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Cassandra doesn't like the sun.
At seven years old, a child with a hole in her skull and cotton in her eyes doesn't like the sun, and hates especially when an infant child looks her way and smiles. A seven year old doesn't understand and scowls in return, observing the infant's lips' corners curling further into its face, folding the skin. It angers her, this mockery; she almost wants to spear her wooden sword through its skull, so that it remembers no more, nothing of its life, its mother, its father, or its death.
Cassandra grows like a grass shoot, reaching for the sun. Her wooden sword disintegrates and in its place is a steel one, burning her palms to oblivion. A fourteen year old knows nothing but an aching sense of pride and ambition; someone, anyone to know she's there. A fourteen year old watches the metal back of the only father she's ever known and sees the gold glint in the light. A fourteen year old's mouth is bitter with immeasurable patience.
A child walks up to her, buck teeth and tattered pants. She can't bother herself to take note of any other features, with eyes of cotton bleeding under the unrelenting heat of the sun. She's sweaty and she fans herself discreetly.
"Lady Cassandra," the child begins, she hates that title, she hates that name, don't call her that, don't call her that, "if a bird flies too close to the sun, will it leave a shadow over everyone?" A fourteen year old stares at a child with buck teeth and tattered pants, gaze becoming hard and cold. "Yes," she replies, glaring at the ground. "But nobody will see the shadow until they look up and want the light." The child skips away to a mother it remembers, fondly, sweetly. This time, Cassandra spears her sword through a straw target, watching it slice even farther, through the straw, through the air, and stab two inches into the packed soil of the field.
A twenty-one year old wears a dress and a corset and a headdress and pumps, and she wants to peel off her skin in strips until her flesh, pink and moist and bitter-tasting pulses under the moonlight's chill.
She trains and trains her final days and doesn't bother to scrub off the grime until its late at night, a fruit of her efforts. Those days are lost when she slips into her powder blue shoes, sweating in the afternoon light with patience rotting away somewhere in her heart. She falls in love somewhere along the way, a sun just bright enough, touch just soothing enough, that she can forget about it for a while. In her dreams though, the children ask her, "Lady Cassandra," don't call me that, don't, "if a bird flies too close to the sun, will it leave a shadow over everyone?" And she wakes up with a thread and cloth in her hand, stitching for a beautiful, radiant princess. Can she go on like this, burning her hand on steel over a flame?
Can she go on with a right hand blackened and charred, nerves severed, fingers twisted beyond recognition?
Can she go on with armor encasing her safely, knives in her belt, dress in her luggage case, waiting?
If a bird flies too close-
Can she go on, staring at the moon through the window in a moving caravan, waiting for a healing recognition? Can she go on waiting for a life shining like the moon, brighter than the life she's tethered to? Can that life she is tethered to see her?
-will it leave a shadow over everyone?
Love becomes poisonous when its left to rot. Cassandra has never liked the sun.