No Longer Alone {Liliana vs. Eliana Fight}

She'd run. Simple as that.
When Eliana Ledessa had struck the young man with the end of her trident and received no blow in return, she did not stick around, because she knew what was happening. A human's body can only be battered so much before it signs off on sustaining life. It says, okay, I've paid my dues, but I can't do this anymore.
It says, I'm out.

Eliana worries that her body is doing that exact thing right now. She'd watched the Anthem between blurry cracks in her eyelids, pretending she knew the faces in the sky. Matching random names to them. Names of people from home - her friends, her not-friends, her mother and father and her history teacher and that guy she met in a sandwich shop one time. Putting faces on the dead brings them back to life, simple as that: it lets her play pretend. Playing pretend is something Eliana has always been rather good at.
When the anthem was over, she slept soundly. In the morning, she could see again, but there was a strong sting that lingered on her eyes whether she had them open or closed. At first, she'd thought someone had attacked her in the night - opening your eyes after a day of blindness and seeing red red all around was not exactly conducive to believing your retinas. But that was the nature of this Arena: it liked to play pretend, too. Only it liked to play pretend that you were dead.

Eliana just walks now. She started off stranded in the middle of the hopeless fracking desert but eventually caught sight of a...tower? and is now venturing in that direction. Her steps are slow and deliberate not for patience or lack of haste, but for physical weariness: Eliana believes her body may be giving up on her, and while she doesn't want to push herself, she certainly isn't going to find any nourishment in the middle of the hopeless fracking desert! There has to be water somewhere, right? Surely not all the tributes are about to die of dehydration like she is?
And oh, how it feels like dying. In painful juxtaposition to the perfect weather, her throat burns like a day hotter than Eliana's ever felt. It burns and aches and stings with every breath; it punishes her for breathing, punishes her for not breathing, castigates her for swallowing and absolutely lambastes her for coughing. But having a tongue swollen enough to practically block her mouth feels a lot like being strangled to Eliana, and even the pain of swallowing is preferable to being strangled.
She divides her vision into three blocks: red sand at her feet, blue sky above the horizon, and a rectangular tower toward which she trudges. Focusing on keeping these blocks distinct and mostly unmoving chases away the delusions and hallucinations that tease at the corners of her mind and crawl beneath her conscious thoughts. I must not lapse in thinking. I must stay sane. I will stay sane. Still, there's no denying that an hour ago she gasped inadvertently when a telephone pole appeared right in front of her and disappeared nanoseconds before she collided into it.

Another feature presents itself on the landscape, a figure. Eliana chides herself into hyper-wakefulness, eyes bugging from the strain of keeping a clear head. Everyone is a threat.
She remembers her initial plan of sneaking up on everyone and slitting their throats and immediately commences convincing herself that she is sneaking up on the strange person. (Even in an attentive state, Eliana is subtly overcome by delusions such as these: that she could possibly be covert in a barren landscape.)
But her attempt at surreptitious behavior is quickly subverted when the figure, now revealed to be a blonde girl, turns and begins to accelerate in Eliana's direction. Quickly deciding she has enough time to prepare, Eliana takes her backpack off and hefts her trident from her left shoulder. The effort brings to mental light a dull throb in her right (broken) wrist, one which Eliana steadfastly pretends she is ignoring. As the girl reaches her, brandishing a rather formidable axe (oh crap oh crap oh shit that looked smaller from far away) Eliana swings with calculated timing, both hands on the trident's handle, and is relieved that the thing doesn't snap when she uses it to block the axe's trajectory.
Pain explodes in her wrist.

Emitting a barely-audible nnf through her bared teeth, Eliana takes the moment to size the other girl up while they both recover.
It really is quite a big axe.
"We don't have to do this, y'know," she says clearly. "Fight. Could just both of us get going, find watah or somethin'."
She steps back with raised eyebrows, forcing herself to hide the grimace of pain, and holds up her hands as if in truce (her left hand is still clasped firmly around her trident).
Somewhere in her brain, Eliana knows that her attempt at diplomacy has no chance of success. Now that she can see her opponent's weapon, she's not sure she likes looking at the thing - danger's more immediate. Not that there's a choice involved for her at this point, but at least her opponent has one.

Eliana waits and watches, body tense, while the other girl's face clouds for a second or two in thought. Be as it may that the girl appears to be at least contemplating Eliana's offer, the brunette is not letting her guard down no not for a single second! and her eyes settle into narrowed half-moons. Though they're still standing too far apart for either to land a decent blow, as far as Eliana's judgement tells her, the other girl ends up readying her axe for another attack.
So this is how it's going to be?
Eliana barely flinches as the axe sails wildly in front of her, hardly ghosting her with its breath. Yes, it takes restraint to stand still, but she's coldly calculating and completely clear-headed now, so she's assured that the blade won't touch her skin just by watching its early trajectory. Her pale, usually-empty face twists into a grimace of contempt - and more than a little betrayal; she won't bother to hide it - but her body reacts immediately. The moment the blonde's axe has passed Eliana's body, she puts her right hand on the trident and stabs forward viciously, instantaneously, wanting desperately to allow the adversary no reaction time. A fair fight this may be, but that doesn't mean Eliana is going to fight fair.

An involuntary snarl rips pain into Eliana's throat when the other girl nearly dodges her trident's teeth. The brunette screams inside her head to vent frustration, biting her cracked lower lip and whitening her knuckles on the trident's handle. Her right wrist aches so; it feels wobbly, like a poor-quality attachment of her arm to the trident that could sever at any moment. But with a giant axe blade being swung at her once more, Eliana tries not to think about severed things too much.
Caught by surprise when her shaky-looking adversary actually manages to heft the axe at her, Eliana instantly knows she has to raise her trident to block the blow. Yet her right wrist chooses that moment to sent a tense jolt of pain up her arm, and for a moment she flinches, hesitates, and then the axe is coming at her and all she can do is try to lean back. Still, it grazes Eliana's skin, the sharp blade easily slicing apart the fabric of her jumpsuit. Cringing and hissing a sharp exhale between her teeth, Eliana jumps back a step and glances from her stomach to the girl and back. Contrasted to the temporary numbness that followed when the boy from yesterday broke her wrist, the slice on her tender stomach stinging like the motherfracking dickens! It feels like her innards burn and the skin around her bellybutton throbs hotly.
The suddenness of the pain, the surprise of the adversary's capability to attack at all, bring instant stunned-tears to Eliana's eyes and for a few frightening moments, her vision flashes red. For a few frightening moments, she wants nothing but to rip and tear and beat and cry at her opponent, flail the rod in her hand at the blonde and bludgeon her until she hurts like Eliana hurts. I want to get her back is what I want. Except her thoughts at the time are not so coherent; they are not coherent at all; they are a clumsily hashed-together conglomeration of awful feelings and rage and bitter betrayal. For a few moments, Eliana is a hair's breadth away from losing control.

Then she blinks and inhales hard through her nose so that her eyes are wide and her vision and mind are clear of red. Keep your head.
One second.
For one full second Eliana locks both eyes onto the blonde teenager she is fighting. She adjusts her grip, now strong and firm, on the trident's handle. She takes that second to centralize all of the mental and physical energy that she has until it is all gathered up in the middle of her and ready to be channeled. Channeled in a controlled, deadly-focused fashion.
Eliana Ledessa narrows her icy-blue eyes and lunges forward in the stab she practiced so diligently during those hours of weapon study in the Training Center.

Eliana is not surprised when her trident buries through the blonde girl's neck and then slashes through to the other side, but she is pretty horrified. Once the blood appears, that is. Within a matter of seconds, sticky dark-red liquid is rushing down the neck of the other tribute; it creeps atop her shoulders and dives from the precipices of her collarbone. Feeling nauseous, Eliana yanks her trident protectively to herself, practically dizzy for the other girl. No, no, no. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. I was just supposed to slit her throat and then she's supposed to just die, right? So why isn't she dead?

Having no experience in killing and no knowledge of the act aside from what pop culture has provided her - Eliana's seen a hundred fights-to-the-death in previous Hunger Games but they happen so fast that she never pinpointed which blow did the victim in - the brunette is completely startled to learn that slicing someone's neck open does not cause them to immediately drop dead. The other girl's saying something, saying to shut up, and Eliana's still thinking about why isn't she dead and surely the blood loss will drop her- so she blurts out "I didn't say anything," blurts it purely out of normal habit, but she's still so distracted and then suddenly the blonde is hefting an axe right for Eliana's head-
There's no time to step back or raise her trident to block the trajectory. There's no time to do anything but madly lean to the right as if she can just duck under it and for a moment she thinks she has-

A whoosh and a very slight shink as the sharp blade slices through skin and cartilage; it's the worst pain Eliana's ever experienced, a thousand thousand times worse than getting her wrist broken.
She staggers back in agony and shock, face gaping open like she's had her eyeballs popped out and her mouth forced open and now she thinks she may die of blood loss; every nerve in her head is shouting RED ALERT, RED ALERT, ABORT ABORT but there's nothing she can do! Run? Run?! In this condition?! The tears streaming down her face are practically icicles compared to the scalding heat of the blood that now runs down her neck and it's an eye for an eye in this fairest of fights. Eliana half-screams, half-gurgles out a ragged yell of agony; she knows somewhere in the back of her mind that she should do something, anything to stem the blood loss but if she tries to press something to it she'll get her head sliced off while her back is turned and plus, she really, really does not want to think about touching that lack of ear.

Sobbing, so dizzy her world rocks and rotates like a ship at sea, Eliana stumbles forward in what she imagines to be a valiant charge. Her fingers shake on the trident so hard it's a wonder she doesn't drop the damned thing; as she clambers forth through the sand that feels so deep now and inhibiting, like it's sucking her feet down and inviting them to stay, the brunette tries to vomit but there's nothing in her stomach so what little her body can manage just dribbles down her chin in the closest approximation of insanity she's physically managed thus far.
Her mouth now opens even wider, trying desperately to suck in all the fresh air she can to rid herself of that horrible vomit taste and the acrid smell and oh, her throat burns so badly she just wants to die and with acid tears obscuring her eyes Eliana Ledessa slashes wildly with the only thing she's got.

While she thought she would maybe (if lucky) skim the surface of the other tribute's skin, the trident's wide-set blades turn out to have an advantage in that they spread the range of where the trident's central tip is aimed. As such, Eliana's weapon bites dutifully deep into the forehead of the blonde, marring her once-lovely face. But Eliana can't bring herself to regret it. She's mentally blind now, almost outside herself because she's so beside herself with the pain. She steps back and thinks she vomits but isn't sure.
Logic and cold calculation have been abandoned for the terror that lives in every drop of her blood seeping across her skin. It crawls down the back of her shirt and feels like violation. It is violation. Words emerge from the opponent's mouth but Eliana doesn't know words anymore. She doesn't know anything. She is a raging, wounded animal and she dodges an axe with hazy reflexes, immediately retaliating with a decisive swing of her trident.