boom(x4) i want {you} in my {tomb} // [Noah Day 3]

The waters are calmer than I've ever seen them. Waves are practically nonexistent here and I'm only moved just slightly with the little rolling force that washes me cold. My arms work tirelessly to keep me treading water, skimming the air and diving back under to propel me up a fraction of an inch. My legs do much the same, kicking back and forth slowly. Against my toes, I can almost feel the bottom, can almost feel the remnants of the solid ground that lingers here in the wake of an island long since moved. When I move sideways a little, I can stand against the sandbar just barely. The thing that hits me hardest is that I can breathe, and she is nowhere in sight. My eyes scan the horizon for a moment, and then I am trust out of my sleep and into the dark cold of reality. The chill isn't so different from the water after all.

When I sit up, I feel tired, but more rested than I have been in two years. I did not drown. The words sound foreign to me even when I whisper them under my breath, letting my lungs work quietly and without panic in the moments of sleepy reprieve. I test my limbs slowly, stretching against the hard mattress of gold and stone. My body cracks and tenses, but I am whole. Er, almost. I glance down at my stump of a thumb, trying to focus my eyes in the pitch black of the room and failing miserably. I have to leave this place, the dark cavern of vast wealth, spilling greedily into the depths. Quickly, I feel around me for my pack and am met with the reassuring scratch of the worn material. Next to it is another little bag and I tilt my head in confusion for a moment before the night previous comes back to me.

I feel at my body for a moment, ensuring myself that I am real and whole and alive. So they weren't little ghosts, come to steal me away. I am still breathing, the air fluttering in my lungs evenly. My eyes are blind to my surroundings as I cautiously stand, one hand tightly holding the little bag that was left for me. It's difficult to walk through the dark without a single clue as to where you are going, feet sliding across layers of coins and beads and other riches. I find myself stumbling more often than not, crashing against mounds beside me before righting myself with a nervous apprehension. Something could be waiting, lurking here in the dark, waiting for me to make a loud enough noise and urge it from its slumber. I want to growl in frustration when the snakes in my bag start hissing, my hands feeling across the cold stone walls as my feet hit a different surface. It feels like normal rock, not gold-gilded floor.

I don't remember the way that was lit by glowing tails yesterday, so I find myself twisting and turning in the maze for what feels like hours. It's not hours. It can't be. I'm still basking in sleepy muddled thoughts, head working slowly to react to dead ends and splitting paths. The maze of hallways is frustratingly bleak and endless and I want to scream in exasperation. I huff lowly and continue to race down a hallway, careful not to run face-first into a wall like the day prior. I don't want my head smarting and impairing my movements like it had yesterday. My thumb is a good enough reminder of that.

When I see an inkling of light on a far wall, I take off running as fast as I can. I skid to a halt, my right side slamming into the wall and I hiss, limping off at a slower pace towards where the light originates from. When I finally reach the mouth of the building, I can practically feel my heart singing in the joy of rejoining the light. It's bleak out, the overcast of the early morning hanging low upon the Arena and pushing the heat and humidity of the new day down harder. It sits upon my shoulders and drags me down, my body slumping with the effort. I'm used to the heat back from District Four, but the humidity is nothing like this. This is a toxic cloud of moisture trying to suffocate me in my wakefulness. I'm tempted to turn on the spot and head back inside, wishing for the chilly dampness of the treasure room, but there's a lingering fear settled in my stomach. Those fucking rats could still be there, waiting for me. I shudder at the mere thought of their beady eyes and scaly glowing tails and razor sharp teeth. Without another moment of consideration, I practically leap down the stairs, taking them two at a time until I'm setting off across the grassy earth.

Walking for long distances is far more tiring than fighting for mere instances. I'm a sprinter, not an endurance runner. I can't keep myself going for long periods of time, but I can expend all of my energy to reach an end in an instant. It usually ends up bad for others, but sometimes it ends up bad for me instead. Sometimes, it ends with me lying in my own pain after getting my ass handed to me during a fight that took longer than my body was ready for. I prefer to be the dealer of pain, not the receiver. I scowl and look down at my bite-ridden arms as a result, grimacing at the nasty looking wounds. They're all red and irritated looking. There are a good amount of two-holed punctures up my arms from the snakes and the deep gashes are from the rats. Perhaps it wasn't my smartest idea to rip my attackers out of my arms. I probably could have been a bit less damaged if I had just left them. That, or I could have been poisoned twice as badly. My face twists up at the thought, eyes trained on the slight quivering in my fingers. It's been three days since I've taken any kind of drug and my body is missing it. The venom on the first day had calmed the storm a little, but now the uneasiness beneath my skin is returning. It's a trembling want in my cells, a lingering longing for more. I won't ever reach a point of supply, not anymore. By the end of this, I won't be shaking anymore.

A big grey structure seems to rise before me in the blink of an eye, my weary limbs thanking what gods don't exist for some kind of reprieve, but there is a wariness in my bones. Something in me tries to shrink back as I ascend the monolithic stairs, the cold grey of the building nurturing the frost in me with every movement. When I duck within the shadow of the doorway, balancing on my toes as I peer inside, I cannot help the sinking feeling in me dropping to the bottom of the pit that is my chest. This is a place of death, and how fitting that I have happened upon it. I perch upon my fears for a moment longer before crossing the frame and letting myself tumble into the bleak reality.

The deep insets in the wall are filled with nameless coffins, bodies rotting in anonymity for all of time. Maybe they are the real bodies of every tribute to have ever died. We all pass into the shadow upon our deaths, forever to be the tributes that were lost, hardly known by name. My fingers skim the walls, taking in the numbness of the dead with every passing second until I can practically feel myself slipping away with them. Each of them pilfer what they can of my soul, taking back what is owed them by the Capitol in the only way they can. Who better to take from than the boy who robbed graves nightly; the one who took from them every possession, every metal tooth, every scrap of clothing? There is no better target of their long-dwelling enmity, their soulless anger. Every step I take becomes harder as I walk down the corridor, my body sagging more with the weight of the loss of many. There are an elite few who join this club, even with twenty four of us being selected each year. We never really find this brotherhood though, choosing instead to kill for the sake of living, plunging the knives into the bodies of others without seeing just how much they take of us with them. We all lose everything to these strangers while we think we are saving ourselves. There's nothing we can do to save ourselves, not from this.

At the end of the hall is a room, only just barely bigger than the hallway in width. The walls are lined still with nameless occupants, my eyes flitting across the expanse of the room quickly at them all. Each of them is without mark, not a single one labeled, but they are there and always will be. In the center, though, there is an altar of sorts. It's just a raised platform, an extension of the repressive grey of the entire building, but atop it lies a casket. It is what lies just beyond the wall in every unmarked grave. This is a mausoleum of untold sorrow, and here lies one pulled from their rest. There are no openings in the walls, no missing places to be filled. This one has been left out to be found. Not a nail holds it shut, but I dare not open it with the irreverence of my youthful sin and desperate need. I hardly even want to go near it, my bones steeling against my movements and locking me in a corner.

There is nothing here for me to make off with that will help me on the journey to the end. This soul has already reached the detached sense of closure, come to terms with its inevitable ceasing to exist entirely. It is only this body that longs for salvation, working with every life-breath and measured step to avoid the truth that will fall into place in its time. Soon, it will piece itself together from the past and become the present, obliterating what could remain of a measly future of pain. That is how this ends, I know. It is only a matter of how and when. This is what waits for me, though, this box of empty comfort. This is my funeral parlor and resting ground, in this Arena. I lay my soul to rest here, my body falling to its knees as it feels the stab of loss.

For quite some time, I thought I'd lost my soul when I started robbing graves to begin with. It had been a forced profession, one taken up out of necessity rather than will. My family was dying in grief, looking for some cushion to break the fall of our parents' passing. We never quite got our footing back, resorting to digging up the bodies of those recently passed and taking all they had left on them, from clothing to tooth-caps to love letters. I was too young when I started, body and mind not ready for the toll exhuming the dead would take upon me. Fitz was there then, as he always had been. He had only been a year older, but he knew better than anyone what I was going through. Fitz had always been the one I had turned to when I was young, seeing as we shared a room. We would wait for hours and hours for our father and brothers to come back from their missions as pirates. Mother could hardly calm us. We wouldn't sleep until we had exhausted all means of movement and energy, resorting to curling up upon one little bed and whispering about our own journeys to come in the future. We just never knew what those missions with father and Jude and Nino would truly entail until we were thrust into the heart of the job and given shovels all our own. No pirates would so disrespect the dead. We were heartless graverobbers, without question.

Everything we could find was put to use by means of pawn or personal, either giving back to the local pawn shop or finding a place in our home. I had felt like I was losing myself to every shovelful of dirt I dug, ever tooth I pulled, ever splinter I earned. Every action I made took pieces of me and scattered them to the wind. There wasn't much to work with in the first place, the majority of my soul having shriveled up or burned whenever my temper switch clicked upright and on. Stealing from the dead was worse, each person grasping at what little was left and taking it as payment for their goods. I didn't let the pain stop me though, because stealing meant living and living meant seeing her.

Now I'm dying, and she is dead, and yet I still see her as clear as day. She lingers in the corner of my vision at all times, a pale ghost clothed in white and dripping with her own faults. Her eyes are murky, white film covering them as she stares blindly at me from somewhere distant. She sits in the edge of my consciousness, urging me to come to her with her every movement. From the day she left the earth and descended beneath the waves, she had tried to lure me from my safety into the waters. She sung her siren song for Fitz across the waves and taken him easily from the known world into her depths. I had stepped in after his departure, unafraid and willing to let her drag me into her arms, but I didn't expect her to pull me under and wrap me in her cold arms. I didn't expect her to fight to keep me every morning when I woke from the waves in desperate gasps. I had drowned in Penelope Libertine's grace every day of my life, but I never once wanted her to drown me herself. Now all I can feel are her thin fingers wrapped around my neck, dragging me down, down, down until there is hardly anything left of me to be taken. When my time comes, it will be quick to dispose of my remains.

I hear a faint beeping from the mouth of the building, my body going rigid from the onset of foreign sound. It's familiar, though, like a distant memory. It sings in chirping notes slowly, incessantly. There's no choice but to go and find whatever it is. I get up stiffly, body protesting movement under the oppression of my mood. It's as if I'm hobbling across the stone, body too tired and too old for such a young age. I'm not that young anymore, not really. My heart has aged far beyond the years it holds. When I finally am at the end of the hall, I see a large canister sitting in the doorway, beeping out its presence. Sponsorship? I kneel quickly, wincing at the pain of landing hard upon the stone, but my hands set to work immediately to open the gift. It's more difficult than I thought it would be, if only because of my missing thumb. I shuffle forward awkwardly, trapping the container in between my legs to gain some kind of traction. When I'm finally able to open it, I nearly sob in relief. My throat feels like parchment and I can hardly speak, my voice quaking when I try to voice my thanks before breaking off. "Th-Thank y-you, so m-uch-" I lift the jug uneasily, feeling the water within sloshing against the sides and it is gloriously noisy. I miss the sound of moving water, my district, my home.

When I'm able to finally drink, it feels foreign to my body. There's a chill spreading from my core outward with every gulp and my body shivers despite my attempts to stay calm. I can feel some of it spilling out the side of my mouth and making murky trails of watery blood and mud down my cheeks. For a moment, I feel as if I'm drowning again, but I would choose this kind of drowning any day over being dragged into the depths by Penelope. It's a welcome pain of regeneration and re-hydration. I would drown in this readily if it just meant to live one more day, and it does. This is a godsend in retaliation at my foolish attempts to step closer to death and taunt it with my presence once more, as always. I get up shakily, feeling the swell in my stomach almost painfully, and walk back inside. As before, I curl up in my corner, my pack and newly acquired jug beside me, and I wait.

I can't avoid death forever. I might as well get accustomed to it while I can.


[Noah receives a full water jug from sponsorship and drinks it.]