killer whales! killer whales! / damaris

Damaris Hope was dying.

She laid broken on her side, crumpled on the ground amidst the chaos of the circus tent. The elephant mutt had charged again, and she hadn’t been fast enough to dodge it this time. One of its tusks had pierced through her face and dropped her to the ground like she was nothing. She felt the pain searing like fire and tasted the blood pouring down her skin, warm and metallic on her lips. The muscles around her left eye pulled uselessly— it was gone, ripped out when the mutt pulled its tusk away.

With her remaining eye, she could see Jessica’s body and the bloody wound through her neck. Finley, the red-haired girl she’d shared a conversation with on the roof of the training center one night, was on the ground, Exover leaning over her. She couldn’t see Aurora, but she knew she was dying as well. There was a noise then, the crack of splitting bone like fireworks, and the little girl from Six was dead too.

All of the girls that had fallen that day were victims— of each other, of circumstance, of an unfair system that churned out bodies and traumatized children every year. Damaris ached for them and their families moreso than she ached for hers. The Hopes were used to this pain, this loss. She was not the first of them dead and she would not be the last. Somehow, that was comforting.

The surviving tributes began to clear out as the mutt retreated. Damaris stayed where she was, in the steadily growing pool of her own blood. She was too weak to move. She was going to die where she’d fallen, alone like she’d always thought she’d be.

Saturn came into the view of her remaining eye. She watched him pull Exover up onto his back, and then he came over to her, kneeling down and picking her up out of the dirt. She curled against his front like a child, resting the undamaged side of her face on his chest. Why hadn’t she thought that he would come to get her? She scolded herself for falling back into an old way of thinking. This was no time to do something like that.

She was carried out of the circus tent, away from the scene of the crime and the carnage. The smell of blood and death still lingered in the air as they got farther and farther away. She knew she didn’t have much time left, but she was determined to hang on as long as possible. She wouldn’t have been able to bear it if she’d died without saying goodbye to her friend. She needed him to know that he had mattered so much to her, that he was going to be okay without her there.

Saturn brought her to the edge of the sunflower field. Damaris looked out over the flowers, yellow like sunshine, like joy, then back to her friend. “I’m sorry. I broke our promise,” she said, because it was all she could think to say. She was not a deer, or a devil, or any of the other things she’d called herself. She was a teenage girl, and she was scared. “I tried really hard.”

“Damaris.” Saturn started to cry, and she felt the weight of it in the pit of her chest. “You did your best. It was enough… you were enough.”

For the first time in a very long time, she was afraid of dying. The possibility hadn’t seemed real, not even in the thick of the fight, because she’d made a promise to Saturn and she was determined not to break it. She knew she shouldn’t have been so naive, but it was too late for regret now. Her breath caught in her throat as she began to tremble. “I don’t want to die,” she said, a useless statement, as she was already dying and nothing could be done to stop it.

“You’re not, no, no, no.” He rocked her in his arms, comforting her as pain coursed through her body. “Damaris, Dam, please, don’t go please, I can’t, I need you.”

She remembered the way she’d felt standing on top of the building all those years ago, the night she’d almost jumped. She had been resigned, peaceful. She had been ready to welcome death like an old friend. Things were different now. She was clinging to life as desperately as she could, but her body felt heavy and her mind felt clouded. She did not want to die now, not after everything, but she was going to. It was cruel, and unfair, and she did not deserve it, but it was the fate she was given.

“You’re going to be okay,” she whispered to Saturn, and she believed it. They had leaned on each other, become stronger together, faced the terrible things that had happened to them and looked toward the future. He was the dearest friend she’d ever had. She thought he was brave, so brave. He had survived death the day before and she knew he could survive it again. She hoped that he knew he could, too.

The darkness took hold of her then, creeping into her veins where blood had once been. She couldn’t fight it anymore. She wanted to cry, or scream, or something, but there was nothing she could do. She inhaled another shaky breath and closed her remaining eye, glad that the last things she’d ever see were the face of her friend and the field of glowing, golden flowers.

Damaris Hope did not die alone. She did not die at the foot of a towering building or in a bloody bathtub. She did not die thinking she was unworthy, or a burden, or that everyone would be better off without her.

She died knowing she was loved, and that was enough.