Marline: More Than a Pretty Face
Marline was never meant to exist. Born in the attics of House Jewel, an unregistered orphan with no past and no official future, she should have faded into the background like so many others. But Marline refuses to be invisible.
At sixteen, she’s already fighting for her place in the world, just in a different way than Guy Erma.
Unlike him, she’s found a way out—or at least, that’s what people think. She’s the newest model at House Jewel, a rising star, a girl with the perfect Domeside look: black curls, blue eyes, porcelain skin.
On the outside, she’s everything the fashion world wants.
On the inside? She’s still the girl from the attic, still the girl who used to fight for a place in line, still the girl who watched Guy train for hours and swore she’d never let him leave her behind.
“I thought you could wear them under your uniform,” Marline whispers, handing Guy his birthday present. A simple gift—black socks, a fine t-shirt. But it means everything. It means she believes in him.
For all her elegance, Marline is no stranger to struggle. Like Guy, she grew up in crowded bunks, fighting for space, for scraps, for recognition. She knows what it’s like to want something more, to feel trapped by rules designed to keep people like them in the shadows. But where Guy fights with blades, Marline fights with presence. She steps onto a runway, and the world stops to look.
She speaks, and people listen. It’s not just beauty—it’s control, a kind of power she’s still learning to wield.
"You have to become someone’s dream," she tells Guy. "As you walk, as you pause, as you pose. You have to evoke passion and desire."
But she’s not just talking about modeling. She knows what it takes to make people want you, to make them fight for you, to make them believe in you. And she wants Guy to understand that, too. Because no matter how much she supports him, she knows he won’t get into the Dome Militant on skill alone. He has to make people notice him. He has to make them want him.
Marline understands the game in a way Guy doesn’t. She knows the value of a well-placed connection, a whispered word in the right ear, a favor owed. She sees the way Loulou and Chart Segat dance around their secrets, the way power moves in the Dome. And she’s not afraid to use what she has to get what she needs.
But at the heart of it all, Marline is still just a girl who doesn’t want to be left behind.
"You’ll be on Sas Darona, living in tents like the tribes—boiling your water, hunting for food, fighting Valvanski," she says, pinching Guy’s arm.
It’s a joke. It’s not a joke. She knows he’s going to leave. She just doesn’t know if he’ll come back.
For all her confidence, for all her growing fame, Marline is afraid of one thing: that one day, she’ll turn around and Guy Erma will be gone.
And if that happens, what will she have fought for?
コメント