.waves! {katie||day4}

[phunke]

saw the water, not the waves
caught your eye, forgot your name

Once again, Katie was walking, walking, with no idea where or why or at this point how. As they had when she left the ashen forest behind when morning light was still hours away, the girl's legs shuffled forward robotically. What she lacked in speed - which was quite a lot; by the time the sun had topped the horizon, she was barely moving forward, still a mile or two from the giant mountain-thing - she made up for in duration. The girl who had always excelled at jobs because she could program her body to repeat an action and then perform that action indefinitely (independent of her physical or mental state) now had an advantage of sorts: though her throat felt as if it were closed up entirely and all breaths came in short draws through her mouth, though her stomach had cramped up tightly and refused to loosen, though she was shaking and trembling and sometimes walking sideways because blood loss had lost her so much control of her body, Katie kept walking. Of course, this was highly detrimental, because the teenager was pushing her body beyond limits it had already defined with no regard to the consequences that she simply refused to acknowledge or feel. All she knew was that some force in her mind would not let her stay, just as she had not been able to stay at the stone pillar or at the mountain the first time.

Hours elapsed and a later point in time found Katie giggling quietly to herself, weaving unsteadily through scattered rocks at the base of the volcano. Every few seconds, one of her too-big shoes would catch on a rock and send her staggering forward or sideways; by some miracle, larger boulders were always there to catch her, or she would be moving so slowly that the stumbles barely impacted her (rather tenuous) balance. Resting would have been by all accounts a good idea, but somewhere buried deep in her hardly-functioning brain, Katie recognized that if she stopped moving she would never start again. So she continued forward, forsaking any particular direction now that she had reached a landmark but still going somewhere. The girl ceased her giggling and took to licking her lips instead, tasting the too-excessive blood there and hoping in her delirium that it would bring relief to her tongue and mouth, which were completely devoid of liquid. Rapid breathing escalated with her new awareness of the dehydration she was experiencing; nervously the girl's fingers began to curl and uncurl in a slow but somehow morbid rhythm, as if counting down the intervals until Death would come for her. But fortune of a sort came instead.
One bad step left Katie falling in a way more dire than her previous stumbles. Desperately she tried to reach out with her right hand to catch herself on a nearby boulder, but missed it by the length of a forearm, for she had none. (That was the moment that, had she been more sane and aware, she would have realized and remembered the cutting off of part of her right arm the previous day; but she was neither sane nor aware, so that revelation was saved for a later time.) Her attempts at correcting her balance caused the girl's legs to inadvertently reposition, and she found herself stumbling rapidly to the right, faster than was comfortable because she had lost control of her legs.
Then she fell into a pool of water.

[/justify]
[[katie drinks water]][/color][/size]
[dice=3]
[Dice roll: 3
Witnesses: Tim, Lalia, Spesh, and Shrimp.]

Though as it turned out breathing underwater was not one of Katie's few talents, that was not for lack of trying. While beneath the surface, the girl's subconscious grabbed control of her bodily functions and she gasped in huge mouthfuls of water, swallowing the stuff greedily, before her more logical cerebrum forced her out of the shallow pool, choking and hacking and gasping all at once. It was a brutal wake-up call, near-drowning was; and while Katie was horrified at herself for voluntarily filling her lungs with liquid, a voice in the back of her mind urged her to try again. Go on. Take more. You need it. This hardly persuaded the girl at first, seeing as she spent the next ten minutes coughing out the vestiges of blood and water from her throat and lungs. But when the tumult and pain had subsided, she began to be convinced. Somehow the trauma of falling into a pool and then almost dying from inhaling so much of it had acted as a mental stimulant to Katie, forcing her brain to work and analyze as it had refused to for hours (even days). Dehydration was srs bznz serious business and she probably would have died of it had she not almost died of drowning.
Tremors wracked the girl's frail and fragile body. She had to act soon, didn't she? A tentative hand, reaching out to cup water, found some but was quickly drained of it by the incessant shaking. Patches of frozen cold interspersed with patches of desperate heat across the girl's skin, sometimes alternating or changing in shape and size. One second she felt wildly feverish; the next, frigid. Continued alternation left her eyes ablaze in colors and pinpricks of senseless light while her skin crawled. Katie could feel her heart beating ludicrously fast, thumping in her eardrums and quickening the fitful rhythm of her breathing. She was kneeling already...the water was so close...
Tenderly, perilously - collapse was imminent - Katie leaned down to the water, supported by a violently trembling left arm. Eyes closed, mouth dropped open (keeping it closed required too much strength, anyway) the girl arrived at the lightly rippling surface. Once more she drank, although this time careful to ensure the water went down her esophagus instead of her trachea. The relief, the perfect relief, was incredible; it was like being reborn time after time, once each second, once each swallow. Maybe vitality would be hers to keep.
Then the vomiting began.

always leaving; either way
I want you to stop me
.
.
.[/center]

ooc; katie drinks water! and it's SAFE.<3
[rand=299999217037111532598638301715255083942630793899330995035846717656]

[phunke]

the future is all mine
i'll find it on my way back

Wake up.
"Uunnh."
Katie rolled onto her back, granting reprieve to a viciously aching left shoulder that she'd been bearing weight on (well, it was the whole left side of her body, but the shoulder hurt the most).
Come on, Katie, wake up.
Sluggishly reaching up with her left hand, the girl reached across her body and pinched her right bicep. The dry, shriveled skin stayed in a pinched position for several seconds before reluctantly sinking back to its normal position due to the extreme lack of water. It was at that moment, when the teenager registered the sour taste in her mouth and the dribble on her chin and the oh my god that is an enormous puddle of barf that she realized she had not been dreaming after all. Everything...all of that was real. The drinking and the puking and the dia-
Katie sat up. Her throat stung, and her body trembled, but at least she could think somewhat clearly and form logical progressions of ideas. Edging away from the red-stained vomit on the ground next to her - the smell was something terrible - she came to the realization that her right forearm was unable to bear weight properly because it was not there. No scream of terror left Katie's throat; simply a series of panicked whimpers that turned into pleading whispers as images of the day before began to flash through her field of vision. The tall tribute. A fight. Attacking a girl with no legs. Running away. Another fight, one made all the more frightening because it was against the tall boy and she'd seen what he could do. Thirst. Begging for her life while her throat burned agonizingly. Talking, sleeping, forgetting. Somewhere in that mix of images was a flash of silver and a few drops of blood hitting her face from the violence with which she severed a gangrenous forearm. A moment passed where the girl wondered where she'd found the strength to do that, then remembered it was merely the result of another cowardly impulse: the black, rotting look of her arm had been too much, too much to bear. An arm lying on the ground and averting her eyes. More images, these ones blurred and spinning. Trees. The sky was still grey. Maybe the tall boy helped her somehow because another image had her stump of an upper-arm wrapped tightly in sweatshirt strips. Another flashing image, this one from before the amputation, of pulling off that yellow bracelet and forcing it over her left hand. It was enough to lose part of a limb without throwing away the fragment of home it served to keep safe.
Katie gasped violently and sat for a moment, shaking uncontrollably. Then she began to sob. The forceful, heaving tremors that always accompany great sobbing were there; however, no tears came. Her sunken, desolate brown eyes had simply run dry, as had everything else in the girl's body.

Cupping her left hand firmly, this time determined to keep the water she could capture in it, Katie began to make up her water deficit in tiny sips, knowing now that long drinks would only make her sick. Time passed as it had that morning: slowly but consistently while she moved in increments. After hours of this, she felt strong enough to remove her shoes and socks; a little while after that, she rolled up her pants and slid her lower legs into the pool of life-saving liquid. Somehow, in this way, Katie found contentment. Death had never really been something in day-to-day life that she'd feared, yet its imminence that day made her certain that she did not particularly want to die. There was something really beautiful about breathing, she thought.

Katie turned and glared at a nearby rock crossly. "What are you looking at?" The inanimate object remained stationary but I can feel its vibes. It wants my bracelet. That was certainly not going to happen; while a kind person, the seventeen-year-old was not particularly generous, especially with items of value to her. "You weirdo. Quit staring at it. Go 'way! Can't have my bracelet." This twisted formation of yellow wire was hers and that piece of shit rock had no claim to it. Plus, Katie thought, if I give it my bracelet I won't have the memor- the images anymore. And I like the images. Thoughtful time spent at the edge of this pond had given Katie time to think, to figure out the peculiar way her memory worked. She'd concluded that events in chronological order were pointless and of no use to her; in fact, memories in general were useless to her, which was why she'd established the habit of erasing them. But images - especially particularly poignant images - stayed despite her best efforts, which the girl had always regarded as a nuisance. And they were, really; dwelling on things that had already happened was a poor way to plan for the future. Yet...everything in this Arena seemed to happen in flashes, in lightning-quick moments. Just images, really, once she'd survived them. In a way, that had rendered valuable every image from her home that Katie could still cling to, simply because if she could keep none of them, all she had were things that had happened in the Hunger Games, and that was no good. Flashes of moments from her life in District Three were much better than those from her brief time in this place and if she had to dwell on something, it might as well be something she liked. "Whatever. Wouldn't fit you anyway," she declared loftily, the proud shift in her neck aggravating the scabbed-over cut on her neck but not causing it to bleed.
A fleeting picture of a crossword puzzle and the gravelly tone her dad's voice always had before his morning coffee wafted through Katie's mind and she smiled, reopening the cuts on her dry lips.

One last sip. Then Katie pushed herself to her feet and began to walk away from the pool; while her path still skirted the mountain, it was in the opposite direction from the one she'd taken before. No definite plan existed, per se, which was odd for Katie - the eternal planner, the constant organizer. Yet somehow, she felt okay with that. The Arena had turned everything backwards and inside-out for Katie, her sense of time and preparation thrown off entirely. There was no way to know what would happen next or what challenges would appear from nowhere. It was impossible to adjust to, impossible to even begin to comprehend, but that meant that she didn't even need to try. Which was good; was easier; was uncomplicated. Just the way it felt to erase her mind of a particularly bothersome event. Katie had replenished her body's most basic needs and given herself time to rest and recover from the worst physical state she'd ever been in. Her legs moved strongly and confidently over the cracked ground, no longer tripping on every rock in her path. Night was falling and Katie Morven was just waking up. Time not to get somewhere, but just to go somewhere.

when i'm gone
i'll know what i've done
i'll go where I don't belong
.
.
.