Lost In The Cracks Of The Landslide :: [Gunner + Nat]

[L△LIA]

GUNNER LA TORRE my body’s moving into r e t r o g r a d e i’m feeling loose feeling untamed and you’re the dynamite Dropping the pulverized head onto the dining room table, blood and battered brains continue to ooze out from the seams of the otherwise nondescript backpack. A piece of fractured bone peeks out from where it was never quite closed — a neck sized hole ringed by zippered teeth — and Gunner's skin and clothing is splattered with that same red, with the sharp scent of rubbing alcohol, with unnameable evidence of something heartless. There is a sense of her being bigger than her body; the shadow following her feet around isn't that of your average teenage girl. This trail of blood could be followed much further back than her performance in the Training Center today and not all of the wreckage from it is cherry flavored. Licking a disgustingly sweet spatter of red off her finger, she looks into the eyes of the young Krigel boy sitting in one of the chairs across from her, his lunch suddenly put on pause. "Tell your brother he can suck a dick." In her head, Gunner is telling herself to smile, consciously commanding her face to convey the joking demeanor she's maintained since being Reaped. Because this is nothing. The Games are nothing. So nothing can get to her. Except the smile won't come, not so soon after turning off the part of her that might just be worthy of being called a soul. After all, no one with a soul could drown a man with rubbing alcohol, not even a plastic man. This is not a simple switch. Since the smile won't come, she picks up a piece of shattered plastic skull and flicks it at Nat, bits of congealed goo soaring through the air around it. "My skill set is just fine without him. This —" Her eyes flick to the bag casually bleeding out between them. "— is what you call a thirteen." One corner of her mouth finally manages to hitch itself up, but her eyes are still as dead as the man whose head she bashed in with a crowbar and carried home in a backpack. Lifelike, maybe, but nothing more.