This is /my/ table now [Insanis vs Noelia]

N O E L I A

Alone.

Around the room are tributes littered at numerous tables, chatting amongst themselves, but all I can hear is a buzz of constant white noise which surrounds me like a bubble begging to be popped. My conscience my only company, blank voices echoing are dark reminders of my solitude.

Knife and fork untouched, I'm not hungry.

The food they served here was excellent and was not like anything I'd tasted before: thick gravy with assorted meats of all kind, vegetables of every colour and puddings that looked as if they could feel the whole neighbourhood—but it's not like home.

And home is where my heart truly lies, and eating this, drinking that feels like a twisted betrayal against a pledge made at birth.

I sit quietly in the eye of a storm of memories, each one colliding to create emotion, colours drained from minds and hearts replaced only by stark black and white. Irreplaceable like a stain, once sullied, never unsullied—this was the work of a true demon.

There was no going back though, no way of unseeing the seen: Leticia's brutal death on day three, spear to the eye which sent her packing like an elephant asked to leave the circus. She was unsaveable, hopeless. Dead by noon, her blood was on the hands of the Keeni boy.

And in these games, in my games—there is another.

Insanis Keeni, the boy from Six. He probably can't count as high as how many of his family have been reaped, but it doesn't matter anyway since he'll be one of the first to go.

I've figured that tributes can make two possible impressions and can be separated into two groups: ones that will die on day one, and ones that will live past day one. Insanis Keeni fits into the latter; he seems to be leaving fire in his tracks—not good if he wants decent allies.

He plunges down into the seat opposite me, confident in his actions and words protruding like a mountain. I roll my eyes at the thought of having to interact with him, and within him being within two metres of me.

I shiver. Leticia would've hated me for coming so close.

"I'm sitting here by the way."

He freezes in his movements like a stone statue from a lifeless garden of dying amibitions. I meet my eyes with his and it all changes. 

"Strange," he says  "I could've sworn my cousin shoved a spear through your eye last year, you a ghost or something?"

"You Keeni folk must have a cactus as a family tree." I cross my arms and give a perky smile from across the table. "Because you're fucking all pricks."

Spitting venom, my words are like blades which cut out towards him. Revenge for a dead girl was never going to bring her back, but it was making me feel more alive than ever.

N O E L I A

Not alone any more, there was another devil dancing beside me. 

I watch as he freezes once again (something I'd figured he had a tendency to do) but keep the smirk wiped across his face. Tattooed with permanent ink, he does not twitch, he does not move as my words cut against him, it is ignored.

Silence swells in the air, thickening air harder to breathe.

The boy from Six wasn't my real enemy, he was just a distraction. A hurricane of words emerging from between my lips, it was I, Noelia Tibideaux of the storm and for a moment or two, it feels like nothing can pull me down from the throne.

I blink and it turns to ice, melting under Insanis' presence.

It would have been Ellerie in this place if I hadn't slipped out those lethal words. An injection of a pure drug into my system, I'd saved a girl on the edge of sanity, but only managed to send myself further into a black pool of desire and emotion plagued by termination.

But a sister of purity was saved—even if her mind was swirling with undiscovered demons and their bites unknown.

"Well, there is just that many of us I suppose." We fall into a void of oblivion, a hand pulling us down through all things pure, sweet and good to things much darker. Blood and gore mixed with glory: this was The Hunger Games.

"But if there's one good thing about being a cactus it's that everyone who fucks with you gets stabbed." He stretches back, his chair tilting under the brute force of his weight. Effort from his face drops, lifeless and cold, Insanis Keeni becomes the face of a corpse. "But I guess that blonde hill billy from ten had to learn that the hard way last year."

His words only open scars
—a pain I'd become immune to. It was no choice of mine to suffer the hurt and heartbreak, it was inevitable. Sister of a tribute, people expected weakness. Wounds forced closed, I'd have to unpick them to find the root of the problem.

To find the source of it all, and to uncover the author of my agony.

"And you're going to learn the same way this year." The painted smirk dribbles away, fading into a paper expression on my face. Blank and simple: there was nothing to misunderstand about a resting bitch face.