fates written in blood // demented fight, day 5

Feeling returns quickly. Down my spine, sudden relief and heaving heart beats are replaced with cannon's blasts. One after the other after the other. We're dropping like flies, this beasts' hands placed firmly upon our hearts. Bang. Bang. Bang. He beats for us, tearing them from in between our lips and I cannot feel anything but relief that it is not me. It is not Cynthia. Nor Jacinta, as brief as our companionship has been another falling while under my watch would only aid in my destruction.

Slowly

but

surely.

I can feel myself breathing. I can feel my heart breathing. once rigid against the ground I sit force aching joints into a sitting position, forehead pressed to my knees and it is a challenge to regain consciousness in the midst of a battlefield. We are drenched in sweat and hellfire. There are words, distorted around me and I can only make out that Jacinta is starting, not the words she is saying.

When I manage to stand again the world is shifting around me. I am off balance, looking back and forth at a field more mangled and sinister than the bloodbath could have ever been. Death after death after death and the stench is one all too familiar to me. Samson, Mariela, and Samson and Mariela. I can't bring myself to look at the monster, to face a beast so awesome that it has held me hostage for what felt like centuries. Chained by ice and fear.

My fingers are sweating. Shaking, wrapped around the axe's hilt and the murderer I see is the sweet boy to which tender talks on a rooftop took place. Oh, how the great have fallen. Mariela was better, she deserved better, and yet all I see are soft hearts surrounded by callouses. Fleas are burrowed beneath Ansel's skin, deep and disgusting. Humanity is a cloak to be buttoned around one's throat and then discarded when survival deems convenient.

I wish I could be like that, a true career like I was meant to be. But I am no more than a disillusioned child with the taste of bitter fear stuck to her throat. I am nothing more than a disappointment. I once thought myself a moon, settled in the sky and waiting for Delilah's embrace but I have never been more certain that I was always earthbound. Meant only to admire those better than I- with eyes as wide as saucers and drenched in inferiority.

So I do not attack Ansel, but his allies- following those I deem my friends.

Like the coward I am.

i can see the air i breathe
got my fingers painting pictures
on the glass in front of me
lay me by the frozen river

The boy from Six has such empty eyes. They stare back at her, green tinged ghostly gray. She wonders if he is haunted, if everything he has done is eating him up on the inside, or if it eventually will. Not that she would know — she never watched him closely enough to notice change.

He has a stone face and an unwavering voice when he speaks to her, a demeanor that reminds her of her mother. "I am not a sadist," he asserts, but Jacinta isn't sure she believes him. He's a killer, so why not a liar, too?

"I put him out of his misery, I put all of them out of their misery." She was about to put Ezen out of his misery, but then Ansel took that from her. "I'm not claiming to be an angel of mercy or anything, just a killer. Nothing more, nothing less."

She was raised in a mansion for half of her life, and at a boarding school for the other half. Throughout both parts of her life, she kept in touch with her relatives and family friends, most of who belonged to elite families in District Seven. It was always around her birthday and Ratmas when the Salazar household would receive gifts in the mailbox, so many that the mailman had to set some of the boxes outside their door because they couldn't all fit.

Her Aunt Liza gave her and her siblings fruitcake every year. From when they were born up to now — they always found fruitcake at their door, chock full of preservatives and ugly brown jelly. No one ever wanted Aunt Liza's presents, but she kept giving them anyway.

Ansel is giving gifts that no one truly wants; he disguises death as a present, as if something good can come from the slash of his blade. Everyone is too dead to say anything against him by now; she can't just sit idly by and be quiet about it.

"I'm pretty sure Quillon didn't want to be put out of his 'misery.' He wanted to live. You're giving unwanted gifts," Jacinta replies. The only one who wanted to die was Clementa and Ezen gave her just that, but even then, she couldn't let it go. She couldn't leave him alive to come back to kill her later.

"Did you really care that much for Clementa Lowe, a girl you hardly knew, as much as Tobias seemed to care for Quillon, a boy he hardly knew?" His words twist a knife in her heart and she hesitates, furrowing her brows and narrowing her dark eyes so that the fringe of her lashes come into view.

There are few things that is certain of. One — that she could die at any moment. Two — that she must succumb to murdering if she is to live. Three — the survivor's guilt over her allies is already crushing her and she doesn't know if she can live happily after this. Four — that she cared for her allies, but she always knew they had to die. She had always been preparing herself for it. (But clearly, it was not enough.)

Five — that she was not in love with Clementa Lowe.

Perhaps in a different life, in a different world, she could have been. If they lived together in District Seven and they never volunteered, Jacinta surely would have fallen for a girl like her. Tough and often brash, but beautiful and brave. She always liked girls with spirit, and Ment's was always on fire.

"It's not like I was in love with her," Jacinta says. "But Clementa was safety and comfort. She, Tobias, and Quill — when we were together, we knew that it would be okay. Just for a little while." On those nights when they laid under that moon and told stories from home, sometimes it felt like they weren't in the Arena at all. Sometimes it felt like they were just kids sharing parts of their lives. It was enough for her, then.

"And that's all I needed, just a few moments of peace." Just a night of laying in blankets by Clementa and the campfire, listening her heartbeat and the low crackle of the flames. It was enough for her, then. Even when Tobias and Quill were long gone.

(Ezen took that all away from her before she was ready.)

"That's gone now, though. There's just chaos now — I don't really think there's room for much else." She sighs and shakes her head. There never would be anymore, not really. Even if she survives this, it will all be trapped in her head. All the blood and the screaming, their faces in the sky, their cold eyes. All twenty-three of them.

Is she willing to do anything to live a life like that? She supposes it must be better than no life at all — no matter how it sends so much fear biting into her core. A world of suffering may just be better than oblivion and the unknown. She has always hated the uncertainty of death.

The Demented finishes off Sirrah for her before she can even think to hit him again. His canon fires and Jacinta is quick to search for a new target. She cannot afford to stop fighting until the end; if she does, she may be seen as a weak link. Like Sirrah — like Atlas Shim.

"But I guess I'm not much better of a person than you," she says to Ansel as she singles out Atlas among the dwindling crowd of tributes. Like Sirrah, his life is fading. She can feel it, see it in the amount of blood drenching his clothes and the ground around him. "Only a little bit right now. But I'll get back to you on that if we ever meet again."

Right now — because it could change at any time. It's changing right now. In days' time, Jacinta could claim as many lives as Ansel. But is killing truly a crime if it is in the name of survival? Were her allies' deaths really as unjust as she prefers to believe?

It is a question that she still battles with every waking moment. Even now, as she approaches Atlas with intentions to land the killing blow.

He is already dying, but she doesn't believe that she is putting him out of his misery. Jacinta is not like Ansel Khiev. She only rarely believes in kindness of death, and she knows that her intentions are not pure when her blade is swinging for Atlas's neck.

"It looks like you're all out of time," she says to Atlas.

[Jacinta attacks Atlas Shim; axe]
5ZHYzBkDaxe
[11101 -- Shallow Cut on Left Bicep -- 3.5 damage]



where the boats have passed me by
all i need is to remember
how it was to feel alive
silent days, violent shades

Love you all!!

Quick filler