hazy hearts | {ghost gen v team titans}

ginny lawson;

Ginny spent the rest of the day being doted on, huddling close to Luya and insisting she was fine. She felt better after a rest on the back seats of the vehicle, taking small sips of the rest of her water and nibbling on her food pack once her stomach had settled - but quietly, she rather enjoyed the attention. Back home she would have wailed, over-exaggerated her ailments, just to get one of her sisters or Ever or even her parents to notice her. Here she didn't have to ask for help. They just looked after her, no questions asked.

And it was funny how Day One she had thought the worst of Cedric, been paranoid about Ty, when they'd protected both her and Luya. Cedric wasn't as awful as he seemed - intimidating on the outside, yes, but he swung his blade wisely - not totally out of hunger to kill, but mostly out of neccessity to survive.. Ripred-willing Ginny survived long enough she wouldn't want to be facing him, but she'd all but relaxed into the boy from Twelve's demeanor. Ty too was kinder than he seemed, lethal on the battlefield but gentle where it mattered.

She would be sad to leave them, Ginny thought with a frown. No matter what leaving meant. She tried to push the concept out of her mind, focus on the here and now.

"How do you drive this thing exactly?" she asked the group, eyeing the steering wheel with both caution and curiosity. One of the boys had gotten the engine running with the keys they'd taken yesterday, and it hummed with intention. Like it wanted to be driven, needed to.

Slowly she hopped into the front seat, barely able to see over the HUD, and grasped the wheel with her blood-caked hands. Whatever was in the cream they had applied to her wounds was working, for movements held far less pain than when she first came to.

Her legs could barely reach the pedals, but her tiptoes found one. "I watched a Keeper once in these, you've just gotta press the- AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

And the vehicle lurched back at a frightening pace, Ginny's knuckles in a white-hot clasp as the alliance were thrashed left and right with her manic jerks of the wheel.

"AHHHHHHHH!" she screamed, shrill and piercing over the roar of the engine. "STOP STOP STOP STOP-"

It obeyed, only with a loud crunch upon impact - she'd reversed into something. Or-

"Oh lord. Oh lord oh lord oh lord," and she swore she might start crying again. "Did I hit someone?"

They stayed frozen for a moment, shocked into silence and waiting for a canon. When one didn't fire, Ginny sighed and collapsed into the wheel.

"Someone else drive!" she squeaked, horrified and flushed.

---

Cedirc, it turns out, was more than happy to take over. A little too happy, racing around the volcanic dunes with a manic grin of glee. Ty stood passenger side next to Cedric with the girls in the rear, and Ginny clung to Luya with one hand and the car's frame with the other. She permanently braced for impact, knocked about like a ragdoll at the expense of Cedric's driving - but who was she to complain? Ginny had almost killed them yesterday.

So instead she stayed quiet, only letting a peep of fright exit her lips when they hit a large bump in the road or something monstrous lurking in the outskirts cried out. Eventually the dunes rolled away to reveal a barren brown horizon, concave dips in the earth deeper than anything Ginny had seen before. Patches of green hinted at food or medicine, and her stomach grumbled at the thought. Never in her life had she been so hungry, body sapped of strength with each day that went on.

But her thoughts were cut short as someone yelped, a blur of orange tunneling toward the Jeep. "Cedric!" Ginny cried out as she ducked, but it was too late - Luya was struck.

The spear clattered by Ginny's feet in the base of the car and she looked up, all rage and fear, to spot a girl with wide eyes lowering her now-empty arm.

"Hey!" Ginny screamed, grabbing the machete as long as her arm and leaping out of her side. "Leave her alone!"

She wasn't sure what had come over her, tiny girl with puncture-wound arms, but it was fierce and primal and petrified.

Don't touch them, she thought - bitter, white-hot selfishness. I just got them.

She wanted to make this girl hurt.

So she did.

ginny lawson;

There is the anguish of missing her first strike, the satisfaction of landing her second, the horror of it all, and then the rage.

"Don't tell me what to do!" Ginny screams, frightened and furious all at once. There's something horrific about feeling a wound dig deep, the strange pressure in your palms, and it's awful. But what tips her over the edge is that she is so god damn tired of girls like these telling her how to be and what to do. They're three strangers, but in white-hot rage she's blinded and they're her sisters.

Cassie. Katie. Remy.

And she's tired of older girls taking and taking and taking from her until she has nothing left.

"You chose this," says the boy, salt in the wound. "You all chose this. It didn't have to be this way."

"You think you're better than me?!" shrieks Ginny. "She," and the girl from Eight points the smeared tip of her machete at the girl who's blood she was so eager to spill, "attacked first!"

Childish, spiteful words for a childish, spiteful girl. Ty hollers something about not saying anything that will get her killed over the spluttering of tires in dirt and the roar of their car engine screeching forward, but it's too late. Her chest is heaving, and she might pass out again from the sheer exhaustion of feeling this much hate. But it has to go somewhere. Fifteen years of it, she has to be rid of it somehow.

There's the sound of gunfire to her left, cracking through the air like lightening.

"I'm so sick of older kids like you thinking you can--!"

Then there's Cedric ramming the car into the boy that came with the other girls and Ginny's head whips to the side -- is he dead?

She answers with a scream, because in her distraction a spear finds itself in her back.

"BITCH!" is all she can muster, lashing out into the air with her machete. "You nasty--"

A gasp as the weapon exits her flesh, blinded by pain and deafened by a gasp straight from her own lungs. She fumbles on the ground, doubled over in pain, desperately looking for her gun she'd dropped into the dirt. She can barely see in front of her, let alone where Ty, Cedric and Luya are, and it frightens her. Failing to feel the cool metal she'd once shied away from, she resorts to opening her eyes and spiting blood at their feet.

"-- bitches!"

It's a word she knows her Momma would have washed her mouth out for, Cassie too. A word Remy could seethe under her breath but if Ginny so much as thought it she'd be barred from any joy for the rest of the year. But her Momma wasn't here right now, Papa hardly ever around to begin with, and her sisters just memories she's not sure she wants to remember. So instead she snarls, fighting back tears, and steadies herself against the car door with one hand.

With the other, she heaves her weapon forward and swings with the worst of intentions. It doesn't do much, not nearly as satisfying as the first wound, but it's something. Anything, and Ginny's desperate - feeling like a wounded creature fighting to stay alive against her poor decisions.

"Ty!" she cries out, each name sounding more like a whimper.

"Cedric, Luya! Help!"