if you must mourn, don't do it alone (Jactavia)

Part 2, Chapter Four

As Octavia dove under a pile of metal and boxes after the first bell rang to avoid the angrily slashing knives, hiding out and trying her damn best to take the advice she'd been given to lay low, she tried to remember all that Indra had taught her.

Pressing her stomach close to the muddy ground, she pressed a hand over her mouth to still her breathing, because she was sure her terror was making her breathing erratic and that might alert someone to her position. Plus, she just needed to calm the fuck down. Scared people made mistakes. Scared, distracted people did not win battles.

As she was replaying battle positions and anatomy lessons from Indra in her head, a thought echoed in her mind, something Indra had told her right at the beginning of their training, when Octavia had been young and eager to prove herself.

A warrior does not kill in battle because he wants to; he kills because he must.

At that time, Octavia had nodded sagely. She'd thought that she had understood what it meant. She thought she understood the meaning of it. But, looking back, she really hadn't at all.

She had a bolt of understanding too, that Indra had let her go about her little assassin ways because that is what she needed to do to survive the horror of losing Lincoln, to move on. It was admissible to her.

But this, in this war? Maybe that would be everyone else's mistakes. They were all swinging their swords around like they intended to cut down every person that came their way, and would do it to themselves in time. They were killing because they thought the should, not because they must.

And here, Octavia was, and she didn't want to kill a single person. But she had to, and she would, because her need to was stronger than her want to. And that's how it all clicked into place.

She'd feel bad if she had to kill Luna or Roan or Illian. Even if Luna had gone off the deep end, she had always been kind to Lincoln and this fear, this sense of hopelessness twisted people. Luna was merely human. Roan was a good leader, despite his mother. He was the sort of person that, in another life, in a different solution, Octavia would have liked to be down in the bunker because he would get stuff done. And Illian? Damn, he may be annoying, but the kid was growing on her. Especially because she'd seen how haunted he'd looked. He was scared witless too. Maybe he was smart, like she was, and hiding?

She shifted to get a view of a scuffle happening in the open area right outside her hiding place.

In the front, throwing up dust, was Roan battling a man with an oversized hammer. She almost feels sorry for the man, swinging his weapon around like a maniac; it was obvious he was never going to win against Roan. Roan grabs the hammer right from his hands and savagely knocks him over the head with it. Once is all it takes, and the sound is sickening as he goes down. Roan nodded solemnly to his dead body, before yanking off the tag around his neck. Octavia shifts and her leg kicks a drum, and the sound echoes for a moment before she's shushing the reverberation with her palms.

Roan doesn't hear it, but it alerts someone from the shadows, and although she thought she was well-hidden, her attempt to quiet the metal has left her slightly visible. She locks eyes with a man wielding two daggers.

"Fio..." Her voice carries louder than she meant it to, and in reality, she never meant to speak at all. She's horrified that she even made a squeak, but also that this is Fio she must fight. She hadn't a good chance to look at Trikru's tribute, but this makes sense.

She knows Fio, not as well as Indra, but well enough. There's a reason he's the one fighting for his clan...he very skilled, arguably maybe even better than Indra because the warriors he trains are heros. But he and Indra are friends, colleagues even. He trains men, mostly, and Octavia never wanted anyone but Indra.