that sinking feeling | {nora/willa}

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

W I L L A

She just... needed a moment alone to compose herself. That's what she told herself as she began to paddle further and further out onto the lake, ceasing her row only after she was long outside of attack range. Everything here was quiet. The wind blew crisp along the murky waves, sent a sliver of ice up her neck and a few stray strands of hair into her head, which hung heavy with exhaustion. She forced herself to take in steady breaths, forced the wetness in her eyes to leave just as soon as it showed itself.

She hated the body she was in. She hated its weaknesses, its limits. She supposed she had even before the accident but now, being here, living like this- it was a cosmic joke of the most unforgivable sort, and she was certain everyone else in the world must have thought it was fucking hilarious. Maybe she would have too, if her fate had been dealt to someone else instead of her. Maybe she would have looked at that person, same as everyone looked at her, and thought, what a pity. It wasn't even an option for them to fear her, and she felt they should have. It was infuriating, deserving acknowledgement as a competitor and receiving pity in its place. She supposed even now, even though none of them knew the truth of her circumstances, they knew she wouldn't live.

There were probably some of them out there right now, looking at the idiot girl from Six who was sitting in plain sight, waiting on her to row ashore so that they could jump her of her items. To be fair, she wasn't being particularly risk-averse in that moment- she'd left all her allies back at the shore when she felt the oncoming panic attack building in her chest- but she was still being smart. She didn't think she'd seen a single bow in that wealth, and even then it would have taken a small miracle to land a clean shot from this distance. Well, the distance, the wind, the fact that she was rocking ever-so-slightly, just enough to make her stomach feel queasy. There were a lot of factors. There might have been some giant water horse dinosaur, or hungry poisonous alligators, or a flesh-eating bacteria floating just beneath her, but the other tributes couldn't touch her.

She sighed as a single tear fell, splashed into her lap.

Willa thought she was going to die earlier, not even thirty minutes ago. She refused to show how thankful she was, because she deserved to live just as much as everyone else, but she was thankful. And in shock. And terrified. Not of what she might have to do to continue living, of course. People seemed to think she was soft, gentle, violence-averse. And sure, maybe some of those things were true, but they weren't because she had some bleeding heart for the others to stomp on or take care of. It was because right now, she wasn't any good at violence, and people tend only to enjoy doing things they can exceed at. If the gamemakers were to host a drawing contest or a book reading contest or a fucking survive the blunt trauma to the head contest, she'd take gold all day long.

But this, here, this was an uncertainty, and for once, Willa just wanted control back.

She heard the sounds of an oar, spared only a slight glance back at Nora as the Twelve tribute came over to join her.

"Just needed a second," she said, choking down any emotional vulnerability that had been building within her before.

"It's more quiet out here, you know?"

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

N O R A

She does most of her first aid alone.

Chad doesn't miss the fact that she's not okay, that she's literally covered in wounds that she had no business earning and no business staying in a fight in spite of, but she shrugs him off, tells him that she's better off than she looks. Everything is surface level.

That realization hurts more than she was ready for.

She can't stand it when she does that to herself, makes herself smaller, and she does it all the time. Makes herself lighter, diet variety, something softer and kinder because that's what her father always wanted her to be. Despite, of course, the very relevant fact that she hated her father.

She doesn't hate her father.

She shouldn't think that.

But she sometimes hates the things that he did to her, and more still the things that he didn't, all the ways in which he refused to love her and believe in her and just look at her. He was always looking away.

Nora's looking at Willa now.

She hope that means as much to Willa as she knows it would me to herself. She can only hope. She knows what it's like to not be seen.

Nora nods at first, quiet, keeping her words to herself and her thoughts quieter still. She doesn't want to disturb Willa's peace, though she knows that in a place like this it can't really taste like calm. "I used to crawl out onto our roof back in Twelve a lot at nighttime," she says, reaching a hand out to hold onto the edge of Willa's canoe, laying her own oar flat over the sides of her own. Droplets of water slashed onto her ankle, but she just leaned her head back and closed her eyes. It did funny things to the slash across her chest, but she couldn't resist the flash of sun before it disappeared behind a cloud. "I thought it'd drive my parents crazy, but they never even noticed."