`Til' I Collapse-- [Day2][Fight-Blythe&Eliana]

Persistent warmth and prolonged jogging loosened Eliana Ledessa's grip on her heavy trident as she jogged through what seemed like endless dunes of sand. It was the worst run she'd ever been on; the ground slipped and slid and sank beneath her steps and the air was bad to breathe, filled with little particles and tasting stale. Sweat lubricated her every contact surface - her feet in her shoes, her clothes on her skin, her hand on her lifeline weapon. Finally the inevitable arrived and the trident slid from her hand, rotating on its way down and catching at her ankles. Eliana took a hard fall, exhausted and manic and wide-eyed; there was a brief plummet and a flash of red and then a ground that felt much less forgiving than it ought to have.
...
That was then and this is now. Eliana awakens although she isn't sure based on the disorienting pain she's experiencing that stems from her corneas. She fumbles around for her trident and clutches it, hugs it to herself for a moment. She keeps her eyes reflexively shut tight but the backs of her lids flash warning lights at her brain, warnings she should heed but doesn't when she brashly attempts to open the eyes. Excruciating, searing pain greets her and she shuts them quickly like the lid of a screaming pandora's box. With shaking fingers Eliana brushes the surfaces of her knees, as if to caress rather than dislodge the million tiny red granules that have made a million tiny pink indentations in her flesh. She worries that she'll never again have a body uncontaminated by sand.
It is the first time the reality of the arena hits her, and it is a gateway realization because then she realizes that she cannot see and that is when Eliana Ledessa begins to cry.
...
Weeping and walking are nearly indistinguishable. Eliana doesn't care where she goes but she listens hard in an attempt to convince herself she'd run from another tribute if she could. The tears are, at this point, inadvertent - a side effect of infected eyes, the body's last-ditch attempt to right a wrong.
Time is meaningless now. She decides during the hours that she'll divide her days into asleep and awake until she dies. Eliana has not accepted death but she has resigned herself to it; every faith she had in her plan to outsmart the Hunger Games has been thoroughly foiled by a few well-placed grains of sand.
...
The anthem breaks her monotony, startlingly unstartling in a world of visual and aural silence. It must be something about the flatness of the notes. Maybe it doesn't strike her because she doesn't see the faces of the dead. Eliana remembers sitting on the train, matching names to faces because she knew it could help her, but even that has been taken from her now.
She sleeps. Fitfully.
...
Wandering is an acceptable alternative to standing, so Eliana wanders. She would've gotten lost in the sand anyway, but even so resents her complete lack of navigational capabilities. Suddenly a voice reaches her, hovering on the stagnant air. Eliana clutches at it but does not dare to call out to inquire who speaks; to do so would be to give away immediately her visual impairment. Instead, because she can think of nothing she finds less idiotic, Eliana sinks into silent hunter mode, briefly recalling scenes from her private training session. Her feet are now allowed to press deeply, silently, into the sand for a stealthy approach. and she wipes her hands nervously on the jumpsuit before grasping the trident again, held as if she has any idea how to go after the source with it.

Nothing she has felt so far compares to the six inches Eliana is sure her stomach just dropped. Suddenly everything between her hips and her ribcage feels completely empty, evacuated: a vacuum. All because of a little whoosh and some air rushing past her skin, tickling the surface but mercifully passing over. Not intentionally, she's sure. I've been found. And she has! Stupid, stupid, stupid. Stupid to think she could sneak up on someone, lacking her own vision capabilities, and expect herself to retain the upper hand. The Hunger Games does not allow for upper hands, at least not for long and not by contrivance. Random chance alone determines advantage or disadvantages.
In her naivete, Eliana continues to refuse this fact. She wants to put her mind to work, she wants to apply logic and cunning and all of those things she tried to convey alone in a room with the Gamemakers. I understand fear. I understand what aloneness does. Now if I can just keep them away from myself-
...
Her body has reacted before her brain. It seizes her mouth: "Jerk! Get away!"
It seizes her stomach: the drop, the vacuum.
It seizes her hands, her torso: suddenly the trident is no longer a slippery thing to be clutched but an extension of her slender arms; it is a thing for slashing, wiping a scar of motion across the area in front of her.

(Then her brain reacts, but she tells it to be quiet, because as far as times where fear is inconvenient go, this is probably on top of the list.)

When Eliana feels her trident rip its claws through flesh, she knows she should feel cold but instead she feels this hot sated anger. Burning satisfaction wells in her chest and for a moment she wrenches her swollen eyes open and catches a glimpse of red, red, all around before the nanosecond has ended and pain forces them shut again. When the wrathful lava cools, her grim smile fades, her blood hardens and she steps back a bit to compensate for the loss in balance that accompanies slashing with a large trident for the first time.

She congratulates herself for keeping calm and carrying on but deep down Eliana wants that satisfied rush of blood to return to her. But a cool head is more useful than a warm heart in the Hunger Games and she doesn--
another whoosh of air hisses over her skin, her jumpsuit, her face; she recoils; she is frustrated. Suddenly she is herself, sitting in history class, and the class clown's poking her in the back of the neck with a pencil and she says quit it, jerk (except with her speech quirk it sounds like 'juck') and she's friends with enough of the popular girls to act madder than she actually is and he just keeps poking her, prodding her into a fit-
Suddenly she is herself, blind and speechless (temporarily) and oh so offended in the middle of miles of lousy endless red sand dunes. Oh yes she is offended as hell and rife with indignance but what can she do? Slash at him again? Yeah, it's a viable option but maybe there's a more practical way to end this annoyance? Eliana internally sighs. If she had open eyes she would roll them.
Oh god yes she would roll them so hard right now.
"Stop," she groans in exasperation, dragging it out. Yes. This is an annoyance. This is a boy poking the back of her neck.
Eliana'd always wanted to stab that boy anyway.
Yay for second chances.

When her trusty trident grows tentative and simply skims the skin of her adversary, Eliana tenses up and really goes cold for a moment. The emptiness in her gut has worked its way up her body and suddenly her arms are hollow and her neck is hollow and her brain stem too.
She is afraid.
She is blind and holding a freaking trident, for chrissake and she can't even see where her opponent is and he won't stop, he just won't stop-

When she next swings out with the trident she's practically asking for it to be blocked. Shaky, tentative. Slow. Eliana is hungry and thirsty and the more her adrenaline slinks away the more she has room for realism.

Eliana regroups when she feels her clumsily-swung trident pushed gently away. The response puzzles her, and yet she knows subconsciously that its tenderness means she has a moment to still her sprinting heart. She exhales shakily through her nose, clenches her upper arms close as if that can stop the chills racking them, and takes her left hand off the trident (she'd been holding it two-handed for the needed stability help) so that she can anxiously roll it into and out of a fist. Yet her conscious mind insists that she keep the trident held out halfheartedly, sort of diagonally as if she could hope to defend herself in some way from her antagonist. Her conscious mind insists that she keep her head.
You need to keep your head. You need to regroup, you need to stand firm and keep slashing and stabbing until this boy runs away or dies. He is just a teenage boy. He is probably afraid! You can do this. You know the game. Slashing and stabbing. He has to die. You don't have a problem with this. No, you don't. Slashing and stabbing.
Then she hears him say her name.
Eliana Ledessa nearly loses her mind.

Her face twists in agony when she hears it because she is being ripped in two, there is the common sense side and the Eliana Ledessa side of her brain and they're playing tug o'war with her body- maybe he wants to help- but no, that can't be possible,- slashing and stabbing-
"What?" she spits as if he has insulted her unforgivably. "What do you wa-"

Hard, spiked metal crashes into her wrist with more force than Eliana's ever experienced before; it hits so hard the trident immediately falls to the ground, hits so hard she blindly fears for a flashing moment that her arm's being ripped off at the elbow; hits so hard that she hears a CRACK and screams.
It begins as the surprised, girlish shriek of surprise, but before long Eliana's voice has descended into the primal, rough yell of "AHHHHHHHHHHHH-" and then she gets a hold of herself well sort of and it becomes "AHH- ah- ah- ah-" surging forth with every labored, pain-stricken breath. She can't feel her right hand anymore and doesn't really try because the pain receptors everywhere near that part of her body are firing like mad.

Hot tears thrash their way through Eliana's shut eyelids and crawl sickeningly across her cheeks; they burn, burn against the tremulous chills of her skin and she bares her teeth in pain and frustration. "Why would you do that?" she whispers at him and her knees are shaking so hard she gives in and sinks to the grainy sand, using her left hand for balance on the ground because she can't feel her right but her fingers are touching something cold and she remembers why she's here-

Curling her fingers awkwardly around the trident - she's always been right-handed - Eliana attempts to heft the thing and ends up wrapping her wrist and forearm around it as she stands, curling it to her chest, in an attempt to not let it drop from her clumsy hand. Unsteadily, she holds it out in what she hopes is the boy's direction. It slips a bit and she readjusts her grip. "Why would you do that," she whispers, "to a girl who can't- I can't- see!"
She flails swings the trident out again, bracing its end against her body and her knees are bent facing apart so she just knows she looks ridiculous but is past the point of caring by now-
Her momentum carries her around as she spins forward.

Eliana feels her feeble swipe being blocked again and can't think of a reason to be surprised. She does, however, have several to be frustrated, and oh she is frustrated, yes. Blind. Blind! Even though she knows that her eyeballs themselves are functioning - this is hopefully not a permanent blindness - in this particular moment she is functionally sightless and battling an adversary and she just hates how unfair it all is! Tears are still leaking from between her eyelids at a steady rate and her breath is still coming in ragged, pained gasps. Trying to remember where her trident was when it was blocked, she readjusts her tenuous grip on the thing and swings again, knowing before she does that it will find no target.