Lazarus {{ District Ten (FIN)

His spine is snapping in half, he swears, and as he feels something drip drip drip down his face that shouldn't be there and as his fingers tingle and tremble with every passing breath and as his vision becomes darker darker darker 

He gives up.

He had been reaching for life, in those final moments until darkness swallowed him up, gobbled him down, but the thing about life is that it is oh so hard to catch.

Especially once it's on it's way out. 

________

There's a man who held life in his hands and a scalpel in the other, who took the sinful knowledge contained in the Capitol's labs and wrapped it with chains that were painted gold to look like treasures, locked it inside his brain before running running thump from a place that ate away at souls and plucked apart spirits.

A bullet, wrapped in blood and skin and a tuft of bloody blonde hair clunked onto the table, it's shadow darkening a crack in the table that runs along the whole east side of it, threatening to snap the whole piece off if hit the right way. A crack in his skull, bullet wounds entry wounds exit wounds and worst of all the wounds, the gashes and the bruises on his memory. 

"I don't know if he's going to make it." 

She was ice, liquid nitrogen poured and molded and shaped into a body. Tight, thin lips and eyes that never wavered from a target, eyes that struck like icepicks and fingernails that ripped like daggers. Her arms were crossed, head cocked to one side as she stared at the boy with golden hair, sprawled out on the table in front of her.

His blood had stained her shirt and her pants as she'd carried him out of a house whose walls had caved in on themselves with the tossing of tea kettle and the loading of a gun. And even as she surveys the blood that trickles sprints dashes down the side of his head, and even as she lifts a hand to wipe it away-

"Honey, don't touch him while i'm working on the wound." 

She wipes it off anyways

-she's staring into what she had judged to be a boy who could hold up the sun and the sky if trained correctly. The son of a distant family friend, one she'd abandoned long ago but still kept tabs on.

This was the son of Copperhead.  

And Copperhead was dead.

And he was weak, because his mother's training had been a soft heart and an even softer touch, not one of knives and combat.

She was looking at putty, she wanted stone.

Her husband's sweat is wiped from forehead to hand to table, splattering against the wood like blood. 

"His body's shut down from the trauma. He could survive, he could not. We'll see I guess." 

The man's eyes soften for a brief moment.

His wife's eyes harden.

________

Stitches, stitches, threads digging in and out and through every pore of his skin. A human rag doll, black threads piecing his arms and his head and his legs and his soul.

Piece by piece by piece.

But there's bugs. Beetles, centipedes, mosquitos, carving through his skin, chipping his bones, making their homes inside his arms and his head and his legs and his soul.  And what's worse, his bodies frozen in ice, shards and crystals hanging from his toes and glaciers covering his heart. The cold pierces skin and freezes ambitions, so much that he can't even bat an eyelash or wiggle a toe.

Four days, four eternities. He counted the passing minutes with a broken clock that had been frozen inside of his brain as soon as his head landed in a pool of blood. 

tick, tick, tick.

A beetle pierces the soft tissue of his toe and wriggles underneath the nail, blood running from toe to air to ground.

tick,tick,tick.

Fingernails ripped off one by one and he's screaming on the inside.

tick, tick, gong.

He's resting on a table in the real world, body light as a feather stiff as a board. And there's a mosquito thats injected itself into his bloodstream. One, two, three sucks of blood.

His body shoots up and the beetles and the leeches and the centipedes that had burrowed under his skin disintegrate into the air and he gasps for breath like his lungs had been put on overdrive, clutching his throat as if trying to get the noose of death off of himself as fast as possible.

He knows nothing, and his rebirth comes in the form of panic and tears and screams.

There's a man pushing on his chest and telling him to calm down and that "everything's going to be alright!" 

but he's so scared

because going from an endless void to endless possibilities tends to fuck you up.

And he fights back for what is, truly, to him, the first time in his life against a man he doesn't even know, weak fists and an even weaker spirit fighting against whatever he was trying to kill.

There's a woman that comes into the room, the click click of heels against wood barely audible against his own screams before she yanks him by the dried blood on his collar and

his cheek stings and her nails leave an imprint on the skin.

Fear is all he knows. At first, it was of the harsh lights, and then it was of his own surroundings, and now, now it was of the woman in front of him. Because, unlike the man to his right, her eyes bore into him, through him, and everything in  between.

She silenced me with unspoken words, tape in the form of icy stares.

"What is your name?" 

And there was an icy breeze blowing in through the window.

His memories were burned up filing cabinets, shredded papers and a black hole inside his mind. The chilled breeze drives true to the bone, his hairs standing up like foot soldiers as he stutters

stutters