The Gambler //Cricket&Zboi

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=style, background-color: 1f1f1e; border: 715F53 solid 2px; width: 500px; height: 181px; padding: 0 0 0 0px; border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px;][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true] I can feel it in the pit of my stomach, like an angry growl, escalating, growing in sound. It isn’t anger though, more of a roar of something else. I’ve never felt it before, I don’t feel much really. I’m not certain I like it very much. I feel like I’m going to be sick, and the shaking won’t stop. I’m on the verge of something. I have been something else as of late, not quite the dead corpse I know. It’s like I’m standing on the deck of a ship, and the world keeps tilting back and forth. I’m on dry land though, and the day is flat. There are no waves, only layers of dirt like skin. She’s under mine, I think. When I saw her last, she was a pillar of beauty, a goddess and the light of the sun made the dust in the air around her dance. I miss that, watching the world dance for joy around her, just because she was there to stir it up. I haven’t been able to rest as of late, and I’ve been prowling around the tents. You learn things that way, who’s a heavy sleeper, who still prays. Once I heard a young one crying softly. For their mother or for something else, I don’t quite know. Last night I went around to my own mother’s. Just for a peek in the window, maybe a short chat if she’s feeling up to it. My father, he buried me a long time ago, in his head at least. There’s a tombstone still from when I finally left home and they stopped searching. According to them I’ve been dead these past six or seven years. I have never felt alive yet, not enough to be counted as the living. Something smaller in me, that I thought was long dead sparked last night when I went around to my mother’s and found the place empty. No furniture, no light, and no warmth. The window was unlocked, when I jimmied it open, dust attacked my senses, and emptiness. Emptiness everywhere, like an overwhelming force, and I missed her then, for a short moment. Just a second, I missed the sound of her voice, and the taste of the cookies she’d place on the window for me. She’d always tell the old man that they were cooling there. I’d find little messages, short, ‘Are you warm?’ and ‘Are you eating well?’. I’d swallow down whatever she’d made, not that I needed the nourishment, and be on my way. Last night, when I walked through there, nothing was placed, and there was no message. They were gone, and they’d finally left me behind too. I don’t blame her, for wanting to perform for the thousands. The thrill of the audience, even a small one is always wondrous. She just had the eyes of the world on her. I don’t know if anything will be as good as that. If I will be as good as that. I suppose that’s what’s been keeping me up since I watched her in the finale, since we watched her performance end. I didn’t stay for the bows that night, I left early, and that’s poor audience etiquette I know, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t just stand there, clapping and cheering when I felt like I was watching a ghost. She’ll be different now, I know. Not in a bad way, it’s just that more people know what she is now. She’s more than that though, what they see when they look at her. For some it will be admiration, for others it will be hatred. I see her image now, plastered all over the District, and I can’t look at her. I can’t look at that face, and see her there. She’s always been something else, but she’s never been so far away, untouchable, and I’m reaching out and I don’t know if when I do she will want to take my hand. She knows death now, properly. She said she knew me, but I don’t think she could even imagine before what I am. I’m just here, not there. I’ve never been anything else, just the mystery of what is beyond in a corporal state for others to oggle and fear. I have never been anything but what I appear to be, and what I don’t appear to be. I have not promised anything else. I think she has expected it though, she looks for it, not realizing. Now that she knows it though, will she still want it. Will she want me? How could she. That is what I fear. I stand on this platform, in line to look at her face, to see her. There are ropes to keep us apart, and everyone, the whole district is here to see her come in, but they keep away from me. They fear me, as they should, like she never has, like she may now. I don’t want her to. I want her to go on loving me, if she ever did. I think she did, I hope she did and I wasn’t just imagining things. I sometimes know that maybe I made our romance up in my head, and she never loved me at all. Quite right too, who could love a thing like me? Neither here nor there, never wanted, and always disliked. Yet still, I am here. I will wait for her, and the train is pulling in. My stomach has begun to swallow it's self whole and I'm not sure if that is a natural decay or if I am imploding. I thought she was going to be gone from me. I still think she will be gone from me, that I will wake up one day and she'll be dead on the television and all her mattering would be nothing. I know that if she had died there would have been a sigh of regret, maybe a curse or two for a lost bet, but nothing more than that. From me, I would have gone on being dead in the only way I know how. I think I would have died further though, let flowers creep through my rib cage and leave this body behind because the worth would be gone without her. Her train is stopped now on the platform and I am twisting a napkin to pieces between my bone hands, and there is a door sliding open, and I shut my eyes, childishly afraid. If she doesn't want me, if she doesn't need me anymore, there will be no one but the ringmaster and the mutilationist to remember me and I might just disappear but no one would notice. I need her like a moth needs a flame, She is the light that I dance around. When I open my eyes, she is there, on the platform, smile wider than a cheshire's tugging at her lips. She is beautiful there, wherever she stands the world changes, alive completely for the space she consumes. She smiles, greets her circus family, and I should be up there but I held back, weary. What if she doesn't want me? Something feral nips at my ankles, pulls at my bones and I am running. My feet move, my hands shove, and I'm not thinking, I'm thinking I'm not thinking. I can't compute, can't contain the horrible joy that lights my nerves on fire. A growl grows from between my lips when a peacekeeper tries to get in front of me, but he loses his nerve and it doesn't even matter because I've scooped her up in my arms and I am running. I am running and running and her legs are draped over my arms, her breathless laugh filling the air, and I won't stop until we are far and farther away. I won't let go. I cannot. Her scent fills up my lungs whenever I breath and I will run for years and years. She is life, and the dead will always wish for it. They cannot have her. She is mine, and I will love her, even if she won't love me. I cannot stop.

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[L△LIA]

[bg=030303][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,400,true][atrb=style,width: 400px; background-image: url(http://i40.tinypic.com/102kqht.png); background-repeat: no-repeat; padding-left:40px; padding-right:40px; padding-top:40px; border-left:1px solid #000000; border-right:1px solid #000000; border-top:1px solid #000000; -moz-border-radius-topright: 25px; border-radius-topright: 25px; -moz-border-radius-topleft: 25px; border-radius-topleft: 25px;opacity: 1;] Camouflaged in the bare truth of his own skin, he is a ripple in the crowd, like a tease of fiction that preys mercilessly upon my imagination. With each successive pair of arms that wrap around me, my vision jerks with a kind of hope that's beginning to feel more like panic. I'm halfway to dizzy as I spin in stuttered circles, passed from the embrace of one friend to the next, my eyes first searching their skin before I glance to their faces and always coming up blank. Pale or tan or furred, they are unmarked and undeniably who they are. All at once, I find relief and disappointment with each of them. They have not changed so much in my absence and each of their smiles remind me of another piece of myself that I have missed over the past few weeks, but I am not yet whole. A haze of gray flickers between one surrounding body and another and my attention skitters after, tagging along at the heels of a mirage. Hundreds of butterflies dart and swoop above our heads, but I'm eager to devote my daydreams to something that is the opposite of their fierce color and fragile life. Teeth and bones and the curious beauty within decay — Gasping as I'm passed into the arms of my parents, my mother's kiss finds my cheeks as I become even more acutely aware of what is missing from this moment. Despite having returned from the Arena, my sister has never felt further from me. Yet, all around is the kind of joy that Victors surely pray for on the train ride home, happy faces and a thousand people who have never loved me better than they do right now. I am not a murderer — what that word means, I still don't understand like I ought to — but a daughter, a soul-sister ironically lacking in blood, a comrade, a mentor, a god. The crown I wear gilds everything around me, until I find myself in the center of a gathering of royals, and together we have everything. Except — The arms around me are tanned and solid, seared into my memory to the point where I know who is holding me without looking, but my gaze still drops in perfect time with my heart. "Daddy —" I lean into the protective shield of him for a few scattered seconds to hide that awful impulse of disappointment before grinning up at him with the most shameless sort of pride. (I swallowed a real sword pride. I fought butterflies pride. I am tattooed in more blood than ink pride.) Before I can even register his response, I'm pulled toward the next person, who only manages to pat my shoulder before I'm swept up once again. For a girl who just learned what it means to fight for her life, I am far too eager to throw myself into the arms of death. But he finds me — teeth and bones and the curious beauty within decay — and every secret I've ever kept within me begs for him not to let me go this time. Scooping me up into his arms, the Nakom wings stitched into my corset crack at the seams from the force of our collision until stray fragments are exploding into the air in puffs of technicolor. Little pieces of evidence flutter down to stick to his skin, amalgamating a lifetime of brightness into the graveyard labyrinth of his grayscale ink. I can't help bursting as well, my laughter wild and untamed as I topple up and over his shoulder. It's all so blatantly possessive that I forget to care or to talk myself out of wanting him. Not just his hold on me, but mine on him, as my dueling heart's unspoken fear finds a remedy in the sound escaping my lungs, a wicked melody that seeks to wrap the air around us more tightly than what mere muscles and fingerprints are capable of. For now, I profess my love to gravity and sink into him. In theory, it should feel easier to wrap myself around him. For a girl who knows the art of motion in midair and how to bend against all laws of logic, wrapping my legs around his torso shouldn't be a challenge. Yet I fidget... and in a flurry of nerves that last only for a single second, I think I quake. It is the space between his frantic footfalls and something sweet sixteen and foolish within me hopes he doesn't notice. (I should have outgrown this. I should be old. I should be wise. I should feel like I've learned something about life.) All at once I find myself and shimmy within his hold until I'm wrapped around him — legs around his chest and arms around his neck. One hand pulls the crown from my head and puts it atop his own as I press my mouth to his ear and turn my voice into a low, conspiratorial hiss of a whisper. "You can stop running, Zombie Boy." Here there is victory beyond imagination and so I straighten the crown and grin as though I've earned the right to this smile. The earnest, visible tendons etched across his skin seem to leap for me in response and I lean in to meet him, burying my face in his neck as if it were one of the twenty-three graves that should have been mine, but wasn't. "Death doesn't need to take what already belongs to it."

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=style, background-color: 1f1f1e; border: 715F53 solid 2px; width: 500px; height: 181px; padding: 0 0 0 0px; border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px;][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true] Breath emerges from my lungs in fowl swoops of life, as if this corporeal body is breathing for the very first time. It hurts, stabs my throat as it comes up, I have never run with such vigor before. It was the run of the threatened and hopeless, who can feel the world fading around them with every step they take. I can hear laughter from behind me, as well as indignant shouts. They will realize soon that Death has not yet given up on Cricket, she is still very much in my grasp. I intend to reach and pull as hard as I can. Where only moments ago, I stood full of salt and horribly blindness, my mind is sudden;y clear. My body has made up my mind. I don't think I care if she does not wish for me anymore. I will chase her until we reach the edge of the world, offering her pomegranate seeds until she accepts. My touch is terrible, I know, people shrink away from my hands when I reach out for their anchorage. They act as if to feel the touch of my hand is to be bitten by frost. They act as if I am diseased, and my expression is so grim no matter what type of smile I tug across my lips that maybe I am. I know for a fact that I haven't got maggots. I keep this body carefully, preserving it for future generations to look upon. Still, there is something that people just don't like about a skull in the darkness. Yet, she, my Persephone has only ever run her fingers over my tattoos lovingly. She thinks them beautiful, and she would be the first other than the Ringmaster and Scar. I don't know why she loves them so, or if she still does. I hunger for a touch I cannot feel, to watch her run her fingers over each design, interest and excitement crowding her face all at once. I have never seen that look on a girl's face before. It's always been disgust or fear when they see me. I hunger for that look in her eye, of pure awe. I don't want her worship, not at all. I worship her enough for the both of us I think. I'm just addicted to the way she sees me. Not as much however, as I am addicted to her. The way she moves is not meant to be normal, everyone knows that. I can't talk however, I've always found horrible beauty in things that aren't meant to be. I can't see how Cricket could be anything but utterly stunning. It's not just the way her body moves, but each flutter of laughter that attacks her chest, each step, graceful as tigers. I cannot feel her skin against mine in this moment, but I can feel the steady thump of her heart, it is pressed against my chest and beats for both of us. The thud of it fills me with the oddest sort of joy. It resounds into the emptiness of my chest and I can hear it in my ears. I press her closer as she readjusts herself, I am afraid she will beat on my chest, hating me. Yet, I can hear her voice in my ear, soft and teasing in such a familiar tone that my legs almost give out from under me. I press my lips to the top of her head. I hold them there, every touch and movement around her done in slow motion because I am trying to make for all the lost time in which I thought I'd never see her again. I feel a weight on my head, I don't know what it is, I didn't watch her place it there. Her crown is gone to the ground most likely, but someone will pick it up and hopefully return it, that or melt it down for a profit. I know I should care about her possessions but I'm too focused on my own. She isn't mine but I will call her my own. She may never be mine, but Death will claim her and I can wait. I can wait a hundred years while we both decay until she is ready to love a walking corpse the same way I love her. She whispers against my throat, legs wrapped just as tightly around my torso as my arms enfold her, we are life and death glued together by our own holds on each other. Neither can be in one person but we can be in two and she is my spring. If I am winter than she is the sweetness on the tongue that comes after. She does not trail after me, no. It is I that chases her. Winter never wanted the aching cold, it just wants spring. I do finally stop running when I reach some field full of long grass and my legs become tangled in it. We fall upon a mattress of it, the long grass and my arms breaking her fall. She topples onto me, and my bare chest probably takes a bruise but it won't show anyway, not beneath these freshly re-inked tattoos. My hands fly desperately over her, unable to feel her but cupping her chin nonetheless, trying to find out if all of her remains. She is beautifully whole, all long limbs and twisting, and I press my lips to whatever skin I can find, feeling nothing but it isn't for me anyway. It is for her, it has always been for her. Joy fills this corpse and it racks my body, pulling me tight in every direction, I have never felt so much of it. Her words register in my head, "Death doesn't need to take what already belongs to it." I laugh for the first time in years, a great booming thing that fills the air and makes a flock of birds nesting in the grasses take off in flight. I run a hand through her hair and reach up to take the weight from my forehead. It is the crown that she was wearing when she stepped onto the train, on my head all along. I smile, ruthless and sweet all at once. Who made me king of anything? I am a lowly pauper in comparison to this evanstar that sits astride me. My hand runs through her hair, skimming along until I cup the back of her neck to lower her head to me. Reverently I place the crown back on her head, eyes downcast. She is the Queen, the King, the Empress. "I thought," I say when my laughter has died, "You were going to be gone from me forever." The admittance is hard because I don't want to think I didn't have faith in her. It is the worry of a lovesick boy, I cannot help it. "I thought," I say, "That if you did come home you would look at me like the rest of them do." Now that he has admitted this, the rest comes out swiftly, "I thought that you would hate me, a boy so associated to the Death you just emerged from. I thought that you would come back and be so different that I wouldn't know you anymore, and I watched you on the television. Gods, Crick, you were so beautiful up there for the world to see." As I speak, my fingers trace her jawline, travelling along to her lips. "I hate that you left, I was angry," I've never said so much in one sitting in my life, "I wanted you to myself."

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