I decided to make one the writing prompts, this one is

BEFORE

thats all, before, however you decide to decide to interpret that, I’ll be on a trip for a couple days, but I’ll read all of your stories when I get back (except for the ones with swearing) and even add my own, can’t wait to see your ideas

A ribbon hung down in front of Venzel's face, tickling his nose.

He reached out and grabbed it, pulling it loose from the tree branch it'd caught in with his chubby toddler's hands.

"Got it, Ven?"

"Mm-hm!"

His father laughed and lowered Venzel from his shoulders, back to the resplendent spring grass. "Good. Here, hand me the string, I'll show you one more time. . ."

Venzel passed over the kite, and watched with as much attention as his five-year-old self could muster when his father lifted the kite and pulled it into the breeze, and guided it with the string until it soared up into the endless skies.

*

Mariana climbed into her brother's lap, already holding the brush and her hair ribbons.

Venzel smiled and took them. He gently brushed through her brown curls, taming the wild things. His mother sang a silly folk song in the kitchen; he hummed along as he parted Mariana's hair. His fingers deftly wove one braid, then a second, tying each with a bow.

He wondered if maybe, for a moment, he felt his father's hand on his shoulder.

*

Venzel's hands were bound with a ribbon.

Blood painted his skin, cold and congealing, but the binding remained white.

It was the only thing his eyes could focus on.

*

When he woke up, his mouth was full of the taste of blood, and every inch of his throat raw.

Venzel didn't know how long he'd been passed out. Not very, he guessed, since they had yet to discover that the lock on his cell was missing.

He struggled upright, his burnt hands singing agony whenever he forced them to do as hands should. The world tipped jerkily back and forth. His ears had stopped ringing, but they heard nothing, and when he lifted a hand to touch one, it came away sticky and wet with red. He wiped his face and found more blood there. Whether the bleeding had stopped or just begun, he couldn't tell.

He had to get out of here, before his chance was gone.

I wish I could go back in time. Before everything. Before the drugs. Before the blood. Before the gunshots.

I could still hear them in my mind. The six gunshots. Echoing in my thoughts. Together with the screaming. throat raw. Choking on my own blood. Clawing at his chest, shreds of skin, dotted with blood, floating down. And... Oh, wait. The screams are mine.

I could see the sticky red everywhere. Everything was stained with it. Like the dark crimson against his pale skin, like the six wounds on his body.

And the drugs... Taking them lets me sleep. At first, I started screaming inhumanly, waking up in the inky darkness of the night, screaming at the shadows pooling on the floor. It looked so much like blood, so so much like his blood...

But the drugs, they helped me sleep. Retreating into the deep, shadowy depths of my mind. Finally, no more blood. No more of him. I don't want to take them, but every time I try to quit, I started screaming at night again, clawing and biting like a wild, savage animal. When I close my eyes, all I could see was

Blood

Blood

Blood

But I gave it up. Yes, I did. But it was more like giving up living. Giving up everything. Withering away until I am an

Empty

Hollow

Shell.

Venzel separates his life into two halves, split cleanly down the middle like a cleaved coconut. There is Before, when he was young and free and his father was merely a cog in the decor of his beautiful childhood. Before there were beautiful sunsets and his mother’s lilting voice. Before there was Mariana. And, there is After, where his father became a slavering creature of lead and metal, there is the scraping pain of adulthood thrusted upon him too early. After is smoke filled skies. After is lonely.

Venzel turns over in his bunk and presses his good ear to the pillow, attempting to block out the noise and clanging of machinery above him. He hears the door open and braces for Chico’s entrance: he always stinks of tobacco, and tobacco smells too much like Venzel’s father. He used to love that smell. It meant Papa's home. It meant stories about airship engines and the men who flew too close to the smog-line and never came back.

He was eleven when the smell started meaning something else.

"Stand up straight," his father had said, not looking at him. There was a man across the desk, broad-shouldered, a brass monocle screwed into one socket, fingers heavy with rings shaped like skulls and cogs. The Vultora crest was stitched into his collar, the same crest Venzel had seen chalked onto walls in the lower district, always followed by a body.

"He's small," the man had said.

"He's clever. Good hands. He'll grow into the work."

Venzel didn't understand, not fully, not yet, only that his father was talking about him the way he talked about parts for the tank frames he used to build. Good hands. He'll grow into it. He would thrash and scream the day the Vultora would buy him from his father like cattle. He did not yet know that this was what they had been planning.

Mariana knew before he did. The night before After began, before the thrashing bloody deafening struggle of betrayal, she came to his room with her hair unbraided and her small hands full of ribbons — his ribbons, the ones from every birthday, every First-Bloom festival, the ones he'd tied into her hair a hundred times.

He didn't know yet that it was the last time he'd braid anything of hers. He didn't know she'd be gone by the following moonrise, spirited off by their mother's brother to some smoke-choked port town neither of them had ever named aloud, because names could be beaten out of a boy, and a boy who didn't know couldn't tell.

He only knew the ribbons were warm from her hands, and that some small, foolish part of him still believed his father loved him.

***

The gang called themselves the Vultora, and Venzel learned quickly that "good hands" meant hands that didn't shake when you were told to pick a lock, strip a bloodline valve, or hold a man down while someone else did worse.

He was good at it. That was the worst part. He was good at it.

He asked about Mariana once to a man with a clockwork jaw who laughed so hard the gears in his cheek clicked aloud. "Your sister's smoke on the wind, boy. Could be anywhere. Could be nowhere." A pause, cruel and deliberate. "Could be dead. Depends how much your old man owed."

Venzel stopped asking. It was easier to believe smoke carried on the wind than to imagine her in a ditch somewhere, hair unbraided and alone. The night that image took over was the night he asked Chico for a pinch of the Gold Leaf he kept in a tin in the rafters, just a pinch, to quiet his mind. The ritual of it: dropping the powder into water, setting droplets on tin foil and lighting to inhale the smoke—had become second nature to him. Something to still his hands. Something to quiet the deafening silence.

He hummed his mother’s folksong before inhaling once more, savoring the last of the high as he lay beneath his thin blankets, before Chico, coughing and hacking, shook him awake.

Venzel turned over to greet him.

Chico was covered in blood.

I screamed. An unearthly, inhuman sound that tore and ripped apart my vocal chords. Blood dripping off Chico's body. Pooling on the dirt caked floor. Sky turning crimson. Like blood. Like HER blood. The stuff was dripping off the inky blackness. obscuring the stars. falling into my mouth, my nose, my eyes. Thick, hot and metallic. Blinding me. Suffocating me. Screaming and screaming and screaming. No sound coming out. Clawing at my throat. HER face appearing in the sky, in the blood. Eyes blinking open. Nothing but black holes. Sucking me inside them. Choking. Vomiting on the ground. Screaming again. But this time it was HER voice. SHE was screaming. Have to save her have to save her have to save her...

My eyes flew open.

Ven lay there for a good long while, staring at the slats of the bunk above him, chest rising and falling rapidly. He thought of Mariana. Of his mother’s folksong. Of the smell of charred corn upon the grill and roasted pork and home. Eventually it passed, and the blood became a faint pulse of fear from minutes ago.

He hesitated before calling out: “Chico?” He did not follow up with I had a nightmare. He was a Vultora man now, and Vultora men were of steel. There was no reply.

Ven braced himself and rolled over. He blinked against the dark, peering at the glistening floor. “Chico?” He tried again.

A soft groan came from below. Chico lay beneath the bed, on the floor, sprawled out and smelling of engine-smoke. Venzel had to bite his tongue to brace against the acrid smell, fuel and tobacco and iron and dung from the streets. He peered down and attempted a joke despite knowing that his nightmare had become true.

“You too drunk to get into bed last night?” He tried, though his voice was thin and wavering.

Chico only waved at him limply to come closer. Begrudgingly, Ven lit the oil lamp at his bedside and illuminated the man in front of him in a sickly orange glow. It was worse than he had thought.

“Ven,” he whispered hoarsely. “Ven you gotta go, man. Take the airship. They’ve caught the boss and he’s taking everyone down with him.” He choked on a thick glob of blood then, hacking and retching until it fell to the floor with a wet noise. “Mariana, she’s out west.”

Ven stared for a second before sense overwhelmed him and he dug his arms underneath Chico’s and hauled him up onto the bed. He was bleeding from his face, his stomach carrying gash wounds of varying depth, his leg, foot and mouth busted and burst, spewing fleshy matter across the blankets.

”What happened?” Ven managed to ask, wrapping the worst of Chico’s wounds in his sheets despite the blood still seeping through.

“Jackal,” he whispered the boss’ name almost too softly to hear. “They got him. He’s not going down quietly—or alone.”

”Who? Who got him?”

Chico sputtered and choked, using the lasy of his strength to stare Ven right in the eye: “Your father’s men.”

And those were the last words Chico ever spoke.

Ven did not remember moving--this action was clockwork to him and he moved like a well-oiled machine as he stuffed his pockets with the cheap paper notes, a tin of Gold Leaf and the one gold coin Chico had always sworn was lucky. Ven did not linger on the irony of its failures tonight. He was Vultora: primed for escape and quick getaways, and the action of leaving a brother in his own blood while filling your own pockets with his provisions to get by was not something worth remembering.

He did remember the blood on his hands.

Not mine this time, he told himself, though some of it was: the burns on his palms had reopened somewhere in the two useless minutes he'd spent winding sheets around Chico's legs and pretending he wasn't wrapping a corpse. He looked at Chico's face one last time, closing the man's eyes with two fingers, the way his mother used to close his own each night before sleep, and then he made himself stop looking, because looking any longer meant staying, and staying meant dying. The compound above was already loud with the barraging crack-bang of gunfire. Ven pressed himself to the wall beside the door and listened to years of training override the animal shaking in his chest. Good hands, his father had said. He'll grow into the work. And that he had.

The corridor beyond the bunks was thick with oil-smoke and the particular bloody-copper reek that made his stomach fold in on itself and his vision swim white at the edges. He swallowed it down. There would be time to be sick later, if later came. Two men in Vultora colours lay crumpled near the stairwell, one of them missing enough of his jaw that Ven didn't need to check for a pulse. He stepped over them like a patch of mud on a grassy path.

The stairs led up to the airship dock. He'd flown with Jackal's crew a dozen times, had learned to read the pressure gauges and coax the burner to life with expert hands. He found the smallest of the airships, the courier skiff Chico used to call 'the flea', moored at the end of the dock and blessedly unguarded.

"Venzel."

The sound of his full name stopped him dead in his tracks. He turned, and his father was standing in the smoke with a pistol hanging loose in one hand.

"You're bleeding," his father said, casual as ever.

"You did that," Ven said. His voice came out steadier than he expected. "You did all of it."

His father's jaw tightened. "I did what needed doing."

"Chico's dead," Ven managed to get out without being overridden by emotion.

"Chico was expendable," his father said, "You are not. Get off the ship, Venzel. Come home."

Home. The word landed somewhere under Ven's ribs and twisted like a knife.

"Where's Mariana?" he asked instead.

His father did not reply. "Get off the ship."

The burner caught behind Ven with a soft roar, heat blooming against his back, and he understood in that moment that his father would either shoot him or let him go, and that there was no version of this where he stepped back onto the dock and became a son again. That boy had died at eleven years old with his wrists bound, and nothing left of him could be resurrected.

"I'm not asking again," his father said, and raised the pistol.

Ven didn't wait to see if he meant it. He cut the last line, and the ship lurched free of the dock, the world dropping away beneath him in a swoop of cold night air just as the crack of a gunshot split the smoke. It came close enough that something hot grazed along his upper arm and Ven bit down on a scream that would have given away exactly how much it hurt. Below him, his father's shape grew smaller, swallowed by smoke and distance and the widening dark, until Ven couldn't tell anymore if the man was still watching him go or had already turned back toward whatever remained of Jackal's crumbling empire.