I Love You More Than My Own Skin :: [75th Finale]

Holding to last promises of sister gone
Now calls forward forgotten rhythm’s song.
Each note and chord are another way to
Wipe clean the wonder of morning’s stay.

I am left to watch my spear melt in Lucas O’Hara’s neck.

When it turns to turquoise wax and dust and falls in the shape of a halo around him, I almost long for the sight of his body. The first time we had slept together, I had asked him to stay with me. Though slurred and weaved in between hiccups and uninterested laughs, I had been genuine in the fact that there was a distinct difference in sleeping in an empty bed versus one occupied.

Following me from childhood to now, nightmares had plagued my mind. As a child, I would awaken in the middle of the night with a start, often crying, sweating, or kicking out. With fear and vulnerability intertwined I had crawled out of bed and made my way to the edge of Cha’s, peeking my head over the edge and looking for the hint that she was still awake and conscious of the fact.

More often than not, she could be found staring listlessly at the window— then unbroken— and only acknowledging my presence when I’d whisper her name with two parts admiration and one part anxiety. She would meet my gaze and send the slightest smile, just enough emotion to remind me that she was still human, and gesture to the space beside her. I would clamber up, take my place, and turn my eyes to focus on the same focal point as her, only to be met by empty sky and the sometimes scattered star.

I never found it in me to ask her what she was looking for, but I would tuck myself under the covers and keep my eyes focused on her until they became weary, and then, and only then, would I drift off into still fitful sleep, the image of my sister sat still still engrained into my mind.

When I would wake up abruptly to meet the sunrise in its daily resurrection, she would finally be asleep, nestled beside me but never close enough to be touched. It was though her emotions extended to her fingertips and then stopped, unable to reach past the space not directly correlated to her own body.

I knew few things then and many things now, but I know that my body was and is no vessel. It does not hold anything within it for longer than the split second needed for its creation. Radiant is one word, but what is it called when not joy, but sorrow fills the places beneath the skin?

Here, it is called thunder— rain drops large and numerous and never finding the need to have a momentary rest. Here, it is running when the ground beneath my feet gives way and begins to quiver, causing heightened senses and a body made of fear to expel itself from the mansion and make way for whatever place could be deemed stable.

But if there is any stability left to be found here, it is not within my reach. Instead I am met once again where all things have seemed to have found their closure, and this time I am once more alone.

No more Wylla Lysander.

No more thoughtful humility etched into my bones by a frail hand much wiser than my own. No, there is no sight of the small girl from three but rather the boy from two who had watched me strike her down. Beside him stands a girl and a boy whose names I do not care for.

Before formal greetings can be established, Saummerand strikes out at the other boy. There is no prerequisite for the end of times, but one could be sure that there was nothing greater to come after this.

Luminescent and illuminating my palm, I take hold of one knife and turn it over, handle gripped and determined to not be opportunity missed.

Wylla Lysander had told me that there was more to my story than a tale ended in suicide, and for the first time, I found myself buying into her words. She had then asked me if my sister had wanted to see me in this state, groveling on my knees for a death that was not mine to claim.

I knew know that if death was a visitor in this mind of mine, it would be as it had been the night he sat at the table with Curse Jinx and I. With the gun cocked and chamber loaded, he had passed the trigger between us until it had left Curse Jinx dead in the dirt.

This time, the chamber has one blank only, and we are yet to know which of us deserves to hold the barrel to our temple.

I take aim with knife, and remember that I am no longer afraid of the gunshot and smoke.

[ table: rave ]

Forget me not is
Over and gone
Under the guise of
New namesake
Desires burn fond.

I strike, knife cutting shallow and sharp and unapologetic. It clatters against the dirt by his feet, leaving no trace of injury in the features of his face. No hopes left in myself my eyes turn to the other girl standing to my right, her shoulders strong and her hands seeming stronger. There is no name to be matched with hollow respect, but still my eyes widen as her knife slices similar to the same space as my own, but differentiating is the large burst of fire that follows in the seconds past hers.

I step back alone, placing myself just behind her plane of presence and anchoring my feet to the ground. Common sense screams in my ear to run, as a safe haven is bound to lie just past the place of our current existence, and every thought running through my mind knows that this could stand to be true.

But they’d just kill me then, and there’d be nothing brilliant in that.

And so I stay, stood and frozen as though hoping my presence will be forgotten in the meantime. But the other boy, strong and sturdy as a building, lumbers toward me with deafening steps, and before my jaw can fall and shatter at the ground he matches my own hand with a weapon of them same.

The world’s gone black, and I cannot determine why.

But then with eyes opening slowly and realization filling the space between my eyelids, I find his knife sticking plainly from the right shin guard shining brilliant rose in the pouring rain. The foremost blade has stuck into the skin just barely, just enough to stand on its own and require me to reach down and pull it from my own flesh. It leaves behind the tiniest of scuffs, and I toss it on the ground at my feet and spit towards it for good measure.

I’m about to ramble forward, about bad first impressions and the disappointment that comes with a blade still deflected, but Saummerand beats me for the initial timing and strikes forward with his glaive instead of myself with lonely words.

Neck met sharp, it seems to me that more blood would be flowing.

The impact resulting to be the same as what my words would have been, I am about to lecture the both of them about the importance of aesthetics and the like, but suddenly a voice is cutting the air and I stop once more, waiting for another nudge and reason as to why I should keep moving, “Go back home, and not in pieces.”

The voice is faint, hardly recognizable and not due with much sentiment. In fact, before half a minute has passed I am yet to place name or face with the voice, but finally the reminder of glasses stamped with District Eight’s symbol come flooding into mind. Eva Hope and her cousin had watched me taken share of my own stomach and then some as I took the drink from Gentian Hope’s hand and never apologized.

Had I not needed it more than them, even then?

My face contorted into a cocktail of content mind and faint heart, I look back to the two boys and search the space between them for an exit when a second voice, much more familiar and so much more conscious speaks softly, “Kill him.”

The voice of Scarlett Stroms is brevity in the space of indecision and though I am no closer to the answer than I was thirty seconds prior, my mind lunges forward with newfound vigor at the notion of pride in her stilled heart.

For her if anyone; for her if not for myself.

And when I am once more in the headspace of a girl not dead but, oh, so living, her voice once again finds my air, only this time it is spoken with the cadence of demands, of a choice no longer given, “Look at me.”

With all else forgotten for a moment then, my eyes turn upwards with a hope that was not buried with her body. But I am met with nothing but the storm cloud and all its tears, those falling still towards me and those now trickling down my cheeks.

My voice starts out but a whisper, “Scarlett?”

But she does not answer, and I do not know why I had believed that she would. With a heart more desperate and a voice no longer quiet I find myself calling out for her still, though her body had left my sight still motionless, “Where are you? Please, just come back.— Scarlett, please.”

But with her first request on my mind I snap my eyes back to the pair of boys in front of me, “I’m so sorry.”

It is not an apology for them, or him, but for her.

[ table: rave ]

Patience loses value in
Each second passed silent,
And yet even still some
Call it reckless or violent.

Eternity knows and
It holds near to its
Heart the young spirits and
Old souls that never depart.

I wait for the glory and the grandeur to follow after the release of the knife from my palm, but the symphony of trumpets and the words of royalty do not befall my ears. There is nothing here to distinguish me from the dirt on which I stand. The knife that had just been set forth falls, and I follow it upward until I am met with another pathetic, barely visible dealing of pain left behind on Tamron Rhodes’s neck. We watch each other in silence, knowing that there was truly nothing worth being said and that any word spoken now was just an inevitable prolonging of remorse that was not harbored in our hearts.

He was not a liar, and beyond it all I could respect that.

I do not know how long we had been standing there, frozen in the time between us as though there was nothing else in the world that mattered, but the girl from two finds no time for our nonsense and breaks the air with voice and not blade, “Aww did I hurt your feelings? You’re a fool Saummerand!”

Her voice rises louder than mine ever could, and momentarily I find myself shrinking away from her, afraid of the implications that crossing her would have. She does not notice me, though. She does not notice me anymore than she notices the ground beneath her feet or the weapon now leaving her side as she lunges forward, two steps and a swing of the arm and suddenly the space between her and Saummerand is illuminated by every shade of color that fire has ever burned.

She steps back, not singed by the flames or discouraged by the fact that the boy from her district was still standing.

The other boy had not broken the line of vision between us, but suddenly his concentration is broken by a moment of still bodies and silence, and he lunges once more toward Saummerand. His knives, so similar to my own and yet still so much less inviting, graze the other’s back, and one look at his torn flesh threatens to turn the bile in my stomach loose at my own feet.

And so it does, for the thought of my own skin mirroring his creeps into my mind silently, only to light ablaze a match of its own and set my body on fire from the heart. I’m retching, falling to my hands and knees and never once caring if one of the others takes this moment of weakness as an excuse to fell me swiftly.

But they do not, and instead I look up to find Tamron simply watching, the girl from two not caring, and Saummerand simply standing at the edge of the precipice and waiting for one of us to push him over by use of only a single finger.

I bring myself to shaking feet, and wipe the last remnant of vomit from the corner of my mouth as I turned my back to Tamron and faced Saummerand instead.

The hope in my heart remains that he will go in silence, but it seems that this will never be the case, for he finally speaks, in a voice quieter than my own but still stronger, “I’m used to betrayal anyways. Isn’t that how we all got here?”

The voice of heresy is often soothing, like honey down the throat or the lick of flames ‘round the fire on a winter night.

Saummernad Demheaux was no martyr— no pariah. He was nothing more than a boy who was not used to every action taken not being carried out in regards to his own motives.

My fist still furled, I walk until I’m standing but six inches from his face— a boy on the verge of death and a girl who had been searching for it— and I spit. “You watched me kill Wylla Lysander. You watched me take the life of a young, innocent girl, and you did nothing.” The moment of her death replayed once more in my mind, and I will the tear forming at the corner of my eye to stop before it met its end now, at a time when this was not the place for such.

I lean forward, until my lips are just hovering away from his left air, whispering, “You should have killed me then.” A step back and a regret once more strengthened, I find myself stuck to the spot, “You should have killed me then, Saummerand. This is your mistake alone.”

I do not know if I believe my own religion, but I know there is no time to ponder the consequences now.

[ table: rave ]