Avox :: Lennon "Lazaretto" Eyre

— five dozen long, perfect teeth. It's gorgeous. Each feather is white enough to contain every memory of the sky Lennon has, an untouchable heaven of perfect blindness and cotton balls, all spun together by cloud-spiders. She thinks: That's what a bed should be, because she can't wrap her mind around so much softness, just eight-legged angels and an understanding of far away.

In The Pit there is no sky. This many-fanged swan has nowhere to fly except at her heart, but for the moment it simply stares. Perhaps the muttation is as awe-struck by a vision of grandeur as she is, captivated as the avox uncaps a gilded tube of lipstick and oh-so-slowly rouges her lips, as if this is her war paint. After the cap has been clicked back into place — a deafening roar of cat calling welling up from the ring of spectators above — she blows it a kiss. Lust for both blood and beauty consumes the air and it is the breath before a riot, before madness. Tonight, the most beguiling creatures on the earth are staring into each others eyes and the world threatens to implode. It is a collision of envy, of pride, of a grotesque desire to be the most bewitching thing in the room, because that is the only victory either of them have ever known.

Sanguine lips curl as the Queen of Hell hurls the tube of lipstick through the air, taking out the swan's left eye in a burst of blood and squawking. Wings rear back, teeth gnash, and everything is violently, stunningly white. Everything is sky. Everything is —

— flinch as she punches it in the throat, a perfect manicure clawing at preened feathers. The blood matches the polish, but even an audience this shallow can't appreciate such delicate details of coordination when the girl's mascara is tattooing her cheeks with the reverberations of an ugly, howling, wounded scream. There are teeth grazing her throat that don't feel like the last time and her heart is racing because this is what it's like to be nervous, to not know what's coming. Despite having mastered a thousand different ways to arch her spine, there is no gentle twist of bone that will release her now.

She was promised less than this. A hot breath of sworn salvation curled itself up in her ear and, in turn, she nestled into his side. Forehead bowed into his ribs like a plea for mercy, but not a prayer, there was a bargain for tomorrows and the closest thing to hope that can ever be allowed to survive behind bars. He said he could be a father to her and had he whispered nothing else, everything would have been clear enough. Lennon knows what fathers do for their daughters and what daughters do for their fathers in return, so she kissed him, because this is what her mouth is for. She wants to live even when she can't always feel why and she believed him when he told her he could keep her safe.

That's how a thought flickered through her that perhaps the swan would hold itself harmless for her, reverent with stillness so her fingertips might graze a gentle path of curiosity down the edge of its wings. Instead a rough tongue drags its way across the wound in her shoulder, ravenously licking up the food of her veins. Saliva scalds the marred and chewed up flesh and she quakes, sobbing herself ugly as onlookers murmur that there must still be a chance while her lipstick keeps its composure. That's surely something. However, she looks up from the flat of her back and —

— to kill her. Eyes locked, there is an explosion of warning igniting the dead air between the two girls and it is passionate with hatred: hostile, half-manic in the name of revulsion... and entirely, secretly one-sided. They pass by each other with a predatory turn and the requisite glare of a well-established rivalry, mere inches of emptiness between two sets of bared teeth as Lennon throws her head back to grin a sun flare into the dim shadows of the mess hall and Greer scowls the glinting threat of a sharper reply. If left unguarded, they might go for each others throats, but the tongueless can't speak easy truths and too many things have gotten lost in translation by accident.

A guillotine of disgust sits invisible on the table as seats are taken and some kind of questionable excuse for food is laid out. More than one neck turns to see which plate is heaped a little fuller than the rest, but it's not an exercise in curiosity so much as a confirmation; everyone knows the resident bombshell doesn't keep her curves by dieting. Judgment falls knife-bright in the silence, but cuts nothing. All heads stay put and the only things that roll are the eyes of the girl in question as she puts on a show for the other avoxes, fluttering her feathered magpie lashes and making a mockery of her own mouth as she wobbles her bottom lip in a sarcastic pout. Their obvious animosity does little to earn her sympathy.

However, there isn't a single heart in this room free from jealousy, including hers.

Dipping a finger into what might be mashed potatoes or might be something else entirely, she idly swirls a pattern through her prize before scooping up a taste and slowly, deliberately sucking it into her mouth. Sin-red lips swallow up two knuckles as the pale skin is wiped clean and the young Capitolite guard to her left can't look away. He's the center of no one's attention though and Lennon goes back for seconds, an expression of unrestrained ecstasy transforming her face into a shamelessly seductive conundrum. (It's not as if she can taste it, right?!) It's a one woman cabaret of the forgotten revelry of flavor as the second bite hovers before her waiting lips, lazily teasing her audience until her eyes flick across the table to the one person putting forth a concentrated effort to ignore her antics.

With a swivel of her wrist, the promise of the world's most delicious morsel of unidentifiable mush is offered to a mouth that looks far more tempted bite the hand attempting to feed. Greer pulls a predictable face and Lennon's heart skips in the wake of routine rejection, the smallest glint of something genuine falling over itself in her eyes, knowing perfectly well that the other girl wouldn't touch her even if she could, except maybe with a knife. To her, the plaything of everyone's imagination is as untouchable as a new world leper and it is the first time Lennon has ever been left to wonder what someone's skin feels like. It must be —

— a hand wrapped around her tongue, threatening her with a blade she'd begged for. Idiot girl, it's only now that she thinks to question if this peacekeeper's calloused skin is really the last thing she ever wants to taste. With a mouthful of lifelines, she still doesn't know where she'll go from here.

After being pulled from the waters of someone else's world, having jumped in knowing full well she was trespassing and loving every minute of it, the pretty little fool confessed to everything. It was her. Everything was her. For the very first time, this was Lennon Eyre. Lying with misguided truths, all she knew was that she'd finally felt something she wanted and she couldn't go back to before — oh god, please — not before.

"Don't give me back," begs a mouth that has never belonged to itself. This is a choice. These are her last words. Nothing she has ever done has been worthy of this punishment, but that's exactly why they can't send her home. Daddy's little girl was raised to be guilty and she's not sobbing for her tongue being freed from its —

— her name from mouth to mouth: "Lazaretto! Lazaretto! Lazaretto!"

Sounds like victory, looks like ignorance.

There is a length of her hair garroting the swan so they are twined — neck-to-neck; new siamese — and no one here remembers what her swooning curls looked like before salvation, only that this is what they'll all be wearing tomorrow. Everywhere, ovation. Everywhere, praise. Everywhere, except the rows of the sever-mouthed silent, voluntarily tight lipped with the only kind of rebellion they're allowed. Lennon doesn't look and not simply for knowing already, but because there are better places to waste her hope.

Bite wounds scatter her skin with the mapping of a bygone battle as she cranes her head to kiss the white cheek of the slaughtered creature limp within her arms. A wing blankets her, stretched out and strangely sheltering in exchange for the lipstick she's left upon its face. The mark of Lazaretto. The manifestation of her plague. The Queen of Hell's calling card. It infects not just the swan, but everyone looking upon it and this is why they named her.

She doesn't understand that she has been baptized a quarantine prison, home for the damned.

However, the expression of the avox taking her place in The Pit seems to have quite the grasp on Lennon's pet name, looking at her as a place to be avoided as any potential for closeness is purposefully sidestepped. To the girl who has only ever wanted to get away, this feels like backwards intimacy and the exhausted smile that picks at one corner of her lips is not a response of sarcasm. As if the other girl would ever believe that.

Surely all smiles are tricks and, here, who could blame her? It's easy to miss the way that upward turn doesn't fade as the next fight begins, sharpened steel carving up mutt flesh with far more skill than any of the gimmicks that came before. Fearless. Self-sufficient. Untouchable. With no one looking at the sidelines, Lennon's face cracks with yearning as she witnesses an alternative life, where nothing has ever been surrendered. This is how far she's come searching for —