til all bones protrude :: axyl vs ines, day 7

By a miracle, I take to the skies on the morning of Day Seven.

It’s for Lonora, not me. She’s been yearning to fly free ever since I encountered her, watching on enviously as her lover circled the skies far above, wishing she could join him but grounded by obligation. I know it’s the Gamemakers engineering that keeps her by my side, but I choose to believe it’s loyalty and kinship that ties us together.

Still, it doesn’t seem fair for her to always be making sacrifices. And so on the seventh day, I face my fears yet again and climb onto her back, white-knuckled and breathing heavy as I whisper into her pricked ears, “It’s okay.”

Granted, I keep my eyes closed the entire time that we’re airborne, not dissimilar to how I’d spent the previous night, swathed in the deepest sleep I’d had since the Games began. I’d fallen asleep before the Anthem, the thought of Felicity’s face in the sky doing some kind of irreparable damage to my psyche that I didn’t want to suffer through. Maybe that makes me a coward; that’s nothing new. I think I’m just tired of feeling this same, incessant pain.

By the same token, I don’t know if Maggie and Xov survived the night. I’d lost track of them somewhere between Marceline dying and Larsen running off to investigate a suspicious looking tree root that just so happened to be… you guessed it, a tree root. I’m under no illusions that they made it through the darkness alive, though. Even if the blaring Anthem hadn’t woken me, a booming cannon surely would have. And maybe it’s delusional to ponder, but I think I would know if their souls were no longer circling my own, our ropes too tightly tangled to one another now. Maggie, after five days of camaraderie; and now, Xov, her memory strung around my wrist in red silk.

“It’s to keep your soul on, so it won’t try to escape when you’re scared,” she had whispered as our sandglass ran itself out – sacred, I took her words as gospel just as she meant them to be. And even though it’s not the same as what Felicity did for me all those moons ago – could never be the same as meeting someone in the before, then carrying them through with you into the after – it’s almost close enough. I think I breathed a little easier, for a little while.

In the sky, though, the air is too thin for me. And while it pains me to bring Lonora back to ground zero, I think I’d fall out of the azure sea myself if I stayed suspended in it a moment longer. It’s safer down here – impossibly, I tell myself this and pray it to be true.

Turns out it’s just another footnote in the long and growing list of mistakes I’ve made in my short seventeen years.

Axyl is a stoic, solitary figure on the shore – an unassuming Reaper with a crude blunt held loosely in his grasp. I’m naïve enough to think that he won’t see me, even as I walk right into the belly of the looming confrontation.

“Ines...”

Yeah. Fair enough.

I take in him and his companions, then, instead; we take turns sizing each other up, three against three, anxious hearts clamouring around inside our ribcages. Lonora whines at me. Casts a longing gaze up to the sky, and even though I’m still afraid of flying too far away from something solid, I’d rather be safe and scared than dead in the sand.

I make my choice, pressing my face into her arctic pelt and nudging her imperceptibly, waiting for her to take the hint and return to her familiar habitat–

“Bennie, no–”

I want to believe he’s as shocked at his mount’s betrayal as I am – that, given another thirty seconds of unevent, we would have agreed to go on our separate ways, one fearful avoidant to another.

I guess it doesn’t really matter now. Not when the pain splattered across Lonora’s back is so fresh, so palpable, as if it’s my very own. I can only hold on helplessly as she crashes into the ground mid-flight, her tattered wing catching Bennie’s side awkwardly in the process.

Face-to-face with the enemy, I see the mutts in a new light. It’s yin and yang, the differences between our snowy companions. The foaming at Bennie’s mouth. The too-dilated pupils. I piece it together before Axyl, stupidly try to warn him of the danger instead of trying to save myself:

“He’s sick!” I yell it into the wind, cringing at the cruel echo of my voice off of the rocks. “Can you make him stop?!”

I don’t want to fight, you don’t want to fight – we don’t have to fight, do we?

From the depths of my soul, I hear Maggie’s voice loud and clear, commanding and brutal in the face of adversity: “Get real.”

Ichor coats the ground almost immediately, the ruby tinge of the great beasts’ lifeblood reflecting so much deeper than the remnants of Harley I still can’t bring myself to scrub away off of my clothes. Some part of Axyl mixes with the spillage. I’m working my tongue around an apology that’s not my own and simultaneously being forced into silence by the scenes of brutality unfolding in front of me.

Flying’s out of the question now. The sight of Lonora’s shredded wingspan cuts deep, a new kind of growing pain, her distress is my own. It’s no surprise that my heart sits within her paw. I wonder if that had been the plan of the Gamemakers’ all along – to call on womankind’s last shreds of humanity in a realm devoid of all goodness – yet I could never be turned into a monster. This is what I tell myself, even as I turn feral, jaw set and face hardened at the advancing rabid beast.

Lonora whimpers as I sob through my anger and disbelief; we’re both being split down the middle and falling apart at the seams. I watch the poisoned contents of our souls leech out in retaliation, pulling a yelp of pain from Bennie’s throat.

We could run. Have to try, but our backs are up against the wall the moment I hesitate, because Bennie is on us again, swiping at Lonora’s front paw and revelling in the sickening crunch of her splintering bone.

To his credit, Axyl is valiant in his efforts to redirect Bennie’s hysteria. I can see it in his eyes, the mirror image of my own. He doesn’t want this, and tries to tell me as much. But what use is a measly human against the awesomeness of Capitol creation?

I know this – know it’s a losing battle to try and make things right, that the best chance I have is to launch myself onto the bank and abandon the only living being that hasn’t yet abandoned me – and yet.

The whine of a girl younger than my years bubbles out of me, pitiful and metallic: “I don’t know what to do!”

I know what I have to do.

I have to stay.

‘Cause maybe I don’t know how to fight for myself, even after spending the best part of a week training as Maggie’s unwilling apprentice, but I’ll go to the ends of this earth to protect and hold on to one of the last truly good things I’ve managed to call my own. Knowing, deep down, that it’s only a matter of time before Lonora turns on me, too, yet choosing to believe that I’m special; that we’ll beat the odds; that it can all be okay, somehow.

The thing with fighting is, that you invite vulnerability into your life the moment you enlist.

It’s my choice to grip tighter into the matted ends of Lonora’s fur instead of dismount and run for the water – and it’s this choice that keeps me straddling the precarious edge of life and death, I know. Because maybe I’d have half a chance of surviving another day if I mutinied now, but I know too the consequences waiting for me down that fork in the road – the different kind of vulnerability I would open myself up to. Something cowardly, and disloyal. The dichotomy of humankind is trying to solve the mystery of where morality goes to die. Of balancing the want to live, and the need to remain a good person. Trying to reconcile with the reality that maybe, maybe, those things cannot coexist anymore.

But that’s not the world I want to live in.
And so, maybe living isn’t the prize everyone keeps telling me it is.

I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I’m fighting for anymore – thought it was a girl called YaniMarie, but even she feels so far away now. Somewhere in the mess of it all, Lonora reminds me that nothing past the beach in front of us matters. She continues to fight as I remain stricken, retaliating against Bennie with a wayward swipe that flings Axyl off of his back and finally shakes me out of my battle with my conscience. I feel the scream leave my throat more than I hear it, horrified at the unnatural angles his limbs contort into in the sand. And I hate the way I relax into myself when I see him eventually haul himself back onto his feet.

Even through the rabid frenzy, Bennie must register the lack of a familiar weight sinking into his skin, and the roar that rips out of him turns my veins to ice water. His next attack is not meant for Lonora. It’s purposeful, and pointed, and vengeful through no fault of mine. It’s a paw aimed straight at my heart that sends me following the same trajectory as Axyl, crash-landing into a towering pile of boulders with sun-sharpened edges.

Lonora’s bones are breaking, and in solidarity, mine do the same.

The pain that shoots up my right forearm is the cruellest kind of punishment. Seven days unscathed, protected by Azure and Maggie’s shadows – of course I can’t stomach my own searing discomfort. Lonora stands over me, fiercely protective until the end, but Bennie doesn’t back down either. There’s no time to suck in more than a single deep breath, though. It’s cutthroat and cruel, it’s just fighting to stand when I’m barely able to find the strength in my deadened arm to drag myself through the sand. It’s Axyl, to my right, finding his weapon; it’s me, instinctively reaching for the dagger in my bag like a tome of protection.

Exasperated, exhausted, I think I black out for a moment. I open my eyes to look down at the wound on my wrist, and wobble through the panic I find there. Black out again, only to come to with the distance between Axyl and I being eaten away by our fears and once-upon-a-times.

My lip quivers; someone whimpers, “Don’t touch me,” against the background of gnashing teeth and spilling blood, like it could change anything. Like any of it matters to anyone at all.

I’m waiting for the pain to subside.

It doesn’t.

It just lingers. Grows, even. Amplifies, because Axyl is cutting into my skin before I even have a moment to respond to his cruelty, my warning to him forgotten in the wind. Lonora spins out of control somewhere far away, fighting for her life and forgetting all about me. I don’t blame her for that. It happens to everyone.

It doesn’t change the fact that my sudden loneliness burns. Droplets of blood sliding down the side of my arm to remind me I am nothing more than mortal.

“One of us has gotta bite it, Ines.”

“Don’t...” I’m gonna cry, feel it welling up inside of me. “Don’t do this.”

Don’t tell me truths, don’t talk to me like I don’t know what has to happen. And yet, and yet. I’m the only one fighting to change our fates.

“You don’t want to do this.” Neither of us do; we don’t have to, right?

We have to. Right.

But I can’t find it in myself to fight. I lash out at him, but it’s a strike that lacks conviction, swung like a girl who never learnt to fight. She told herself she could make it through on the names of plants and anonymous faces, clinging to shadows cast by stronger women than herself.

You will die.

I grit my teeth in refusal, even as Axyl’s bat traces the torn fabric clinging to my bodice. I don’t even have the strength to try and sidestep the taunting movement.

It’s probably supposed to be a consolation, the way his voice breaks across my name. Like it pains him to say it, to speak his decision into reality.

Good. Let my ghost haunt him forevermore, through this life and the next. Let the adopted name of Izar be the burden it has always been.

I shake through the pain, the fear – a mimic of him. Pulling strength from the creatures battling beside us, trying to harness their might and call it my own, to the bitter end.

half-post half-filler for timing! sorry sorry x

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“I don’t wanna die, Ines.”

I want to tell him that I know, I know: but we all die, eventually. This is all temporary.

I want to tell him that I’ve seen thirty years of history come before us, before this impossible moment, and it doesn’t matter where an Izar floats to, because their fate is always the same.

I will die. I’ve known it since the start of time.

And I hoped it would be as far away from the icy wasteland of the Arena as possible, all those days ago. But now the frost has thawed, and spring is emerging, and it’s not Eleven, no, but maybe it’s enough.

Lonora continues her valiant battle against Bennie, braver than me. And Larsen, forgotten in the fire until now, nudges my ankle tenderly. I tear my eyes away from the bloodied frenzy to look down at his sad little face. I thought he might be the one to teach me how to be strong. I know now that some ghosts simply aren’t meant to be saved.

“Okay. Okay.”

It’s not okay, but I understand.

“Just don’t–” I swallow, nervous bile bubbling inside of me, eating away the last of my pain. Everything turns to numbness; a cool, detached clarity takes hold of my hand. I imagine it’s Xov, or Maggie, or Felicity. All gone now. There’s only Axyl in front of me, real and tethered to this life with watery eyes and heaving lungs and the last remnants of something soft that I need to latch onto.

“Just don’t let me be alone.”

I don’t remember my parents. I guess most orphans don’t.

I guess what I mean is: I don’t remember the house I may or may not have grown up in for the first few months of my life. I don’t remember how they left me on the front porch of the Orphanage when they finally decided it was all too much to handle. I don’t remember the way the sky looked when they made their choice, whether it was day or night when our fates were severed. Whether they cried, and whether it was with grief or relief.

I never wanted answers to those questions, not like some of the curious kids I shared rooms with.

Nekane Izar is a different story.

Because I remember the way she showed up at the Orphanage with a mission to fulfil. I remember the hard determination etched into her face when Mrs Wench tried to turn her away without the right documentation. I remember the look in her eyes when she saw me for the first time after finally getting what she came for – something that resembled hope entering the room when I did. I know, because I felt it flutter in my chest, too.

I know so much about her, and yet I know nothing at all.

I don’t know why she never married. I don’t know why she doesn’t light the memorial candles in the living room even though Vasco has tried to tell her time and time again that it’s not for ourselves that we hold these rituals. I don’t know anything about her parents, or the sisters she has no portraits of. I don’t know what made her so bitter in a past life to be so narcissistic about everyone and everything.

Except.

For.

Yani.

The girl who wasn’t her own. The golden child. The beacon of hope, the untouchable.

Nekane might be watching somewhere out there, now. Wondering how Yani might have done in my place if I wasn’t the sacrifice to her survival. Or she might not. She’s an enigma that I was never able to read. Most of the time she felt more like a stranger than a mother figure. I’ve spent countless nights losing sleep asking questions gone unanswered of whether she cared about me at all. You watch a girl go from child to teenager to young woman, that’s some type of bond to be shared, right?

Strange, then, to feel more belonging to a place of pain and bloodshed, of death and decay, than the house on the hill with sunflowers growing in the garden for all the dead relatives I don’t share a bloodline with.

A single thread of carmine flutters around my wrist. Something borrowed, like the name that is not my own. It’s just another symbol shared, passed down through the ages and destined to be buried with the rest of them.

“Just don’t let me be alone.”

Please, don’t let me finish this life the only way I’ve lived it.