taught her how to be gentle, how to be loved.
Instead, she was molded by the darkness, shaped by the fires of Zaun's decay. And while she bore the weight of her scars with a brittle strength, it was loneliness that clung to her like a second skin. A haunting specter she couldn't outrun.
Yet still, she lived. Not because she wanted to—no, not out of some grand hope for a better future—but because survival was all she knew. And in that survival, she carried a secret: a fragile desire to be more than the monster they all saw. A desire to be seen, truly seen, beyond the masks they wore. Even if it meant losing what little fragments of herself she had left.
