As perhaps it always should have been (Calix)

With an irritable gesture Sarenrae threw the sweater on the floor and threw on one of her own outfits. Her hair was styled to perfection, her make up was way over the top and a gazillion pictures had just been shot. Just like any other day on the job really. She'd had the early morning shoot planned for quite a while but she wanted to get to camp. She needed to train (ugh) and she wanted to see if she could talk to Calix. She hadn't had much chance to talk to him since returning to her old life. She sighed as she saw the glances for her colleagues. The scars were too obvious to miss, the main reason she'd never be able to model anything that didn't cover her body for the most part without a lot of retouching on photoshop. She ignored them, not in the mood to seek conflict. 

She signed off for the day and got into her cute little bug (car) and got on her way to camp. Just a weekend before she got back to the hectic life of medical school, internship and a modelling job on the side. For now she got to be herself for just a while, although with far too much make up. She got a great deal of it off at the borders of camp Jupiter and calmed her hair down. She wasn't going to pretend any relation to Venus and didn't want any either. Still she preferred that over Mars, but she held a few resentments against her grandfather. Mostly for her father had gone through. She wondered how he was holding up. Not that it was wise to linger on that for too long. She'd broken his heart with her death and wasn't allowed back any longer. Nobody looked after him now, which hurt Sarenrae quite a lot. She'd always been there for him until the Fates had gotten her in the bad luck lottery.

She only stopped by the barracks for a short moment to grab her (still brand new) gladius and strap it to her side. The weapon felt clumsy and offensive. Not that it had ever managed to draw any blood but it had bruises on it's name, something that already bothered Sarenrae quite a bit. She hated fighting and causing harm. She by now realised training was essential if she wanted to fight monsters but she preferred to avoid them. She most certainly had no interest in turning other people into tenderised meat or kebab for training purposes. 

She walked up to the Principia to see Calix again. In her past she had flirted with him a few times for fun. He was rather attractive after all. Now that he was dating her twin it felt a little bit awkward. The two were a perfect (but impossibly) stubborn match according to Sarenrae. She'd missed all the drama that had preceded their relationship but didn't care much for it either. She had plenty of her own drama to fuss about if she wanted. She touched her stomach for a moment, biting her lip. Never linger on something that only causes pain, her doctor had said. She supposed he was right. Ignore where possible.

Arriving at his door she knocked politely. "Calix?" She said and let herself in. The room was large and had two desks. One was in seeming extreme disorder. The other of course belonged to Calix. She blinked a few times. She'd heard of the other Praetor of course but seeing the messy parts threw her off a little. They reminded her of the mess her father made at times. Not pretty. She shook it off and smiled at Calix. "Good to see you. Do you have some time to talk and catch up? It's been a while since we last got to talk." She said, taking the liberty of picking herself a seat. While Sarenrae respected authority she mainly saw Calix as a friend, which to her meant the formalities could be set aside. She looked at Calix and waited for him to respond.

Powerful wasn’t a word that Calix had used lately to describe himself. But in the last few months his mental and physical strength seemed to undergo fortification. In a way, he owed that improvement to Calla. Being in a relationship with the fellow Legacy proved to be beneficial in more ways than one. Mostly because he simply wanted to be good for her. In his past and even sometimes in the present, Calix wasn’t the best person. He was arrogant, prideful, a womanizer. Even though Calla didn’t see those things in him (at least, not anymore), Calix still felt like he had something to prove. He wasn’t like that. And he never would be. So he strove to make himself better in every aspect of his life. Calix worked to obtain mastery over his anxiety. He went to the Arena as often as he did before everything went downhill. He ate better, he tried to finish as much of his paperwork as he could, though he made sure it didn’t take over every aspect of his life. Calix made sure to have some time to himself, to do the things he enjoyed and take care of himself above all. And he had Calla. Needless to say, Calix was a happy man.
 
He was in the middle of his daily tackle of the paperwork when the door of the Principia opened. Calix set down his pen and looked up. What he saw startled him just for a second. Primrose. Er, Sarenrae, as her new papers stated. He remembered when she’d first come into camp and caused quite the uproar with her sister. To be quite honest, Calix never really asked about Sarenrae after that incident. Just afraid that he would trigger something in Calla and accidentally send her up a tree. For all of Calix’s skills, he could not climb trees as well as his girlfriend. He regarded Sarenrae carefully and marveled at how she had grown up. She definitely did look like Calla, but he could tell the difference. Calix thought back to their teenage years when it was a lot more difficult, a fact that the two took advantage of, pulling pranks on him and the like. Now he noticed differences in something as simple as the way they walked. Sarenrae held eye contact for the whole time she approached him, so Calix assumed that it was him she wanted to see. He stood just as she took her seat.
 
“Oh. Um. Yes, of course.” Calix sat down again. What an odd request. An alarm bell went off in his head, wondering if this was a late-coming ‘if you hurt my sister speech’ but it didn’t seem that way. It came off as a genuine desire to simply catch up. Calix put his hands in his lap. He twiddled his fingers just a bit. “It has been a while, hasn’t it? I… I don’t even know what to call you, Calla has only talked to me about everything once, and you know how she can be about things.” All of the words shot out of Calix’s mouth at once. Probably not something that Sarenrae was used to either.

Sarenrae had known Calix fairly well in the past. She and Calla had been cruel teen girls that played tricks on multiple men. Things had changed since then but Calix did seem slightly wary as she approached. Either she was mistaking or not but it didn't really matter. Sarenrae was the bigger flirt of the two girls from what she remembered. She felt as though Calla had always had an eye on Calix so it only made sense to Sarenrae her sister had ended up with their friend. Sarenrae had never felt that sort of a connection to anybody. Part of her envied it, but the one time she convinced herself she did have that bond everything had gone seriously wrong. She was just happy Calla had still been able to find happiness despite what had happened to her twin.

Sarenrae nodded slowly and thoughtfully as Calix greeted her and admitted his confusion about her name. "It's been a while indeed," she agreed, "Not that I can blame you about the confusion with the names. It kind of bothers me too. I've been Sarenrae for such a long time that I barely remember what it's like to be Prim. I usually favour Sarenrae, if only to keep some of the memories of the past at bay. I suppose you can call me either Rose or Sarenrae, whichever takes your preference. I prefer not to be called Prim though. It kind of feels like she did die, if you know what I mean?" It was confusing so she had no idea if she made any sort of sense. The name brought a lot of confusion now that she was picking up her old life but wasn't quite the same. This entire life wasn't quite the same. The past and present were starting to bleed into each other and it was becoming harder to distinguish what ought to be the past and what was supposed to be present. Sarenrae and Rose were starting to blur in her mind. Who exactly was she?

"I suppose she still goes into the trees? She half attempted to kill me when I got to camp until Mars decided to interfere. Not quite the happy kind of reunion I might have wished for but I do understand. To have a dead sibling show up must be difficult." Sarenrae amended. She too had thought for a while that Calla was dead in the destruction of camp but had heard prior to meeting her sister that she still lived. Part of her had been able to keep hoping as she'd never officially heard. The same could not be said for Calla, as Primrose had officially been declared dead, although was known to live off the record. Quite the confusing situation indeed. "I'm happy you two got together though. She seems very happy. I always guessed you two might make a cute couple." Sarenrae said with a bit of a devious smile. "But tell me about camp.. what happened in these last years? I can't really get much out of Calla and I'd prefer to hear from a friend rather than a random stranger." Sarenrae leaned back with a slight frown. "Or if you wish, I can tell you my story first, although I do have to warn it's not particularly pleasant, if Calla didn't tell you that already." She could imagine that her sister didn't want to talk about why Primrose had abandoned her, even if Rae had never made that choice herself. On that point Sarenrae felt like something was broken that would take a very long time to repair, if it ever could be mended to being with. Such a sad idea. Yet those were the consequences of her actions, weren't they? For keeping a relatively safe life she had chosen to start a new life away from her family. Now she had to live with that choice and everything it had caused.

A part of you dying. Oddly enough, Calix could almost relate to what Sarenrae meant. Of course he couldn’t begin to fathom comparing situations… it wasn’t a contest and everyone experienced even similar struggles differently depending on their ability to cope. Calix always figured he had a strong resolve and that it would take an entire army to take him down. He never expected that it would be his own mind and thoughts that destroyed him. Calix might have been able to withstand physical pain, but his mind was never as strong as his body. When circumstance exploited that weakness, he’d felt like he’d been shot in his personal Achilles’s heel. Even though everything happened long enough ago that the wound should be healed, sometimes Calix moved a certain way or took too deep a breath and everything broke apart. His goal at this moment in time: lessen the hurt, improve the recovery. He let the person who his depression nearly ruined change… but maybe, in hindsight, he didn’t let him die. Calix took that part of him, that part of his story and embedded it into the person he felt like he was now. Like a link in a chain of armor. A small piece that made him stronger.
 
He nodded slowly. “Rose,” he said, hoping that he had answered in an acceptable timeframe. Familiar enough to him but different enough for her. It seemed to be a good compromise. Calix wondered on Rose’s and Calla’s first meeting. Surely it didn’t go as smoothly as ‘oh, what’s your name now?’. His only response to her prediction about the trees was to nod. Calla was a master at confronting things that didn’t agree with her. Any sort of sarcasm fully intended. Her favorite solution? To climb trees. But he couldn’t blame her at all in this instance. “Well, it came as a shock to all of us. She was certain… we were certain…” obviously certainty didn’t apply its rules to Rose. He shook his head. Whatever happened happened. It couldn’t be reversed. Much like the color that rose to his cheeks when she mentioned his relationship with Calla. He shrugged. “She makes me happy, and apparently I do the same for her… I’m a lucky man.”
 
Part of the reason that Calix stopped his train of thought before it entered uncharted waters was the sole fact that the waters were uncharted. He didn’t know how comfortable Rose felt about talking about her past. He didn’t want to ask just in case it triggered something unpleasant. But it looked like she felt willing to share her whereabouts for the past few years. That would have helped nicely with her very thin file. “Do you want to know what has happened to Camp generally or specifics from me?” Even though Camp Jupiter 2.0 had been set up hastily, the size still made it difficult for Calix to relay to Rose the majority of things that happened. “Other than a coup, nothing interesting has occurred.”