Understanding Honour

• Adriana Ariffin, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2014

I thought long and hard about the dilemma that I had encountered. I was staring at a blank wall, just a plain white wall, there were five of them. The room shaped a pentagon around me as I lay on the hard mattress, probably staining it with my muddy clothes from the daring escape.
Well, you couldn’t really call it an escape considering I was caught in the end.
“Victoria?”
My body straightened into a sitting position at the mention of my full name. My eyes came into contact with lilac eyes across the bars of the cell I sat in.
“It’s Tori,” I hissed at him.
“So you’ve mentioned,” he sighed. His fingers clenched into his palm and his left eye twitched slightly, tell-tale signs that he was annoyed at me.
“Look, unless you’re here to tell me that someone has died and there’s going to be cupcakes at their funeral, please go away,” I waved him away as I fell back into my previous stance of lying down.
“You aren’t leaving this cell anytime soon to attend a funeral; cupcakes or no.”
I glared at him. “I’ll find a way to break out of here for the cupcakes. I won’t let them be eaten by rich snobs.”
His temper flared at my casual insult. “Quit being rebellious,” he snapped at me.
He sighed heavily, his anger disappearing as fast as it came. He hated that he could show so much emotion around me.
“Victoria, your trial is in an hour. If you aren’t calm and ready by then you are going to be restrained and taken by force.”
“I’ve spent my whole life being forced to do things I don’t want. It’s nothing new,” I told him, suddenly growing a fascination in the roof.
“If you listened to what people had to say maybe you would see reason.”
“There’s no reason for this. For life. Your-our¬¬-belief system is so screwed up. You spend your life fighting wars that can be started by the slightest thing. People die for no cause. Wars are lost. So are lives. And I don’t want to be a part of that; I want to do something… honourable with my life, not waste it because I listened to the wrong person.”
My eyes never left the white roof; as I said my words I saw the war and famine that werewolves had caused to the human world, because of our selfishness and possessiveness… we were blinded from the real truth behind life.
“I never thought of it like that.”
I propped myself on my elbows to look at him. “Royals are so obsessed with claiming land and packs and power that they don’t realize how much they’re hurting others.”
“And you don’t want to be a part of that,” Hunter finished for me.
“Do you understand now? Why I ran away? Why I’m resisting? Why I’m rebellious?”
He sighed, suddenly looking very tired. “No… I don’t… but-I’m starting to-”
And then the bombs hit.