kill your darlings (the reprise) day six

i am haunted by my hands around their throats. 

i cannot look at them without being reminded of the pulsing of their heartbeats: still strong, still proud. the people watching at home gaze upon them. they are still beautiful, they are still terrible. fate has taught them no lesson. no example has been made of their pretty little heads; no guillotine has removed the malignant growth from their shoulders. 

tomorrow. 

tomorrow, i'll rip their guts out - i'll tear the features from their pretty faces - i'll let their blood paint the arena red - i'll set them alight, burn their hair, blind them, pull one fingernail and then the next. i'll show everybody what you get when you are the capitol's sweetheart. i'll make a mockery of the whole institution. i'll show them how stupid they are, that i've been playing them the entire town, that they were so blinded by their self-importance that they didn't even realise the street kid decked up in career's clothes, right beneath their noses. 

tomorrow. 

not today, though. i'll give myself one more day. a reprieve, a moment to stop and rest and pull up the flowers one by one, get the dirt beneath my fingernails. i need a moment for the world to stop spinning, to collect myself. it can't be time to do the job yet, not if i'm not ready to do it perfectly. when it's time, i want to put on a fucking good show. 

tomorrow. 

this afternoon is long and easy. the hurt is dulled by the poison in our veins and minds. the urgency, too, is tempered. tomorrow seems like good enough. i braid their hair and make them daisy chains and i tell myself it's a brilliant, wonderful show. the more i kiss their cheeks and fawn over them, the more i clutch the stone andromache gave me to my chest and whisper into it, the more we greet eulalie with joy as we invite her back into the fold: all of these things will only make the revenge sweeter, only mean they fall from even higher. 

they are terrible, of course. they are everything i hate. everything i stand against, epitomised in human form. they are the flesh-and-blood, the discarded bones upon which we must climb in order to take back what the world owes us, we who have been waiting, worms beneath their feet, for too long. but even so, they are mine, in the sort of way you might trap a spider and feel love for it in the moments it spends encased within your wine glass. at some point, you must throw it outside, or flush it down the toilet, or tread on it with your father's boot. but not right away. for a moment you can just be a girl and a spider. 

look, i whisper to my spider-girls, who are all fangs and venom and dew-soaked webs. in the forest, there! i point to the shapes that almost glow there. a small herd of white ponies has gathered and stands grazing. 

we haven't spoken about what happened, yet. it is not very dignified, not very got-it-all-together of us, to have cried about cake and our mothers so publicly. 

back home in district four, they say that the pegasi eat only the secrets of pretty girls. i narrow my eyes at andromache and eulalie.

under my tongue, my own secret dissolves, a sour-sherbet candy with tomorrow in it's centre. i bite down upon it, a mandible-crush that tastes like lying to myself.

_[DARS]