Cutting The Ties (Day 6; M vs. A vs. S)

Sold my cold life
A heavy stone
Sold my red horse
For a venture home

Alexander Hood —

Alexander's sword came crashing down with much more force than she'd expected, only without the body in the way to slow the blade's descent. It hit the ice near her feet with a clear, clean ringing of metal on metal — like a bell, almost — and the blade sung with reverberations in her hand. This, fatally, drew Alexander's attention away from both the spiderwebbing of shatter marks that grew out of the area beneath her feet and from the new knife that Sawyer sent flying her way. She didn't need to look to know that there was now a length of silver stuck in the side of her face; she could feel the tip of the cold blade in her mouth, though the sudden metallic taste was more from the blood that was pouring in with it.

She howled in pain, though every movement of her face caused the knife to bite harder, its two sharp edges lacerating the delicate tissue on either side. Every sharp intake of breath likewise was accompanied by the searing pain of her stomach knife, every stroke of her falchion paired with a jolt from the blade buried in her chest. It hurt to fight, it hurt to move, it hurt to simply exist. It was in that instant that Alexander knew she would not make it another ten minutes, another hour. Sawyer had won this round, and even if Mace brought about the boy's demise, she would surely bleed to death before they could patch her up.

Knowing that she was going to die didn't make the pain any easier to bear. She tried to grit her teeth, to squeeze her eyes shut and wait for the end, though the knife in her cheek made it agony to so much as blink. She tried to hiss, to growl, to roar, to yell, to do anything to lessen the extent of the damage she felt, but she couldn't muster the battle high that had allowed her to ignore her severed little finger the day before — and that was a mere scratch in comparison — but today, even parting her cracked lips to allow the blood to drain from her mouth hurt. Unable to do anything else to express the blinding torture that emanated from Sawyer's three knives, she tightened her grip on her sword and pounded her foot on the ice, once, twice —

CRACK!

Before she knew what was happening, Alexander was up to her chest in frigid water, desperately trying to support herself on the ice so as to not be dragged away by the fierce current. Through the transparent ice just downstream, she could see the water dyed red with her blood as the water beneath the ice sheet sucked it from her body, like a too-thirsty mosquito that would never be satisfied. The cold assailed her, a thousand tiny daggers covering every inch of her, little brothers to the three knives already buried in her flesh. Shivering started instantly, involuntary muscle contractions forcing movement around the blades. A tortured cry escaped her, sending a spray of blood onto the ice in front of her, where it froze instantly. Whether it had risen from her stomach or her chest or simply gushed into her mouth from the hole in her cheek was beyond Alexander and not something she would care to think about if she had the mental capacity to focus on anything but keeping her head above water.

She struggled to push herself up out of the hole, tremors wracking her arms and shivers wracking the rest of her body. But the ice was too difficult to get a steady hold on, and Alexander barely had the strength to maintain her current position. So this was it. This was how she was going to die: a sitting duck, freezing to death and bleeding to death with nothing to do to fight back. Her falchion lay next to her hole, glossy with blood as always, ready for its master to resume combat. She never would be, though. Somehow she understood that she'd swung it for the last time.

Hadn't she told herself just minutes before — minutes before? hours before? years before? — that she didn't want to go out this way? That she didn't want her body carried away by the current, feeble and limp 'til the glacial water froze her limbs rigid in whatever pose she held, an icy statue not for display but for a well-crafted pine box — a box, that like her, hailed from District Seven, and a box, that like her, would be hidden away in the ground, slowly rotting until all of Panem forgot that the both of them ever existed.

For whatever reason, thinking of the coffin calmed her. Lumber was familiar, and pine had a nice scent to it. Warm and inviting. The exact antithesis of the Arena. For a moment, she wished she were there: sound asleep in an Alexander-sized room of wood that, in all probability, she herself had helped to mold from a tree. She'd built her coffin and now Alexander Hood would get to lie in it — that was the saying, wasn't it? But not just yet. She had to get out of this frozen pit first, had to keep herself from drowning. Maybe Mace would help his brother out. But if he didn't, that was just as well. She wasn't about to ask him for a hand, but she wouldn't turn it down either; she was in no position to do much of anything at this point.