Ballad of the Sin Eater :: [Shadowless vs Maneater // Day 3]

you didn't think they could hate you, now did you?
but they hate you, they hate you 'cause you're guilty

It’s awkward. One might argue that everything involving a kid like Zion is awkward because he’s a little odd, even when he’s not dressed in bunny pajamas. He doesn’t mean to be, but it was always easiest to spend his time with his family, instead of being out in the world dealing with other people’s opinions about them, and so his social skills aren’t the most adaptable. Instinct tells him to keep his secrets because that’s the way to protect the people he loves, but the part of him that knows he’s going to die at any moment just wants to feel close to someone one last time. It’s not particularly logical for Cassia to be that person, but she’s here and he’s here and... this is their option. For some reason they have each other and the pairing reeks of desperation or pity or manipulation or any other descriptor that’s fitting of a capable girl bringing an unskilled sidekick around as backup for battle and Zion knows. Zion knows, but he’s okay with it because it’s the best he can hope for.

Still, conversation takes a bit of effort. He’s certain that he confessed too much, too quickly, forgetting about the cameras or maybe even that he wasn’t talking to himself or his other half. Back home he had his sister Denali to confide every terrible thought that ever crossed his mind. They would talk about his nightmares or share conspiracy theories about their parents being responsible for the environmental damage in Five and how more and more people seemed to fall deathly sick every day. Everything their parents did was for them and so it was their fault, their fault, their fault. They spoke of guilt felt more deeply than children should know how. Other times they simply vented about petty fights with their younger siblings or how they’d get jealous if one of them paid too much attention to someone else because life is lonely when there’s only one person in the world who truly understands you and you lose them for even a minute.

Cassia is not Denali, but he closes his eyes as they talk and he pretends she is. It’s only fair. He may not fully understand the ways in which she thinks she can use him to her benefit, but this is what he gains. More than safety or survival, he just wants to be with his sisters again and so his mouth runs unchecked in the dark as he tricks himself into believing that this girl is one of his secret keepers. ”I’m afraid of dying,” she tells him in return and if she really were Denali then he would reply I’m not. Enough people have died because of me, it’s only fair that I take a turn. He looks Cassia in the eyes, but it makes him feel acutely lonely so he shuts his eyes and pretends harder. ”I’m scared that if I don’t be the best, worst version of myself then everything will have just been for nothing. I think about everything that has ever happened to me, every little bad thing, and it makes me angry. It makes me angry because all I have ever been is angry, never happy. I can’t think of anything that has ever made me happy because it feels like I was born to die.” And then he feels a little less lonely. Me too, he wants to say, but he’s too polite to interrupt when she’s still speaking. He has never understood what the point of him being born was if so many people had to die because of it, if he was going to have to die to even things back out. The money couldn’t have been worth the fracking. If his parents had found another way, he’s convinced he wouldn’t be here right now.

She speaks of feeling like a monster and he almost reaches out for her hand, until he glances over looking for it and can’t find the familiar sight of his sister’s freckles upon Cassia’s knuckles. A monster... He thinks all people are monsters until proven otherwise and he’s not sure if they can be redeemed. If any of them were truly good then it wouldn’t be possible to have a game where twenty-four children murder each other in the name of entertainment — they would all step off their plates in a harmony of explosions or huddle together in fear and innocence as beasts devoured them all. Instead they live in a world where twelve-year-old children can be tempted to bloody swords with the lives of their friends and classmates. Zion has seen siblings slay each other in these arenas. One of his first memories of watching the Games was the Keeni twins hacking each other to bits as he and Denali cried into each other’s shoulders, swearing they would never —

I would never —

Well, the time has certainly come to find out. “Fear keeps us human,” Cassia promises and that sounds like the opposite of everything Zion has seen on television.

“Then I must be more human than anyone who has ever lived,” he replies, trying to get comfortable enough on the sand to curl up and give himself over to the inevitable nightmares. There have been nights without terrors, but he knows that’s too much to ask for here.

The dark brings a vision of Cassia with her wrists slit to her elbows, molten gold free flowing down her open palms to gild the earth at their feet and become the mother of rivers and oceans. When he tries to ask her if she’s okay, she opens her mouth as if to speak and more gold flows up her throat, across her tongue and bubbles between her teeth. It gushes down her chest and onto her toes and this much gold could buy her anything she has ever wanted, except her life, and it drowns her body from the inside out until even the whites of her eyes are molten. Zion tries to run from the sight of her, but the gold runs faster and he ends up chasing the rivers of her. Eventually one river flows into another and he finds the girl from Six crying gold, shrieking gold, bleeding it into the earth. Beyond her stand the district partners from One, the girl from Eight, the girl from Three, the girl from Four, the boys from Eleven, Ten, Eight, Six, Four, Three, Seven... Zion screams and feels his lungs flood. Gold pours from between his lips, burning and melting his skin where it splatters. Desperately trying to tear it away, he feels flesh ripping free and still the greed wells from deep within him, unstoppable.

He falls into the glittering ocean they have bled themselves dry for and wakes in the black waters of another kind of truth. The menacing deep is far more honest than the shallows that lure him with an otherworldly glow of pre-dawn blue, galaxies shimmering on the ocean floor that beg him to reach out. For a moment he can’t help himself and stops swimming in order to see if he can touch the ocean's floor and almost dies for it. A wave rises up over him and the world becomes a tumbling blur until he’s spit out onto a beach made of stones so colorful that he feels as if he is sprawled in a meadow of glass wildflowers. “Cassia!” He cries out after retching up what feels like gallons of sea water. She is all he has and he becomes overtaken with the fear that he has lost her. “Cassia!”

Maybe this would be fear enough to keep him human if only his shouting didn’t attract a different monster than any of the children damned to this place. It rises up from the shallows and it’s only when Zion tries to reach for his pack that he realizes he doesn’t have it... or anything. He is naked from the tips of his toes to the crown of his head, having stripped his pajamas off in an unconscious attempt to rid himself of the molten dream-metal, and all he can do is whimper when he sees his backpack caught on a rock down the shoreline, closer still to the beast staring him down. All he wants to do is run away, but there’s nowhere safe without his weapons, without Cassia. Impulsively, he dives for his pack and reaches for an axe because there’s nothing else he can do. Maybe he’s not afraid of dying, but he’s terrified of dying alone.