[ Set during SCAR ]

Once, long ago, Leifite had peered into the bottom of Pandora's Box, and found only madness among the dark. Once, long ago, she saw her blood to be black.

Some things leave their marks violently. Stolen limbs, lost eyes, jagged scars across skin. You learn to adapt, to continue the fight, and the body heals.

Some things leave their marks on those around you. Forgotten loved ones, burned memories, grave stones among the grass. Here you move on, you pay your respects, you keep them in your thoughts.

Yet others leave their marks deep and hidden in the recesses, locked away and contained. These ones you forget about, you ignore, you turn away from until they begin to eat you from the inside out. Sometimes you carve your flesh open in your agony, sometimes you dream of drowning, sometimes you step through a door and wind up as someone new.

Sometimes you grin and laugh with eyes wide with blood lust.

That was not exactly something you could do in proper society, much less while on the roller rink. So she learned to calm the madness, to calm the need to make everyone bleed. She’d smothered it under pretenses of being a proper lieutenant and the ‘model soldier’ and to keep her place on the derby team.

(She’d not meant to break that girl’s pelvis with her hip check, but she’d been so whiney and cheating and needed to be taught a lesson. Really!)

Leifite kept herself in check, kept the violent tendencies from reaching the surface. She may have facial burns from the oil, but it was one small sacrifice in Metallia’s name. She’d grown past it and found her blood to be red.

She was in control.

Some things linger in the dark until they see a chance to sink claws deep into your heart. Until they see the moment to take hold once again.

Beneath starry skies it crept forward to curl around her mind, widening her grins too wide and bubbling a giggle in her throat. It darkened her vision, whispered sweet nothings of blood and power in her ears. In the dark of the night, it began to take hold again.

She was in control.

She was in control.

She was…

A giggle bubbled in her chest among the crags and cliffs of the Rift, quiet and contained. They’d lost a few members - weaklings, they were, to be taken so easily. She wondered if they bled red when they hit the ground. Oh how she’d love to know if they bled black.

She was in control.

Calm Velma, calm.

She pulled on a hang nail until it came off of her finger, red pooling in its space. Her blood was red, not black. Red, like everyone’s blood. The Rift was a place of calm for the madness within. Here the Chaos around her smothered it, pushed it down until it was but a whisper in the dark.

Calm Velma, calm.

She was in control.

[ WC: 500 ]