and i bleed like the rest | katerina + hannah

[я𝑜𝓈𝑒]

I am bathing in an ocean, lathering the salt water in my open, oozing cuts. A million crimson tiger stripes are still searing from the reaping, sliced across the skin, pale and bluish like a winter sky, of a dead girl.

They think they'll kill me in the Arena -

but you can't kill someone who is already dead.

They drained my life away, sucked the blood from my precious golden victor veins the moment my name fell of the escort's disgustingly glossy, plum lips.

"Hannah O'Leary!"

And I fell to the floor, turned into a bloodless, cold corpse. I keep feeling my chest for a heartbeat, wondering if my body has given up yet, if when it will. Always fearing that my heart will suddenly stop like a swift train screeching to an abrupt halt. Always fearing that everyone I carry with me - Abraxas, Katerina, Colgate, Cordelia, Clio, Scope, Crest, Mom, Dad - will drain out of my head with my blood on my deathbed.

Always fearing that a blade will cast me into oblivion.

Rigged. The word still sits bitterly on my tongue, screaming for me to cut the strings that have sewn my lips sealed. I can't send that one simple word to the grave, not when it raises its crimson flag so boldly high.

"LET ME OUT!" it screams behind its steel bars. "YOU'RE DEAD ANYWAY!"

"I know."

The strings are frayed, the bars are dented, but its prison holds, solid as my own in Death's dark, skeletal hands.

Rigged, rigged, rigged, is a whisper in my mind, a soft crackle of a fire.

Rigged, rigged, rigged, sings on, even in Katerina's presence. And I want to scream and throw myself and my shattered heart against the wall. I want to scream everything that is locked inside the cage nestled on my tongue, where my words go to die. My mouth is a dry, icy wasteland from the dust of the dead.

When I do speak, my vocal cords rub together like a shrieking, out of tune violin.

"Katerina!"

And my arms are thrown around her, chains locking us in an embrace. I don't want to let go, but the clock is tick tick ticking, the sound like a needle rhythmically pricking my eardrum, and soon they will yank her away from me. She may as well be a ghost like me when the clock runs out and we diverge, our eyes and skin forever torn away from each other.

The river rises over the brims of my eyes, and I finally speak the surviving words.

"Whatever happens, whatever you see me as in the arena - an animal, a brave warrior, a shrinking coward - I love you, Kat. And we'll always be sisters. That's the one thing they can never take away from us."

They can drain my blood, they can cut out my veins and turn them into jewelry. But they can never rip apart my DNA, they can never take my sister away.

erasing all your memories,

darling they won't go so easily

❧

{ table: zoë }

[[nyte]]

K A T E R I N A  O ' L E A R Y

I should have volunteered. I should have volunteered, I should have-

The world takes to crumbling around me. Chunks of the sky tearing their way across the horizon as I sit. I fall. My knees collide with concrete, tiny bits of gravel finding their way into my skin as though I were a puzzle incomplete without them. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am. There was never any reason to pretend we were the same. That me and my brothers and my sister were not damaged destroyed by the boy that chose to leave us.

To save us.

I've been trying for so long not to hate Colgate. (And for even longer not to love him. )

I couldn't kill someone. I couldn't face what he had with my head held high and a sword pressed to my palm. The mere thought of burying an ax into the flesh of some poor child makes my stomach churn. To volunteer was to kill myself, of that I was certain. (But maybe it was worth it, to save the little girl whom we have all tried so damned hard to protect.)

It's too late now.

Hannah. Hannah. "Hannah..." the words are soft, desperate and too small to be heard by the girl standing thousands of feet above me. I was too much of a coward to protect her. I was not like Col, not like any of them. Some selfless hero who was willing to save us or to die trying. Maybe that is why I have been so angry these years. Maybe I am jealous.

The square drains slowly, blood from a wound as they all trickle away. Down long, fleshy canals dug by the beasts my brother faced so long ago. (Beasts and Humans alike, I could not tell the difference on that screen.) But I stay, I stay until I am the only heart bothering to beat and beat and beat and I wonder if I could stay here until this incessant thumping stops. With my knees bloody and my dress ruined, could I simply stay here and whither away? Did I not have to watch my sister die or become some monster I no longer recognize?

Can't I just wake up already?

I should visit her. That is what I tell myself. I should visit her. I should say goodbye. But I can hardly stand the thought. There was a sort of closeness one developed with an only sister. With long nights spent braiding hair and sharing secrets that we dare not tell the boys.

They wouldn't understand anyway.

I have to say goodbye.

Or at least see you soon.

My feet are like iron, high-heeled velvet tapping a merry tune upon tiled floor. (this is not goodbye. this can't be goodbye.) I don't know if I can survive another. But I enter this deathtrap anyway. A room built for farewell.

"Katerina!" her arms are around me and it hurts. It hurts so beautifully sweet that I cannot help but return the embrace, failing to cage wet diamonds and so I hide them in my sister's neck and I hope that she cannot see the way my shoulders shake.

(I'm so scared, Hannah.)

But my lips have gone numb.

I am a fish, hooked to here every word as though the lure has forced its way through my upper lip. They burn and sting and I writhe like an animal doomed to the scalding heat of an iron pan.

"No." the words shake past clenched teeth, squeezing the younger girl's palm between my own. "Hannah I'm so sorry. I should've... if I were..." (A better sister.)

"Hannah I'm a coward."