orange. — orville v wes, day six.

ready, set, go, notice this game
i'll just play with the board
you're a rat in the trap anyway

A rusted antique microphone unravels dramatically through the air in the wake of the explosion, dropping down from the rafters on a silken cord. It looks real in the dappled, criss-crossing shafts of light filtering through the holes in the Scrapyard's roof or, at least, it looked real until Cricket Antoinette's ever-baffling likeness comes flying down the length of orange silk, twisting and spinning like gravity is a silly myth and her existence is the overdue punchline to a joke the universe started telling at the beginning of time. It's hilarious that anyone could believe in a farce that seems so obvious now. Mankind clipped their own wings while she soars.

With one leg artfully hooked around the cord, a feathered red train spills down to curl shamelessly around her velvet waist. What glitters beneath is so blinding it must hurt to look, the sun itself bursting from her holographic skin and penchant for outrageous underwear. "Ladies..." she purrs, lips catching on the corroded metal, "gentlemen... miscreants, maniacs, and madmen!" She gasps in slow motion, dangling one arm down to trail her fingertips across the crowns of Wes and Orville's mechanical heads as the scene twirls around her. The moment is as motherly as it is fleeting. "Have you ever contemplated the meaning of life?" The subtlest giggle snakes through the loudspeakers, the collective audience of televisions known as the Static glitching in tandem. "Emphasis on mean."

Sudden laughter erupts from the Static, ninety years of snickering tributes montaged together in an unsettling collage of clips. It cuts away as quickly as it swelled, their attention automatically cycling between one fight and another. "Let's give those introductions another try, shall we?" Lazily untangling herself from the microphone cord, Cricket releases herself to the ground, landing on tiptoes with her arms in a flourish. "It's our honor to welcome King Grit to the arena today! He looks quite... riveting in his mantis mech, if I do say so myself." Flitting around Orville quickly enough to blur, she drums her fingers over the patchy badge of duct tape on his chest where one might expect a heart to be.

"Now before you all lose your heads bowing before our would-be Lord of the Flies, it would be heinous of us all not to cast our attentions upon our dark knight," her voice escalates dramatically, "the Recluse himself! And my, my does Wes not look hungry for a few flies of his own?" Languorously back-handspringing right through Orville's rusted chest, Cricket's hologram brandishes her light upon a dripping smiley face adorning his arachnid-clad opponent. Touching her hands to the blackened metal and then to her own cheeks, her face instantly becomes a grotesque mimicry of the expression. "You better be more fun than the last one I killed, indeed! Don't worry, darlings, fun is what today is all about. We're all here to make certain of that... but if we're keeping score, my King, then you must forgive me for pointing out that you've both arrived bearing equally weighted crowns of death today."

Stretching one hand out towards each of them, a single finger is raised on each hand. One-One. The corners of her lips curl into themselves as the inevitability of the tie-breaker match settles in.

It would be dangerous of either of them to underestimate the other, both of their blades glutted on the blood of others before anyone had yet raised their hand to attack today. Cricket is a wraith amongst their weapons, bending around Wes's angry glaive and flipping out of the way as Orville's chopsaw whirs greedy and impatient through the air. Blood spatters the ground like an extension of their announcer's scandalously cut ensemble. "Ohhh!" She cries out excitedly amidst the action. It's a clever cut as Orville shifts the momentum of his attack at the last moment, carving a gory welt across Wes's leg right when it looked as if he might aim higher. "Well, King, you certainly do deserve points for a cunning move like that. The question is..." Raising her arms to poll the audience, Cricket's voice booms, "do you know how to keep the upper hand against someone unafraid of being underhanded?"


The screens of many a television-beast cut to slow-motion replays of Charlotte Bellisario and Fatima Al-Amin's final moments, Cricket slow clapping as she casts her gaze upon this battle between little boy monsters. Advertisements for Wally Wundull's Rainbow Sprinkles — now Yassified! abruptly crackle their interruptions through the faces of the pair of dying teenage girls like a badly timed cliffhanger. Holding a gloved hand out expectantly, the microphone instinctively drops back into Cricket's grasp, knowing exactly where it belongs. "I think we can all agree: these boys certainly know how to show a girl a good time, but as for me, well, this girl can't wait to see what they have in store for each other..."

pretty psycho purple kiss

maestro, maestro
i'm a pretty psycho

It’s not just Cricket’s pointe shoes keeping her on her toes today, blood red satin laced tightly around her ankles, it’s the ever-surprising nuances of human nature.

For always she has loved spotlights and stages more passionately than any lover and that has not changed, readily swearing unwavering devotion for better or for worse as bright lights and velvet curtains swore undying devotion to her in return. Even now she feels a sense of safety with the arena's cameras looking out for her, despite the way she flits out of the center of the ring with swift, silent steps to ensure that today's true headliners maintain center stage. A woman like her does not trust often, but when she does, she trusts forever. She trusts the cameras, she trusts the stage, and — somehow — she trusts Wes and Orville to be worthy of all of these things she cherishes most in this world.

With one hand wrapped around the microphone and the other gesturing emphatically at the two misfit titans sizing each other up, Cricket slinks round-and-round the ring's edge, her pace quickening with every step. "This is quite the matchup we have here today," her voice is a confident whisper that understands the importance of convincing the audience to lean in and listen closely. The two boys trade jokes and jabs, already checking all of the standard boxes for excellence that would thrill the average gamemaker, but Cricket wouldn't have bothered with them if these were her only expectations. "Spider versus mantis; a pairing to make your skin writhe — with anticipation, with the burn of venom and the ache of an unexpected cut, with little terrors that make you scream as something wicked leaps from the shadows..." She bides her time and energy, giggling on cue as they banter and flirt with fondness before Wes exclaims for Orville to blow yourself up again!

Leaping into the air with a giddy shriek, she wraps her legs around the microphone cord once more, hanging upside down as she twirls in peripheral circles around the central battle. Wes is right about one thing. "I'll share a secret," the genuine excitement in Cricket's voice is palpable, "the score doesn't matter. What matters is what happens next. What matters is if today's audience is here to see the obvious... or if you're here to find out why your nightmares are filled with the tiny fangs of creepy-crawlies more often than giant beasts with rows upon rows of monumental teeth. Lions, tigers, bears?"



Tell me, Wes and Orville stare each other down with their strange brand of friendly determination, how would you like me to make this hurt?



"Oh, no. Spider and mantis; hornets, centipedes, maggots, and flies. When you peer into the dark, sometimes the dark peers back. Sometimes —"

By inches, Orville replies. By inches and inch worms and the slow pang of poison from a festering bite. Nothing more. The whirl of Cricket's revolutions around them is silent and reverent. She twists the microphone away from her own lips, redirecting it to grasp at King Grit's whisper: tenderly. Something in her chest caves, beautifully, like cracking the spun sugar cage of a truly decadent dessert.

"— the wicked little monsters that live beneath your bed or in the webs of your cupboards or the cracks in your floorboards are watching you and biding their time, awaiting the perfect moment to reach for your throat. Other times they're simply curious. They want to know you. They want to understand you in all of the ways you want to avoid understanding them..." Blood trickles from the fresh wound on Orville's chest and down Wes' hip, where the chopsaw nips like baby teeth breaking through young gums. "Do you get it? Do you see them? These cuts are shallow, but that doesn't mean they're weak. The Recluse aims for the heart, while Grit wraps both hands around the thorn in his side and twists."

Tenderly.

Cruelty lives in everyone. It thrives as vibrantly in kindness as it does contempt. Slow deaths and gruesome beheadings are weighed equally within Death's tendrils, a famished kraken caring little for honor or last requests. It hungers and it loves and it cannot tell the difference. Begging for tenderness, pleading for beauty — all are weighed equally and found to be words that do not exist within the language of Death. It cannot understand and it has no interest in learning how to.

Make them remember it, the living entreat, and I'll promise to do the same. If you want it.

It's another shallow cut, made to mirror Wes' own, to make them into a matched pair, to embrace their sameness. A shared wound. Cricket smiles sadly, the strangeness in her own heart swelling. Don't you know? Yes, she does. They're always going to tell us who we are.

"Marvelous." The microphone presses itself to Cricket's lips, coveting her throat in the shadows that reach for her from the rafters. "Aren't they? You're right to fear them. They're so much more than you'll ever be." The editors in the broadcasting room frantically attempt to cut her microphone, pushing at buttons and tiny levers that raise the volume of other tribute's clashing weapons or the ambient noise of the ever-watching Static. The rough contempt in the Victor-Gamemaker's voice for feeble onlookers melds with her affection for the bravery before her. She does not flinch. She loves and she hungers and she cares not for the languages of anyone outside her own kind. Can't you hear them narrating every bit of our lives?

Her laughter shakes the Scrapyard, impossibly gentle yet omnipresent. I don't want to be remembered. I don't want them to know me at all. That's too bad. Orville is one of hers, Wes is one of hers; it would be impossible to unknow them now.

She is deaf to the complaints within her earpiece, little voices as terrified to cross her as they are terrified to admit that their control over her is little more than pretense. "It's a massive assault to the heart! Can you hear it? The crack of ribs, the split of flesh, the reach of a hand into an open chest. You can, right? You can all hear it... the perverted flutter of your own hearts, living vicariously through the violence of others. So many itsy-bitsy monsters have crawled in your ears and up your nostrils over the years of your lives, chewing their way through your bones to make nests in your hands. Tell me, do your fingers twitch with jealousy? Do you wish you could be this close to someone? I dare you to be this brave. I dare you to try, to taste failure, to dream of this moment and wish it were yours."



Maybe it's all nonsense. "No, no. Our audience could never." Cricket's voice is a macabre fairytale, a twisting series of jests that fester with glitter and mock all sense of order and safety. It's what they bring her back for, again and again, to tease the Capitol with it's fetish for gruesome fantasy. None of this is real, after all. To them, Orville's hand passes through Wes' chest the same way Cricket's hologram passed through Orville's chest earlier. Like make-believe. It's all a tease: the violence, her baffling narration, the audience's counterfeit emotional reactions. Yes, that's it.

Oh, Orville, don't you know? We can only be who they tell us we are. "All of you sweet innocents at home, sneaking a peek into the shadows for a thrill... don't look away now." Make the most of it. "Anything could happen here." They've painted such a pretty picture of you.

The spider jumps and one of Cricket's red, red shoes knots itself more tightly into the microphone cord as she gasps, both hands thrown into the air in revelry as Wes' own blood soars through the air from the force of his next attack. Gruesome. Gorgeous. Even without her, they paint such pretty pictures all on their own.

pretty psycho purple kiss