awaken, my love | lost boys vs the darlings

Count my cards watch them fall
Blood on a marble wall
I like the way they all
Scream

When the leg falls away from the rest of the body, it takes a few seconds to register that it was you that delivered the cutting blow. You, the same boy who had been unable to cut through armor and was known least for his strength back home, had just cut through flesh and sinews, muscle and bone, and not just a partial cut but straight through the bone and out the other side.

And when the girl falls one way, her leg falls the other. And, not for the first time, you feel sick.

So this is what I've become, you think, as nausea sets your head spinning. But something still must be on straight, for you don't double over and retch. Already, you're acclimatizing, for blood and gore no longer evokes a reaction from within.

Give it a few more days, and you might just become the stone cold killer that the Capitol loves.

You shake that thought off somewhat easier than you shake the nausea, for you know the truth - no matter what might transpire in the next few days, you will not lose your humanity. Every soul that you've had a hand in ending - Cesare Crocetti, this girl from Four who has now been reduced to two limbs out of her original four, even Ike Tate from Seven, who you had thrown to the ground as she had tried to escape the bloodbath - will weigh on your shoulders for the rest of your eternity.

But a tainted soul is a small price to pay for survival, you've told yourself that perhaps a dozen times by now. You will never enjoy ending someone's life like some others have in the past and will have in the future.

But you will do it nonetheless. You will deal with the hand that was dealt, and you'll see it through to the end.

Then conscious thought is ripped from your brain, nausea turns to pain, and the butterflies wreaking havoc in your stomach are suddenly replaced with cold, hard steel. You scream, maybe, as the blade recedes and a gaping smile is opened on your flesh, mere inches where a fresh set of bandages cover a similar wound that has not quite finished healing itself.

Such is the way of the arena. Heal one wound, survive one encounter, and in doing so you ensure that you lose twice as much flesh, twice as much blood by the next. You're doubling over, sheer determination not to collapse and show weakness to the boy who would as soon kill you as you would him and his ally proving the only crutch from turning two legs into four.

Jade hilt sinks into the earth, and you lean as the inferno in your belly lessons from lava to a mere wildfire. Slowly you catch your bearings, and you look around.

Blood splashes across the dirt in pools. The one-armed one-legged girl sports a new wound on her remaining leg, as well as the shattered remains of some sort of armor not unlike your own. Andy has a gash on his own stomach matching yours, and yet as you watch he manages to break the weapon lock that Florence had engaged with him, spear on spear. She speaks, asking the unspoken question of why and you realize that you made the correct decision in distancing yourself from her all along, as much as it pains you to admit it. Back home, Akira Sokatoa would do what he could to help the naive little girl understand the ways of the world, and he'd make sure that both parties would have fun while doing so.

Here, such naivety is a liability. But you're saved from having to make a response by Bella of all people, who responds with words eerily similar to your own thought process before capping the statement with a slash along her cheek.

There is no honor left among monsters made of men. For better or for worse, you will forever bear that title amongst some - that of monster. For you have killed a boy in the heat of battle to ensure your own survival, and you know that you would do it again in a heartbeat.

Let the boy from Eight hack away at you to his heart's content. Others might break against such an onslaught, but you can take it. You must take it, and so you will take it. No questions asked.

He will flee soon enough, of that you are certain. All living creatures with half a brain do when death becomes raw and real and personal.

And when you swing your blade towards the one-armed one-legged girl for a third time, you're not even sure it's murder so much as it is mercy.

Tell me which one is worse
Living or dying first
Sleeping inside a hearse
I don't dream

song: you should see me in a crown - billie eilish

Count my cards watch them fall
Blood on a marble wall
I like the way they all
Scream

Weakness plagues your bones. For all of its reach, the polearm is not a light weapon to wield, and its weight sends your strike wide, sinking into bloodstained earth instead of flesh and sinews. You're tired, oh so tired, but you must press on.

Pain burns in your thigh, bores a hole through your stomach, and yet you press on. You must press on, for to stop means to die, and today is not the day that you will be sent to a brand new home six feet under.

And you curse yourself for missing, for being useless, for landing one good strike in three, but of course it would be your luck that the one target whose leg you had to separate from the rest of her was the one target who wouldn't let herself be stopped by such petty distractions. It's a reminder that you are merely a child playing at god, for no matter how hard you try, a scrawny boy from a land of urbanization and technology has no place dancing around with deities.

And yet you do anyway, for to not pull your own weight when pillars crumble to ash before your very eyes would be blasphemy to whatever shred of honor that has managed to remain untouched through murder and bloodshed, all in the name of survival. Honor, fairness, those are exhausted concepts claimed by those who want to sugarcoat the hardships of survival into maintaining some sort of moral high ground. Everyone knows that to escape with your life means to kill, and there is no such thing as honor when it comes to butchering another kid up who simply wants to survive.

True, there is no honor in ignoring the boy from Eight so you can hasten the death of the girl from Four in his place. But if he was a threat to your being, he would have killed you by now, of that you are certain, and it was more imperative taking out the girl who was not only a Career by birth but also possessed enough willpower to fight on with half of her limbs missing. There will be time to deal with the spares later - better take out the real threats while you still have two Career allies of your own to help you with the heavy lifting.

You watch as the battle draws to a close, as the one-armed one-legged girl's hail mary catches Andy across the forehead with enough force to draw forth a spurt of blood and send the boy collapsing to the ground. For half a second, your heart stops, but no cannon sounds.

Florence spouts words of naivety once again, and you're glad that Bella is there to receive and counter, for even though she is both a rival and an enemy, you have no wish to do harm unto your district partner today.

You watch as Bella catches the girl from Four across her now-exposed chest with her blade, and you listen as the cannon sounds for her. A pyrrhic victory, perhaps, given your wounds and the fact that Andy appears to be on death's door, but a victory nonetheless.

So at last you give your attention to your would-be killer, just in time to receive a cut to the arm. Superficial in comparison to your prior wounds, you barely give it notice as muscles tense and your polearm is brought in front of you.

"You've had your blood." When you speak, it surprises even you - you've said maybe a dozen words across four long, hellish days, an act no doubt thought unthinkable by the people that knew Akira the Chatterbox back home. "And we've had ours."

You take a step forward, just outside of weapon range of both you and the boy. "Now get out, before I make you."

You're not sure where the bravado is coming from, given that you're covered with half a dozen wounds of varying freshness and severity, but you think it comes from the fact that, although barely, it was your alliance that got the kill and not theirs. Everyone flees once death fills the air. Or maybe it was simply the fact that in a fight between a team consisting of a battered girl from Three and an inept boy from Eight and a team of a battered boy from Three and a fresh Career who had just killed a girl, you're quite certain that you know how the odds will fall.

You stare him down, yet for some reason that even you are unsure of, you do not strike. Perhaps it's under the presumption that even the boy who has tried his best to kill you over the last few minutes deserves a chance to end things without any further violence.

Perhaps you're just tired.

Tell me which one is worse
Living or dying first
Sleeping inside a hearse
I don't dream

song: you should see me in a crown - billie eilish