at the gates of hell // yaa&andy [day 5]

She survived.

She survived.

Only it didn't feel like survival. It felt like a swarm of birds had dropped from the sky and pecked at her skin until it was bloody raw, leaving nothing behind but a frail-looking girl, red dripping from the very ends of her fingertips - and where her fingertips were no more - to the tips of her toes, the only piece of armor left untouched on her broken body. The miracle of victory in the Bloodbath and the opening of the wealth chest had ended up saving her life days later, just as she predicted it would, but any sense of victory that she felt was drowned out by the feeling of her own blood seeping into the fabric of her clothes.

When exactly are you guys going to be ready to die?"

That was the argument: what if taking a chance on this terrible thing right now, this deadly thing .. What if it saved her life? It was another type of puzzle whose picture was too big to see right from the start, but all the pieces fit and she just scraped by with her life, not failure, not a loss, but the luckiest of chance circumstances that spanned the beginning all the way to the end, whatever that end might be. But if she died, she would die knowing that she had done everything within her power to stay alive, even from the first day. And if she didn't, she could stay to see the entire finished product crafted from the pieces set out so haphazardly before her. But it felt like death.

It felt so much like death.

With each blistering step, her arms and legs and neck and head burning from the pain of it all, she made her way towards her ally out in the distance. The image of a severed head brought her back to that day with her district partner, the day Deimos Lasner lost his head and she had screamed so much it felt like her lungs were going to jump out of her throat. And maybe it was the blood spilling from her veins that made her want to cry, but the image sent her over the edge and into the pool of feelings that she had never wanted to feel, thinking about people that she had never wanted to lose. And so she trekked, her head held low, sobs heaving through her chest uncontrollably as snot dribbled down her nose and her breaths came in ragged gasps. She was crying for everything that she was capable of crying for. She cried for her family back home- how stupid she seemed in the eyes of her mother, how her brother was going to cope without her, how her father had laid a strong, steady hand on her mother's shoulder on Reaping day when she had crumpled to the ground. How tears had been rolling down his cheeks despite the trouble, the rebelliousness, and the recklessness that was his only daughter. How he had yelled so much and yet somehow stood there and cried like a baby, forgetting for a moment the bad things while the purest of truths about his daughter rushed ahead and took over as he watched her walk away.

She was strong.

She was brave.

She was clever.

And once, years and years and years ago, she had once been a scared little girl who only needed someone to scare the nightmares away.

And maybe she still was.

But she didn't just cry for her father. Her sorrow was of the infinite sort, the tears more like the tide than the rainfall. The death of her ally and the vision of his blood seeping into the dirt from the stump of a neck weighed on her like nothing she had ever felt, for she could have protected him, could have fought just a little bit harder or jumped in front of the flying blade. Better to die instantly than see something so gruesome and live with it, wasn't that true? And to see it again, only with the face of a murderous girl..

And his last words.

Yaa, I -

Yaa, I -

Yaa, I -

And she knew. How could she not? The thoughts that followed were the ones that plagued her mind, an endless stream of questions that only served to make it difficult to breath. What if she had actually met him in District Seven? What if they had never been reaped? What if he had lived a little bit longer? Would she have loved him? She could imagine him, a ripe old age and still a bumbling idiot, sitting in an old, worn-down rocking chair - one of the comfy ones right by the fire - as he retold the story of the Games to his grandchildren, the story of how he had loved and lost one hell of a girl, a short-haired, blue-eyed beauty with nothing to her name but long legs and the occasional sarcastic remark. And how there had been two valiant boys by his side, boys who had battled giant spiders and wandered off all the damn time and didn't quite keep their sanity - hell, nobody did - but were fantastic people all the same.

And even if his story would be twisted, warped into a brighter light, he would have had a story, would have had a life and a gorgeous wife and painful memories, but happy ones too, and children whose first words would be "Dada" after that crawl-and-poop-over-literally-everything stage. And he would grow old and maybe even die peacefully in his sleep, head attached firmly to his neck and mind far far far away from the horrors of his past.

He could have had that life, and she could have loved him till her very end.

But she never did love him, only cared for him in a way that she couldn't even try to explain, and his chance was over.

And what was left?

Only pain. That's all there ever would be.

The closer she got to her ally and the more she saw the look on his face, the more distraught she became. Real, godawful pain ached like fire over her skin, and when she reached Andal Ferde she was nothing but a dripping pile of tears and blood, whispering "I hurt.. I hurt.. I hurt.. I hurt... " over and over and over every few seconds as he did his best to stitch up her stump arm. When the work was done and he turned to her, grim expression on his face with a grim question to match, Yaa broke down entirely.

She didn't mean to throw her arms around him - both of them now missing a hand and looking quite awkward in a hug - but she did, resting her face up against his shoulder as she tried and failed to calm herself.

"I'm hurt so bad," was all she actually managed to say.

ooc: I'm sorry that this is so bad and that it took me forever, I had to write from my phone </3