soften rough skin // starlords day 2

﹙    a m a t e r a s u    y a m a m o t o    ﹚

Death was unavoidable in the arena. That was first and foremost the reality of stepping foot into the Hunger Games - no matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter if you win or you die, death will touch you in some way, shape, or form.

She'd always heard that it must be lucky to be on this side of it, because in her world, death was something to be afraid of. Her father educated brilliant young minds in order to prepare them to make a difference in the world, and doubly so after a plague had swept throughout the nation last year. Her mother spent three quarters of her waking life in her lab, supposedly learning how to accomplish miracles like cure deafness or eradicate cancer so that such technology isn't monopolized by the Capitol, even though a) her deafness wasn't something to be cured, and b) everyone knew what would happen if she ever so much as intended to go public with her findings.

But having seen the way that Calamity from Twelve had choked on their own blood before collapsing like a house of cards, having seen how quickly disbelief had been replaced by a haunted, faraway gaze in Brennan's eyes, seeing how the line between life and death was so much more fragile than she ever could have imagined, now, she wasn't so sure.

Now, live or die, she'll have acquired the knowledge that she knows exactly what it looks like when someone realizes they're about to die. That she knows exactly what it looks like as the panic and the light in their eyes fades, as their rich, vibrant history goes down as just another death in the Games' nearly century long history. Worse, she hadn't even done it herself.

(She'll have to, if she survives. But alas, when Mother Nature took away one of her five senses, it wasn't the ability to see nightmares unfold before her very eyes).

It's curious, perhaps, how little Haize and Pierce seem unaffected by Calamity's death in turn. Perhaps the inoculations of their respective backgrounds made the death of a virtual stranger easier to bear - Pierce likely had all sympathy towards the dead trained out of him back in Two, whilst Haize had no doubt lost enough uncles, aunts, and cousins that death may as well have been an old friend for her.

Whereas she was poor little sheltered Amaterasu, complaining about her comfortable life because her mother loved her work more than she loved spending time with her own children.

Perhaps that's why she hangs back with Brennan for a moment instead of skipping along with the others. Perhaps that's why she fails to see the festive spirit of soaking in a springs, opting to merely dip her feet in the water and nothing more (and no, her modesty and the idea of each of her allies seeing her in anything less than her full uniform have nothing to do with it, thank you very much).

She itches to bring her diary out, to write her conflicted feelings like she had for years beforehand. One of her mother's few helpful suggestions, it had been, yet the idea of doing something so mundane even now in front of people unnerved her.

Tonight, then, when she takes first watch.

Belatedly, she realizes that there's a conversation going on around her, that Brennan (and his unfairly attractive slim body; why did he not submerge himself like Haize and Pierce had and spare her poor eyes) is finishing up a sentence, that the one word she's able to make out is-

"Yeah, some soda would be nice right about now," she agrees, remembering the rare times her father had managed to snag the cola from work and bring it home as a gift. Coke had always been her favorite.