Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Having grown up in Candor, Lilith had learned from very early on what a believable lie looked like. She could even say she had once been good at making a few of those up, even if she always forgot a detail that would later destroy her own fictional stories. It wasn't until years later, after her father's suicide, that guilt had started flowing her insides whenever she said something that wasn't the truth. It made her want to vomit, and it made her sweat, and it even gave her migraines, on a few occasions. So, Lilith had stopped lying.
At least that had been the plan, up until Nate had spotted the gash on her forehead, the morning after Peter's attack. Eric had been right when he'd claimed she didn't need stitches, and she'd only been in the hospital wing for 20 minutes as the nurse disinfected the wound. On the way back to the dorm, Eric had told her that the less people knew about what had happened, the better. If someone were to find out the extent of her rule breaking, she'd be joining the factionless before being given a chance to explain, and that was something the girl didn't want. Anything but that.
Still, despite wanting to get the best ranking possible, Lilith just couldn't focus on her training, during the following days. They had done some more shooting practice with guns, most of the transfers seeming to have gotten better after Capture the Flag. However, Lilith had only managed to hit the target a total of five times in as many hours, which had earned mocking grins from Peter, Molly and Drew, that she'd done her best to ignore. Four had seemed confused by how she had gotten so much worse in the span of the two days, even approaching her at the end of a session to ask if she was doing okay. Like she had been told, the brunette simply smiled and nodded.
She had been aware that iniciation was turning the transfers into the worst versions of themselves, but she would have never thought that it would get to this extent. She never even thought of the possibility that one of the boys she had grown up with, someone she saw in the backyard of the house next to hers nearly every day, would descend to the point of hitting her with a rock. Peter's intentions hadn't been just to intimidate her, and she knew that if Eric hadn't gotten there when he did, the fighting would have lasted until one of them was passed out, or worse. Lilith was perfectly aware that she was in a state of denial, but she couldn't drag herself out of it, no matter how much she tried.
Knives flew on both sides of her as she made her way towards the target she had chosen, between Christina and Nate. Target practice had taken a different turn, that day, and instead of shooting at the targets, they were throwing blades at them, doing their best to hit the middle. It was a task that needed more precision than what they had been taught, that far, and Lilith wasn't in the right state of mind to focus on the area she was supposed to hit. Her knives consistently collided against the target, not sticking to it and clattering to the ground with a solid clank, that made her flinch every time.
Not even blinking, Lilith turned around after collecting her blades from the ground, gripping all three of them tightly in her hand. Christina's eyes met hers, a worried frown lacing her features, and Lilith was the first one to look away as she reached her spot, a few feet away from the target. Her heart hammered against her chest as she checked the clock on the wall to her right, sighing as she noticed that she still had to practice during another hour. If there was a day Lilith would have chosen to stay in bed and ignore the fact that she was alive, that was the one she would have picked.
