Cutting the final string (Deja DP; Day 4)

[*]

Deja Hatcher No hesitation, but simply despiration. I flung myself at Hyacinth. My body falling forward as the edge of the weapon barely misses her body. One leg shy kept me from my target and the uneven balance set me spiraling away from the very person I had to fight. Fingertips bent forward. Nails cracked under pressure. The broken part of my wrist turning my arm in a gruesome direction. Finally, the thud of the spikes biting into the ground resound in my head. Everything slows down a notch and the crisp air invades my lungs with a sharp intake. I see nothing in your eyes, and the more I see the less I like. Is it over yet, in my head? "No!" Harshly my voice whispers as I glance up to my enemy. This treaterous flower has me in the palm of her hand, and she's ready to deal the final blow. This faithless blossom has been tainted with poison and her crooked mouth now resembles my abhorrence. She will never forget the day she met me. Whenever she closes her eyes, I hope its a sense of deja vu when my face crosses her mind. An unpleasant chill injects itself within my blood. A deep, penetrating frozen line of blood pumps through my heart and something feels off. I'm peering at her; gaze softening. I'm looking straight at her, yet she did not shift. Ghostly apparitions have emerged again beckoning me to follow them into the unknown. A knife clinks to the ground beneath my body covered in blood. The hilt of the knife so eloquently wrapped it had to have been something the capitolites would have made special for this fight. This very special occasion; my death. However, it has been tainted with the sins of my own precious life. It is clean no more. A gasp. "It..." I know nothing of your kind, and I won't reveal your evil mind. Is it over yet? I can't win. A gurgle. "...hurts." A grasp for the crutches nearest to me only to receive disappointment in return. They are barely out of my fingers reach. The hard plastic coating merely coats itself from my reach. "No. No. No. No..." My body trembles. "Bolts?" My breath escapes but it's faint. My fingers caress my stomach and the numerous gashes and puncture wounds have started to trickle again. Dots invade my vision as warmth leaves my body, dripping to the ground beneath my half kneeling body. Is this what it's like to die? To have numbness spread like wildfire? That very syringe felt like this the very first time, too. Poison spreads through my veins and I have to wonder who pierced me with the needle. Forehead touches the ground in front of me first. The gritty feeling of rubble and rock embedding itself into my skin. I begin to submerge into death's threshold. Only, I'm not done living yet. My fingers dance upon the ground, looking for my lost weapon, but that materialistic feeling is gone. My body slumps over exposing my face and tears for all to see. Why do I feel like this? So sacrifice yourself, and let me have what's left. I know that I can find the fire in your eyes. I'm going it all away, get away, please.

[Python]

H Y A C I N T H  M O R T U U S

Her thrust was weak. It scraped the back of girl’s skull, her sword a paintbrush splattering red onto a rocky canvas. Another girl – Samira – had smashed her wrist into a fractured mess, and Hyacinth knew her heart was fading. This girl could fight, she could be fury, she could believe in defying death, but sometimes loss was inevitable. She could believe she had all of the power in the world, and then fate would snatch it way from her. There was dormant anger still stirring in Hyacinth’s core after the day of her punishment. The one person she could blame was dead, and the Peacekeeper responsible for her scars had forced himself into her life. Another man to please, another night to forget. Another reminder that she could be powerless.

This girl wanted so badly to live, but so do I. Cannons bellowed in the wind, warning them again and again that players on the board were dropping. Maye was among them, dead before Hyacinth could witness a second of it. Her voice was swallowed up by the perils of this place. Such a beautiful day wasted on death, sun beams streaming between the cracks in the earth to glisten against the silver of their blades. The cloudless sky seemed so far away. They were ants trapped between two walls, carrying the weight of sins rather than food. This girl believed she could escape fate.

Not today.

She pivoted, angling her sword for another strike. Time froze. A red stain blossomed from the girl’s abdomen, and she didn’t remember a knife having been embedded into her skin. She had yet to move, yet to breathe, she had only blinked and it was over. Someone else had stepped in and caught fate by surprise. A sinner, not a savior. The girl collapsed.

”It hurts.” This wasn’t a quick death, but something sharp and terrible. She asked for Bolts, and Hyacinth found herself standing beside her remaining allies, hands clutching the hilt of her bloody sword. The girl was in a pitiful state. Defeat was here, and the realization that she had to die would strike down like a hammer. This was the truth no tribute searched for, but one everyone would witness. Her raw emotion, her honesty, seeping out of her like the blood in her veins and the tears in her ducts. Celia would relish in something as sweet as a slow, painful death. She would not.

Hyacinth’s expression didn’t change. She pursed her lips, knowing that she was not her sister, yet also knowing what had to be done. She let Ansgar say a prayer, she let Bolts say his goodbyes, but this girl was fading breath by breath, and none were painless. They could not leave her here to bleed out like an animal. Hyacinth was not an empathetic woman with a gentle soul and stars in her eyes. She was still cold, inside and out, and felt as empty as she did when she found Mordecai’s face in the sky. Nothing would save her.

But she still had a conscience.

”I was right,” she said, because someone had indeed killed this girl, a simple death sentence with one toss of a knife. Now, it was matter of delivering the final blow before her heartbeat gave out. ”I wish I wasn’t.”

Because despite everything, they didn’t just kill each other. The Capitol reaped all of them. Every player was manipulated by their manicured fingers, and she would never forget how painfully pointless it was.

She looked Deja in the eyes, and plunged the tip of her sword into her heart.

[Chevi]

BOLTS SPARK

DISTRICT THREE

Deja wanted to live so, so badly.

Bolts cried out as he watched her fall. It would have been easy, so easy to tell himself that he cared because she looked so much like his sister. Because she reminded him of Joule, and how even if he won, she could still end up just like this, broken and bloody and missing a leg, and he had no way to stop it. Right now, only a few feet away and armed, he still could not to anything to save Deja.

And Deja was not Joule.

The truth was, Deja was as different from Joule as she could be. She was young, and red-haired, yes. But she was also strange and broken and quirky, and kind deep down, and she loved French toast. She had lost a leg on Day One and and she had been fighting ever since somehow, despite the odds never being in her favor, just because she wanted to live. She came to the Feast for a chance. She asked him for help. She asked all his allies for help. And even now, blood seeping away, she was not done living yet.

>>"It... hurts... Bolts?..." 

Bolts looked up at Hyacinth, sword poised in her hand. In this moment, it was mercy, even if it did not feel like one. He sheathed his own knife and went to keel. Deja was grasping for things on the ground. He held her hand.

"I'm here Deja." she was not a little sister, but she was a little girl, and she looked younger now that she was dying. Bolts wondered how others saw her. For them, she probably just looked scared. Bolts had nothing to say. It was no matter whether sister or not, there was nothing to say to a girl who was about to die scared in front of an audience of millions.

"I'm here. I'm here. It's okay... you can stop fighting. I'm here. You are not alone... You were very brave."

Hyacinth just wanted to live. Deja wanted to live more, but somehow, it was not a decision either of them could make. The fight was over now, everybody fleeing back to the arena as if there was a corner of it that was not a death sentence to all. Bolts saw the sword balanced in the air and wondered if one day soon he would see the same sight. 

Above the sword, there was only the sky. And behind it, all that watched, and listened, and maybe cried, and then sent tar for children to make them kill better.

Bolts gave the small, bloody hand a sqeeze. Tears burned like fire. 

"Deja, don't look. Don't look at them."

BY CHELSEY