immortalize me ; aspen v. love / day eight

[eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris]

It would be kinder if we could just flash through.

One moment I'm pulling the mask away from my face, breathing in the cold air with a knife through my throat — and it feels like I've been suffocating. I am suffocating. And even in the darkness, gilded by the golden fire light, I see Robin's face sleeping across from me. I see the way his chest doesn't move, falling out of sync with the way the world turns. It feels like I've aged a century. It feels like I've forgotten the sun.

Even then, knowing where it leads me, I would stay in that feeling forever if I could. Close my eyes, and open them again; standing across from another enemy, stained weapons in both of our hands, ready to charge into that endless war again. If it were kinder, and easier, then yes. Time would have left me to stop the bleeding in the dark. Pulling steel from my flesh, reawakening the wound that has been numbed to the shock.

I would suffer that, and it would be enough.

But through the clouds, I watch the sky become flushed with light. Neon blue streaking through the inky black, painting names and faces and tragedies in place of the stars. And it goes without saying; that when I saw him looking down at me, it was like dying. It condenses all of my pain into one quick strike through the chest. All the blood drains from my face, like it's pouring from my throat, and the scream that follows is a terrible, primal sound.

Because now there is no one to hold me, and there are only trees. Little shadows reaching out their hands to me. My mind tries to fill the spaces, going through my memories and matching names to the threat. Areto and Love, of course, and a stranger I met briefly in battle. Where I lost Willa, and Nora, and — and I falter there. Because going any further means accepting that he's gone. I told myself it would be easier to forget.

Let them die, and keep going. Reach into the night, and chart a path to the sun. But then I remember his touch, and the way I had been such a fool to let him become my shelter. Now he's crashing all around me, and I don't know where to go. Where to stand. It's the fact that there will never be closure. I'll never tell him that I love him back, and I'll never be able to tell him I'm sorry. For the things that happened to them, and my part in them.

The cicadas sing me a lullaby, but it pales to his.

I remember every lyric as I sob, curling up on the cold earth and feeling it flow into me. Until it's hard for me to keep shaking, and the cut across my throat has started to tear again, and all that leaves my mouth is a whimper. My eyes see nothing, the shadow covers everything. And I wait for his arms; because as willing as I am to do whatever it takes to go forward, there's a quiet part of me that wonders. What if I could be softer?

And what if my ghost could stay here with his?

Neither of us speak. The silence has teeth.

And when I wake, I feel refreshed in the way a wound has been cauterized. There's nothing to hide now, my hair is a wild mess of blonde waves, and every emotion in my eyes is sad and angry and pitiful. There's nothing I can do to distract from it. I'm terrified — of what it means to be here, and what it means to leave. I tie my hair back from my face, as if it matters now, and I gather my spears like they're not slick with blood.

They are, and will always be. I refuse to bring them with me.

That's the pretty thought. That when I watch the sun rise again, I'll wash away these wicked parts of myself. As if I have not always been this cruel, and so eager for destruction. It's hard to tell myself that the battle is almost over when I think of what escaping means. It suffocates me. I see my mother, and my father, all my siblings and friends and enemies. A wall of faces glaring down, like the ghosts. Always the ghosts.

I have no secrets; I never will.

So, forgive me when I tell you that I sought out the light — that I took those bandages and wrapped them tightly enough around my throat to silence all of my fears. That I made it to my feet, and accepted the terrible things I would have to do to make it home. Slaughter the innocent, and hunt down the monsters, too. There's a blur on the horizon, a signal for me to follow. And I do. Even knowing it'll destroy me.

Like a kiss by the campfire; like the things we whispered in the darkest parts of the night.

When I arrive at the cornucopia, like I've walked through time to that very first day, I close my eyes for just one moment to remember it another life. Something like pride, and hope, but then it shifts. And it's just dark, and eerie, and there's a thickness in my throat that's hard to swallow. Like when I see him standing there, and I have no questions. I know Love Bellisario in the way I know a wolf; I have all my weapons at the ready.

"Huh." My voice is hoarse as I speak, low and somber. Melancholic. "I was wondering where you were hiding." Time continues to warp around us, refracting memories of when we came face to face, surrounded by our friends. And pawns. There's not a moment that I don't relive stabbing Chad through the eye. I remember the way Love had pushed him in the way of every attack so carelessly, the way I familiarize him so much with a serpent.

Let him poison me. I'll take his head.

"Should I bow?" I ask with a sarcastic bite, spreading my arms wide enough to reveal a spear in one hand, and three more clutched in the other. We both know what this meeting will end with. A chorus of cannon fire, and another ghost for the haunting. I wonder for a moment if I should ask him if he had a hand in Reece's death, but knowing would only make it worse. I would lose all good sense, and relinquish everything to my fury. I would crown it my god.

I can't risk that. Neither of us can.

"Did you run out of puppets? Was it worth it in the end?"

Through my grief, I remember seeing Julian's face, too. I'd imagine it fits like a knife in his chest. Perhaps we'd be mourning if there was any hope at peace between us. Our blades would rust in the rain, and all the blood would be rushed away. And we could forget. We could remember forever. The end stares at me with baby blue eyes, and as I always have, I refuse it. Preparing to strike, I let the sadness turn to the fire in the chambers of my heart.

Let it burn everything.

"Either way. No one should have to die alone."

This is the smallest kindness I can offer him. Sharp enough to pierce his skin.

"I'll be hearing your cannon soon, Love Bellisario."

aspen attacks love ; javelin 1/3
Nosl57mm5ejavelin
block

accuracy | day eight

javelin
miss, javelin lost

javelin·javelin

[pogue]

He doesn't think of Fleur's body. He can't think of Fleur's body.

The two statements are entirely different and entirely the same, an endless battle in the shattered pieces of his soul as he sits on the damp grass with nothing but the night to keep him company. Every breath feels like a betrayal and every wince of pain that shoots through his form feels like poison, laced into his bones and muscles and veins with a rusted needle and venom thread. He'd collapsed into the dust and dirt at some point and the world had done nothing but pass him by since, dragging shallow claws against his flesh and counting the amount of cuts turned scars turned warnings that now adorn the same skin he'd considered diamond.

Every breath is borrowed, expected to be paid back in double. As he sits, he realizes he's living on borrowed time that can only be payed back with one thing.

He fights back against the feeling, dissects it in the back of his mind until there is nothing left but unrecognizable pieces of a fleeting thought, jagged edges of a shattered reflection that are easy to throw away. It's a strategy he was never taught at the Academy, to reduce everything that could have been down to its worst form, down into the fact that it simply never was. Seven days of hopelessly fighting back against the ghosts that haunt him, tearing up the memories and the reflections and tossing away the poisoned pieces of glass. Now, they pile up in the pit of his stomach and dig themselves into the holes in his heart in reckless abandon, slowly killing him from the inside out and dancing with the ghosts that embed themselves into his skin. He shudders, shivers, blood loss and hollow pain flowing through his body like an ocean wave, crashing and burning and pulling away only to do it all again.

By the time the sound of horns blaring hits his ears and the night sky coats itself in electric blue he feels it a blessing, broken gaze drifting up to stare towards the familiar look of the end.

Coated in blue are the faces of the fallen above him, peeking through the mist and the shadows as neon ghosts and hollow souls. Before he'd entered the arena he'd thought this would be considered sweet, that the faces of the fallen would feel like sugar dripping down his throat and candy on his tongue, spread out into a smile and watch the forgotten memories slip by in and out of his mind like they are nothing. Now, as he stares into the void and feels the void yell back at him in trumpet and horn he hears the distant voice of his Father's tone, stern and stoic in tone and reflection. Even the angriest of hives will work for you so long as you offer honey." Coated in honey and offering it to every single tribute that stood near him, watched them flock and swarm with a smile plastered on his face. He gulps now, as face dissolves into face dissolves into sin and sadness, tasting nothing but bitterness scratching at the back of his throat.

When Julian's face greets his gaze it feels like a million stingers pierce his skin at once.

Worse than any other pain that he's felt in this arena before and for the briefest of moments he goes numb, revels in the fleeting thought that maybe his body will coat itself in shock and awe, until he can't feel any of the pain both inside and out, until the cuts turn to shallow wounds turn to scars turn to nothing, until he can forget. A heartbeat and a half later his foolishness is righted, and the wave of grief and pain and shattering heart runs through him in a battling war of fire and ice, freezing every fried vein and nerve in his body before burning them into nothing but the same dust that floats heavy in this arena. The smoke and the mirrors collapse into his lungs and he chokes as he hears a lion's roar from the sky above, caught in between the trumpets and the tears in his heart and he unknowingly returns it with a meek roar of his own. Guttural sob claws its way up his throat and slips from bloodied lips as he pulls his knees to his chest, presses them into his form until he can hardly feel the way his heart falters and stumbles in between shaking breaths, until he can't feel himself feeling anymore.

And it's instinctive, the way his mind wonders if the sob is from pain or sadness or fear or fury or all of it at once. He whispers in bated breaths sweet nothings that feel like venom on his tongue, convincing himself that it is nothing but the first, that a warrior's heart only has room to cry from the wounds on the body. Then, he convinces himself that it does not matter what it is from at all, that is has never mattered. The face of a boy he never knew fades into the sky and he's left with nothing but memories he wishes he could forget, buzzing and swarming in the back of his mind.

"I hate you."

"All of us deserve better."

"I hate you."

"When- if- I win, that's what I'm going to do."

"I hate you, I-"

"I am going to make it all better."

"I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate-"

He says it until he thinks he's convinced, that it will become fact in the back of his mind, until the smoke and the mirrors in his lungs fade into obscurity just like Julian's face, until the hollow sobs that threaten to spill from his throat lose the battle and focus on the war.

Then, he wonders how long the pain will stay with him. His heart answers forever. The voice in his head confirms in silent agreement.

The final falls from his bag when he pulls the bandages out from in between the items, steel and plastic landing in the soft chill of the grass. They stare at him in mockery and laughter, a chorus of his own failures and the shatter playing in the background as he wraps bloodied fingers around the first one, pulling it closer until Julian's name greets his sight, written sloppily in the wake of his own downfall so many days ago-

-shoved into the bottom of his bag as the only tape he hadn't had the bravery, or lack thereof, to send.

Even now, his thumb hovers over the play button, memories of speaking into metal and static and hearing nothing return playing in the back of his mind and daring him to listen to the stammering voice of a broken boy. And he can't, doesn't have the instinct or the warrior's heart or the fool's mind to play the final words he wanted Julian to hear from him, the final words that he wanted himself to be remembered by.

As if it was ever his choice in the first place.

He drops the tape and slams Fleur's throwing knife into the casing, hearing the scream of static crackling in final breaths.

Vanya's tape to him runs on repeat as he pulls his knees tighter to his chest and buries his face in them, feeling tears spill forth in a war won. The cameras around him immediately crackle and groan as they turn away from an unwanted sight of a broken career, and he mutters bitter nothings to himself under his breath as he sobs.

"I love you, Mom."

"I love you, Vanya."

"I love you, Lux."

He continues until he runs out of people who he wishes could care about him, until he runs out of people who will never hear his sobs or his confessions. Until he runs out of people who won't remember him.

The tears dry on their own in the dead of the night, and when he wakes up he feels foreign in his own skin, battling against the soft ebbs and flow of pain that still wash over his body as he stands, gathering what is left of his heart and his energy and beginning to walk.

He lets the mist and the shadows that dance within it guide him, too tired to carve his own path and too used to the choices being made for him to think of anything other, and when the towering sign of the Cornucopia finally begins to materialize through the fog he gulps down the chill that attempts to crack his spine in two, tapping the spear against the ground to steady himself as he sways. He wonders if Emerson Le Roux is waiting for him there, if the Gamemakers have raised a lion in place of Julian's fall, if she will drive her blade into his throat and pull all the lies and sin he's spewed out from his insides, let him fall to the ground and become forgotten in the dust and the dirt.

He nearly thinks it true when the figure in the shadows in front of him turns real, when blonde hair meets his eyes, when Aspen steps into his line of sight. "I was wondering where you were hiding.", and Love gulps down the fact that all he can feel is Chad's form pressed against his palm, thrown into the line of fire and mercilessly taken at Aspen's hand.

His ghost stands behind Aspen and laughs, hollow and guttural and filled with blood. "Should I bow?"

"Neither of us are in any shape to be bowing." He quips back, taking in every shallow cut and bandaged wound that is scattered across Aspen's body, reflected on his own. "We might not be able to stand back up." And he coughs, iron and dirt still staining his tastebuds.

"Did you run out of puppets? Was it worth it in the end?"

His body begs to answer yes and no, the faces of the ghosts flitting through his mind all at once and all for nothing. Emerson and Chad and Waverly and Ariel and Six and Fleur and-

"The hive dies quick when the honey turns out to be poison." He mutters, feeling a million stings of pain echo through hollow bones.

He scoffs at her offer, laughs at the fact that even with a million bodies near him he'll still be alone in his own death, "Can't promise I'll return that kindness if it's me watching you die."

The metal of her blade flies forward in between his own hammering heartbeats and he dives to the right, body flaring up in pain as adrenaline floods the source when he stands, spear gripped tight in white knuckled hands. "I don't think either of our trainings prepared us for this, huh?"

He jabs the spear towards her with the ghosts screaming behind him.

"Who've you hurt? What have you been through, Aspen Peake?"

[Love attacks Aspen, spear]

Bh8Sb4xmXvspear

[Deep gash on neck - 10.0, +1 strength]

spear

[eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris]

He speaks of honey, and poison. Seems fitting. He's like a rose bush in the swell of summer, blooming with pretty words and graceful movements. But the trick is that I know where his thorns are hiding; where the golden liquid starts to burn a hole through the skin. It festers, turning black with rot, and we watch it die in front of us.

It sounds like his lie.

It looks like my rage.

"So, you admit it? You're the reason they're all dead."

Our hearts are still beating, and because of this, we are reason. I know this. As long as I'm still alive, I should also be held accountable. Two of his allies died at my hand, regardless of how he set the scene. Something about this boy seems so inclined to take control; say this, and do this, and lay down your life for him. He makes my skin crawl. He makes me furious.

And so terribly afraid; because it is dark, and there are wolves in the woods.

Of the mistakes I can make, underestimating Love Bellisario will not be one. I try to mimic the fight from yesterday, start by attacking a distance and then overwhelm with close combat. But he's fast as a viper, sinking in and out of the shadows. I hear my javelin thud against the ground uselessly, swallowing hard as if I'm trying to repress my anxiety.

"Can't promise I'll return that kindness if it's me watching you die."

"Then I'll haunt you," I whisper.

Just the thought of him being my killer makes me want to throw the rest of spears into the night, hoping that they might skewer him through the chest. He plays with my emotions in a way that none of the other tributes have mastered. I wonder if he can see my anger burning in my eyes, and I wonder if he'll use it against me. Stare down at me with that trademark smirk.

Choking on the taste of rust, and pride.

"Who have you hurt? What have you been through, Aspen Peake?"

It's a scary question to hear, especially coming from the darkness. His spear is the first thing I see, quick and decisive as it cuts through the dim light, and I'm barely able to fling myself out of the path of being impaled. I can feel the point of it slice across my throat, deep enough to disturb the wounds there to the point that I can't help screaming.

The feel of it dripping down my neck and pooling on my chest makes me shiver, fingers shaking around the hilt of my next javelin. I suck in a raspy breath, and I let it go. I'm breathing, though every inhale is a new flush of pain, and for a moment I let myself linger in the agony. In the dizzy feeling that tries to numb the blood loss. My body tries to save me.

But I want to be bigger than myself; want to be more than my scars, and the way I struggle to aim. As much as I resent him for it, there's a quiet voice in the back of my mind that confirms my jealousy. He's a bigger threat than me. Just looking at him, I know that a slit throat is the least of my fears. He's a career. He has the best odds.

"I don't think either of our trainings prepared us for this, huh?'

"Guess not."

It feels like I'm shrinking; it feels like disappearing.

"Do you care?" My voice sounds thin, like an echo with no source. I take a few steps back, trying to make up for the distance lost, but I stay where he can see me. It's the fading that I'm terrified of. Blink, and I'm gone. As much as I want to ignore him, I can't help the hope that maybe he can tell me who killed Reece. Maybe I'm in the middle of revenge.

"You didn't give a shit about Chad. What about Waverly?" I give him a moment to let it sink in, paint myself in the colors of a monster. I can be the bad guy, too. "I killed them, and the boy from Six, too." I want to be loud, and forceful, but my words are a small breeze where I want them to be a hurricane. I want to be powerful.

We all do.

"I've been through Hell."

My arm pulls back, an extension of my spear.

I am lethal. I will not go easily.

"And I don't need this therapy session."

aspen attacks love ; javelin 2/3
ow_Z6nN4Bkjavelin
SHALLOW CUT ON RIGHT CALF -- 3.5 damage

javelin

[pogue]

Aspen Peake's voice is laced with liquid rage and humbling fear, spoken with nothing but malice laced into every word as she stares at him. His fingers curl tight around the spears handle as he pulls it away from Aspen's neck, the tip stained in red and black as he spins it in his grasp. The shadows comfort him, ghostly hands in misted tendrils pushing and prodding against the exposed flesh of the wounds that litter his body, red seeping through the bandages he'd wrapped tight against skin.

Aspen's tone sounds like fury and bloodlust and, when he swallows the words like poison and feels the bitter aftertaste, he recognizes fear.

"So, you admit it? You're the reason they're all dead."

And Love's muscles tense, then release, gaze drifting up from measuring the feet of blood soaked soil between them and up to Aspen's eyes as she stares him down, the shadows in the fog dancing between them. There's a feeling that simmers up from the pits of his stomach and spits shallow wounds into his lungs and soul, drags sharpened claws onto the edge of his tongue and leaves a million words left unsaid in its wake. Love laughs, guttural and filled with every lie and half-truth that has slipped between his lips in this arena. Because he's looking at a girl who pierced through Chad's body like it was nothing, whose boy buried a lion in a shallow coffin so many days ago, who has done unspeakable things just like he has, who is a monster just like him.

And here she stands, swaying in the breeze with red leaking from her neck, trying to throw the blame onto him.

He'd hardly shouldered Julian's quiet roars. He would not shoulder Aspen's fearful blame, too.

"You'd like that, right? If you could throw all the blame on me."

He tries to laugh again, but a wave of pain erupts from wounds left open and it comes out more a meek cough, body fighting against phantom pains that still linger heavy in his flesh. He thinks of everyone who has already fallen, of Emerson and Chad and Six and Waverly and Ariel and Julian and-

The ghosts are too many to count at this point, too many pairs of hollow eyes drilling holes into his soul.

"I just charted the path. Don't blame me just because they chose to follow it."

Six days ago he would have followed it up with a smirk, would have reveled in the way Aspen looks like her bravery is painted in broad strokes across her face, waiting to chip and crack and reveal what's underneath. But now he does nothing but tense as the other girl listens, focuses in on the wave of scarlet that leaks from Aspen's open wound and pools on her chest. He sees the faces of Emerson and Chad in the red reflections, watches their ghosts chatter and scream in every drop, hopelessly calling out his own involvement in their downfall.

He waits for the sickness to come up from his stomach, waits for guilt to settle in his skin. It never does.

Maybe that's the only benefit of shattering like he did. That you don't have to pretend to be hollow anymore, for you just are.

"That crown carries a load of guilt, Peake. Can you handle that if you win?" He says it quietly, as if it is more a whisper to the wind than an actual question, and he feels his words swallowed up by the soft breeze of the shadows that flicker in the edges of his vision.

"Then I'll haunt you."

"Bad news.." He starts, readying his spear at what he knows is to come. "but there's a long, long list of people ahead of you for that one." And Emerson and the others laugh, then roar.

The darkness does its best to swallow up the metallic glint of Aspen's javelin as she launches it forwards, the tip piercing through what fractured remains of the moonlight still scatter between them. He dives to the right, muscles and veins and bones and flesh screaming in protest all at once as he tucks into a sideways roll, fast but not fast enough. Aspen leaves her mark in a thin line of red, the javelin falls to the ground with a tip stained scarlet and Love gasps out even at the shallowest form of the pain, fire and fury washing over his body like it had done that day prior as he rises on unsteady feet. He fights back against the wooziness that has laid dormant underneath the wounds since he'd woken this morning, fights back against the way his body yearns to slip into the darkness as one final facade.

"Do you care?"

The words pump toxic adrenaline into his veins and he looks to Aspen with narrowed gaze, ice and fire and crimson and cobalt all swirling in blue irises as he bites back the words that want to spill from his lips. "You didn't give a shit about Chad. What about Waverly?" Because who the hell is Aspen Peake to know who he gave a shit about, who gave a shit about him. Waverly's face haunts his dreams and his nightmares like a specter, and Chad's was no different.

"I killed them, and the boy from Six, too."

Oh.

Love's muscles relax for the briefest of moments, heartbeat hammering in a shattered chest and he cocks his head at his opponent, mouth hung slightly open and words still hanging from the edge of his tongue. Because Aspen has torn a page from his own book, adorned with red lettering and toxic kisses and tried to throw it out onto the field and claim it her own.

He knows better than to fall for a facade half-broken before it is even worn.

"I mean, do you care?" He cuts her words in two, feeling the redundancy slip and slide from his lips in reckless abandon. "Seems useless when I ask it, right?" Question thrown to no one and there is no answer. If Aspen wanted to pretend to revel and bathe in the blood of those she's killed then so be it, he could play along with that game. He knows it all too well.

"It doesn't matter whether we care, Aspen."

Emerson and Chad and Six and-

"We did what we did, we'll do what we do."

Julian and Waverly and Fleur and-

"This isn't a therapy session."

He stares through Aspen and into the ghosts behind her. They do nothing but stare back.

"It's a sentencing."

[Love attacks Aspen, spear]

iy4mEnjZ0Xspear

[SC on stomach - 4.0]

spear

[eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris]

"You'd like that, right? If you could throw the blame on me."

For a moment, I think of Reece — and the freckles on his left collarbone, and the way there was a time that I would chart constellations there. When I reflect on it, knowing what I saw last night, the realization alone is enough to cause tears to form in my eyes. Stinging as they slide down my face, and drip into the nothingness. I wonder what that's like. Imagine sitting under the stars with a friend, imagine watching her die. It's like a gunshot.

Just that fast. Relentless.

In myself, I hold my bravery in the highest regard. Quiet as it has become now, trembling fingers where my fists were once hard as stone. I remember being feared. I remember liking it. And it comes as easily to me as stabbing a kind boy through the eye. Stabbing a girl so many times that her heart gives out from the shock. Losing your voice to a boy who had no face, and had no closure. His story ends in a gush of blood pouring from my throat.

Stitching myself back together, so that I may become undone again.

"I just charted the path. Don't blame me just because they chose to follow it."

In the shadows, I see Reece staring back at me, and it's the closest to religion I've ever felt. Deeper than clasping my hands together before the reaping, and more grounding than anything I can put into words. The wind blows my hair across my face, and my breaths come out like quiet little sobs. And it's ironic when I think about it; that for a girl who guards herself so much, I am so open with my suffering now. My grief washes over everything.

He's dead. They're all dead. It's never easy to process.

"I could blame you for a lot of things." I wonder what he thinks of my voice; do I sound fearful? Do I sound wiser than I used to? Or does he see the bandage wrapped around my throat, and put it together for himself. I wonder if he pities me, and the taste is like acid on my tongue. My skin crawls as I meet Love's gaze. "But you could do the same for me, so we'd just be counting our losses." There's a streak of blood across his calf.

You could mistake it for a shadow, if your eyes were clean.

He speaks of crowns, and their weight. I scoff even though it hurts me. "That's the problem with people like you. You want the shiny toy." If I could forge all of my anger into one thing, it would not be beautiful, and it would not be quiet. To think that the prize of a killing game is worth anything more than my spit sickens me. "But I just want to live. I don't care about anything else. I don't have anything left to lose."

And, yes, it's a terribly heartbreaking to say. Worse even still to mean it.

"And I can be patient when I need to be. I'd wait my turn."

There's a crowd of ghosts circling around us. And we either join them, or we accept the haunting. Because there's no easy way to heal the trauma of this. It soaks into you like a stain you can't bleach out. It's always there, and it always feels like fire on your skin. "I mean, do you care? Seems useless when I ask it, right?" As much as I hate being alone now, there's no comfort in the way he's so familiar to me. He looks so tired.

But how can we ever sleep again?

"It doesn't matter whether we cared, Aspen. We did what we did, we'll do what we'll do." He says it like it's effortless. I wonder if I should envy him for it. But I remember that his words are quick, and his movements are quicker. "This isn't a therapy session." There's something feline about him in the darkness. The cicadas are louder when I see glimpses of him. The world whirs with so much life in the minutes before death.

And then silence. Like a cloud over my senses.

"it's a sentencing."

He thrusts out with his spear, and I quickly fling myself to the side, gasping in pain at the feeling of the point tear across my stomach. I struggle to maintain my footing, using one of my spears as leverage by stabbing it into the ground. I circle around it until I'm facing him again, jerking it out of the cold earth and tensing my muscles in anticipation to throw this javelin straight at him. Aim be damned.

"Who made you the fucking judge, jury, and executioner? Don't fuck with me."

I wear these things openly; that I have suffered, and I am furious, and I am so awfully unsure of everything I do. I follow the thunder clap, and never the light. I hate how familiar it is. The night, and the way blood feels in the palm of my hands, and Love Bellisario. A worthy, but frustrating foe. "I'm not any of those things, either. I don't give a shit about how good you are." I think of his puppets, that hive of bees turned to rot. I lie to myself.

We both have ghosts. They're reaching out for me, too.

"I'm guilty. I'll keep being guilty if it means I get to live."

I'm as sure of this as my fingers around my javelin. It whistles as it streaks through the air only seconds later. This, too, I find familiar.

War; endless war.

And all the wicked sounds of it.

aspen attacks love ; javelin 3/3
yXEA7I7oPujavelin
SPEAR IN STOMACH -- 9.5 damage | +1 strength, +1 rivalry [11.5]

javelin

[pogue]

”I could blame you for a lot of things.”

Love grimaces, frown spread across bloody lips and spear still wrapped tight in his grasp as he backs away from her, waiting for an opening to strike like a snake left unseen. Join the club. the voice in his mind whispers, and when he looks at Aspen he sees Areto and Avriel and Julian laced into the reflection that stares back at him. It’s target practice for misplaced blame and sorrow, spat out into the air as if they don’t deserve it.

"That's the problem with people like you…”

”People like me?” He cuts into her sentence with words of a sharpened knife, practiced and perfected in seven days and eighteen years of monstrous expectation. And he’s tired of the way Aspen sounds when she makes him the other, the way her voice strains so badly to classify him as anything but a scattered reflection of herself.

He’s seen it all before, time and time again and running on loop since he’s stepped foot in the arena. Areto and Avriel and Ariel and Julian and Aspen and-

They so badly want to make him into the shadows in the corner of the room, with shadowy claws and tendrils as dark as the void. They so badly want to make him to be the one that looms over the arena, the bumps in the night that keep them from sleeping. To make him into a monster with nothing but bloody fangs and bloody grin.

Something to gawk at, something to be afraid of, something to defeat.

He thinks that in the end, when all is said and done, the hardest truth for them to face is that they are all just shattered reflections of the same image. Teens holding weapons holding trauma holding fear, swinging wildly into the night in hopes that the light will come back soon.

”We’re not that different. You want us to be, but we aren’t.”

”I don't care about anything else. I don't have anything left to lose."

”Bullshit.” He barks, snarls the words in blood and spit as he cuts her off, fingers tightening around the spear at the sound of her woes slipping from between her lips. Fatigue wracks his voice as it cracks, eight days of torment and fury and everything in between laced into the words when he stares her down. Because he’s tired of hearing people tell him they have nothing left to lose, nothing left to bury, nothing left to hold to. It makes his stomach flip and curl in bubbling fury whenever he thinks of it, of the fact that everyone here is so unafraid to announce their failures and write them into the dust and the dirt.

Having something to lose, in a place like this, is forever constant.

”Cut the woes, Peake. You may kill me right here, and right now..” He points the spear at her, the shadows and the ghosts biting at his flesh.

"But don't act like the list of what you have to lose isn't just as long as what you have to gain. If we're both going to lower into our graves here, don't insult me by pretending you’re fighting on hollow soil."

He hears the whistle of steel in the air.
It sounds like his Mother’s songs.

Sounds like seven years old and sounds like when he’d crawl into her lap at half past midnight, when the shadows and the spirits that he thought haunted him would run and knock on the walls and dance in the hour of the witches Vanya had told him amount. He’d cower under blankets until no amount of white-knuckled grasp against silk could protect him, until no amount of pretending to be brave could make the fear that rested heavy in the pit of his stomach.

He’d crawl into her lap underneath the fire that burned in her orange locks, rest his head against her chest until he could hear her heartbeat knocking away any demons that wanted to grab him from the dark and into the dust. She’d whistle soft tunes into his ears, slipping between her lips as effortlessly as could be and it was like magic to him, all those years ago, that a woman like her could exist in a world like this.

There was safety in her touch, then. Safety in strong arms filled with loose expectations.

His Father pulled him from her with strong legacy and strong wrists, sat him down and told him that only a boy is afraid of the shadows, not a man.

A Mother’s touch turns to kiss of steel in the span of a single shattered heartbeat. Love feels the spear enter his stomach before he sees it, feels Aspen's anger split skin and muscle and flesh alike and pain rush out in a crashing ocean wave from the source as he coughs blood onto Aspen’s feet, all sin and flesh and stone before he stumbles backwards from the momentum.

It feels like penance. It feels like too much. It feels like too little. A father’s scolding and a lion’s swipe, all in one and all for none.

He gasps and chokes on a breath that just won’t catch, screaming out in pure pain and fear as his back hits the tree behind him, a new wave of fire and brimstone and scattered torn muscle ripping his body anew.

And, for the briefest of moments, when his hand wraps around the steel as if to ask the world if the weapon that has laced itself into his stomach is real, as if he expects his hand to pass right through it, as if he expects the pain to be nothing more than a passing phantom,

Love looks nothing like a monster, nor does he look like a man. He looks like a terrified kid who is staring at Death’s door.

A shadow is only terrifying if you don’t understand that it is offering shade. The things that go bump in the night are only the sounds of creatures who can only dance in the dark. A monster is only terrifying if you don’t understand that it never had a choice but to show its fangs.

Blue eyes follow the course of steel and find Aspen’s gaze, shock and fear and pain written over and over again all over his face, and a soft whimper escapes from his lips as he stumbles forwards in blue and black, hardly managing to catch his balance by driving the tip of his spear into the dirt. He presses a palm to the wound and watches it run red, pulls it back and feels his own morality spill from the source, scattered against cold steel and staining the grass beneath with the scarlet writing of his tattered legacy. When he looks to Aspen there is nothing but a fire caught in the ocean of his eyes, fighting a lost battle and a losing war as it waits to be snuffed out.

”Who says I’m the one- fuck.”

He wonders, as his eyes drift down again to the wound in a state of dying and disbelief if he looks any different to the girl across from him. He wonders, if with sagging shoulders and spilled sin Aspen considers him still to be nothing more than a terrifying beast waiting to crumble, if the way her hands wrap tight around her weapon mean she’s still scared of what he is, or that she’s scared of what she has to do. He wonders if there’s any difference.

Maybe she sees him in a new light, in the scattered flames of a dying fire, hopelessly illuminating something that never wanted to be seen in the first place. Maybe she simply sees a boy that is eighteen years too young to be dying like this.

The problem with seeing someone in a dying light is that the outcome is inevitable: it will never last forever, it will always fade.

Dad always said to die as a man, not as a boy.

So he chokes back the way his eyes water with pain and fear and everything in between, presses them tight until there are no tears left to spill down bloodied cheeks and presses his teeth into one another until all he can feel is the pressure of his own shattering, until the scorn and hate and survival he’s been taught stitches itself back into his face.

”Who says I’m the one sentencing you?” The sentence is accompanied by a chorus of blood filled spit dribbling down his chin with labored breaths, swaying on shaking legs and black spots coming in from the darkness to cloud his vision. ”By the looks of it..-“, the sentence is cut off by a pained gasp for air, head and heart suddenly coming to the full realization that there is steel still sticking from his body. His gaze drifts down again, meeting red with blue and then back to Aspen.

"I'm guilty. I'll keep being guilty if it means I get to live."

”Guilty.” He chokes out, as if he’s just now tasting the word on his tongue, just now feeling the repercussions of his own actions. It’s a lie, of course, only told to himself in between restless nights and haunted dreams. He’s felt the sin and the sorrow he’s caused in the diamond tattoos pressed into his flesh since the first day here.

He still wants it to feel foreign, guilty, as if he's spent his whole life and then some running from it, as if it hasn't followed in the footsteps of every ghost and ghoul that drags their feet in his wake.

It never has. It never will. He’s been raised guilty, forced to be, guilty pleasures and guilty pain.

Guilty. Instead, it feels like home.

”Ariel-“ He chokes out, the name dancing with rust and iron on the edge of his tongue. ”I killed Ariel, and-“, maybe the pain is working for him as it surges up from the steel, desperately trying to pry the words he holds from his mouth before they are spoken. ”Nine, the girl from Nine.” Blood loss and spotted vision try to pull back the puzzle pieces from a killer’s mind. ”Fleur.” He finally fights out.

”I’ve hurt a lot-“ but he can’t fight out the sentence, pain too deep and sorrow to strong and red too plentiful.

He’s hurt a lot, and he has hurt a lot.

”Are we still guilty if we had no choice?”

[Love attacks Aspen, spear]

ucuvk0WCddspear

[Result

spear

[eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris]

"We're not that different."

I am tired, and full of rage, and I will do anything to go home again; and I recognize that the monster standing in front of me isn't really a monster at all. He just wants the same things as me, is all, and I guess that says more about what kind of person I am than anything else. "You want us to be, but we aren't." It must be nice, the way that he thinks he has me all figured out. I think this as if I'm not a hypocrite.

There are no such things as villains in the Hunger Games.

And yet.

"Cut the woes, Peake. You may kill me right here, and right now..." he brandishes his spear in my direction, toward the shadows and all the quiet things hiding there. "But don't act like the list of what you have to lose isn't just as long as what you have to gain. If we're both going to lower into our graves here, don't insult me by pretending you’re fighting on hollow soil." I wait for the world to give out beneath me.

It doesn't, of course, and I resent the idea that he thinks I'm standing on uneven ground. Just because I have nothing left to care about doesn't mean the warmth goes anywhere. It flows in and out of me, like a little flame, frightened because it doesn't know where to belong. It could turn into regret, or anger, and then to the static. And that's the scariest feeling. When I finally come to terms with the fact that I will never have closure.

The blade never cuts gently; there is no process of revelation that I enjoy. It feels raw, and it feels wrong, and if I could leave this place without changing, of course I would. I wish I could forget. I wish I could bottle this memory and put it away; and of course I know that I can't. I know what it will mean to survive this, and I know that I am undeserving. None of us are. Of course I feel hopeless. Of course I am a wildfire in the shape of a girl.

"You say we know each other." It's like talking to a wall. He will never yield to me, and I will never understand him. There's a moment I mistake the concrete for glass, like for a moment I am staring at myself in the place of him. But the image shifts, and my eyes adjust, and my breaths are quiet. He's not me, and I'm not him. Of course I want to know him, and of course I want to walk away from this fight knowing that his heart will never beat again.

That's the wicked truth. That's the trick.

"If you have it all figured out, then tell me. Explain to me how to be okay with any of this." My voice is a sharp line cutting through the space, fragile but direct. I hold his gaze intently, spreading my arms out as if I want to surrender. As if there are not weapons firmly clutched in both of my hands. I feel the fury again, and I let it stay. It roars inside of me, flashes in my mind like all the memories I'm so terrified to forget.

That's what I have to live for; for the quiet little moments that connected me to them, and the way that I'm all that's left of them now. If I die, all of my ghosts will be set free. And then we just cease to exist. There's no one left who knows the way Willa's eyes looked like sapphires under the moon, and that Nora's laugh could have soothed any beast. Until it couldn't, and all the lights faded from the sky. I remember the feeling of Reece in my arms.

I remember the things we promised each other.

And I don't want to forget.

"We're both lost. That's all this is."

You could mistake my words as kind if that's all you take them for; if you ignore the way my javelin lands true, impaling him in the stomach, watching as his hands reach for the blood soaked wood and tremble there. The way his skin pales, and his expression goes flat, and for a moment I wonder if he's dying. But then he sinks his claws into the earth, and he refuses death in the way I have. Stays on his feet, stares at me until all the blue turns to black.

It's like an echo. It goes on for eternity.

"Who says I'm the one sentencing you?" he says weakly, still whole but a little disconnected. I feel a phantom pain glide across my throat, tickling the fresh scar there, and I shiver. It's getting cold, and when I focus on the space ahead of me, I can see where my breath rises to meet the clouds. And it disappears, almost gracefully, to a place I can't follow. I think I could stare at the sky until the end of the world.

Searching for his face again.

Our eyes find each other again, and I acknowledge that, to him, I am an awful person. I am a threat. For as loudly as my heart beats in the presence of him, I know that the same is true for him. All anyone wants is to live. I'd hate me from his perspective, too. That's the easy pill to swallow. It's when I think of my friends dying so suddenly, like fireworks fizzling into nothing behind dark clouds, that it devastates me.

I think of how lonely he must have been as he died, and how everything was robbed from me. From all of us. It turns to stone inside of me, and it makes me terribly sad. It goes without saying. Or it should. But I'm nothing if not stubborn, and I'm tired of being robbed of all my choices. "Does it have to be a sentencing? Can't it just be quick, and finished?" I look away, and listen to the wind moving around us. I wonder if this could ever be peaceful.

The cicadas try to answer me. They hiss behind his voice.

"Guilty," he croaks out, like the word has never left his lips before. I watch a quiet conflict spread across his features, and I give him the time to speak. "Ariel. I killed Ariel." A stranger who killed one of my own. Avenged by a serpent who can hardly understand all the things that have been stolen from me. As far as I care to know. I think of the boy he appeared to love, and the way losing Reece still feels like a knife in the chest.

"Nine, the girl from Nine. Fleur."

I watch as his soul reveals itself under a starless sky.

"I've hurt a lot," he starts, and cannot finish. I understand, and turn to look over my shoulders. A line of somber faces stare back at me, the sounds of the forest coming from their opened mouths. Damning me, and reminding me that to be damned is to be alive. My end will not be slow, or gentle. "Are we still guilty if we had no choice?" I stare at him for a long while, and try to come up with an answer.

"I don't know. You know I don't know." It's the cruelest thing I can say. Because then we're left with the silence, and the disappointment, and the fact that we're both still alive. That just won't do. His spear swipes out in desperation, cutting across my bicep and tainting what little innocence is left between us. I stare down, and watch the blood trickle down my arm until I can't follow it anymore. The light doesn't reach us here.

And it's terrible, but I don't think it ever will.

"But I do have a choice, Love."

This time, there is nothing I can do from a distance. Down to my last spear, staring at a critical wound I can exploit. It hits me like a cold gust of wind, that there is nothing in him that will ever go down without a fight. It will take everything I have, and I will give it willingly. I'll carry the blame for this forever. I'll carry everything. My hands wrap around the cold steel, and I channel all of my conviction to warm me. My sadness, too.

Because it reminds me of the people I loved.

And the sun doesn't feel quite so far.

"And I'm making it."

aspen attacks love ; spear
8cST2WFzymspear
Shallow Cut on Right Bicep -- 3.5 damage

spear

[pogue]

The names leave his tongue and feel like betrayal, memories forged and memories forced to be forgotten bubbling up to the surface and dragging hot iron against what’s left of a fractured soul. It dances hand in hand with the way the pain flows up from open wound, carrying red and black and blue through every fried nerve and broken vein that is scattered underneath his skin. He feels like he’s in limbo as he stands on shaking legs, watching the black spots cloud and gather in his vision in between every blink.

A parasite spills its guts to the ground. He gulps and swallows in between the waves of pain, wanting so badly for the world to be anything but black.

"If you have it all figured out, then tell me. Explain to me how to be okay with any of this."

Love laughs, then gasps at the way his body cuts him off, pain cutting through smoke and mirror and spilling out from his lips in so much red. He feels it trickle down his chin and carve unspoken word into his own tarnished legacy, then feels it fall from his skin into the darkness below.

So much darkness in a place like this. He misses the soft blue of the light, the way it made him think of the ocean and how he had always wanted to see it. Now he’s drowning in the waves, feeling his bones crack and shatter with the ebb and flow.

He cracks a grin, heartless and empty and feels it burn his skin, pain erupting from his body when he steps forwards towards her.

Because Aspen Peake still doesn’t get it, still can’t see past the walls she has built in between the two of them, and can’t realize that she’s only looking at her reflection written in red. She begs him for an answer that he can only give in blood, question to question and life to life.

”You fake it.”

The admission burns his tongue and scalds his breath, and he watches it gather and fall around his lips before it dissipates into the fog, poisoning the mist around him and forcing him to perish to his own poison. You fake it, his mind repeats to him as if it wants to hold the dagger in his back and twist it clockwise, count the hours he’s spent in smoke and mirror as it turns and watch his penance run red with every second. Because you’re not strong enough to break from it. He clutches the spear closer, hopeless against the tidal wave that rises and falls in his head and his heart.

Eighteen years written into the hilt and it does nothing to protect him from his own truths. First a parasite spills its guts into the soil, and then it spills its sins.

The arena responds in exactly the way he knows it would, in exactly the way it should when a heartless Career finally shatters just before the fall. The cicadas hiss and scream in their frustration, and the shadows bump and clack in the night, and finally he hears the sound of the cameras turning away from their fight.

He watches little specks of monstrous red disappear from sight as the world forgets about the two of them for only the span of a few heartbeats. No Capitol citizen would see him break, no loved one would watch him confess, no hatred would be diminished, no kindness would be unpunished.

He’s their own narrative, their choices are his namesake. And to them, he’s better off a monster than a broken boy.

The cameras leave them in the void as in the distance a cannon fires. Love wonders if Avriel or Areto has fallen, and if they saw the same shadows that he’s seeing now.

And it becomes just him and Aspen and the walls they throw between them to convince themselves they are any different.

And it hurts so much, and it feels so little.

”Cause that’s the catch-“ He starts, and every word feels like he wants nothing more than to swallow it back down, push it into the dust and the dirt until it fractures and splits into a million unrecognizable pieces, until he can forget it, until he can pretend he never realized it in the first place.

”-you can never be okay with it. You’ll never be okay with it.”

Eight days of pretending to be okay with it, of feeling it gnaw at soft flesh and eat his soul from the inside out. He’d fallen on the fourth, stumbled with half a heart and all of his sin against the dust and the dirt and broken down in front of Areto and watched her do the same.

”You carry it, then you run from it-“

He’s so cold now, swaying against the soft breeze of an arena that wants its count, and he thinks of the way Julian had described his skin as gold and how he’d described his own as diamond.

So caught up in pretending, so desperate to recognize themselves as anything but human.

He wonders if Julian felt like the gold plating was falling in scraps and sin from his skin before he died, wondered if his eyes took in every cut and bruise and bump and scar as a final inventory before taking in the night. He wonders if he was just as cold as he is now, and if all he wanted was the warmth of something that didn’t want him.

”-then you become it, then it takes you back.”

He blinks, and watches himself drive his spear into Ariel’s skin, drive his Axe into Fleur’s neck.

The steel in his stomach reminds him that this is his final stop.

And there’s silence that spreads between them. It drags its claws slow and oh so unsteady between two people who stand on nothing but blood and skeletons, swiping at each other with steel and regret and anger and untold fury. He feels himself choke on the sins he

"Does it have to be a sentencing? Can't it just be quick, and finished?" She asks everyone and no one in particular, and he catches himself in between the two.

”You’re asking the wrong person.”

Aspen’s gaze drifts away from an ocean of blue and to the arena around them and Love’s follows, eyes rolling lazily up to what is left of the sky above them. He watches the death and the darkness and the shadows stare back, and as he gulps down a cough and a choke that threatens to shoot from his lips he can only think of the way Julian held him even against the cold dark of the night, against the wind and the rain and the tornado that whipped and whispered between the two of them.

He misses the warmth, and he misses the feeling of the boy’s arm wrapped around his chest and carving patterns into his back, and he misses crying hollow tears into a lion’s mane just to feel them dry.

And, as the spots in his vision are briefly lost against the endless void above him, he misses the feeling of having a feeling at all.

He hopes where he’s going is warm, like that. The cicadas and the fog hiss at him that it is not, and the ghosts murmur in agreement.

”I don’t know. You know I don’t know.”

He hears Areto in her tone, sees Avriel in her face and Julian in her movements as she lets the words sink into the silence they share, cutting against the hum of the cicadas in the night and the scream of wind in the trees. Aspen is Love is Areto is Avriel is Julian is-

An endless list spills in red from both of their wounds, holding the names of those who have fallen and those who stand uneven on their skeletons and nothing in between the two.

It’s the same answer Julian would have given him, with a lion’s claw scratching memories into the surface of his skin,

It’s the same answer Areto would have given him, even as she held steel in her hands and took every step to avoid catching her own reflection looking back at her with hollow eyes.

It’s the same answer he would give Aspen if it were her voice spilling from trembling lips, tumbling carelessly to the ground and staining it with a different feeling other than red.

All images of the same shattered reflection, all watching themselves sliced thin against the jagged edges.

”You and me both.” He answers to her in shallow breaths.

Because they all don’t know, and they all never will, and they all were never supposed to in the first place.

”But I do have a choice, Love.”

He laughs only to himself, hearing the hollow voice of a broken boy echo and groan with every protest of his own body. ”And I’m making it.”

So sure, so sinister, so scared.

Her words still echoes in his mind even as she strikes, clutching desperately to the steel laced into her fingertips and moving towards him on heavy breaths and borrowed time. His mind screams at him to roll out of the way, every memory of eighteen years of Career training laid out in the front of his mind like cards stacked on the table.

They flip one by one as his body protests the commands, muscles groaning and bones shattering under paper skin. He gasps in pain as Aspen’s spear drags against his skin again and again, metal to flesh and flesh to ruin as his opponent writes a scarlet eulogy on his skin.

He returns it with one of his own, watching as his own sin seeps from her flesh and into the darkness. So easily found, so easily lost. Always there.

Words to remember are etched into both of their bodies at this point, carried in little white scars until their soul is taken back.

And he’ll play along with Aspen’s grand illusion of choice in a place like this, he’ll pretend the cards they’re throwing onto the table are anything but a losing hand. After all, all he has ever been told to do is pretend.

They cheers to a life worth losing and a life that won’t be worth living, watch their reflections shatter in the glass and steel and watch liquid spill in scarlet out of their cups.

”To the choice we think we have, Aspen.”

[Love attacks Aspen, spear]

Y7WNewBbEDspear

[Result]

spear

[eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris]

"You fake it."

It's the hopeless way he says it that cuts deeper than anything else. Like there's no other possible answer to my question; it's just a dead end that goes on forever. Just a sad, resounding sense of disappointment. So loud that it rattles as it settles inside of me, fitting a little unevenly where it finally comes to a rest. I feel awful, and overwhelmed, and I'm not quite sure how to pack those feelings away. I've always been honest to a fault.

And now it all seems so terribly pointless; like I'm craning my neck to stare up at the sky, as if it doesn't feel like a fresh knife sliding across my throat every time I move. As if the endless darkness will ever easy for me to accept. Like my eyes haven't trained themselves to spot the tiniest blur of light on the horizon, like all the tiniest sounds haven't transformed into a symphony around me. I can hear the life pouring out of everything.

Death rings like a guitar chord under the melody of it.

The trees bow to the cold breeze, shadows of branches moving across the illuminated skin of our faces. The insects sing around us, and it sounds so mournful, somehow. Or maybe the blood loss is finally getting to me; or maybe I'm just so desperate to find a song in the place of the one that was stolen from me. I don't care how wicked it sound. I don't care how depressing it is to be comforted by the cicadas. I'm afraid of the quiet.

I care that living means losing myself.

"'Cause that's the catch." I keep my gaze trained on him, fingers tightly wrapped around the hilt of my spear. As much as it devastates me to hear these hard truths, I can't really find the use in hiding myself from them. He's not wrong, and he's not lying, and I try to make that peace with that. Love offers no poisoned honey for me; just two shot glasses for the both of us, toasting to our ghosts and unfulfilled dreams.

"You can never be okay with it. You'll never be okay with it."

And I wonder, which is worse? To take a spear through the eye, or to leave knowing he'll never follow in my wake again. "You carry it, then you run from it." I think of what the world must think of me, the families cozying up to watch our murders, the audience that never wants me to be complacent with my suffering. Each passing day is a new trial; kill a boy, watch my friends die, kiss a boy in the dark and lose him there, too.

It all comes down to a distant cannon, and his face shaming the stars.

Of course they'll never shine again.

"Then you become it, then it takes you back." I glance down at my hands, at my white knuckle grip, and the way I feel like I could level mountains; the way I feel so terribly small in my body. I am my own rage, and I am my own grief. It feels like being torn in half, and now I'm left with the absence of myself. It's so easy to reduce me from a person into a caged animal. Tell me to fight for my life, and I will. I've proven that.

Can we blame it on the trauma? That scar we'll never be able to close?

I'm so tired of the way blood feels so familiar on my skin.

"Well, that's depressing." And honest, of course, but I'm nothing if not stubborn for the sake of it. He speaks with so much melancholy that the shadows seem that much thicker around him. And in that sadness, there's a wisdom. Cold, but precise. A blade of ice sliding into me, trying to freeze the fire inside of me to dead embers. I can't blame him for any of it. I can't say that he's wrong because he isn't. How could I ever be okay again?

"What's it say about us that we're still standing here?" I have to scoff a little at myself, at the way it feels like I've dug myself into a grave that I can't escape. There's death all around me, lurking in every memory, lingering at the edge of every new experience. I don't know how I'll ever hold anything sharp ever again. I don't know how to let go. Of any of them. As much as it feels like my chest is caving in, every nerve is raw, and alive.

"You'd think we'd just give up."

I breathe.

I breathe.

I breathe.

"But I can't stop fighting. And I know you can't, either." As tired as we are, as welcoming as the night is, I can see it in the both of us. We'll be trapped here for an eternity if that's what it takes. Neither of us can end willingly. It has to be sharp as a blade, and merciless, too. I could paint him in a kinder light, if I really wanted. I could stare into those blue shadows, and feel pity. Familiar.

The war folds in on itself until we're only inches apart. No carnage between us, a dark vacuum sucking us in, where the ghosts are only felt. And never heard. Never again. "To the choice we think we have, Aspen," he says solemnly. It echoes for only a moment, and then he's on the attack again. I play my part in the dance. Throwing myself backwards, but I can't beat him in speed. The best I can do is damage control, trade a fatal wound for a scratch.

Death by a thousand cuts doesn't sound so bad.

It's not the hurting that scares me.

I jog out of his reach, weapon secure in my grasp, circling around him like a huntress trying to find her best shot. Because even though I fear it, I need this to come to an end. We can't keep doing this forever. He can't always be my villain, and I can't always be the hero. "I have one more question for you." I remember the face I saw last night, and the one after. I feel my chest constrict, and yet it feels like I could scream for an eternity.

Until he can hear me again.

Knowing I'll never hear him again.

"Did you love Julian? Truly, I mean."

He looks less like a danger when I humanize him; it makes it that harder for me to keep holding his gaze. I feel exposed, and a little foolish, too. I am my grief, and I am my rage — but I am also my hope, and my love. They burn in me. Another sky of stars hiding in the dark. "Because I—" and my voice falters, and fades into the wind. It's so easy to share the terrible things. It's like opening your fist to find a palm full of glass.

And it's like knowing you should let go.

"Because I loved someone."

Now there's nothing left to lose.

aspen attacks love ; spear
d9milwj_Kzspear
block

spear

[pogue]

”Well, that’s depressing.”

Love does his best to shrug, feeling exposed muscles fight his every movement as he does so. All he manages is a a half a movement, pain cutting him off at the source and he gasps on air that feels so toxic now, coughing up blood.

”You asked.” He chokes out, reminds her that she wanted to know what to make of the shadows and what the shadows would make of her.

Those black spots dance so heavy in his sight now, clouding Aspen’s already silhouetted form further until he can hardly make out the way she scoffs and scowls at his words, the way she chews on them and they chew on her in equal measure.

”What’s it say about us that we’re still standing here? You’d think we’d just give up.”

He laughs, but the laughter turns to pain and he’s left with a gut punch of scarlet as he feels the wooziness kick into his system, tearing and pulling the world at the edges.

”Almost like we both have something to lose.” The words are pained, strung out against flesh and blood and broken legacy but exist as a mockery nonetheless. Her words from just moments ago live in the dead space between them, hopelessly flickering as a dying flame begging to be snuffed out.

Aspen Peake, the girl who claims to have nothing to lose, stands before him with the spear still wrapped so tight around her knuckles. Running from what she’s lost and towards what she thinks she is gaining. Against the darkness he tries to smile in the irony of it all, in all of this, but his teeth are too red and face too burdened to show anything but the fangs of a monster.

”But I can’t stop fighting. And I know you can’t either.”

”No choice in the matter.” He coughs, feeling a wave of nausea spark from his stomach.

”I have one more question for you.”

Aspen’s voice calls out through the darkness, and Love can do nothing but offer a shallow grimace in response. Because he’s tired of all the questions they have for him, thrown into

He can’t always be their answer, he can’t always be their question. He can’t always be the only person realizing what this is, and what it isn’t.

He can’t always be the thing they look to just to make themselves feel better than. They are not, they never will be.

Neither will he.

”Did you love Julian? Truly, I mean.”

The question stings his skin, leaves it singing with a fire so hot that it’s as if the flesh and sinew will simply melt from the bone, slink to the ground in heart and abandon and mark what’s left of his forgotten memory into the grass and the darkness.

Neon blue lights up in his mind of Julian’s last stare, looking down from the sky with a lion’s pride and a boy’s torment and everything Love had managed to sew in between the two. He gulps, eyes waver and muscles shake as he clenches the spear tight and a tear dribbles down to his chin, refracting what is left of the moonlight in the briefest form of innocence.

It mixes with the dried blood that coats his skin, and falls to the ground tarnished in his legacy.

It’s like the arena starts to respond to his own trial. His ears catch the way the cicadas sound like the static that dances behind the blaring anthem, the rush of the wind in the trees sounds just like the materialization of those they have gained and those they have learned to lose.

The hammering heartbeat in his chest sounds like the trumpets, blaring and glaring in hollow tune. A mockery.

”Because I—“, her voice trails off into the whispers of the shadows, and Love understands. He thinks of the way he met Julian in the waves and the water, made a deal in the sin and the sorrow and the red and the gold. His chest tightens again and again, as if Death itself is taking his skin and twisting it tight as punishment and pleasure, and his heart responds in a wave of shatter, the kind that echoes underneath the skin, the kind that walks the line between hurt and harrowed.

”I loved someone.”

I don’t know. He wants to repeat back to her, wants to lie. You know I don’t know.

But his hands are at the altar now, and his blood is on the pages, and the guillotine blade is sharp enough to cut through lie and leave only truth.

”Love, in a place like this.” He says, and it hurts. He’s so tired of hurting. He wants to laugh at the thought, wants to make it a mockery and a memory, wants to forget it.

”I cared for him, but only in selfish ways.” Spill his guts, spill his sins, spill his truths. The sponsorship gifts and the fame and the applause are all marked on his tombstone, reflected against the cracks that desecrate it.

Because that was the core of it, the eye of a raging storm, the ember that lights a raging flame.

Love’s affection was a gamble and not a gift.

”One week, twenty three dead, one dying. Love can’t exist in that, it—“

Every touch was expected to be repaid with warmth, every sweet nothing was expected to be returned with sugar and sin, every held hand was just to share the blood between them.

”I liked that I could be bad, and he could think himself good, and neither of us could fix the other. I cared for him- but I couldn’t love him.”

The words simmer in his skin, even as Aspen lashes out with her spear and it takes everything in his body to parry the blow. He stumbles backwards on uneven ground, driving the tip of his spear into the ground and steadying his balance. Pain fires out from the source as he gasps, focusing on the way the metal melds with his skin as he clutches the spear.

”I couldn’t love him” He repeats, as if trying to convince himself of empty fact. ”And he couldn’t love me.” His heart wants to tell him that, in another life and another world and another game, they could have found something else.

He thinks they could have found a spark that warmed instead of burned.

But they are not in another life, they are in this one. That is why Julian Le Roux is dead, and that is why Love Bellisario is dying.

”We weren’t built to love.”

He stumbles forward like a wounded snake, shows his fangs and tastes the poison dripping down his throat in rust and iron. Aspen readies her spear as well, and their chapter writes itself in words of red.

”Did you love him?” He fires back, red tipped steel in his grasp.

”Or did you just love that he made you feel human, even when everything you were doing told you otherwise?”

[Love attacks Aspen, spear]

aLEFDdKBIFspear

[Result]

spear

[eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris]

She listens to him speak, noting his dry humor and snide attitude. On the surface, he's exactly who she expected him to be, prideful and dramatic as the rest of them; but then she looks deeper, in that scary place where she often has to confront herself. And maybe he's not so different from her after all.

"You always sound so bitter. Everything you say, it's just miserable."

It's not really her place to comment; she's the one whose voice has been warped by strain. She doesn't just sound it, she is miserable. Just moving her head around stings.

"How did you grow up? You read as rich." She doesn't mean for it to sound as bitter as it sounds, but once she confronts this issue, she can't stop herself from confronting the rest. "I mean, you're a career. You volunteered for this."

We're all so fucking sad, and terrified. They never show us this part of the Games.

It'd kill the mood.

"Are you just one of those people who can't be happy? My mom's a lot like that." I wonder what Love's silence sounds like. Those quiet moments where he reveals himself. I wonder if he also wishes he could run away from all of his problems like she did.

"I didn't get the chance. To love him, I mean. How can you really fall for someone that quickly? I don't, um," and she falters for a moment, a flush of warmth in her cheeks. "I don't always understand what I'm feeling, but I know I could have loved him. I really would have liked to."

The sadness is like a blade between them.

They can't let go of it.

"Have you ever loved anyone? Anyone at all?"

It aches quietly. The cicadas take a brief pause.

And she strikes.

aspen attacks love ; spear
qIUQLPGHWespear
Deep Gash on Back -- 8.5 damage | +1 strength, +1 rivalry [10.5]

spear

[pogue]

”You always sound so bitter. Everything you say, it's just miserable."

He arches an eyebrow, training his gaze on the girl in front of him and watching the black spots curl around her face. They hide her from his sight, until he can hardly see the way she looks at his words with venom and disgust.

It’s just like they’ve always wanted, for no one to be able to truly see one another.

Facades, faking a smile, eating a grin until you can’t taste the blood behind the smile.

He knows it, and it knows him. He hates it, but it will always love him.

”It’s just the truth, Aspen.” He says, fighting against heaving breaths. ”You asked for it, and you got it.”

Dance in the dark, the ghost claw at his skin as he desperately attempts to remain standing, focusing in on Aspen’s form as she moves towards him. She’s too fast, and he is too slow, and he feels his heartbeat counting down the seconds until he’s reclaimed.

”Are you just one of those people who can’t be happy? My Mom’s a lot like that.”

She asks like she wants to know, as if she truly means the question she throws so effortlessly into the night. He curls his fingers against the steel, feels the cold give way to his warmth and feels himself fading. ”Does it matter?” He asks, disconnected from the world and the way blood flows so easily from his wounds.

He feels the music his Mother used to sing him, the way it cut through the shadows and made everything seem so light.

and he feels the way Vanya used to swing him around when she was still so much taller than him, the way she felt like a giant and he was just happy to rest on her shoulders.

and he thinks of Lux, and the way he would burst through her door as if he owned the room, carve their affection into witty banter and shit-eating grins. ”I think-“

”I think that it can’t matter here.” He says, and a tear forms heavy in his eye.

He strikes silently, unsuccessfully.

It’s when he turns to distance the gap between himself and her blood-tipped spear that he feels it connect with his back, feels it drag down and rip a new chapter into a torn through page. Flesh and muscle give way and he screams out in raw pain, raw sadness, raw sorry and scarlet and black as he stumbles away from her on shaking limbs. He whimpers, broken and shattered and feeling his sins spill from the wound that is carved into his back as the last bit of adrenaline surges against muscles too tired and bones too broken, barely managing two painful steps before he collapses to his knees and faces the ghosts that lurk in the shadows.

”I don't always understand what I'm feeling, but I know I could have loved him. I really would have liked to."

Aspen stammers as she circles around him to stare into his eyes, still wielding steel as if the boy in front of her isn’t halfway into the shadows. Maybe it’s mercy, what she will do.

He can’t blame her.

He understands, the way the words sound like they hurt to hear. The cold seeps into his bones now, and his breaths are labored as his gaze rises to meet hers, tears falling heavy from his cheeks and refracting the moonlight.

”Maybe in another life.” He confesses, and the poison bites into his tongue.

He can hardly keep himself from collapsing forwards, every muscle in his body screaming for him to finally succumb to what was already written for him. His breaths sound like shrieks, the way the air can hardly fill his lungs as he sits dying.

He’s kneeling at the alter and professing his sin, a sacrifice in the making and a boy for the taking.

”Have you ever loved anyone? Anyone at all?”

He thinks of Vanya, of Lux, of Julian, of his Mother, of his Father.

They all feel so cold, and so distant, so forgotten and so longing to be remembered.

”No one who knows it.”

It hurts worse than the wounds.

”Guilt.” He spits out, stammering as he looks at the ground and the ground looks back, the world collapsing in on itself in a mess of black spots and blue waves. He can hardly feel the tears on his cheeks, can hardly sense the feeling of the grass carving his bare shins. His gaze rises to meet Aspen, one final time.

”Good luck with the guilt of all this, Peake.”

He means it.

[Love attacks Aspen, spear]

pzTGpUtJ7hspear

[Result]

spear

[eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris]

"I guess I did." It's strange to get what I ask for; but when I count all my losses at the end of my life, at least I'll be able to hold this one thing sacred. Black as rot in the palm of my hand. Another shadow to haunt me.

Because I know the truth. I'll always know the truth.

"But still. It's a hard fuckin' pill to swallow."

The night continues to move around us, wind in our hair and fog rolling over our skin. I could lose him just by turning away for a second. I've trained my eyes to make out the shape of him, the way he uses his spear for quick and decisive strikes. If I look away, he'll be gone.

I wish it could be that easy.

As much as I wish he wouldn't appear again moments later; driving his weapon through my throat. I'd walk away if I could. I'm not too prideful to admit that. As polite as our violence might be, there's an edge to it. I pry a little too deep, and his reflexes kick in.

I can't blame him for the way his words burn like a flame.

"Does it matter?"

The silence stretches on forever. It feels like we've been trapped in this same moment. Always pondering some sad question, bleeding out as we reflect on all our scars. Until we're too caught up in our own suffering to think to close the wounds. We let them fester.

It's the nature of the thing.

"I think that it can't matter here."

Sighing, I run my fingers through my hair. A little frustrated. "It should. But I get it, now's a little too late." So what if he's miserable? What am I going to do? I can't save him while I'm trying to kill him. It will never get better than this moment.

He said it himself. We don't get to be okay.

And then he speaks softly, "maybe in another life," and it hits me harder than anything else. A tear rolls down my cheek before I can think to wipe it away. Then I start to laugh. A small, feeble sound that doesn't do anything to lessen my grief.

"I think I'm fine with just this one."

For all the things I have lost, and all the regrets I've gathered, I can't bring myself to give up. I've clawed my way through something solid. And I'm alone on the other side, and it's terrifying, but it doesn't take away from the fact that I'm still here.

I'm alive.

Hope is my north star.

"You could still tell them. Some of them, at least."

I gesture out into the nothingness. It stares back at me. "I mean, it's what they want. It's the show you signed up for." I exhale tension from my body, trying to remove the bitterness from what I say. "I wouldn't think less of you for loving."

It feels like reliving a memory; another quick cut through the darkness, scratching my skin, jogging to the side to catch my breath. He speaks of guilt, and I watch as he battles with the wounds I've given him. He sounds so defeated. It's peaceful in the most terrible way.

"You don't have to worry about me."

And that's the beauty of it; that's the honey in the fly trap.

He'll be free. This will never hurt him again.

I watch as he struggles with a small shape in his hands, fingers trembling around it. It falls from his grasp, and thuds against the ground. I reach down to grab it, gently so that he doesn't think my intention are cruel. Once it's in my palm, I realize it's a cassette player.

We have asked our questions, and confronted many things; but now I crouch beside him in the dark, just breathing, listening to the wildlife speaking for us. He doesn't need me to say anything else. And I know what I have to do. My spear is by my side.

I press play on the tape, and lay it down on the ground beside him. I rise to my feet as the sound fills the space between us. I stare up at the sky as I always do, and try to give him privacy. This isn't for me. None of it's meant for me.

But it ends with me.

"We're gonna be okay," I whisper under the melody.

One last lie for the end.

aspen attacks love ; spear
4kRswJxSyDspear
Deep Gash on Left Thigh -- 8.0 damage | +1 strength, +1 rivalry [10]

spear