biting down. terra, 6th.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

lost cause .

You look at them and you know damn well they aren't going to survive, one that won't stop crying and the other with his heart around his neck.

Lord, you think then. You've got no chance.

// tell us how to survive, the prompter asks through silent sobs.

"I can't," you reply back, a shrug in the place of sign.

You can't, and you won't.

No point lying. You know for sure that the children of One, Two and Four have a fighting chance. But you don't tell them that. You've learned from a young age not to bullshit, how to recognise a lost cause. How to save your own skin over anyone else.

So you turn and walk away, leaving them to tears and slaughter.

table by elegant.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

savour .

A carriage. A whale. Soon to filled with strangers -- all for you.

How odd, had been your first thought. How awful, your next.

And then the relief of Babe and Mo drowns it all out, the small hug exchanged with Five's newest victor and a friendly elbow nudge in Nine's sole survivor's side. For now you can forget this past year. Forget the training, the missions, the doctors appointments. Forget the pain, the numbness that follows, the mourning for a person you knew for a day, perhaps two. Forget that you are adored, loathed, somewhere in-between. Forget that you're an outcast. Forget that you're all alone.

It is a pity you are to be joined by strangers, poking and prodding and avoiding your eyes like a deadly animal on spectacle. You expect the bravest ones will speak slowly, loudly, as if the higher the volume could cure you of the irreparable damage the Capitol had caused. For now you will savour these moments before the games, glad to be in the company of this country's finest.

"It's good to see you", the feeling of your voice syncs up with the way your hands move in front of you, slow but steady.

You smile as you speak, nodding towards Mo - you had practiced all week just for him. It's hard to forget the terrible things that have happened to you. You don't want to forget the scattered good, Mohamed on the train station platform months ago making an effort to communicate with you in a way no-one else had.

To Babe you raise a middle finger and poke out your tongue, failing to hide the grin that twitches between your ears. How lonely you have felt this past year. How much effort you had made to isolate yourself from everyone and everything. How wonderful it is - and how strange - to feel the complete opposite around the very few people on this earth who understand.

If you are to witness this every year for the rest of your life, you're glad you get to do it with them.

table by elegant.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

register .

You knew it then and you know it now, watching One and Two rack up kill after kill, Four use the arena to her advantage. So they had been listening, you think, quelling your silent musings as to whether or not these children or their friends had been in the crowds you taught.

It's impressive. You'll give them that.

And the Capitol will be happy. You're not stupid - you know that's the most important thing.

One kills the little girl first. Bludgeons her to death - no cleanliness, no knowledge of killing, this is all emotion and no strategy. Capitolites at your side squirm in peripheral vision but you don't pay them any mind, turning from the television to look out one of the carriage windows and watch.

Learn.

Find something familiar in the chaos.

Vengeance is a subtle undertone, hidden beneath rage and sheer bloodlust. You'd thought her manic at first, something like Ramsey. Almost identical. But it's the way blondie from One -- Cordelia Blake, the television tells you -- hunts them down one by one, something in your register clicks.

Oh.

She catches you staring at her, covered in blood and smiling something sickly-sweet, raises her hand and waves before darting off again.

Oh.

If you weren't so immune to the shock of death, you might have needed to sit down. Instead your palms grip the cool windowsill of the carriage and think, thankful that you can't hear the pandemonium behind you. Someone taps your shoudler and you shrug them off with a huff, checking to see it's not Babe or Mo before you send them a glare. Your face says more than silent words could and the Capitolite almost cowers at your shrug, turning your attention back to Cordelia Blake from District One.

Ramsey had siblings, too young. A child, someone had whispered, even younger still. The child's mother, surely not.

You think of midnight's alone in your house, screaming into a dark you cannot hear. One in the same and Lachlan crosses your mind, dancing against the blue of the summer's sky, how only he could have turned you inside out and wild as the monster the country has claimed you are.

("You'll pay for that!" you had sneered.
Two seconds later a sword in a girl's eye.)

Oh.

A friend.

If only the Capitol's worst enemies knew that the one person Terra Montague might be afraid of was running through the arena right this very moment.

table by elegant.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

rumble .

Isn't it strange, staring out of the carriage window with a frown, unable to remember what the train that took you to the capitol sounded like?

Around and around, around and around, it circles you like a shark. Taunting. Mocking. Crease in your forehead - why can't you remember the sound?

All you can remember is how it felt, an uneasy rumbling in your bones;

and the placebo bite of a shark, violent and abrupt, as the boy from One buries his axe into a girl's leg.

table by elegant.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

game .

You wish you found murder grotesque, but in all honestly you feel nothing. Nothing at all as you look at the mangled bodies of your tributes - and others - lying in the sand. Perhaps an emptiness that you could pretend was sadness, but nothing more than wishful thinking.

But what you do find disturbing is how they enjoy it. You never liked killing. You simply had to. Never had, never will, but you respect it for what it is. Take every life as quickly as you can. Bow before a fight. Act on instinct, head over heart. A sword through an eye, lightning fast. Look at Teddy King, without an arm and bleeding out, and decide to give her a quick end rather than please the crowd.

Perhaps that's why you pay no mind to what the rest of the world thinks of you. You are simply Terra, still alive after all this time. No conscience, no guilt, just a beating heart and ringing in her ears reminding her of a boy she once knew.

Murder was all you were ever good at, and all you ever will be - but you have never enjoyed taking life. Relishing in adrenaline that kept you alive, sure. Realising you live another day, it was always a sense of relief. Never feeling guilty, never attributing it to good or bad. Just a fact of life.

Just another day, just another death.

But these children treat murder like sport. They play dirty with smiles on their faces, the captions on the televisions show them bickering and arguing over who gets what, who carves the better wound, who deserves the glory of the kill. It isn't a competition. It isn't life or death. There's no respect here, no rules to obey, no lines they won't cross. It's fun. It's a game.

And that twists something terrible in your heart.

table by elegant.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

terrible .

The screen speaks for her, pixels your eyes eat raw.

// But terrible and terrific come from the same place, right?

Juno Tallis' lips move two seconds ahead, eyes as dead as Fawn Grangers. For a moment you stop breathing - hanging on to every single word.

// I figured out a long time ago that being the terror is much more interesting than being one of the terrified.

And right then and there is the first time you swear, you swear, you might just have heard someone's voice amongst the ringing.

table by elegant.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

boom .

At some point you remember asking in what felt like a hiss, perhaps a whisper,

"Do they still have the canons?"

Your fingers curled up and exploded in one motion. Ringing, ringing, ringing-

Someone nodded. Your heart sank into the silence.




And then on the up your eyes caught not, as, last, time.

Juno Tallis loses an ear regardless.

table by elegant.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

threat .

She catches you off guard.

You hadn't been watching the screen, preferring to stare out of the window of the train carriages and watch. The show begins and you think of the whales, how they swallow you whole in your dreams, how you can still hear things when you sleep. How you mourn noise every morning when you wake. How you bury it in your chest as you swallow down, hard and fast.

Cordelia Blake's little blonde head was facing away from you, but her lips curl around the end of something terrible as she turns to stare you down. Blows a kiss in your direction, in your dreams it will sound like a gunshot.

You spin and glance at the television screen but it's too late, your eyes claw at images - no words, no sound.

"What did she say?" you bark, pointing at the blonde girl yawning on-screen and then your mouth. "What did she say?!"

The Capitolites just stare at you, wide-eyed and blinking, curling in on themselves like you're the one with the axe thrown over your shoulder. Your words are loud, probably, scratchy and manic -- you can't tell, you don't care enough to soften yourself for their benefit. They took away your hearing. The least they can do is translate, fill in the gaping hole they dug up.

But they don't say a thing. Because they're scared, and all they see is a violent girl simmering with something in-between rage and fear, and they don't understand what's going on.

You do. You know a threat when you see one - even if you couldn't hear it.

And Cordelia Blake just made a threat.

table by elegant.

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

prize .

She wins.

Because of course she does. No Terra Montague in her way this year, but a thumb drawn across her throat is the same in both your lost language and your newfound one. And you stay stone-cold, hands in fists at your sides as you feel all eyes at the back of your head.

A moment, two, three. The ringing one long, drawn-out scream as you breathe in through your nose, outwards, close your dead-set eyes.

Then you dart towards the nearest Capitolite standing by the food trays and snatch a fork right out of his hands - no knives, figures. You can see the gasps, feel the tension of all that are in this carriage with you, brandishing the utensil against your chest.

She sets off too, hollering something you cannot hear and jumping into the furthest train car.

This is what the shadows taunted you with for three hundred and sixty-five nights. This is who the ringing told you was coming. Cordelia Blake starts toward you in the first carriage, mania played out on-screen. Instinct -- survive. You wrap your cardigan around your fist and smash through the glass in one swift movement, shielding your eyes with the other arm.

If the Capitolites in the vicinity started screaming, you can't hear them. In a heart-beat you scramble up through the window and clamber onto the top of the train cart, getting the upper hand the only way you know how. Hide. Wait. Fight. Survive.

She's got a knife and hearing and and rage like no other, but as you stand on top of the now-frozen vehicle you notice on the screens that she's also in pieces - a blood trail follows her prior movements in the dust and she hobbles ever so slightly.

Some members of the crowd begin to stand up out of their seats, a healthy stream of Peacekeepers following Delia's footsteps into the train car and there's a camera panning toward you, blonde hair on screen flowing in the wind. You just stand there, chest heaving up and down with a fork in your hands, poised and reach to fight to the death.

You know what's coming. That same fury, that same fire. You've fought it once in Ramsey Robichaux and you'll fight it again in Cordelia Blake. You'll win, again, because although she has caught you off guard she is predictable. First prize, last to die.

Come and get me, you think with a twitch of your lips and a death stare. Because what's another dead kid in this place to you? What's a threat eliminated to the Capitol? You were their darling first, their prized weapon. Self-defense, you'll call it. Not for your life - for this new-found land.

You watch and wait. The screens switch to security cameras inside the carts and she takes out one, two Keepers, screams something the subtitles can't catch. You know what she's saying, feel it in the sweat against your neck and the goosebumps rising against the afternoon sun on your skin.

But then she stops, a dart in her chest, and crumbles. // Cheater, you might have smiled at that were she not trying to kill you.

Seems the Capitol thinks you worth saving, because she collapses into a blurry unconsciousness. You wait a moment, two, three, twelve, eighteen, fifty. A white-gloved hand motions for you to come down but you don't move a muscle until you see her carried out in a stretcher, bound by more than just bandages and blankets. Biting down, teeth grinding to ash, your muscles ache.

Your bones creak when finally set free, and the ringing feels like fire in your ears as you disembark with a clean jump to the ground below. The crowd chants her name, lips curled around the syllables - taunting you. Haunting you. You feel the target on your back painted in blood, X marks the spot, as the Keepers escort you to safety.

The fork stays gripped in your palm.

Next time you'll bring a knife.

table by elegant.