The Edge of Glory [Someith v Heather v Beretta]

"Now, now, Heather. Young ladies don't roll on the floor, and especially not with little boys!"

My mother had a habit of ending my fun before it ever began. I was four years old and she had forced me into a stiff blue and white checkered dress that her 'very own mother had worn ages ago' and some other sentimental shit I did not begin to care about in the slightest, and she dragged me down the road - making sure I only bounced on the balls of my feet and never let my heels come in contact with the ground - to her neighbor's tea party.

When I thought of tea parties, I expected tons of stuffed animals and sipping air with my pinky up. When she thought of tea parties, she thought of boring conversations held around a long, nondescript wooden table, all while sitting only on the frontmost part of the seats. Pastries were displayed on the table in shining dishes, but no one ate a bite.

Luckily, our neighbor had a son around my age. He was cute, if I was allowed to think about boys, and had a tiny speck of dirt on his left cheek. His own mother had clearly given him instructions to avoid the dining room, but I saw him peak out from the door frame several times, exchanging giggles and stifling them as fast as we could. It was almost as if we already knew each other, knew that we couldn't be seen expressing amusement or we would get a stern lecture. His game of peek-a-boo around the frame turned into a finger wagging and he disappeared, so I did my best to sneak away from the table without being seen.

But I was four. When I thought I was being sneaky, I was being glaringly obvious.

Nonetheless I ran for it, through the doors and away from the ladies positioned with their ankles crossed beneath their chairs and their dainty little saucers held beneath their matching mugs. I ran straight into the boy, as if by instinct, I licked my thumb and scrubbed the dirt off his face.

Next thing I knew we were on the ground, laughing and rolling and forgetting that our mothers were only a room away.

"But Mother, I'm not a young lady. I'm a little girl!"

I never made it back to a tea party at the boy's house. The days of those were conveniently the days I was instructed to stay behind and clean the house. We passed each other in town sometimes, but despite his laughter and his waving, I never acknowledged him again.

Still, I wanted to be a little girl. I wanted the luxury the boy received. I wanted to be regarded as inferior and childish. I wanted to be young and free. Instead I was me.

I stumbled all night, unclothed and unaccustomed to the terrain before me without a guiding hand. My fingers instinctively reached and curled into anything nearby, hoping it was him but it couldn't be him I left him he was gone we were done. I left him. I told Tyler goodbye and I left him and I could not stop thinking that underneath this skin there was a human clawing its way out of its earthly cage. I was not really alive, a part of me had never been allowed to live, always stifled like my laughter at the party. But ever since I found him it had been different. My thoughts were clearer and my human inside, the one that had been so content in its prison for so long, laying dormant for years and years, was fighting again. This part of me had been sleeping steadily since I was a "young lady" but now, now I got to be a little girl again.

But my girlish curiosity that he had exposed, that had struggled with my insides and carved its way out through my chest, had been killed again. But this time, my mother the terrible was not the culprit. For the first time in my life someone besides her had held me back.

It was me.

I left him and the human inside went back to rest and I was completely alone.

The whole night was spent alone, away, with no warmth and no protection and no me. I found my boots kicking rocks as I continued forward, my body accustomed to the chills the arena provided. I assumed the sun had risen but I didn't much care. I just wanted out.

My nose twitched as I smelled the dead-looking one coming towards me. Daria's District partner. Something Kranes probably didn't realize I could tell he was coming. Hell, I didn't want to be able to recognize someone I maybe said a word to in the Training Center by his scent, but I couldn't fix that. My eyes were out of commission for the long haul and that was all I was left with. A super nose.

Super fucking duper.

I held up my arm and stopped him, readying to strike back, when I smelled something far more sinister enter the area. The Queen of everything was nearing me and for the first time since she drenched me in blood and ripped out my entire soul I felt nothing in me react.

I had half a mind to just keep walking through, and let the weird Skeleton Twins hash out their post-modern gothic angst one on one, but then I heard the last thing I wanted to hear.

Chatter's screams found my ears, his anguish apparent and his distress cutting into me deeper than any weapon could. It disappeared for a brief instant, and then it was back, a whirring accompanying its oncoming screech."What did you do to him?" I called, the Queen riding up on what smelled like a horse to slash my shoulder. But I didn't care what she did to me. I didn't care what anyone did to me. I wanted answers.

"What the fuck did you do to him?"

I swung.


attacks beretta bc she has fuckin chatter wtf m8
HqvgswAOglaive
stabbed in forearm 8.5

Her blade dug into my thigh and a part of me considered it her way of flirting with me, and any day before today I was entirely likely to fall to my knees in submission to her majesty's desires. But today was different and I was different and I was not about to cave into sinful temptations now. A cannon sounded and for a second my spirits jumped, hopeful that Beretta had been struck by cosmic karmic resonance, but I still heard the possessor of her heart's cavern thumping away in her chest and that caused my own heart to sink.

Immediately I was terrified for the faces that would plaster the sky that night. I couldn't see who made their way out of the Arena like the other Tributes, but I had a feeling I did not want to see the Anthem anyway. Two days ago I carried my alliance through the games on my back, and today we were all alone and without me I didn't have as much faith in them as I wanted to. Daria could hold her own against almost anyone left, maybe not Harbinger and his sheer mass, but Tyler was who terrified me. Tyler. A small inkling of guilt began to drip-drip-drip from a leaking faucet in my head down into my heart. If leaving the boy for dead actually resulted in his death I didn't know how I would go about forgiving myself.

With the way this fight was going, I probably wouldn't have time to find out. Maleficent was too strong, too strong even for her similarly brooding counterpart fighting alongside me. And for whatever reason, she purely charged at me, refusing to even open her mouth. Maybe I was thankful for that much - her silky voice may have been enough to pull me out of my focus and - no. Nothing was enough to convince me to stop striking the girl until I drew every ounce of life out of her. It was what she deserved for whatever she did to Chatter. I still had not figured that out; I had witnessed his evaporation and anguish only a day before, but here he was, eternally screeching but seemingly trapped around The Dark One's being.

Her gravitational pull did not only affect unsuspecting humans but the dead, as well. And that was nothing I was a match for, not here. I couldn't help but doubt myself when compared to Beretta. If, and that was a very big "if", I managed to destroy her and release the souls of the damned out of her ironclad grasp, I would kiss myself silly. It was so improbable and so unlikely, though, that it just might have been plausible.

I wanted to get out of this Arena now, to rewatch the reels of this fight, to see how and why my opponent had found control of the fallen, had created an earthly prison for the uneasy ones that should've been allowed to pass over fairly and were instead confined to Beretta's body. And if I couldn't make it out, if I couldn't sit down and watch myself remove the head from the beast, I wanted her to have done the same to me.

"Yours was the kiss of death," I said, wiping my hand up my dampened leg and tracing my red and oozing fingers across my lips. I hoped she could see me mimic her signature lipstick with the liquids she procured from my body. I hoped she could see nothing else ever again. I hoped she burned.

attacks beretta
nGPkwI16glaive
shallow cut on stomach, 4.0 (3.0 bc fck berettas armor)