to the nines // charlotte vs siren

What feels like a year of torture all comes to a peak with a single realisation:

I was not going to make it out of this battle alive.

The fucking thought makes my heart race even moreso than the sight of flaming knives being pelted at me without array. Days of fighting have all been in vain, for I would not walk out of this ghost town alive. Perhaps my very soul would be embodied into the musty air I have spent the past three days breathing. Not that it mattered, really – nobody remembers the dead.

Owen and Aelia are recurrent thoughts. I would not forget them so easily, like the rest of the world would have inevitably already have done. Someone had to keep them alive. They say that you die twice – once, when you take your final breath. Twice, when someone utters your name for the very last time.

‘Owen. Aelia.’ Faint whispers that sound too gentle to have come from me, and yet the names leave a tingle upon my lips that is unmistakeably calming.

They would not die yet.

Not a minute passes where I do not think of their belittlement within the arena, degraded into nothing but sombre faces in a starry sky.

I wonder how they are.

White anger boils inside of me, coursing through my blood to leave my skin prickling – a sensation that mimicks the feeling of the fire kissing exposed flesh, delivering a promise of Death. Siren’s cruel gaze is frenzied, her desperation to return home painted into the creased lines of her forehead with the blood of the dead. The thought of Owen’s blood encrusted underneath her slimy fingernails terrifies me more than the verity that I too had the liquid life of another smudged across my face.

She was a killer, and I was going to die.

The knife in my hand feels heavy, weighed down by a poignant friend that has followed me ever since my death sentence. Questions swirl in my head, refusing to be silenced, pushing their way to the foreground of a mind already consumed by darkness and grief. What chance did I have? Why was I still alive? Would anybody care if I disappeared right now? How on Earth did Siren impress the Capitolites enough to be sponsored so much shit? They were queries that did not require answers, questions I would not be granted the luxury of knowing. The only thing I knew for certain was that I would not live to see Day 8 – that was a truth encapsulated and accepted. But it did not mean Charlotte Browning would stop fighting. I hoist the knife into the air, watching the blade gleam in the golden sunlight.

I smile.

‘You’re a fucking bitch.’

If only I had more plates.

[attacks siren the mermaid]
crDVWa0sknife
miss and this is the last time /this/ happens


{is it too late to try out 1st person??}
{yes?}
{oops}

"And?"

And she would die, Charlotte.

They would both die, regardless of who breathed onto the boundaries of day eight filled with adrenaline and an ego's venom. Charlotte knew the two who were left (Potato and Leon, and how she longed to forget both of their names - to let them die from her tongue). and she knew they were both more apt than the ghost town's population. One of the four would walk back home and one of the few things that still reassured her was that it would not be herself, and it would not be Siren Baitwell.

And?

And she would die, Siren.

And the thought scratched a chuckle through her throat before another knife slid through the skin of her arm, fire hugging her like Aelia had Leon five days ago. It hurt, it hurt like hell, but in a strange way it didn't. Because it was her release, in the knives that Owen held the last time she saw him, in the fire decorating the tips, in the girl in front of her. Just in the same way, it hurt in a strange way; blood tasting against her skin and all she could was watch. It pang through her arm and through to her torso and through to her veins, but it was just like all the cuts she drew to love throughout the week. It was just average, if anything another tattoo to add to her collection.

The cut was like its crafter, average. And it was a phenomenon that a tear into her skin deep enough to piece it apart to bone was becoming average, and in the same sense it was a phenomenon that a career like Siren Baitwell was becoming average as the days lingered on. It was the final four and three were careers and none of the three were anything special.

And.

And they would die, both of them.

With knives in hand and blood in their lungs, the two of them would never step out the arena with the aspect of a life ahead of them.

And the thought of Siren killing her made her bite her lip while the opposite made her chuckle.

[attacks siren]
cQT19Sywknife
[2167 -- Shallow Cut on Stomach -- 4.0 damage]

filler, bc you literally gave me 120 words that didn't even relate to the fight


[attacks siren]
L3U339HOknife
[2180 -- Shallow Cut on Left Forearm -- 3.5 damage]

filler #2.

[attacks siren]
|m5rjOYdknife
[2129 -- Deep Gash on Left Forearm -- 8.0 damage]