all the same take me away [WT and/or Tom]

[Lyn𝛿is]

(tw: graphic depictions of dead body)

galley prank
dead, silent, constant
yet always changing
my favorite view of this world

Autumn, in her opinion, is one of the loveliest times of the year.

The way half of her world changes to mottled red-and-gray-and-gold (while the other half remains evergreen), and the brittle fallen leaves flake with a satisfying crunch beneath her boots. The way the wind nips at her face and frost forms during the night - a reminder of something in-between, changing, something on the verge of dying but not yet dead.

Sometimes people forget that dying and dead are of two entirely different characters; one is stagnant, the other vibrant and changing, an ephemeral beauty to be savored until the end. It's why she usually stays away from the lumberjacking routes, that measure out the death of the forest until it's something clinical, sterile even, an ugly eyesore of flat space and corduroy roads.

The older, disused sections aren't so bad though, where nature has taken over between the cracks and mushrooms have begun eating away at the wooden logs. Occasionally she comes across a worker or two, but they're usually happy enough to go about their business and not give her too much trouble. And sometimes she finds other treasures along the way, like -

- oh?

The deep red blood stands out, against the light sandy soil and yellowing blades of grass - even darker than the red flecks on autumn leaves, were there any trees to be found in this section of the forest. As she gets closer, she can make out the form of a young man lying in the pool of crimson, wearing the standard flannels and with a pair of thick black-rimmed glasses framing his face.

She feels his skin - as cold as the air around them, with little blisters forming on the surface. Obviously, no heartbeat. A few stray flies buzzed around the body, held at bay by the cold. Near the man's stiff fingers lay a bloody axe just out of its grasp; the large wound across his torso, where his organs had begun to spill out, was the obvious cause of death.

She's seen plenty of dead squirrels, before. Quite a few dead birds, too, and once, an entire wolf, flesh half torn off by vultures and maggots swarming all over what remained. But never a dead human body, at least not up close in the District Seven wilderness, far from the cracked television in their little house that broadcasted the Games every year.

Her fingers reach for the wound on the man's body, and half of his liver falls from it, smooth and slippery, dangling from his abdomen as it oozes dark, clotted blood. The intestines, fortunately, are unbroken. She'd always imagined them all coiled up like a rope in a person's body, as though she could give them a tug, and they'd come out like a thick rope being held inside their belly, the way most other animals' organs came out of their bodies quite easily after they died.

This was proving difficult, however, with the strands of flesh connecting them along their sides and keeping them tied together, and before she can dig any further she hears the crunch of footsteps along the dirt road. She wipes her bloody hands against the man's flannel and turns towards the noise, but it's too late. Judging by the strange look they're giving, they've already spotted her.

OOC: The dead body is that of Payne D'elia, Tom's character. Tom has given permission for his character to be killed.
lyrics: dead to the world - nightwish

[WT]

The cold does District Seven no favors. Well before winter snow sets in in earnest, food gets scarcer and each month's oil stretches thinner; under the blanket of frost the poor fall ill more and more often, and the Capitol offers nothing new to help them.

Coming off the tail end of a flu that lost her several days' pay, Ayane would love for none of that to be her problem, but if she's learned one thing with the rebels it's that important work is almost never possible alone and almost always an unglamorous pain in the ass. She has the day off, and she lives closest to Dinah; of course she'll take the antibiotics, shivering and coughing into the lining of her jacket the whole way or not.

The trip takes longer than it could, or arguably should, which is entirely her own fault. She follows the reasoning—if stopped, play the new courier lost on her route, deflect suspicion to the nonexistent sender and recipient on the labels, and get out quickly and cleanly if things go south—but it still makes her antsy, hauling a parcel of stolen supplies around with no backup tougher than a couple of makeshift flashbangs. Getting off the beaten path leaves her out in the chill wind longer, but the disused logging trails keep her out of anyone else's way.

That's the hope, anyway, until it's dashed messily against the nearest rotting log by a kid messing around in someone else's guts.

What Ayane has seen of death off-screen has usually been, if not necessarily clean, not gory either. Stumbling across a corpse once in a while is part of District life—maybe not in District One, but here, certainly, where poverty hunts lives long before and after they cross the Reaping day ropes—and while a body dead of fever or starvation can smell to high heaven, it also stays contained. Bullet wounds bleed, of course, but by and large they leave a person's innards where they belong, and she doesn't exactly stick around to poke at the mangled results of crashed trucks.

This kid—and the dead one does look like a kid, too, a few years older but fluffy-haired and with glasses almost too big for his face—strikes her, primarily, as revolting. It's a tragedy and all, she supposes in the quiet corner where she shoves things away until she finds time to have feelings about them, but damn, does she take back her complaints about the cold. A touch of summer sun and they'd smell that reek a District over.

There's nothing near enough and large enough to duck behind as the living one, casual as you like, wipes her fingers and looks up.

One hand moves automatically, twitching toward a holster that isn't there and then toward the flashbangs in her inside pocket, before she stills. Tempting as it is to call a person with their fingers in someone else's intestines, an arm's length from a bloody axe Ayane would never reach first, things going bad, the kid looks about half her size, and while Ayane has watched enough children heave axes at one another to believe this one could have, she doesn't really get the impression that she did. For one thing, the body looks like it's been sitting, all the blood pooling down and—where it can—out. For another, she just doesn't look panicked enough about witnesses. Her calm is a littler uncanny, but she doesn't run or dive for the axe when they lock eyes, or jump to her own defense before Ayane can get a word out. None of that is a guarantee, but trusting her gut has gotten her through a lot—gotten her into a lot, too, but always back out the other side—and her gut says the only person here who needed to be afraid doesn't have problems anymore.

That still leaves her shivering in the middle of a razed forest, a bag of illegal pills slung over her shoulder, staring down a child with a corpse.

"What," she says, with all the flat resignation of watching wood pulp slurry spill across her shoes, "the fuck."