blood under the bridge // { sb; av; yusei }

[aya]

clean out your mouth this is not what it's for
there's still a bloodstain from the spill of the war
pick up your sorrow this is not who we are
i won't cry uncle having come so far

It's weird. Lex Lionel has never left anywhere for good before, but there's an unshakable sense of finality when she boards the long train for home. This is over — for real this time. She'll never be back here again. It feels more conclusive, more certain, more set in stone than when she left District Seven for this damnable adventure in the first place. More than when she was shuffled from her quarters for a hovercraft ride and a trip up the glass elevator, only to be dumped in the expanse of pavement for a seven-day death march. More than when she lay on her back with her eyes turned skyward, gentle fingers smoothing back her hair while her blood dampened the cool grass beneath her. This is the end, for real.

Her brain won't let her fixate on the lie of it: she may very well be back here again. The odds aren't high, but that didn't keep her safe last month. (Month? Ripred. That can't be right.) She may be back here, but it won't be like this. It may as well be a different Capitol entirely without Angel's perplexing soliloquies, without Bette's thoughtful silences, without Carmen's vicious affections. Without Denali.

The oversized city glints on the horizon as the train speeds toward home. Home. As the skyscrapers melt into the landscape, Lex catches herself wondering if everyone else will melt away too the moment they're out of sight. If stepping into the woodshop again for the first time will be like waking up from a fever dream, and maybe she'll think to write down the blurry strokes or maybe she'll just let the details fade until she can no longer separate memory from imagination. Until all that's left is the life she already knew. Quiet. Peaceful. Routine.

Even the hypothetical of forgetting feels like a lie. Not even Lex Lionel is proficient enough at compartmentalizing to fully sequester the last wild month of her life, no matter how unreal the whole thing still feels. But if she won't be back and she can't forget, what sort of purgatory does that make these final few days? Some sort of epilogue for her first life or a footnote on the murder interlude that interrupted who she really is?

If they're all going home like nothing happened, maybe none of this counted for anything after all. At her core, Lex doesn't believe that. If it counted for nothing, it would feel like nothing. The silence, the solitude would be every bit as comfortable as they were on the other train ride, as they were on the floors of the training center above the Vault. She wouldn't've spent the previous night glaring at whatever was in front of her — the mountain of herb and garlic mashed potatoes on her dinner plate, built into a skyscraper then demolished in four oversized forkfulls; Jacquelyn, the district escort, with her constant stream of intrusive questions intercut with fits of joyful weeping that couldn't possibly be genuine; the clothing that had been laid out for her, covered in impossible fasteners and fitted too tightly over her arms and legs — trying out anger because it seemed like the closest feeling to whatever parasite had burrowed into her chest.

If none of this counted for anything, it wouldn't have hurt quite so badly every time she caught Denali's eye from across the Vault only to be met with suspicion, hostility, and frigid distance. Confusion devours her — the root of her grief is uncertainty. Lex doesn't understand why. Why, all of the sudden, she doesn't even get an explanation. Why the girl who had seven days to cut and run and didn't — even though they both knew that meant it would come down to a duel to the death between them — can't stand to let Lex within twenty feet of her now that it's all over. Why, after chucking axes and knives at one another, after bleeding out with her head in Denali's lap, only now does it feel like they really did fight to the death after all.

She doesn't deserve this. (No telling each other we deserve this.) If this is the end of the iconic wealth-winning duo, the dissolution of the crew of the legendary RLS Trolley Problem, if the badass bitches are burning their battle jackets, Lex at least deserves to know why.

Jaw clenched with a determination she hasn't busted out since scrapping for her life on the blacktop of the Bloodbath, Lexandriy methodically stalks the train from back to front, desperate to demand what she's owed before they run out of time. She crosses through the corridors of each district car, shamelessly barging in anywhere Denali might be hiding. As the numbers dwindle — no sign of her in the District Six car, nor the District Five — so does her patience. She should've started at the dining car. Energy flagging from the exertion of hobbling down the length of the moving train on her stabbed leg, Lex is almost surprised when she does find Denali: too preoccupied with scuffing her toes against one of the fleurs-de-lis stained into the tacky carpeting of the District Four car's corridor to bother looking up at the slam of the carriage door.

"Hey," Lex calls, a little too forcefully. Her heart has migrated to her throat and tastes like brass against the back of her tongue. "Hey. Denali." (Don't you Freckles me, Hell Demon.)

The redhead slowly shifts her gaze from the flower on the floor. Lex doesn't wait for acknowledgement or eye contact; she's been rehearsing all day and needs to go now before her mind goes blank. "Look, I promised I'd haunt you. So you can't ignore me — at least for today. Okay?" A note of desperation edges out the anger in her voice right there at the end. A few days ago, the crack might've bothered her. Today it doesn't seem like there's any reason to care. She runs her right hand through her hair, tugging at the roots.

"You've got the rest of your life for that. Go back to District Five, pretend that none of this ever happened. I'm not —" she swallows. "— we'll probably never see each other again anyway, right?" How many hundreds of miles separate their homes, anyhow? Doesn't matter. The miles aren't the problem when there are walls, fences, armed guards in between. Her eyebrows knit themselves upwards, on the edge of acquiescence. "I don't know what I did to you that you won't even look at me, but let me make it right. Give me today."

[L△LIA]

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I built this house of mirrors all myself
The faces staring back at me look like somebody else

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Peering closely at the paneling on the corridor walls, Denali searches the woodgrain for... she doesn't know. Secrets. Everything is untrustworthy and it feels like at any given moment she might stumble across a holographic flicker in the design, uncovering some kind of evidence that this is all a trick. When she and Minx took the train to the Capitol, Denali spent the entire ride checking behind picture frames, knocking over candle sticks, pushing at anything that looked as if it might be hiding a secret button or a trap door. Desperation to escape the fate she had volunteered for began unraveling her every breath. She paced through each train car like a caged cat, but now she investigates every nook and shadow for the opposite reason.

What if this isn't real.

What if she had everything figured out yesterday.

What if Ripred is just totally fucking with her right now?

In the Vault it only made sense not to believe the impossible — that she had been resurrected, that they had all been, well... spared certainly isn't the correct word, but whatever was happening still felt like far too much to hope for from a hateful city of god complexes who had spent the last week partying over two dozen children hacking each other to bits. Scratch that. Who had spent nearly a century partying over hundreds and hundreds — thousands? — of children hacking each other to bits. Despite the psychotic definition of 'normal' Denali has always been taught to believe, the idea of being given life felt like too much to accept. So she didn't.

Then Lethe —

Was she in there? Was Eden there?

— felt undeniable.

Denali blows air at the paneling, exhaling with enough force that she triggers a fit of coughing, her lungs still struggling with deep breaths. Nothing. Brow furrowing, she straightens up and tries not to dwell on the echo of her mentor's voice within her aching chest. If they could bring Denali back, then why not Eden? ...why not Zion? Dropping her head back, eyes squeezed shut as her face turns toward the ceiling, the thought bursts like an invasive seed in her heart, taking root and growing stronger with every moment she's unable to push it out.

Absently turning in circles for a while, when Denali looks back at the rest of the train car, it's difficult to tell her soft dizziness from the general movement of the train itself. She sighs. Time will answer the questions of her impatience, whether the promise of going home is too good to be true or if this is just another sick Quell twist, but the rest will remain unanswered forever. Even after the train comes to a halt in District Five — or if it doesn't — and Denali ignores her wounds and runs reckless into the arms of the family that will heal her better than any medicine — or if she can't — there will never be true rational for why she was allowed to kiss Death upon the cheek and return to the living, but Zion wasn't. It was unjustifiable before. It will continue to be unjustifiable after.

Yet, the pain is new again with the revelation that it might have been this easy for him to be sent home. If they were able to put Faux Rhodes back together again then it would have been possible for Zion as well. All the little pieces of his brain could have been glued back together and the gaps in his skull could have been bridged with imitation bone and someone else's skin. Maybe then the strange hands Denali wears would feel a better sense of belonging, instead of the way one glimpse of the too perfect flesh fills her with unspeakable loneliness, as if she doesn't even have her own company to comfort her.

Trying to find something else to fixate her thoughts on, she glances out the window at trees rushing by too quickly to be anything more than a blur; at tiny flecks of dust floating through the air at an absurdly contradicting tempo; at the fleur-de-lis pattern of the carpeting and how it's trying so hard to pretend this corridor isn't tragically boring and ugly. "Hey," a familiar voice calls and Denali's already cowering heart trembles a little more, "hey. Denali." Scuffing her toes against the carpet, she ducks her face, assaulted by an echo of all her internal questions balled up into the fist of Lex's voice.

Taking in a hesitant breath, she peeks at Lex through the messy fringe of her bangs, as if worried she might still be in need of armor. Anything to shield her from this emotional reckoning. "Look, I promised I'd haunt you. So you can't ignore me — at least for today. Okay?" The hidden tension in Denali's face softens with a spike of regret as the anger in Lex's voice flinches with more desperate emotions. Between the two of them it was always the Lyons girl whose feelings escaped her control; Lex was always even tempered and rational. This small break feels so big in the context of... everything. Fuck. Denali, well, she doesn't know she fucked up, but — Ripred — she hopes for it, despite the implications of what that means she's done to a girl willing to face death for her.

Running her hand through her hair, this isn't one of Lex's idle ramblings. "You've got the rest of your life for that." This is weighted with forethought and the kind of worries that gather in the dark until one small concern has formed an army. "Go back to District Five, pretend that none of this ever happened. I'm not —" Lex tries to swallow the words back, but something already broke. "— we'll probably never see each other again anyway, right?" Denali lifts her face fully, staring Lex's panic dead in the eye, letting it make an easy target of her so that each barb might bury itself as deeply as any axe or knife. Right. The realization strikes bone. "I don't know what I did to you that you won't even look at me, but let me make it right." Fuck. Fuck. Fuck she fucked up. "Give me today."

Silence strangles Denali's throat as she tries to say something, but can't find the words to explain because she hasn't actually figured anything out yet. Everything is still as much of a mess now as everything was yesterday, it's just that now that mess is on a train. It moves — mind-blowingly fast — even as she stands perfectly still. Her toe traces another fleur-de-lis. "Okay, Lex," she murmurs, voice tentative as the name leaves her mouth. Lex. Not Hell Demon. Maybe... Ripred. Hopefully. Hope hurts worse than the brutal resignation of the Vault, where at least she could put up wall after wall of mental defenses to protect herself. Trust is so much scarier. She already died; whatever might come for her next will surely be worse.

The most terrible part of it isn’t what Denali said or how she behaved for a handful of hours. It’s how she felt — genuine revulsion and petty hatefulness gnawing at her every thought. It’s that a handful of hours is no small thing to be wasted when it’s all the time they have left. If this was never a trick of the gods, be it of one hellscape or another, then those hours that felt like decades could have become something worth remembering instead of more agonizing mistakes to be buried side-by-side with Denali’s death.

Confessing the kinds of awful ideas that were whirling around in her head yesterday certainly won’t make either of them feel better about it, so she bites her tongue until she tastes iron. The two girls stare at each other without speaking until it becomes clear that okay, Lex is all Denali has to say for herself. No excuses. No apologies. There’s something in the manner of her meek agreement that admits how Lex isn’t wrong and that if Lex isn’t wrong then Denali wasn’t right. There’s no point in arguing over whether concrete facts or abstract truths should win a war between them.

Lex waits longer than necessary for a response that doesn’t come before taking two steps forward and glancing to see if Denali follows. She does, still shuffling her toes against the carpet in case the pattern finally gives way to some kind of answer. They meander through the next two train cars slowly, but without any resistance to whatever destination Lex has in mind. It’s only as they walk through the District One corridor that Denali loses focus and gets distracted staring up the tiny lampshades on the wall sconces, pulling herself onto tiptoes to examine what might be hiding in them. Maybe the bulbs twist to open a secret compartment or what if the shadows are coded to —

"Looking for something?" Lex asks, raising an eyebrow at the same time the rest of her face seems to fall flat with exasperation. Denali squints at the light fixture until spots blind her vision with splotches of blue and purple and green, like a bruises. Lightly prodding at one of the cloth shades with her bandaged fingers — just to be certain — she immediately regrets it. Even this faint pressure feels like needles pushed straight through her fingertips, in one side and out the other. It will take weeks still, months even, for her fingernails to regrow.

Hissing through her teeth as she yanks her hand back and clutches it to her chest, Denali’s eyes flicker toward Lex and she tries to find words that don’t exist. Again. "I’m looking..." Her brows furrow and she scans the carpet, the ceiling, the window so full of blurry trees that it appears empty. "... for the absence of something." It sounds stupid. She knows it sounds stupid. "I just need to know if —"

"Hey, Lex!" A voice much brighter than Denali’s struggling incoherence calls out from the room nearby, the door left ajar. Craning her neck, Denali catches a glimpse of Bette standing atop a chair on tiptoes, straining to pin a blanket to a cable running across the length of the car. "Could I get a hand?"

She cuts herself off and nods at the door, less as an excuse to change the subject and more to imply that Bette's needs are probably more important than anything Denali has to say. "Don't look at me," leaning against the doorframe, she runs her eyes over the stacks of pillows and oddly repositioned furniture, "even if you weren't the tall one — and you obviously are — it's not as if I'm gonna be useful to anyone right now." Awkwardly holding her bandaged hands up, she shrugs casually before dropping them back to her sides and subtly angling them out of sight from the occupants of the room inviting Lex in.

There.

There it is: the flickering error that Denali has been searching the train for and she can't see it, despite the way it glitches out in the open where anyone else might notice. It's a flaw in her confidence, in her sense of self. An undeniable belief has taken root in the Lyons girl's chest that regardless of what else is or isn't real following her death, one thing she knows for certain is that she was brought back a little bit wrong. Be it her life, her hands, or a tiny spark in her heart, something isn't quite what it was before and if she could stop searching everything and everyone else for evidence of betrayal then she might see the true source so clearly. In herself.

wander. wonder. the arcadian wild

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