live deliciously | h vs sb vs ck vs hags

I can feel the warmth from Axyl's hands before his fingers grip and shake me to wake up. I shouldn't be able to distinguish the callouses on his hand through layers of clothing, but I can. Or maybe I just think I can. I can't remember if I was sleeping or awake, my face towards the sky, stars dancing in my eyes that have nothing to do with the boy hovering over me.

His eyes reflect the darkness that hangs all around the arena this morning. Rising with a grunt, I run dirty hands over a dirty face, standing quickly and stretching up towards a purple black sky.

"We have to move," Axyl says to me. His sentences are always clipped, biting comments and observations that somehow befit the boy from Six. His words like his stance, like his movements, always quick. As if there isn't enough time to get out a full sentence.

I jump on Butch as the bear takes unsure steps forward, head swinging back and forth to figure out our location, our direction, anything. The ski mask is tight around my neck, more of a garter than anything to cover me. The overalls we pulled from the Mines hang limp around my body, but they're warmer than anything I can remember. 

We walk for what feels only like a few moments before I slip from Butch, a touch to his side. Axyl has turned once more, his jaw set and his bat raised as he tells me to stay close. The morning feels fated, noises from the ground and the sights of the other tributes a clarion call to death as laughter breaks all around us. The attack is quick and I spin on my heels, a gash against my side that tears through my overalls, blood disappearing in the darkness. I can see enough to know that my hand is smeared red. I touch it over my face, the warmth mixing with the taste of copper. 

The laughter is gone nearly as quickly as it comes and I turn to see Axyl swinging blindly at a girl, his lips curled in a snarl.

My mind has already made the decision for me as I watch him. My heart will catch up in time. We've wandered through the night for so long that I've forgotten the taste of nothing but war and violence on my tongue, forgotten how the sun kisses the trees as it rises, forgotten how to rise instead of fall. Mornings now taste of ichor, a sadness I swallow as I sprint the Axyl's side.

It's us or them. It's always been that way, hasn't it?

"You guys hear that, right?" The giggling breeze catching on branches becomes louder the deeper we tread.

Nothing like a leader, I've been forbidden from rushing ahead. There's a bruise on my neck from where netted rope caught me off guard. A constant aching concern that has come to remind me of Inga. ('Told you to stay up.') I sink into the footsteps she leaves, I call them gospel.

Leaning into the warmth of Izzy's shoulder, I solder my fingers to places they connect with her. Linking pinkies like molten brass, burning heat in spite of the absence of it. The looming trees mock my pink cheeks, flooded with the wrong sort of adrenaline.

No, but, really, are they laughing at me?

I've got a prey's instinct, a knack for knowing when things are about to go to shit. "That's not the wind."

It's not like I didn't know that horrors hid here, but I was kind of hoping they lived by the golden rule. Live and let live, you know?

Hope is a useless thing in places like this.

They swarm. Blackened fingers linked, grinning shadows with jagged teeth. I wonder if these hags can smell my fear. Watch the way my eyes dart side to side, muscles tensed and searching for a chance at escape.

Not a leader, not a fighter, not particularly a survivor either.

Fuck me, right?

"We have to do this." Axyl comes from behind with a fucked up baseball bat. For what it's worth, he sounds a little sorry. I know it's nothing personal, but all I can think about is the rip and tear of veins, the way blood would gush around the bite of metal. Nails aren't even that sharp.

"Swing and a miss!" Like it's all a game, like he wasn't trying to kill me. "Strike O-"

Lionel Estrada emerges next from the gloom. Ratty boy, named after a predator. Roaring at Axyl, with a sword that cuts to bone. I kind of want to be sick. "Oh holy shit. Oh fuck that looks like it hurts."

But it's smart, right? Two on one. If Axyl is focused on Lionel, he won't be aiming for me.

I nod at Izzy, scrambling for the pike at my side. Seeking assurance, seeking permission to be terrible. I run hemlock along the sharpened edge, letting the leaf weep.

I aim for Axyl's back-

[sage attacks lionel ; pike (axe)] [poison 1/3]
aFmRi2Revsaxe


[9.0 +1]

"SHIT! I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's really dark and the hags are freaking me out. I really didn't mean to-"

Fear. It tastes like the rain. It tickles against their skin, each scream, each pained huff of air, each defiant growl. The darkness swells like fog, wisps of it dancing between their fingertips. They cackle in the aftermath of the chaos: blood has been paid, but is it enough?

The tributes could swear the creatures are floating above the ground, but in the darkness it's too hard to know for sure. Clawed hands with gnarled knuckles reach out and grab at the tributes, ripping at clothing to reveal the soft flesh beneath. They rip strands of hair right from the scalp, dangle it over themselves and tickle their faces. More laughter: enjoying themselves like the tributes were no more than a box of toys that had been spilled out before them.

Fear. It tastes of honeysuckle; there's never enough. An entire vine bled dry and only a faint taste of sweetness to remember it by. Blood has been paid, but it simply is not enough.

Kill, the voices chant inside the tributes' heads: Kill, kill, kill.

In a flash, they're five feet up the trunks of the slender, limbless trees. Ten feet. Watching from above, eyes reflected in the inky blackness like unblinking stars. They wish to watch the destruction they've set in place as it unfolds: front row seats to a tragedy they crave.

Kill. Kill. Kill.

Louder, and louder, until it's all the tributes can hear. Until they aren't sure anymore if the vocies are coming from inside their heads or outside.

Kill. Kill. Kill. It mixes with the cackle-

Strength in numbers only fucking works when you outnumber your foes, never when each step you take in an arc means that someone stands right in front of you. I could swing my fists in the darkness and hit out at someone, our enemies approaching and circling like the armies of old, one step at a time. 

How the fuck are we gonna get out of this one alive?

Here's the thing: I don't think we will.

Axyl and I circle each other, taking deep breaths as the others dig out pieces of our flesh for trophies. My strike on one of the girls falls weak and I could chalk it up to lack of sleep, but I just fucking miscalculated, hadn't I?

Not about Axyl, never about him. He's been the compass that has been pointing me toward home since the day that I met him in the Training Center, lopsided grin and skin made of diamonds and a voice that would no doubt send me to my death. I cry out as the spear slashes and gashes my skin, coughing blood and spit. 

This, this fight, it's all wrong. It's rushed and ugly and I really fucking hate the way that my name cracks and breaks on Axyl's tongue. 

" Hugo, I - Too fuckin' many of 'em." He's wrong, he's gotta be. We can get out of this the way that we got out of the Mines, my back against his and our weapons held high.

But his swing is wide and clumsy and the blood loss is casting his face in white in the darkness, a beacon calling to the gods for the final offering. 

"We gotta double up. If I drop-" He pauses, and I turn to face him, a hand nearly outstretched, even if this is the last moment of tenderness, I can't bear to let the others see it. They don't deserve that version of him. The version that gave me a walkie talkie in the darkness. The version that laughs like a melody and curses like a sloppy drunk. 

As for the version of me, well, there's an acid tang in the back of my throat that burns when I swallow. Nausea slides through my stomach and it curls around my heart. 

"-run. Don't stay." It's the last sentence that barrels toward me like a freight train, the bile rising as anger fills my veins. He can't give up, not yet, at least.

"You're not going anywhere, idiot. Just - fucking - swing that fucking bat like you mean it! Fuck, man."

Skin splits, unwoven like threads of fleshy sinew. I hold cruelty in my grasp, lips stretching around an incredulous smile. I laugh, like the monsters, at the result of my actions. I don't mean to do that either, it's a humorless sound. Bursting like the blood vessels I'd destroyed. Lionel will be lucky if he lives long enough for that wound to become a scar. Though I struck because I was afraid it looks no prettier than the wound Inga made on Hugo.

Wanting to hurt does not make for deeper wounds. Gentle violence will not turn my blade into feathers.

I swallow around a wave of nausea. The stale chips sitting high in my esophagus like shards of glass.

don't freak out.

In my mind's eye, Izzy does not bleed red like the others. It's something richer, closer to the earth. The dark purple of mulled wine. A part of me wants to protect it, like the lilies I'd stowed in the garden during summer storms. As if I could place my body between her and the northern winds."Right." I nod. The hags laugh in my head. Making fun of the way my hands shake, now slick with blood.

I suppose I should feel accomplished for having struck anybody at all. I'm feeling feverish, I'm feeling frantic.

A voice I can't place calls out from the haze, and goosebumps erupt along my spine. It's fucking visceral, like I can feel my skin peeling off my bone. I whirl around, following the arc of Hugo's weapon to where it just barely misses Felicity. Girl made of shadow, apparently, with her dart in Inga's stomach.

"STOP!" At my most pathetic pleading with red palms.

There's no stopping any of this now. Perpetual motion, perpetual agony. We leave here broken or we do not leave at all.

I can't do this.

I don't want to do this.

Sage is a girl who has always laughed louder than the hollow between her ears, so good at pretending there is nothing there. She is not supposed to be in a place like this, she was supposed to rot in district Ten. Until her skin becomes bone and it all nourishes the earth.

Right now, I can't be Sage.

So I let the hag's screeching fill my thoughts, until they drown out everything else. Frantic, maddened, starving. Wanting.

Bloodshed. Carnage. Pain.

Wanting death.

I breathe through grit teeth, I heft my weapon over my shoulder.

I look for a fresh wound, I look to make it worse.

And, sure enough, I'm not scared right now.

I'm far, far away.