what we owe to each other :: [ lex + denali // day seven ]

"Lex... it's a cage. It's a cage fight."

Reaching for a weapon has become second nature here. There is a comfort in filling her twitchy fingers with the smooth steel of her sword's hilt. Blade in hand, there is nothing in this arena that can catch Lex Lionel by surprise, nothing that can catch her unprepared. Even if she can't find whatever's coming to get her. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Where are they?" She wheels around, scrutinizing every hedge, every growing vine, every bunch of grapes swaying in the breeze. It wouldn't be mutts this close to the end. Right? Her heart thrums in her chest.

Regret lies leaden in her gut; she curses herself for letting Denali talk her out of scoping out the whole vineyard. Could it be that the kids from yesterday followed them? They should've finished them off at the tide pools — it would've been that much easier, with Quest out of the picture. Or maybe it's Angel and District Four-fingers. She wasn't ready to betray the tenuous truce of having the same home that first time they met on the battlefield. She wasn't ready to take on his two lackeys the day she murdered Minx. Today, Lex is ready to cut him down without giving it a second thought. Otherwise it's Temple and Bette. It twists behind her sternum like snakes, but she could do it. A lifetime ago, they laughed together like friends. Two lifetimes ago. (Wander. Eve.) Friends or no, Lex has no misconceptions about where they are and what that means. If today is the day that Temple and Bette need to die so they can live, well, today is the day that Lex will kill them.

But the vineyard is still. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"It's just us," she mutters, eyebrows knitted together in apprehension. The only thing in the bushes are roses. The only blade drawn is hers. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Who are we supposed to be fighting if —"

She tosses her sword as though the hilt just put a splinter in her palm. Alternating waves of revulsion and denial roll over her body like a flu, clenching and unclenching each muscle, dampening her furrowed brow. Oh. Fuck.

Nothing clears her head like a crisis. The mesh of vines encircling them may not be subtle, but Lex Lionel has never known how to take a hint. Hatchet in one hand, flint in the other, she marches over to the enclosing wall. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Maybe we can..." she starts, but it quickly becomes apparent that she can't. Every hole hacked into the hedge knits itself back together before Lex can so much as get a glimpse of the other side. And fire is a non-starter: the turgid vines are too green, too damp to catch. Her frustrated strikes split the flint, the final shower of sparks decorating her oxfords with one last glint of useless beauty.

She holsters the hatchet, her eyes landing on the the RLS Trolley Problem. Face set with determined madness, Lex sprints at top speed towards the back of the trolley, then runs the nine-cart monstrosity directly at the hedge like a battering ram. The landship buckles in on itself in a tremendous crash, sending Lex toppling over the rear carts and into the dirt. Still contorted into an awkward heap on the ground, she surveys the damage to the vined palisade. To her surprise, the massive ship put a sizable hole in their enclosure. Hauling herself to her feet, Lex dusts herself off for a second attempt — only to find new tendrils springing up from the ground, rooting the Trolley Problem in place.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"Are you..." Her mouth hangs open in disbelief, too incredulous to even muster her signature angry spluttering. She lands a decisive kick on the back of the shipwreck, the rickety pile of metal clattering in response. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Are you—" clatter! [attr="id","lSpeech"]"—fucking!—" clatter! [attr="id","lSpeech"]"—kidding me!?" clatter! clatter! clatter! [attr="id","lSpeech"]"That would've fucking worked! Or they wouldn't've made us stop!"

She lies flat on her back. Walk the plank bitch pose looks an awful lot like defeat, but Lex Lionel isn't there yet. Inhale. Exhale. She runs her hands through her hair, wracking her brain for something, anything else. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Maybe we can build a ladder?" She sits up, taking inventory of the resources at their disposal, hoping to spot a trellis or an arbor or something. Instead, she watches the hedges weave themselves a foot taller. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Or make a battering ram out of the mast." The greenery grows up the center of the wrecked ship, tying the pole to the earth. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"I'm sure the roots are too thick to tunnel under it..." The ground beneath them contracts, the earth itself drawing itself into a defensive position. Lex draws her knees up to her chest, too.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"I guess this is it." She looks Denali in the eyes, making no effort to conceal the helpless resignation. It isn't just that Lex doesn't want to — she's no longer sure that she can. She sighs.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"How should we...?" Even if Lex knew what the question would be, there's no way she could ask it out loud. How should we decide who gets to live? How should we kill each other? How should we keep deluding ourselves that this isn't the only way out? How should we...? — is it even still we? How should I?


[attr="id","lSpeech"][ my heart is going to keep on needing a moment tbh ]

Even before the ground rules are laid between them, it's obvious that Denali's challenge is the best option. The only option. In resolution, her jaw firms, her heart settles. A field of honor, a fair framework — now that it's in her head, this is the only way Lex can imagine fighting Denali Lyons. As long as she doesn't have to imagine it for too long. If it remains in the abstract, if she doesn't have to feel it, she can do it. They need to push through this as fast as they can, because the longer the thoughts churn in her head, the longer they'll have to turn into imagined scenes, into genuine emotions. There's no starting back up again if they stop.

So when Denali falters — "We can... we could rock, paper, scissors, for who starts —" — Lex is quick to cut her off with an authoritative shake of her head. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"You go first." She's comfortable deferring the first throw if it means they'll get there at all. She'd lose anyhow — she always throws rock, and Denali has teased her enough about it that surely she'd remember. Or Denali would throw scissors despite what she knows, and that would be worse. Deciding that she deserves a better chance at making it through this, or deciding that she deserves a worse one — Lex can't put another unfair choice on Denali today. She waves it off. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Don't make me play that infernal game again." Don't make me play any of these infernal games. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Not on top of everything else." Denali can go first. It'll be okay. She nods at Lex and presses on.

Or, she tries to press on. But Lex isn't about to let her last chance to try a line on Denali just go to waste. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Why do you have to break my heart like that, Freckles?" Trademark smirk tinged with sadness — as genuine as if her proposal really had been rejected outright. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Eloping was totally going to be my next plan." If not for the inevitability of death, it may well have been, sooner or later. She's done her best to keep those fanciful notions from taking root, and there's no worse time for daydreaming than the present. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Think they'd let us out for that?" Lex glances at the wall of vines, willing them to unravel. Grape leaves rustle in the wind. Otherwise, all is still.

Her mind wanders anyway: what happens if they do just stay here? They have the grapes. They have some water — hell, they could make grape juice too, or even wine if they wanted to give the other day's botched attempt at celebrating another try. And it isn't as if Lex would be above trying to eat part of Denali's flock. Rotisserie horrorbirds with skin crisped golden brown, juicy drumsticks dripping with rendered fat, dark meat soft and delicate between her teeth... her stomach growls, not sated by the handfuls of grapes she'd gobbled up that morning before the world went wrong. Could that work? Stay within their Gamemaker-prescribed walls and keep having their picnic? Or will the vines encircle them tighter and tighter until they're squished together and suffocated in the greenery? As a group, Capitolites have a worse attention span than Lex does, even on her worst days — the ones where she can't sit down to cut a mitre joint because she also wants to put a new coat of tung oil on the half-finished planters she's been making out of scraps, and because she needs to draw up plans for a new woodshop cabinet to hold smaller hardware (once she finishes the new and improved sorting scheme she started devising last week), and — yeah they'd be bored of Lex and Denali sitting around before nightfall. That sucks.

Denali continues laying out the ground rules: no dumb throwing or missing on purpose, no reneging, no take backsies. No joking. Lex gets the last one out of her system, grin growing at the sight of the slight smile she's won from the other girl. Last one. Denali's camera is too far away to grab in time, so instead Lex tries to burn the details into the back of her eyelids. The way the stitches on her face contract together like an inchworm crawling up her cheek. The snarls of fiery hair poking out from the eye sockets of the condor skull helm atop her head. The way Lex can tell by the slight crinkling of her nose that she means it when she smiles; the glint of grief in her eyes betraying the rest of the expression.

Caught on the cusp of hesitation, she lobs a grape at Lex in distraction. Keep moving forward. It strikes her dead-center, clattering against the star shaped sunglass lenses that Denali affixed to her battle jacket after the bloodbath. Denali might be teasing Lex about her jest, but they're also proving each other serious. Lex means it when she insists that Denali aims true; Denali pelts her with fruit in promise that she will. Not trying would be worse, somehow. After everything they've been through together, they owe their best to one another. And if Denali falters, she knows that she will too.

No guilt. (Impossible.) No apologies. (Easy.) No name calling. (If you say so, Freckles.) Lex submits a rule of her own: [attr="id","lSpeech"]"And no biting." It's impossible to imagine Denali getting feral with her again — it's even hard to remember her teeth sinking into Lex's shoulder the first time. It's hard to remember fighting at all. Maybe she should've ripped the redhead's heart out during the bloodbath, if only to spare her own today. Assuming she'd've even made it this far without Denali watching her back. She might've. More likely she would've been skewered on the end of the bleeding tree, or shredded by Temple and Bette and Wander and Eve, or brained by Quest, or eaten by who-knows-what in her sleep. Ripred, dying before Angel fucking de Costa would've been embarrassing. (Still might be.)

Denali adds one last item to the list of banned behavior: "No telling each other we deserve this." Don't they, though? If today has to be the day that Lex dies, she deserves at least this much. She deserves a murderer who understands what they're doing. The gravity of it. The implications of it. She deserves someone who knows her name, someone who's made her laugh and scowl, who's smiled with her and stitched her wounds and lied to her face that everything was going to be okay just to make her feel better. If this is the end, she only deserves to have Denali Lyons holding the blade.

But if Lex opens her mouth to protest, she's positive that the only thing that will come out is a choked sob. So she bites her lip and focuses on the new scuff on the toes of her oxfords. She can lie, too, if only by omission. Denali can have this one if she wants it.

Gentle hands fix Lex's battle jacket (for the last and hundredth time —) and she almost laughs at the ridiculousness of wearing the tattered denim cutoff, complete with leather patches and eyelets and [attr="id","smallestCaps"]eat it! emblazoned on the back in rhinestones, to a traditionally formal affair. She may be pressed for choices here, but the jacket is the nicest thing she owns.

Standing is the most strenuous thing she's ever had to do; the strand of throwing axes is the heaviest thing she's ever draped over her shoulder. She adjusts the strap on Denali's knife block. The silence between them is the hardest one she's ever had to break. She extends her hand. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Denali." This is the only way that Lex Lionel knows how to say goodbye to someone she loves. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"It's been a privilege and an honor." Concision keeps her voice from wavering. She still needs to swallow the lump that's been forming in her throat all afternoon. Denali acts like she doesn't notice, and that's for the best. If they stop now, they'll never start again — they won't be able to give each other what they deserve. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"I am lucky to call you a friend. I'll miss you."

Denali presses her hand into hers, returning the sentiment. "A privilege and an honor. I'll miss you too, Lex." (If they stop now —) They turn around, back to back, before they break any rules. No reneging. No take backsies. Silent tears roll down Lex's face the second it's out of Denali's sight. They fall from her chin in alternating drips, the tears on the left slowed by the claw marks intersecting across that cheek. ("It's not over yet.") Her pinkie finds Denali's, seeking one last comforting squeeze. She holds her breath to smother the sobs forming in her chest.

A pair of arms reach around her shoulders, wrapping her in a tight hug. Lex puts her hands on top of Denali's, clasping them tightly to her heart. The other girl's chest heaves against her back, eyes dampening the back of her neck with each heavy sob; Lex's tears fall freely, honest and shameless, onto the freckled wrists embracing her. If they stop now —

but Denali proves herself the stronger person and lets go.

It takes three deep breaths to regain her composure. They have to. She has to. They count out their paces, and all Lex can think about is how much colder the world feels every step she takes away from Denali. Her hands threaten to twitch, so she stuffs them into the pockets of her trousers, balled into fists. Lex stands stock still, facing Denali head on, target fully exposed. It may not be the best dueling form to present the whole of her torso at the easiest angle — but she can't bring herself to turn sideways and hide behind her shoulder, either.

She takes a breath and holds it when the breadknife leaves Denali's hand; she exhales sharply on impact. The serrated blade splits the battle jacket, rends the kevlar underlay, and continues into Lex's chest an inch or two above her heart. A sharp breath draws itself in through her clenched teeth. She pulls the knife from her ruined armor, drops it on the ground at her feet, and opens the hole in her battle jacket to show Denali her new wound.

The smoky wind stings the small puncture wound, but Lex makes an effort to give her a reassuring smile and a thumbs-up. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"I should've believed you about the bread knife, Freckles," she calls out. Does it constitute a violation of the rule against joking if she means what she says? [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Looks like they do stick pretty well."

She draws a hatchet and stares down the field of honor. All of her hesitations come rushing back at once — but Denali held up her half of the agreement and aimed true. Lex owes her the same courtesy.


[attr="id","lSpeech"][ throws axe at denali ]

l_tlvv3SN1throwing axe

[attr="id","lSpeech"][ miss ]

Lex shakes her head. She can't. She can't think about Denali dead until she has to, until all of the room left for doubt is cleared by a cannon. It has to remain in the abstract. So far, Lex has been lucky enough to avoid any of the ugly fates that inevitably fall each and every tribute. Everyone else in the arena has suffered worse than her. Seven days in this hellscape, and what does she have to show for it? One puncture wound on her tricep. Some busted up armor. A couple scrapes and bruises. She hasn't been torn open too badly, still has all of her fingers and toes. Hasn't seen anyone she cares about dead. (Just say Denali.)

She knows she's wrong, but it's impossible to convince her brain that there are consequences where when she hasn't been faced with any. All of her grief lives in a blister full of maybes and coulds and mights. Lex doesn't know what to do when it bursts.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"I'm not gonna do that until I have to." She's not like Denali - her power doesn't come from fury or from indignation. Lex doesn't ignite in the face of injustice or offense. Her head stays level. Consistent. Sturdy. Calm in a crisis and chaos at rest. She can't allow herself to get lost in the forest of how fucked up it is that today they've got her throwing axes at the girl who's good-hearted enough to give Lex pointers on how best to kill her with them. It cuts through her ribs and snaps off in her chest better than any bread knife could.

She needs to fix her heart to fix her aim.¹ Or maybe Denali will finish it with her next knife. In her entire life, Lex never once thought it would be easier to be the wood than the hammer.

The steak knife clips her arm, tearing most of the sutures binding yesterday's stab wound closed. It had taken Denali's exasperated insistence and forceful snatching of the threaded needle to get the thing stitched up; to the best of her effort, Lex couldn't do it on her own. Guess it's staying open now. One way or another.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"Maybe you shouldn't've stitched it up." She teases Denali with her own words, examining the slow stream of blood in fascination as it winds down her arm and drips off her elbow.

Lex smiles because she needs to, jokes even though she isn't supposed to because it's the only way she can stay on top of the fucked up situation they find themselves in. She needs the distraction, the separation between reality as it is and reality as she demands it to be with every dark jest and stilted smile. Is it dishonest to pretend that everything is okay when the world's gone this wrong?

She can't think of where the hatchet in her hand is bound if she has any hope of letting her fingers unfurl.


[attr="id","lSpeech"][ throws axe at denali ]

KEvrsH0Bthrowing axe

[attr="id","lSpeech"][ 10058 -- Deep Gash on Thigh -- 8 damage ]

¹ - referencing "...you either need to fix your aim or your heart." - [attr="id","smallestCaps"]dysis admea, 59th games, 7f [played by stare] here - do yourself a favor and read that whole post. (also thread, also games.)

Her chest heaves in time with Denali's sobs, her entire body clenching in a desperate effort to trick her muscles into thinking she's doing something. That she isn't just standing still and useless while Denali cries and screams and bleeds ten paces away. From her toes curling into the smooth soles of her oxfords to her jaw clamped shut to lock away the looming apologies, Lex is wholly composed of tension. She'd squeeze her eyes shut, too, but she forces herself to watch what she's wrought.

There are thousands of reasons she should want Denali to drop from her knee to the ground — that means this is over, that means mercy, that means Lex lives — and yet she can't will it so. Maybe she's still just drawn to delaying the inevitable, the way she's been doing this whole time. Stitch by stitch. Scratch by scratch.

They always knew — or at least Denali did. She'd said as much that second day — "Don't feel guilty about it. I get that we have to kill each other." It was her way of calling out Lex's lie, the one she'd told herself out loud about leaving Denali behind to save her own skin when the time came.

Prescient or just planning for the worst, Denali had spelled out exactly what she wanted out of the end as clearly as she'd listed their code duello. "If it comes down to me and you then just don't be an asshole about it. Don't call me a bitch if you're the one with a knife to my throat." Denali howls at the sky, tears streaming from her face, as Lex's hatchet dyes the shredded train of her gown violent crimson. "Don't tell me I deserve it. Don't make that the last thing I ever hear."

We deserve so much better than this, Freckles. You deserve so much better.

The cleaver burrows into her throwing arm — deep enough that she can feel the top layer of strings snap in her bicep as the blade blows past. She snaps her arm to her chest in an effort to lessen the strain on the injury. Not that it does much for the pain. And yet, the worst part of it all remains the same: they're beyond repair.

There's nothing she can say to fix this, any of this. What is there to fix, when they've committed to the end? Even Lex is past trying to laugh this off. But the silence between them — apart from Denali's sobs — is too much for her to bear. ("Well, what do you want me to say?" "I dunno... more nice stories about your dad and your cat.")

She presses her right hand to the new wound on her bicep, blood welling up from between her fingers. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"I never told you how we wound up with Burl in our woodshop, did I?" Lex doesn't wait for a response — not as if Denali being asleep or catatonic or preoccupied has ever stopped her from launching into a ramble before. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"She isn't our cat — my dad's very clear about that. She's the cat that's allowed to live in the shop in exchange for eating the mice. A business arrangement, not an adoption.

"Anyway, we've got this trough outside — Arthur gets into metal casting every couple of months so it's full of water about half the time, to cool the pieces — and about five years ago I see this cat with a bird struggling in its mouth sitting on the edge of the trough, dunking it into the water to drown it. Come winter I see this cat trying to do the same thing with a mouse, but the trough's full of snow instead of water, so obviously it doesn't work so well.

"She sees me, walks right over to me like this is your fault, you deal with this and drops the mouse at my feet. It scurried off, but she let me pet her for awhile and even pick her up. She was so skinny and shivering, so I brought her into the shop. We sat on the rocking chair I was sanding for awhile; she fell asleep on my lap. Took Arthur a couple days to notice we had a new tenant in there. I wanted to name her Burl cause she's got this beautiful coat that looks like burl wood... and he wanted to name her Burl cause she's a little bit gnarly. Burls are big bumpy growths on the sides of trees — super ugly from the outside, but beautiful when you cut them open."

Lex slowly flexes and unflexes her left arm — she thinks she'll be able to use it. The hatchet strains harder in her grip.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"She's really sweet with me, even if she isn't technically my cat. She sits on my feet if I'm standing in one place for too long, and if I'm bent over something for long enough that I look like a table she'll curl up between my shoulders. Guess it doesn't matter what her title is — tenant, employee, pet — if we're both happy with the arrangement."


[attr="id","lSpeech"][ throws axe at denali ]

_A4WvbypwQthrowing axe

[attr="id","lSpeech"][ 10118 -- Deep Gash on Hand -- 8 damage ]

Lex beams. This is the squeeze of her pinkie that articulates all of the things that are too hard to put into any other language. This is thank you and I'm sorry and you're welcome and everything else all at once. This is permission to keep going and request for more distractions from the reality too soul-rending to acknowledge except by proxy.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"Yeah? You too, Freckles. Well..." She points at Denali's blackened eye, wincing slightly as the gesture tugs at her new wounds, lips maintaining their upward skew all the while. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"The one, anyway. The other's still a little gnarly."

It looks better than it did that first day, newly swollen shut from a rogue fist in the bloodbath. Allowing her to secure the handcrafted eyepatch over the wound was the first tenuous trust Denali had placed in Lex. After that tense morning of scrapping, followed by aggressively crafting near one another, but not until it was obvious that Lex had no plans to strike a finishing blow. Or that Lex was too genuinely stupid to pose any sort of threat. After all, it takes a special kind of naive to let someone stitch their wounds if you're planning on killing them, and an different kind of dense to give them your armor. No wonder Denali had relented. Lex had given her as many opportunities to bite her throat out and the best fighting chance if it had come to blows between them.

If it had come to blows between them.

The filet knife clips her right arm, a thin arc of blood tracing the muscle up towards her shoulder. Thin streams flow down with gravity, tattered red curtains hung over her bicep. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Look, you were the one who cut the sleeves off my jacket. If you didn't want to see me bearing arms —" she flexes her right arm just a little, grimacing as the broken skin pulls taut [attr="id","lSpeech"]"— you had a whole week to say something."

She shakes her head. Forget it. It doesn't feel quite right to tease Denali like that today. Not when she's throwing knives at Lex's head instead of pillows.

Instead, she tries to start another story:

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"Hate to break it to you, though, but that's not even the worst black eye I've ever seen. I don't have a picture to prove myself the winner here but a couple years ago I'd've totally kicked your ass at this one. I was cutting the drawer faces for this small bureau I was working on — it was camphor wood, smells really amazing. But I couldn't find Arthur's crosscut sled jig and didn't feel like putting one together, and... this is really boring, isn't it. You don't want to hear about me getting beaned in the face with a piece of wood from table saw kickback."

Denali asked for nice stories, and here Lex was talking about Burl drowning a bird and getting a board launched into her face at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. About the design of table saws and the physics of how they can fuck you up. It hardly qualifies as nice.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"The best Ratmas I ever had," she starts again, course-correcting. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"I was little, maybe five. It was the first Ratmas without my mom, and Arthur had been in a bad place for awhile. Money was bad, I think. He hadn't been working as much when she was sick, and dying is expensive. I'd been relentlessly pestering him to let me into the woodshop — I could help, I'd insist. But he was so busy trying to catch up on work — you know, keeping us fed and paying down some debts — that he didn't have the time, really." Even then, she understood. It had been a hard year. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"But when he finished up in the woodshop on Ratmas eve, we still went out and felled this beautiful balsam fir to put up in the front room, across from the fireplace."

The tree made their whole house smell like sap for weeks. It was like waking up in the woods, the whole world fresh and wild and full of adventures before she even opened her eyes.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"I thought that was it — taking the time to drag a tree home after being holed up working before dawn til after dark for too many days in a row was..." Meaningful. More than enough. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"But the next morning, near the tree, there was a stack of boards — rock elm — and a pair of metal runners. We spent the whole morning in the woodshop putting together a sled." She'd wrecked it within a week, going too fast down too steep a hill with too many trees on it, but that just meant she and Arthur got to put it back together again. She wrecked it a lot that winter.


[attr="id","lSpeech"][ throws axe at denali ]

MtteYvjVTSthrowing axe

[attr="id","lSpeech"][ 10135 -- Broken Rib -- 7 damage ]

Winning these smiles from Denali really does feel like winning. Their weapons bouncing harmlessly off one another's armor, Denali's face lit up like it really is Ratmas morning in her head... even with her arms bleeding and her eyes still a little scratchy from crying, Lex can't help falling into her usual trap. Nothing bad has happened, so nothing bad will happen. They have to hurl their weapons at one another until someone dies and yet she still feels invincible. Invulnerable.

Falling into her usual patterns it's too easy to forget the way that this is bound to end. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"What's that face?" She finds herself ribbing Denali the way she so often has, brandishing a big grin of her own. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"You're looking at me like you like me or something."

A low boom echoes across the sky, shakes the ground. She feels it up through her feet, her legs, her spine. It rattles her ribs and shakes her heart. Jarred from the comfort and safety she built out of denial, her face falls. Someone else is doing what they're supposed to be doing. The cannon confirms it.

Brows knitted upwards in helpless concern, she picks up another axe. This time, when she throws it, there's no distraction from the intent: they're killing each other.


[attr="id","lSpeech"][ throws axe at denali ]

p7bLfY5QRgthrowing axe

[attr="id","lSpeech"][ 10123 -- Shallow Cut on Stomach -- 4 damage ]

Lex doesn't make it far past the sad noise in her head, the echoes of the cannon's knell reverberating inside her skull. She keeps forgetting. Even now, with her arms and armor torn to shreds, it's too hard to process this as the end. It's too hard not to extrapolate. She hasn't died yet, therefore she never will. Same for Denali. For as long as Lex has known her, she's been very much alive. So, obviously, that's what she'll keep doing in the future. Anything else would be... too much.

"Ratmas is my favorite." Denali paints a winter scene so vivid and cozy that Lex's imagination happily wanders off into the snow. She raises her eyes, shamelessly staring at the stitches on Denali's face as they animate with wistful fondness. Even in narration only, the Lyons family Ratmas is a sensory experience: she can practically smell the citrus and spices strung together and draped around the familiar presence of fir trees; phantom snowballs burst against her head and send shivers down the back of her coat in a chilly avalanche of burst ice; and even though the idea of an intentionally noisy family contrasts against the comfortable, enduring silences of the Lionel living room, it's all too easy to picture Denali's unrepentant caterwauling accompanied by gentle piano melodies. "I'm actually pretty bad, but that doesn't stop me." Of course it doesn't. Lex can't imagine negative reviews making Denali do anything but sing louder.

Her lips twitch at the mention of heirloom ornaments — they've never bothered to put any trimmings on the tree that goes up in their front room most years. (Why hide the branches like that? They look nice enough on their own.) And moments of sentimentality are rare, bordering on nonexistent — especially for Arthur, who expresses repeated disinterest in storing other people's garbage. Memories included. "My mom cries like crazy any time one of them gets knocked off a branch and breaks." (Things break sometimes. It's okay.)

There's a brief silence at the end of Denali's story. Lex braces for the latest knife hurled in her direction — this, too, has become routine. Instead, something else slams into her sternum:

"I do like you, Lex." Lex brings a hand to her chest, clutching at the space above her heart to double-check that there's no new steel protruding from the spot. Startled by the very genuine belated response to her teasing, her eyes widen as the low-grade panic sets in. She bites her lip in an inept attempt to contain herself, still convinced that Denali can hear her heart pounding from ten paces away.

"Sometimes I can't tell if you're brave or you're stupid —" Lex breaks, face splitting into a fully-realized grin. Definitely stupid. "— and I like that because I've spent my whole life trying to figure out if I'm brave or stupid too." They're not mutually exclusive.

"It's really sad. Being here. Being told that people I like kind of a lot are my enemies when there were plenty of kids back home way meaner than anyone here." It's hard to imagine what that could even look like. The kids here have been insulting Denali, insulting her brother to get a rise out of her. Stabbing her. Mailing her a jar of piss. Telling her she deserves to feel pain. Tying her up for a hostage. Unkind, even by Games standards. "There have been a lot of reasons for you to be cruel to me, to leave me tied up or screaming my head off in the middle of a fight like a useless idiot, but you didn't." Lex shakes her head — there's exactly one reason why she might've done those things. But Denali's death being a precondition for Lex's survival never seemed like enough reason not to be kind.

[attr="id","lSpeech"]"You're both." Her voice is quiet when she chimes in again. Bravery and stupidity are inexorably linked — especially in a place like this — and Denali is bolder than most people Lexandriy has ever met in her life. Maybe bolder than anyone. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Usually both at once. Trying to fight me for the wealth to your dying breath. So stupid with half your blood already on the front of your dress. But you still had me on the ropes for a minute." Her mouth opens, her expression halfway to incredulous commendation. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"Brave and stupid. Audacious. From the get-go you never really gave me a choice but to admire you for it."

She drops to one knee. Lodged in her thigh is Denali's boning knife, buried practically to the handle. Lex stuffs her fist into her mouth to muffle the torrent of incoherent swears that accompany her body adjusting to its new metal appendage. There's a big artery around there — removing it, she thinks, would be some sort of suicide. It's easy to talk her hands out of fidgeting with it.

"Being here would have sucked without you." She nods in agreement. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"If I had to be here, I'm glad I got to have you with me all the way to the end." A privilege and an honor. [attr="id","lSpeech"]"You're sorta okay, too."


[attr="id","lSpeech"][ throws axe at denali ]

_2J8VD1Ltjthrowing axe

[attr="id","lSpeech"][ 10040 -- Miss -- 0 damage ]

[attr="id","lSpeech"][ accuracy ]

throwing axe

[attr="id","lSpeech"][ 10033 -- Axe in Thigh -- 8 damage ]