river styx | [lalia/dars] blitz

i feel the pins and needles in
my skin, skinned

There’s nothing Zion can learn in this place that will save him. Some of the children here have devoted the whole of their young lives to memorizing the balance of a sword in their hands or how to perfectly aim an arrow right into the pupil of his eye. The Lyons boy is not one of them. He’s going to die and he knows it and everyone who has ever known him knows it and everyone who didn’t bother to know him knows it too. Inevitability is often obvious. Death had already marked him before his name was pulled from that glass bowl — a penance to be paid — it was just a matter of details. It’s almost a relief to finally know how the sacrifice of his body will play out.

No one contradicted him when he declared he wasn’t worth bothering with, but that didn’t mean he was allowed to skip out on the last ditch attempts to train him into something slightly less pathetic. His protests were ignored; this is the way of things. It made him laugh, despite the seriousness of his situation — inevitable death and all — because it felt so familiar. Normal. Nothing about this should feel normal. Even if he’d have stubbornly tried to refuse, it’s not as if it would change anything and so he put on his uniform like a good boy and went along with things just as he’s supposed to.

Zion has always been a good boy who does what he’s supposed to. His only rebellions exist in his subconscious, when the night sends his sleeping body running through the streets in search of an escape. In the unconscious dark he knows how to climb fences and trees, fearlessly wandering into the most dangerous parts of the city as if he weren’t just brave, but casually reckless. He has been naked and shameless, screaming into the abyss beyond a cliff edge that he might have tumbled over if not for the wind of his own bellowing bravado, but only when he dreams. Those nights terror itself infests his bones and he is transformed. That Zion would go head to head with anyone, but it’s not him, it’s not him, it’s not him. Not really.

“You could try holding it closer to the bottom, if you want.” He had hidden himself away at the hatchet throwing station because it was abandoned — even the trainer had slipped away for a bathroom break or something to eat. Somewhere on the far side of the training stations is a girl with his sister’s fire-bright hair and when he saw her for the first time his breath caught in his throat and suddenly he was crying and couldn’t stop and so he ran and he hid and he picked up a hatchet because he needed to hold onto something, anything at all and he was just standing there holding this foreign death thing in his hands, so tight, so tight, so tight that he could crack his newborn frail skin on it —

He throws it without thinking, that devilish subconscious of his flinging the hatchet with more force than logic can explain. It doesn’t hit anything it’s supposed to, but it misses hard. “Oh gosh!” A little piece of Zion’s soul jumps straight out of his body, a firework of surprise in the air. “I-I-I didn’t... ohhhh, gosh. That’s not right at all.” There is more blood flushing his face than the rest of his body and it’s a wonder he doesn’t faint.

“The trick is not to throw it too hard.” Other tributes who plan on being better at not dying than Zion watched the reapings of the other districts in order to size up their competition, but that minimal amount of strategy hadn’t even occurred to him. The idea of learning the names and faces of kids he was supposed to fight to the death was just... sad. It was so, so horribly sad. So he didn’t, as if it were something he could avoid that easily. Looking up at the boy offering him friendly advice, he’s clueless as to who he is or where he’s from and he wants to run away again so he doesn’t have to find out, but that wouldn’t be polite. Who cares about manners right now?

Running would only put him back in the path of Denali’s doppelgänger and his heart aches too much for that. He’s not ready. “I’m not very... good...” that’s too honest, “— at these kinds of things.” It’s an afterthought add-on that does little to disguise the obvious truth of something he didn’t actually need to bother saying. “I think I’m only good at understatements, to be honest.” Picking up another hatchet, he holds it closer to the bottom while eying it as if it were a stray dog that might bite him at any moment. There isn’t time enough to learn how to tame it, but they all have to while away what little they have left somehow.