{ this cold feeling } Opal/Pyrite

She didn't remember what crying felt like.

The stinging below her eyelashes was foreign and harrowing, like a laugh in a memory catching in her ears. Pulses drummed in the veins around her ears and hammered the weight of the world into her frame and forced her, collapsing in defeat, to the floor. And as a hand reached up and caught a droplet in the darkness of her room a crackle escaped her mouth. A noise that sounded as if she were laughing at herself in her miserable state, as unkempt as the contents of her room (she hadn't cleaned it since her furious rage that left a ruin in her wake) and as pathetic as her now hopeless, useless drive. She didn't remember what crying felt like - until now.

And anything felt better than this.

So she let it take over. Asphyxiation choked out rage too tired to be anything else but silent sobs. Selfish was not a word Pyrite would choose to describe herself, but in this moment she wouldn't be anything but. Crying felt awfully weak and disgustingly indulgent, but she couldn't even see herself in the dead of the night, let alone anybody else. A chaotic, irrational nature she'd kept under her skin swept through her body and bled from her eyes, blinded by the night and the last self-loathing hatred she'd swore she'd ever feel. The next morning she awoke with a hole in her mind and the drumming knowledge that today, Opal was coming home.

In the instances where Opal had clung to victory and pulled herself to the top of the podium, the triplet had watched her entire purpose crumble. Of course, there was more to life than winning the Hunger Games (the alternative is losing and ending up with no life at all), but since that plan had been snatched from her hands and placed into her sister's palms in the blink of an eye there was a big, gaping whole in her morals. Losing was even more of a stranger than crying, let alone at Opal's gain. So Py took a page out of her childhood books and decided on the prospect that if you can't beat them, join them. With a permanent scowl - most days it just sort of appeared on her face (or maybe it was just her conscious in the mirror furious for her act of weakness the night before - "You look like shit" she'd spat at her reflection before storming downstairs to the hammering at the front door), she held her breath before greeting her equally-furious sister.

"I'm..." she began after a few seconds, hesitant to say the next words. It was more of a question than the planned statement that she finally forced through her lips, and she hated the way it tasted. She hated more that slight truth lingered against her tongue as it fell through the air between them and killed the fragile silence.

"I'm sorry?"

She feels the blow before it hits her. Part of her expected it to happen, she just didn't believe Opal had the guts to do so. But it does, and it's incredibly real, not dreamt up in some nightmare world or in an exaggerated daydream. Pain rockets through her jaw and causes her nerves to scream in protest, but it's not the punch that knocks her off her feet - it's the shock. An exasperated huff leaves her chest as she blinks away the pain that throbs at her jaw, unable to choke out even a Bitch! towards her sister.

Instead, she listens to her sister's explosive emotion that pours from her eyes and mouth in silence. Jealousy still reeks from every inch of her body, but all that fills the space between them are Opal's shouts of fury and whimpers of pain from the depths of her lungs. In ragged breaths she apologises (there's an awful lot of that happening this morning and it's a strange, foreign process underneath this roof) and ceases to speak. Pulses in Pyrite's cheek rage underneath the now red skin, stumbling through a battle between forgiveness and resentment, in-between moments tugging at her better judgement. But it would take more than a punch to turn her into an apologetic, sister-forgiving saint.

"Why are you apologising?" she spits. You deserved that, every bit of it she thinks in a heartbeat that drums in her jaw. "You're sorry you won? You're sorry you got everything we've all dreamed about for our entire lives - something Emerald sacrificed herself for just for a shot at? Well congratulations, Opal - you did it! You proved me wrong, you proved us all wrong." Bitterness is comforting as it slides off her tongue, even if she is just arguing for the sake of it. (Arguing about who should apologise has not been one of her high points - but neither has this entire situation either.)

She laughs, and it's effortless. (Crying is also easy, but admitting it is much, much harder.) There is no point in arguing any more - not with Opal, not with anyone. Fighting will not give her what she desired - what I once desired? What do I desire now? To be worth something? In who's eyes? - and as questions fly around in the calamity of her conscience she closes her eyes and breathes.

"You're lucky you didn't have a family. You're lucky you didn't have this," waving a hand behind her to illustrate her point, "to compete with. And it turns out we didn't need it - maybe that was our poor judgement, maybe it was Mom and Dad's. It doesn't matter now, none of it does.

"And I know I'm a bitch - who doesn't? But you're not the only one who had things that you felt were important taken from you." Whether she has a right to be so selfishly terrible is another argument in itself - but Pyrite was sick of fighting. Fighting Opal, fighting her siblings, fighting herself.

With an exasperated sigh, she leans against the door frame and looks up at her sister. "So are you coming in or not? It is your house too, you know."