{ always gold // elya

{ always gold // elya Jul 13, 2015 0:48:56 GMT -5

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Post by gm bourgeois decadence [aya] on Jul 13, 2015 0:48:56 GMT -5

i was born when they took my name
when the world turned wicked, when i joined their game
but i turned and fought them
like you always knew i'd do

Elya Johnwayne woke up that morning a champion of her favorite game. She and Circe and Gunner La Torre had crowned each other victor half a hundred times before the break of dawn, skin a warmer trophy than gold or laurels could ever hope to be. She savored, savors it still, even midway through the Bloodbath.

Still, she'd have another victory under her belt soon enough. And why not? She was a patient Dan, she was Stark Harper seen humbled, she was Dru Charlesburg hard of heart, she was Razor Creel with an army at her back. She might be half blind, but buoyed by the previous night, Elya Johnwayne could see no reason why she wouldn't win the 70th Annual Hunger Games.

Something flashes past her head — a knife, maybe; it's too big to be an arrow, too small to be a javelin — ripping Elya out of her thoughts. Turning her neck, she tracks it through the peripheral vision she no longer has until it's safely past her.

Another hurtled blade catches her attention before she returns her focus to front. In a trance, she can't look away — she follows it further, past its relevance to her own wellbeing —

Despite being afield, it stabs Elya in the chest seconds before it rockets across Circe's, a tail of crimson left in its wake. She flexes her fist against the bars of her brass knuckles, an avalanche burying every ounce of calm she'd spent the better part of the last decade honing.

Shit.

i sat and dreamed at the foot of your bed
you split my skull and reached inside my head
and pulled out the pictures i'd been wishing I'd forget
and you stitched me up then
and wiped the blood from off my chin

In that instant, she realizes she is a liar.

"I only have one eye, Circe Lyon," she'd said on the train, however long ago that had been. A full lifetime of iron stares and quiet threats, of elevens and tens and rooftop heart-to-hearts, of sheets and smirks and bang bang bangs had passed in the interim. Elya can't make up her mind if it had been half an eternity or the blink of an eye. "And I can't keep it on you."

She can't keep it off her small piece of home, her left hand, her sometimes-lover, her loyal ally. Her good distraction. Her partner in crime. Her friend.

"If something happens when I blink..."

Teeth gritted against the hypothetical she could never force herself to answer, she changes course.

Elya Johnwayne has seen enough of her own misfortune from a distance to be complicit in the death of another person that she thinks, maybe, she might care about. That list is short, but she refuses to let it grow any smaller. She's got the empty socket to prove that fighting back is not always enough, but Johnwaynes do not go gently into that good night. Like Dan before her, Elya is too stubborn to back down from anything short of death itself.

An arrow clips her calf. She doesn't slow her bullrush. Another slices through her thigh, and she doesn't bother to cast a glance around to see which tributes are firing at her. Calf, thigh — both are telling targets. Whoever has set their sights on her is either too weak or too poor of aim to sink one into her chest, her stomach — not that a single arrow to the torso could hope to break her charge.

She leaps over an unclaimed recurve bow, eye darting around to see which tribute needed to be relieved of their offending hand. The fidgety District Eleven has a knife, Olivia and one of the girls from Seven both have spears, Bowers has an axe, the littler Ten is swinging a lead pipe. There are half a dozen bows — those don't concern her. Most are in incompetent hands. But Nat's somehow managed to get ahold of a pretty broadsword that Elya will make him trade her for the throwing knives she plans to cut from District Three's fists.

She's never had the patience for ranged weapons, anyhow. They aren't practical enough for the no-nonsense District Two, who could never rationalize throwing away her weapons in the middle of a melee. If you were lucky, maybe you'd be able to hit one target in the critical points with one of your projectiles. But if there were two of them, or if you couldn't do it, or if the critical points weren't critical enough you were just plain fucked. The Johnwayne can't bring herself to depend on luck — she's sure as shit never had any.

Elya raises her bladed fists, ready and eager to take Kiena Ward's attention from her own best-and-worst distraction, desperately hoping that it will be enough to bring her focus back to the free-for-all unfolding all around them.

She doesn't get the chance.

and the sky is wrecked full of rotting clouds
from chimney mouths spewing smoke around
and i can't stop coughing
my lungs just won't calm down
but still I keep grinning
as the blood from my face stains the ground

A figure slams into Elya's blind side, sending her sprawling. Long black hair whips past, and the career finds herself spitting curses after the self-righteous bitch from Nine.

Fingers curled around the cold brass of her weapons, she rises to her feet. But she's lost her mark somewhere in her non-existent periphery. With another quiet swear, she wheels on Noah Bowers, the stormclouds of her rage finally spilling over as she breaks into an all-out sprint. She needs to hit something. Now. And the Johnwayne with her two sharp fists could carve up some weaver-district boy with a hatchet, two eyes or one eye or none, and all without breaking a sweat. Her feet dig into the ground, pushing off with such force that the gravel scatters beneath her boots, leaning further and further into her charge and —

"Oh."

All sixty-eight highly trained inches of Elya Johnwayne go cold, her heart pumping icy fear through her body for the last time.

That's not a hatchet.

That's a throwing axe.

And it's airborne.

Her momentum is too much to stop or even redirect, and without the long reach of a sword or a spear or even a proper dagger, the career girl is helpless to bat it aside. Her fists would not, could not, make it in time. She is fucked — irreparably fucked — and for the first time that day, takes no pleasure in it.

There's no way she can —

Gunner La Torre presses two fingers into her forehead, dead center. The familiar mischief is gone from her eyes, replaced by something colder, something unembellished. Her voice is neither vindictive nor remorseful. Simple as stating a fact, her lips part to whisper: "Bang."

The world falls to pieces at the point of impact as Elya's head snaps back from the force of it. Arms, shoulders, and body follow, and in slow motion she is falling —

In front of her, there is only overcast: a sky as stormy, as bleak, as barren as the solitary flinted eye reflecting it. Red spots dance before her, and it takes the Johnwayne an eternity to realize she is watching an arc of her own blood follow her down, down. It is the only color she sees these days. Her body hits the stone with a dull thud — it echoes through her bones, resonating under her skin with all the timbre of a corpse.

Her vision wavers, flickers, fades as the red torrents take over and her focus slips, but her mind catches on one sharp thought on the way out:

She has won her victory early. Noah Bowers has crowned her with an axe.

a bird, caught in the wires
bleating for help I can't provide
i'm not that big
i hope for the best but nothing changes
i'm sorry

The stone in winter is cold beneath her, but it is the shock that causes Elya's battered body to shiver. Time has lost all meaning, but the sky is beginning to grey, the scant smattering of cardinals and sparrows and mourning doves now heralding the coming dawn. She has been here for hours, frozen to the flagstone.

She has been here for hours, one hand pressed to the gaping wound on her face, the other resting useless and broken on her chest, shaking and shivering with the ragged sobs that wrack her body. With each tremor comes a fresh bite of pain, blunted by the cold and the small mercy of her pounding adrenaline, but still as brutal as the squat stone skyline of her home.

One stubborn leg still kicks, refusing to give up. Inch by agonizing inch, it pushes her through the pool of her own blood. In hours, she hasn't gone more than a dozen yards. But dying is out of character for Elya Johnwayne. Surrender is out of character for Elya Johnwayne. So still she struggles.

Tentative bootsteps approach, turn around, and quickly flee the scene, scattering gravel onto her bloody ruin of a face. She doesn't flinch.

Her cold grey stare fixes on the cold grey sky, and she counts out her last heartbeats until their rhythm turns into a pair of footfalls returning, perfectly in step.

"...don't —"

Warmth floods her frigid body at the words, even as they turn in tone from doubt to disbelieving rage.

"— fuck."

If she had half the strength, Elya Johnwayne would've broken character and cried. Her head fills, her attention lapses, and she can't catch the full command. Doesn't need to.

"...with my..."

A familiar pair of sturdy arms scoops her up, lifts her into the air. The world spins weightless, the lost blood untethering her from reality. Her head drops back, the strength to support her neck no longer in her wheelhouse. She relaxes. Safe now.

"It'll be okay," Dan Johnwayne lies. She rests her head against her big brother's chest, hollowed out eye socket staining scarlet his last good shirt. "We'll fix you right up."

but i was blessed with bad eyes
there's a lot that i miss but i don't mind
i'm not that old
i'll find out what broke me soon enough