this is melodrama | epa leisure, day 4 pt 1

The thing about injuries acquired in ways he’d never had them before: they hurt in ways he’d never felt. How did one heal themselves of alien spotlight burn? How did one even come to accept the truth of that happening in the first place? Yes, this was the Hunger Games and anything could happen but- how? Why?

Jacks chest rose and fell, his legs ached from the effort of carrying him away as quickly as they could. Emerson, Wolf- none of them were dead. They lived. They survived whatever madness had seemingly been set up to kill them. Jack tried not to think about what that meant, what it would’ve been like for his family to not have anything left to bury. No coffin to close in acceptance. It was more cruel than death alone, he thought. It was more cruel than the simple stop. This would’ve been different: erased entirely, like a misspelled name on a callback sheet. Gone with it, any opportunity of its existence.

“I’m glad we didn’t-” he said to them both. He couldn’t find the rest of the words but he knew they felt them.