call up the storm [carly vs tex ; day 7]

And when she reaches for her sickle, she finds two.

One crossed over the other, like a dead boy's hands folded over his chest. Laid to rest. There's no closure. Only the morning light pouring through the cave entrance like a portal to another dimension. The darkness holds her in its mouth, three days of trials and tribulations, and it feels like glass digging into the palms of her hands. A mountain she wants to climb; an obstacle that tears into her until all that's left are the memories.

Andrew Priest is dead.

Tune Walker is nowhere to be found.

For the first time, on the seventh day, Carly is forced to stare at herself and see a girl in total isolation. With only her steel, and her pride, stripped of all the treasures that gave this experience more meaning than what it's destined to become. Since the first day they spoke her name, even now in the depths of her own undoing, she has known she would return home. No matter the sacrifice, regardless of how cruel she would have to become. It's inevitable.

But she still grabs Tune's weapon, holds it in front of herself, all while feeling the blade of it stab through her back and pierce her heart. There's no blood to prove her suffering is real. Just scars, and a fading hue of purple, enhanced only by the glowing mushrooms along the cavern walls.

Ultimately, she can force herself to understand the situation she's in. For her to survive, Andrew had always been fated to die, and to be as selfish as she is, Carly has no right to fault Tune for making her own decisions. She's counted the faces in the sky, too.

This morning had always been scripted to break her heart; and she's been robbed of the experience. She wakes up to the cold, the emptiness, the words she might never get the chance to say. For a week, they are the most important things to her, and then the image shifts. It ceases.

She tries to make her peace with the absence of them. But her grip tightens around the handle, and her lungs constrict, and before she can stop herself she's throwing the glaive out and away from herself, spiraling out of the dark and disappearing in the halo of light.

Her hair hangs in her face, breath coming quickly, shoulders trembling.

"Hey." There is no one else here. She hesitates as if giving them the time to listen, time to remain with her. The silence does not yield to her voice. "I love you."

It's meaningless now. Dying roses on the gravestones of dead friends.

She knows this, and she cries while no one is there to see the girl beneath the image she's so carefully crafted. There's no rage. No power. Just sad, blue eyes, and the one debt she'll never be able to repay.

"Both of you."

When she steps into the light, hours later, warrior at dawn, she leaves their ghosts in the quiet dark.

Her softness, too.

---

She's kneeling by the river, trying to scrub the filth from her skin and the bloodshot haze from her eyes, when the world crashes into her.

With all the force of a tidal wave, right against her spine, she barely has the time to yelp before her face crashes towards the earth. Only to meet water, slicing through the surface and plunging below, just barely able to register the feel of fingers curled up in her hair. She thrashes in the dark blur, so quickly torn from her peaceful contemplation and dragged so forcefully into the one thing that had frightened her about this situation. This is no longer an alliance game, it's just person to person warfare. She screams, chokes, claws for her survival in the murky depths.

And just as quickly as she's sunk into the river, she's jerked out of it, tossed like a ragdoll against the bank and crashing against her side. She gasps for breath, spitting out the water that felt like it was flooding her chest. Trying to blink through the way her gaze distorts, trying to make sense of a thing that can't even make sense of itself, she stares up at the one ghost who dared to follow her. Texas Lovell, looking far worse for wear than how she left him in the shadows.

He can't hide from her now; not when he's forced her to collapse in front of him, sacrifice on his alter, her mind races to find a solution and her lips part trying to summon the right thing to say. "You probably think I'm doing this because of what you did to Kip." She shudders, remembering the way she so coldly told Tune to hold him and force him to watch the murder of his ally. Like it was the simplest thing. Like once upon a time, she was the monster between them. His veins are purple beneath his skin, eyes so full of rage, black rot clinging to him like war garb.

The voice he speaks with is not the same voice she recalls from his interview. It cuts into her like river stones. "I'm not." He hefts his spear like a bolt of lightning, like his fury has come to life in his grasp. "I'm doing this..." she desperately tries to reach for her sickle, detached from her belt and tossed aside on the shore, in the moment he approaches her. She looks at him with fear, and he looks at her with indifference. "Because I really, really want to watch you die." Her fingers have just wrapped around the hilt when he thrusts the blade through her thigh.

Like a butterfly pinned beneath a sheet of glass; she considers a future where she plays the victim. Her tragedy immortalized on film. Sad little girl torn apart by something so much bigger than her. Two gunshots echo in her mind, she feels the halving of her flesh like it's a metaphor come to life, like she's already been hollowed out.

"I've got bad news." Her voice is a rasp, tired and suffocated and so full of pain. But she pulls herself to her feet, red blood stains blossoming beneath the fabric of her uniform, agony that she wears with pride. When she glares at him, her gaze is blue, only blue, and she makes her peace with the fact that she will have to tear this boy limb from limb to rid herself of the threat. It's necessary.

"When I die, I'll be a hundred, cozy in my king sized bed surrounded by all the things I've earned for myself." She dares to stoke the flames, challenges a tribute who has none of his humanity left to gamble. He listens even as she raises her arm, pulls it back, channels all of her ambition into the swing. "And you'll just be a name on my list of kills." Clarity, clear as crystal, she can see her dreams beyond the force that threatens to ruin her.

Aiming for his heart, shattering the fragments of his mind.

"You should have drowned me when you had the chance." The guillotine falls to meet his neck. "Stupid boy."

His arm catches her blade, black blood and regrets spilling to the surface. She clamps her teeth down on him, still sucking in ragged breaths, trying to ignore the hot spike in the center of her chest. Every word feels like she's swallowing gravels, like her head is below the surface again, cheek scratching against pebbles. Her limbs are aching as the adrenaline flows in and out, thunder clap in the sky and a snap of fingers in her mind. She refuses to lose her footing. Endlessly, she has a vice grip on herself.

Until he slits her throat wide open, she will always have something to say.

"Maybe I should have." The waves rise and fall around her ankles, white foam against the muddy bank, approaching and breaking apart in an endless loop. It should be peaceful. Her legs shake beneath her, the last thing she has to worry about is a dead boy she could have loved and a missing girl she wants to love longer. It's background noise to the force charging to meet her, the monstrous addict and the devilish schemer. Maybe karma comes back around.

Maybe the next time it swings at her, she'll break its arm.

She glances at the vials secured around his waist, the ill-purple hue across his flesh, the way his eyes seem like they're searching the perfect place to start tearing her apart. "But I think I want to watch you suffer first." River-born goddess, she stares up at a heretic and scoffs. Like it's the most ridiculous thing. Like in the back of her mind, in the back of her throat, she might ever be able to switch off the memory of her face screaming under the water. Robbed of air, stripped of control, so easily pushed aside.

"How the fuck did you let this happen to yourself?" She steps closer, wincing slightly at the way her skin tears around the wound on her thigh, a blood red flower unfurling. "You've let them make a mockery of you." She doesn't always mean to sound cruel, just honest, but her tone often ebbs and flows between the two. Logically, she recognizes that in the state he's in now, nothing she says will get through to him. More rational still, she already has a good idea of who will have the favor in a physical fight between them.

But she's wickedly clever, and just as resourceful. She belongs wholly to herself, deeply, even if her knuckles burn white hot against the handle of her weapon, even if an aftershock of the rage and the hunger still sparks like an ember in her mind, ever so steadily stoking her courage and her superiority complex. "Look at me. I've made the Top 8, and they have the audacity to send a mutt for me to kill." He's a boy who deserved better, just like she's a girl who will have exactly the life she deserves.

He's in the past tense. Even now, she will grant him the dignity of separating the monster plotting her demise from the boy who once was Texas Lovell. "You speak like you've already won."

"Because I have."

She says it firmly. No hesitation. If manifestation helps her secure her goals, then fuck it. There won't be a single day where she wakes up thinking she doesn't own the sun. "Tell you what..." he inches closer with his spear again, like a bloody tide, like a thing she wants to watch disappear. Part of her fears he might just come back. "When I put this spear in your gut and watch you die, we can both pretend the soil is that king sized bed you dream of." Her heels dig into the earth as she braces for impact, her reply an offended huff.

Texas strikes, just grazes her skin, but there's a wound inside of her. It bleeds. She imagines him like a playground bully trying to steal her favorite toy, her fondest dream, and her selfishness charges into the battlefield.

"Hard pass." He's taller than her, and yet when she gazes at him, it's like she's glaring down. She won't allow him to be the nightmare he wishes to be.

"I'm not a pretender, sweetheart. Watch me get exactly what I want."

It's not that she's unable to recognize when she's losing — it's that there's nothing in her that knows how to stop. Her heart pounds in her chest, hateful words burning through her ears, fingers curling around river sand soaked with her own blood and full of sharp gravel. Texas Lovell is trying to kill her; he even says so. Every movement aches, every breath is labored, every dream she's ever had trickles out of the gaps in her hands like dust. The crown has never felt more intangible.

And gracelessly, ferociously, she screams and throws the dirt right into Tex's purple eyes.

She ducks below the smokescreen in the few seconds that it spares her, racing up the bank and securing herself on the stable earth. It's funny how grateful she feels for the grass beneath her feet, the way the water is churning in the storm and not churning inside of her lungs. When she swallows, it's like swallowing glass. Her every word is soaked in red. "You're not getting anything," cuts through her mind, and she grits her teeth around the audacity.

"If you think I have anything at all to prove to you," she says that last word like it's venomous, like just the notion of him is toxic to her health, "then you clearly never learned how to pay attention." A girl sneers down at the goliath, all too aware that in a matter of moments he will close the distance between them, and he will thrust his spear into her skin, and she'll feel small again. She knows this.

Her mortality stares at her deeply; her morality turns away.

"What do you think the historians are going to say about you? When it's all said and done and twenty-three of us are in a cemetery plot." She laughs, hides the sparkle of tears in her eyes behind her cruelty, spreads out her arms as if to gesture at the grand joke they're telling. "If you're going to end my life, then at least make it fucking worth something." If he wants to be a monster, she will slay him / and if he wants to be a mountain in her path, she will fell him. "You want to kill my future, the one I've given everything to have, for the lifetime of nothingness waiting for you? Really?" Her laugh is a honeysuckle nestled in briars.

"That'd be the irony I deserve," she whispers more quietly to herself, so sad behind the guise of her pride, so close to having all that she could ever want; only without Aneesa, and Andrew, and inevitably Tune by her side. Alone and separated from the only people she would ever sacrifice her ambitions for. Maybe that's why, even now in the belly of the beast, she tricks herself into believing that anything is possible. That she can conquer a boy that has gone mad with his bloodlust, with his own twisted goal, who so easily sees the victim beneath all of her bravado.

"You think you own the world, but you're just groveling at the feet of the exact people who put you here."

"How else do you think you win?"

Carly Volkov feels nothing for Panem — and everything about succeeding. "Wake up from the sob story. Pull yourself out of the grave they're trying to push you into." Beneath her robes, her gunshot wounds ache, old aches bleeding into fresh ones. "This nation hates girls from Nine just as much as boys from Twelve." There's nothing she has to hide; she is who she is, and her scars belong wholly to herself. She's drug herself through impossible odds for the better half of her life. That doesn't stop now.

Even when he tosses the vial in her direction, and she side steps it just to hear it shatter on the ground over her shoulder. His treasure becomes a waste / and he charges, and the point of his spear tears through her back as she tries to spin out of the way. She catches herself on her palm, tries to silence the splitting of nerves into a dull ache, a vibration she can hide under the ceaseless drumming of her heart. It's a song she wills to play forever, a desperation that always forces her back up on her feet, even as she trembles and seethes and bleeds. She stares him straight in the eye as she tries to murder him.

This nation hates girls from Nine just as much as boys from Twelve.

"I just made them love me."

Their bodies crash like thunder. River titans locked in an endless war, bleeding blasphemy into sacred waters. Texas throws her to the tide like a sacrifice to the raging storm, and she stumbles, hands clutching the loose sand beneath them as if her fingers are digging into life itself. Her hair blows into her face, drenched from the rain, from her failed drowning. Every fiber of her being aches.

And yet she's breathing.

And yet she can speak.

"A crown won't save you, Carly Volkov."

"I'm saving my-fucking-self, Texas Lovell."

Blade against blade, muscle to muscle,, she meets the beast standing in the way of her fairytale with her full force. When she screams, he roars — and when she bleeds, he triumphs — and the loop goes on and on endlessly. Her sickle slices clean across his back, he claws at the dirt in his eyes, the waves approach and flee, and the lightning illuminates all the terrible things she can't escape. They match each other scar for scar.

"Guess I'm just selfish like that." He scolds her like she's child, like she's only seventeen, like there's ever been one thing in this tiny existence that could be called fair. She doesn't owe him a damn thing. No one knows Carly Volkov as deeply as herself, nine chapters deep into her unpublished memoir and with countless more to write. Who is he to take that from her? Who is she to steal from him? They play tug-of-war with their survival. "Now you're getting it."

His spear point glares at her face, and she slaps it away as if it's not coated with her blood. Her eyes glare daggers into his soul, manifesting a blade ripping through his heart. "So tell me, Volkov. Are you taking what you want or just begging for scraps?" The thunder drums a funeral march, and they sway to it, hurt to it. He slams into her, and she tumbles like a princess slipping from her pedestal. "You're convincing yourself, not me." His spear strikes a familiar nerve.

The agony that flares is a feeling she can retrace behind her eyelids. Red as her rage, red as her humanity; she thrashes in the water and glares up at his purple sneer, at his hatefulness and his honesty and the way she just wants to bash his skull in. Over and over, all because she wants to, and nothing to do with being doped up on her own self-hatred. "I'm taking it. It's mine." She says it over the churning water, over the sounds of her pain, his attempts to drown her. "So get the fuck out of my way."

For the longest time — for a terribly brief amount of time — the world has tried and failed to snuff Carly Volkov out.

Two bullets could rip through her body, a metal rod could break her bones, her best friend could die on national television, she could get rigged into the Games only a month after nearly cementing a place for herself in the Capitol. And she would work her fingernails to bloody nubs dragging herself through the carnage, over every obstacle in her path, against any and all odds foolish enough to stack themselves against her. Simply because she wills it so.

She's already proven this and more.

But she still remembers those days in physical therapy with Aneesa, hands held as they would talk about all of the things they would never have. And Carly would smirk, and she'd squeeze her friend's palm all the more tighter, and she'd dare to hope for something bigger. Brighter. Penthouse suite, roses on every open surface, more knowledge than a girl from Nine could ever know what to do with, a place in a world that would value her, support her, want her.

The tragedy is that Carly has resented the life she's now so terrified of losing.

Now all of her greenest pastures are soaked crimson.

There's a burning sun just behind the clouds — dark and thundering and so full of fear, of rage. Lightning dances in the sky as she goes back in time. She drops a handful of dirt atop Aneesa's casket, stares up at Andrew Priest's face like a northern star, in the distance she can almost make out the sound of Tune's voice screaming in pain. Through all of her deepest hurts, she has survived; she stepped out of that cave and into the day.

"And look where that's gotten you."

In the water grappling with her own death, knuckles white as bone around the hilt of her sickle, spitting up water and blood as her head rises in and out of the choppy waves. There's a shark with purple eyes, but he looks like a boy, and he has the gall to say the same thing she's heard for the better part of her life: "No." He claims she won't win, refuses to allow some small flicker of hope that she could still trick her way out of this. The thunder claps as if to wake her, to urge her to her senses.

Bite for bite, their blades carve out pieces of one another — until the water is red as her passion, and the day is dark as his fury, and the end is coated with every single shade of them. "Fuck you," she barks just as harshly as him, all thanks to her own emotions and her own power and her own will to go out with every fiber of her being fighting. She slices her sickle across the river's surface, a mock swing only to make him flinch and to send a wave rising to meet Tex's eyes.

And she makes a break for the shore, tries to ignore the way her skin feels like it's unraveling around herself and how every step feels like she's shouldering the storm raging overhead. But she claws her way up the muddy bank, gasping desperately and with every ounce of her strength, grass and blood and grime beneath her, until there's nothing but her feet on the earth and the feeling of the inevitable just over her shoulder, always closing in, following like a shadow. But damn the fear.

She runs with what little energy she can spare, boots mimicking the drumming sound above her, in her own chest. Until she reaches the tree-line, open palms crashing against bark. She struggles to find her breath, hands shaking with the flood of adrenaline and the trickle of blood she's losing. "Do something," she croaks out quietly, voice too strained to be sensible. She swallows, grimaces, sinks her nails into the wood and starts ripping with the full extent of her strength.

"Fucking do something!" Splinters, sawdust, her every nerve ending stings as she peels off the unassuming bark of a wide tree, revealing the inner machinations of a hidden camera within the trunk. The perfect viewing spot to see the war that has taken place along the river. She places her hands on either side of the lens, forcing herself to be the central focus. "Look at me, gamemakers. What the fuck are you all doing? Help me!" She dares a glance over her shoulder, at her shadow, emerging from the depths and approaching in her wake.

"Do you want an addict from Twelve as your victor? He's going to kill me. You have—" she struggles to think of some loophole, some magic password to make the arena open up and transport her to safety. "You know I'm better for the narrative. I don't care what you do, make all these trees fall and crush him, hit him with a lightning bolt. Just save me!" Her voice is as raw as the tears streaming down her face, fists crashing against the sides of the camera, driving the point of her desperation home.

She never planned to go back there.

But she'd give anything.

Wiping her tears in the silence, in the sound of her own pleas going unanswered, she turns on her heels to face the monster running straight for her. And she inhales, and she clenches her jaw, and she forces herself to realize that the only person in this world that can save her is herself. So she runs to meet him, to meet the deciding blow, and she screams at the top of her lungs like it's the most honest thing she's ever said.

I will not go quietly.