The Carnival

[Orion]

Victoria's sullen body language stood out like the beacon of a lighthouse against a malevolent storm. Upon their initial meeting, her bubbly and child like demeanor seemed terribly out of place for an indoctrinated assassin. Such an uncharacteristic personality of a professional murderer stabbed directly into Orion's memory like a pesky splinter. It irked him slightly that a buoyant, almost innocent young girl could coexist with the no-nonsense practicality of a mercenary, since they were so incongruent. In another way, however, it opened a door that he thought was closed, chained and welded shut; a person's identity wasn't necessarily born of their past. Maybe her cognitive dissonance was at an all time high, for all he knew, but her outward presentation suggested against that. Orion could spot an actor a mile away, and Victoria's performance was anything but rehearsed.

Due to their earlier encounter, Victoria's behavioural shift from perky but somewhat reserved to downright depressed triggered the saiyan's curiosity. Something occurred to sink the candy haired girl's attitude to the introverted depths of sadness. A myriad of possibilities floated in Orion's mind, all retaining feasible points. All of his thoughts were unified in the belief that this misery was caused by Gamer in some indirect fashion. Of course, he wouldn't discover the issue until he investigated.

Orion fell into the bench clumsily, almost knocking Sprinkles from his perch. He growled in a haughty British dialect, siphoning any imitating hostility that the hamster wished to portray. Straightening his top hat, he composed himself and waddled over Orion's shoulder and onto the lip of the bench behind the saiyan's neck, inching closer to Victoria. Orion grunted a warning, and Sprinkles kept his yammering to himself.

"You'd feel better if you talked about what happened," Orion suggested with as little commitment as he felt he could get away with. As much as he identified with Victoria, filling the role of an unofficial counsellor was slightly out of his comfort zone.

Victoria's eyes remained locked to her ankles. "You wouldn't want to hear it."

Orion scrunched his face. He wished she would just accept his offer, dammit. This was embarrassingly unconventional behaviour for the bellicose warrior. "Look, I ... want to know. Just tell me, will you?!"

The gloomy gaze of the youthful bounty hunter lifted to meet Orion's eyes. "Are you sure?"

"I say, look here! He's bloody well offered to be your sympathetic shoulder to cry on, so jolly well listen to-"

A burly hand coiled around Sprinkle's entire body and mouth, leaving only his widened eyes visible above Orion's clenched fist. He shook his head disapprovingly to the space hamster, conveying the point that he should slam his buck toothed pie hole shut. Orion's thoughts were mutually inclusive to the space hamster's, but even the socially awkward warrior recognised times for tact. He gesticulatively ordered Sprinkles to refrain from his extroverted bouts of honesty before loosening his grip on him. Orion watched ominously for the monocle wearing rodent to test the rule for a brief moment, but Sprinkles didn't fancy another mock asphyxiation.

The saiyan cleared his throat, stifling it with a fist to the lips. "I'd like to hear what happened."

Victoria sighed deeply and stared down the pavement before her feet. "I was put in this western place with Alex. He was a really nice guy. We ended up in a shoot out with the enemy, and ... well ..."

It didn't take a rocket scientist to adumbrate the closure of her trailing sentence. "Yeah. I understand now."

"It just wasn't fair," she elucidated, a strengthening of her vocal chords occurring as she relived the moment. "I mean, it all just happened so fast. I tried to help, but-"

Astonishingly to the saiyan, a compassionate instinct springing from the darkest, infrequently visited recesses of his mind compelled him to action. Perhaps even more astonishingly was how he immediately reacted without a single conflicting thought. He patted Victoria reassuringly on her knee in a surprisingly informal gesture of friendship. Rather than simply denounce Gamer and his narcissistically derisive intentions for the caged puppets, Orion opted to focus on his own similar experiences.

"I've lost more than my fair share of companions to wildly unfair circumstances," Orion started, leaving his calloused hand on Victoria's knee for a second longer before withdrawing. "It eats at you like a voracious virus, consuming everything you thought you were before it happened, until one day ..." He paused, sighing in an abrupt, disheartening revelation of his own, "you're merely a shadow of who you used to be."

Victoria suddenly relinquished the vice-like clasp on her sorrow and craned her head at Orion, fascinated by his unintentional confession. "What do you mean?"

"I mean ... revenge, for a start." As soon as the R word left his lips, it was all he could do to avoid an image of Szar stealing the spotlight in his mind's eye. "It distracts you from who you are. Tears down everything you worked for. Your life, your friends, be they old or new, a chance at a fresh start ..." He grizzled a fake cough, swiftly noticing the lowering of his tone in tandem with the vault of scarring memories he hadn't unlocked in the longest time. "You can't let sadness or vengeance steal away who you are. If you let it, it becomes a cancer, eating away all the good things left in you until you're nothing but an empty shell, a dead man shuffling around until the second, less important death claims you."

"Wow," Victoria gasped, sitting upright for the first time since they converged. "I ... guess I didn't think of it that way."

"It's OK to grieve," Orion explained. "Just make sure that you let out the pain, mourn their passing, then let it go. Don't let it fester into something worse."

"So ... I shouldn't want to kill Gamer, then?"

"What? Oh no, of course not! Gamer's still going to die. Just don't let that become your sole motivator. Got it?"

The bubblegum haired android nodded appreciatively. Even Sprinkles managed a wry smile, although his physiological limitations prevented it from being respectable.

"I say, smashing!" he announced, sliding down the curved backing of the bench and onto the seat. "I'm sure that's got you feeling a smidge better, what?"