katie's real death post

[phunke]

Hey guys! Unfortunately I had two finals today so I spent last night studying and missed a chance at actually finishing the finale properly.

Before I begin, I'm taking a leap of faith here, which is that with enough asking, Katie would've gotten Heron to admit she stabbed Storm in the ear. I find it plausible that this could've happened, but my deepest apologies to Rashi [<3] if admitting this would have been out-of-character for Heron.
The ending would've been the same anyway, just...a bit different, I suppose.
Another assumption I made [this one with Rashi's approval] is that Katie eventually got her knife back.
Also keep in mind that it's in 'rewind' format so the end of the post is the beginning, chronologically. I have my reasons for doing this, believe me :)
One last warning: this is pretty candid/graphic at parts. Read at your own risk, preferably not right after you've eaten.

Were she able to look back on this moment, Katie would smile and call it the most peaceful of her life. For a girl who has only ever wanted to be the embodiment of light, she would find darkness oddly comforting; it waits beneath her lids, it laces its fingers in hers, weaves through her hair. Darkness is in her mind now, filling all the empty spaces that love never quite could. It encapsulates her rabbit heart and cradles it to stillness but does not enter (even darkness has boundaries). Down her legs and through her veins the darkness streaks, oozing out of an opening in her chest then pulling back; it shadows the curve of her mouth, fills her ear canals to overflowing until darkness spills out onto the ground and seeps across it, catching hold of fungi and retreating again, receding to where it is comfortable; darkness shields itself in the folds of her clothes and in the dirty creases in her left elbow. Finally it ebbs onto the scars on her hands, sliding across and taking them away; darkness will have no signs of previous conquest, it starts anew, it is its own thing. It takes possession of the girl and shivers inside her bones, climbs into her cheeks and pushes the color there out of the way, waiting until it can glare up at the eyes of the opponent.
For a girl who punished herself for doing anything she deemed wrong, she would find this- this- lack of life, this total wrongness, a final contentment. Many people love living and fear nonliving, but it is only at this moment that Katie could really truly know she is all backwards from those people. Released from the pressure of right and wrong, black and white - there are no such hues now, only colorless dark - from the pressure of being good and knowing she sometimes couldn't, would be the sweetest instant in her life. If only she could know. It is a cruel twist of irony, but luckily irony spares three: the beautiful, the innocent, and the gone.

For a girl who filled herself and others with life, Katie Morven would be ultimately happy in death.
Unfortunately, that isn't something she will learn, because while emotion comes with recollection (even if it is just a tiny tiny fraction of a second later that one remembers and feels), there is no remembering in death.
She really would be happy.

Rewind.

This time, the room was not so much white as airy grey, as though with each return the opacity of the walls were decreased a little bit. Fading. I'm fading too. Staring through the glass, perplexed, Katie felt suddenly stunned by the newfound silence. There was no more ringing and she certainly wasn't screaming anymore, wasn't even sure if she had a voice to scream with. The empty, echoing silence began to twinge at her eardrums - no, just one eardrum - but Katie remained where she stood, gazing solemnly at the room she now knew she could never reach. A shadow, not her own certainly, flitted across the glass, toying at her peripheral vision. The twinge in her inner ear increased to a sharp pinch. Suddenly Katie longed for music, or maybe color, but that could come with music - all she wanted was to hear something but the awful intensifying feeling of pain - no tunes came to memory. No anything came to memory. The white room, now grey, was fading and would bring Katie with it. For an instant the shadow disappeared entirely, and foolishly she hoped that the pain would go with it. For an instant, that hope alone extinguished the agony.
Then it returned. Crippling but she could not fall to her knees, torturous but she could not cry out in pain.
Whiteness.
Glass.
Blink. Blink. Glass.

Katie broke free from terrifying, agonizing reverie - her head was pounding, here was a beat, here at last but no music to go with - boom. boom. boom. it was blood pounding hard in her ears - and through the pounding she flung her hands forward and grabbed at the glass, she'd touched it! - oh the relief - BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. - the beat was unbearable, her fingertips scrabbled at the unforgiving surface and suddenly it let them in, like a bubble, and for some reason that was satisfying until she tugged and discovered her fingers were stuck in the glass - BOOM BOOM BOOM -
Katie collapsed against the glass, naked body shivering as it sucked the warmth from her skin and pulled her lids closed.

Rewind.

When Katie came to again, the pain was dulled - but then, everything was dulled now. Warmth seeped into her hair in a sick red halo, soaked into her neck and shoulder. Unable to feel her legs any longer, the girl was apathetic to the stabbing pangs that used to come from her calf. Even the slash across her once-proud collarbone had subsided to a dull buzzing pain; it throbbed less and less with each passing second, and probably would have ceased hurting long ago were it not agitated by her defiant, hammering heart. Her ears still felt full, as if being pressed into by pure roaring noise, but it was a lesser roar than before, still raging but more distant somehow.
Lead weights had been attached to her eyelids and were desperately dragging them closed. Katie fought it, she really did, fought with all she had; blinking was bad, blinking would take her back to the white and the glass and no no no I won't go! I won't! as her eyelids twitched violently, flashing white into her brain until willpower won out temporarily and Katie had restored the blurry grey and red of her vision.
The frenetic limb-flailing of before was now replaced with shudders and twitches. Knees folding partway up off the ground then collapsing again, fingers rapidly opening and closing in loosely-clawed partial fists, shoulders jerking one at a time a tiny bit off the ground and slamming down, Katie had lost all motor control of herself. Right cheek pressed to the ground, her once-warm brown eyes stared blankly at the bland landscape a few feet from her face (it blurred into nothingness in her brain); tiny red droplets teetered and sometimes fell from the tips of her eyelashes. One last smile - albeit involuntary, contrary to the thousands before it she'd formed in her lifetime - graced Katie's features for part of a second before flicking back into neutrality. Her left eye slammed shut to stop the blood threatening to drip into it, and it wasn't long before her right closed too, plunging Katie back into whiteness...

Rewind.

For the second time, Katie was surrounded by white (quiet relief); however, this time, instead of an explosion she could see that she was in...a room? Vocal chords leached of any noise-making ability, the girl ruefully (yet not without burning curiosity at this anomaly) observed the area around her. She appeared to be surrounded by four white walls and a white ceiling (of some sort - it had no dimension) with white under her feet. It was a room, that much was obvious, but Katie couldn't tell whether the walls were within range of her fingertips or hundreds of yards away. It felt huge because of the absolute, vacuous silence, but there was really no telling - the total lack of noise could have given feel to a compressed room as well. The only other thing in the room was a pane of glass dividing it in two, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Straining, Katie tried to reach out and touch the glass, but found herself immobile as if bound (or, more likely, paralyzed).
I need to get to the other part of the room.
Resentment welled up in Katie's chest, and with it, a ringing began in her ears - it replaced the cavernous silence of the white room, which would have made her grateful if she could think about anything other than that damned glass. Ringing. Louder now. As resentment melted into steely anger, then to fury, Katie found that she could move her right arm (I wonder why I didn't think of that before?...no reason not to use this arm, right?) and swiftly brought her palm up to the glass and would have pushed it, shattered it, had not a sudden liquid serenity coursed into her, but the ringing was culminating, worse and worse, and it filled her ears and she couldn't think couldn't think had to get out-
Katie's eyes opened.

Rewind.

PAIN.
PAIN.
EVERYWHERE PAIN. There was only one thing left in Katie's world, she'd filtered it down at last, painpainpain her skull was surely splitting open everything burned oh my god oh my god vision flashing red and why did I do this? why did I- when do I get out? need to get out need to can't live anymore everything felt red as if color had become feeling and it seized and twisted every nerve ending in her body until Katie wasn't human anymore, she was just a fragment of a physical organism enduring the worst possible agony-
Were she able to separate herself from complete terror and misery, Katie would have objectively accepted the sacrifice as a necessary means to an end: she really, truly cared for Heron. This was the only way. And...and...for more selfish reasons too, she would have been glad; 'fight' had never actually been a viable option for the girl, and when forced into it she only longed more for flight. This had been brought to the extreme until she broke. One who has lived with fear on a daily basis does not take well to situations which incite terror in more normal people. Here was the result.
PAIN.
Crumpled on her right side in the dirt and sparse flora, the shell of Katie's body entered into a last-ditch sort of swipe at life: a series of convulsions, wracking tremors. Her appendages spasmed quickly and repeatedly, flailing at empty air and always smacking back down to her body; kicks and swipes and neck forcing her head to jerk back and forth across the ground in a sick, twisted nod. Through it all, through what was left of the saltwater in her eyes, she watched in horror as someone witnessing a rape would do. But her pupils were transfixed on no terrible distant point; they were merely seeking to find anything outside of the torment she was undergoing. This did not work until her eyelids jerked shut for a fraction of a moment.

Rewind.

Pure, painfully unadulterated light erupted across her mind. It was quiet. Eerily tranquil. Unbroken, untouched. Serene, cool; Katie was standing completely unclothed in the whiteness that seemed devoid of anything and all she could think was where is the blue-eyed girl? did she win? did I sa-
Katie erupted into a jarring, splitting scream similar to that of a drowning child - high-pitched and juvenile - but ceaseless, unrelenting.
It rent the silence mercilessly, filling everything, filling her ears and her eyes and crawling over her skin; the shriek permeated every fiber of Katie and everything else. For a long time it seemed as through life itself had ruptured. Then the white receded into something far worse: reality.

Rewind.

Shaking her head, Katie stared dumbfounded at the short-haired teenager before her.
All her life, the District Three girl had watched the Hunger Games with her parents (or just her dad, but that was beside the point) and been fairly entertained by them. Just a television show, she'd always known- thought- and surely staged, just like all the television shows. A particularly well-done one, but she assumed that was because it was the Capitol's most treasured, most clever production.
That belief was shattered shortly after Katie stepped into the fifty-seventh Hunger Games arena; regardless of how she denied, resisted, refused to remember...there were teenagers here, and they were killing. Worse, worse still...(Katie used this to justify to herself the murders she'd committed) these teens wanted to kill.
They wanted to win.
Incredulous, she continued to stare at the deep blue eyes belonging to Heron Kimberling, a girl with reason, motivation, and desire to win the fifty-seventh Hunger Games.
I am the only thing in her way.
A girl who had lost her legs and then brutally killed the boy who carried her around.
No matter how you look at it, that's unspeakable, that's- that's-
...here I am attacking her. Girl with no legs. And I think I killed the first guy, the tall guy, the one who actually helped me in this godforsaken-
"No, no, no, no, no..."

Everything was catching up to her. Katie couldn't run anymore. Even if she had legs, Heron wouldn't have run either: she was made of stronger stuff. She's not weak. Desolation began to rip at Katie's conscience, tearing into her motives, the awful things she'd done. I cracked just like everybody else. I...I...participated in this sick show or whatever it is. I'm no better. I'm no better.
Looking at a mushroom near her right ankle - she was now crouched on the ground so as not to aggravate the stinging slash in her calf - Katie's eyes welled up with tears for the last time. Hot liquid filled up and spilled over - I was supposed to be better, damn it! I was supposed - cutting at her cheeks and the blush creeping all under her skin because here she was, figuratively naked - to- to be - for all of Panem to see, they'd all know by now that she was the lowliest of human beings - BETTER.

Sobbing now in resignation, Katie looked from her knees to Heron to the switchblade she was now stuck with again (and to think I blamed all of my horribleness on this inanimate piece of shit) and back to Heron again. She knew what she had to do. Garbled words tumbled out, ghosts of explanations that should have been forged long ago. (That much was owed by now, surely.) "I ca-can't stay here, I-I- I c-c-c-" she inhaled sharply and sniffed to stem the tide of mucus coming freely from her nose- "Wh-why w-w-wouldn't you llllet m...let me h-help you?" Flickered back to the switchblade now. Everything was blurry and hot despite the sting of a chilly breeze. I have to do this. "I-I cou- could- could help y-you!"
Katie shook her head wildly (it made a sharp tearing sensation at the gash in her chest but hell if she cared) and brought her left wrist up to wipe her eyes. The switchblade was so close...the girl's hand trembled, came close to letting it fall. Searching for something - anything - to tether her to cogent thoughts, she bit hard on her dirt- and blood-caked wire bracelet and clenched on the knot until her whole body had stopped its violent shaking. When she removed her teeth from the token, its knot (having been loosened gradually over the last eight days) finally came apart and fell to the ground.
A distraction. A distraction from what I need to do. Channeling her gaze to the bracelet and the bracelet alone, Katie willed herself to aim correctly (one final coherent thought, a pinprick of light in the completest of darkness, appeared and it was I am okay, I am strong): then in one swift, resigned motion, she shoved the blade hard into her left ear.
(But her focus wavered ever so slightly and entirely too late; at the moment the blade cut into her temporal lobe and cerebellum, Katie's terror-enlarged brown eyes latched onto Heron's face for a sliver of time.)

The trusty switchblade was well-aimed: it severed part of the brain stem and cut off the heartbeat so that within a few seconds, Katie Morven was dead.

here i am, a rabbit hearted girl
frozen in the headlights
it seems i've made the final sacrifice

we raise it up, this offering
we raise it up

this is a gift, it comes with a price
who is the lamb and who is the knife?
midas is king and he holds me so tight
and turns me to gold in the sunlight

i look around but i can't find you (raise it up)
if only i could see your face (raise it up)
instead of rushing towards the skyline (raise it up)

i wish that i could just be brave

i must become a lion hearted girl
ready for a fight
before i make the final sacrifice

raise it up
raise it up
raise it up
raise it up

and in the spring i shed my skin
and it blows away with the changing wind
the waters turn from blue to red
as towards the sky i offer it

this is a gift

rabbit heart (raise it up) -- florence + the machine