darkest before the dawn - [meg]

She doesn’t even know who she is any more. Once upon a time, she would have been ravaged by a whirlwind of nervous emotions during this party, so worried about impressing everyone here that she forgot to relax and actually enjoy it. Now, she was completely relaxed, because she didn’t give a damn about how anyone here felt of her. The urge to rip off her beaded shawl and shake her stump in the guests’ faces was almost overwhelming: a statement to say ‘Fuck you and your mollycoddling, I’m not a fucking stupid career and I never will be again!’

It was as if the amputation of her arm had also amputated any urge in her to fight. Now, she looked at the games as hopeless. When was the last time her district had even had a victor? They all died in the end. All those stupid well trained tributes that almost got home, got the districts hopes up, but were ultimately defeated, outsmarted, outfought. And what would happen if one were to become a victor, anyhow? You’d be so badly scarred, disfigured, yet another cripple. An accident involving a boat had mutilated Iosanna’s mind so badly, she couldn’t imagine the effect of an intentional accident with a person.

Expensive tissue puffs in turquoise and light pink dangled from the rooves in the downstairs of the house. The carpet, thick like whipped cream, had been especially steam cleaned, and real pearls from her father’s farm lined the food table. The house was like a mummy: prettily, expensively decorated on the outside while Iosanna’s corpse beneath mouldered and rotted. And like with the mummy, it was as if no one wanted to get too close, because of the bacteria that might be lurking underneath. She found it strange how people bandaged their corpses. The endless lengths of bandage had done nothing to regrow her arm, as they had not helped to heal the dead.

She took a glass of champagne off the tray of a smartly dressed waiter. If this night was to continue as it was, she would need an awful lot of alcohol to dull the pain. As codine and morphine has washed around the physical pain in the hospital, the alcohol stopped her mind scratching at the inside of her skull, begging to be let out. And that was a much worse sort of pain.

The sight of her old friends dancing made her want to vomit, and then induced the urge to find stronger alcohol. She knew where her parents hid it, sure, but there was a good chance her mother would be in the kitchen, fussing over the hors d’oeuvres, guarding the gin like a dragon with her eggs. Except that simile actually implied that she was a good mother, for the first time ever. The blonde, bouncy girls had not talked to her since the accident. Surely, they were not afraid that amputation was catching? But that was the way it seemed, as they were avoiding even making eye contact with her. Once, these two girls and Iosanna had shared everything with each other. They giggled over gossip and secrets and the hottest career boys. Now, it seemed that she was the one being giggled over, and all because of something that she could not help.

Good riddance. She didn’t want them to talk to her, anyhow. Forget amputation catching, she didn’t want to catch their immature stupidity. If the accident had given her one thing, it had made her grow up awful fast. She couldn’t believe that it was just over a year ago that she was there giggling with them. Now, she realised just how stupid they looked, just how disgusted she was by the fact they were ignoring her. And yet, part of her longed to be dancing there with them.

They were all the same. All the girls here, giggling over those who had made fashion blunders and how good the boys looked in suits. Gossiping over who was lifting what weights in training, who was the best with swords and throwing knives and harpoons. There was not a single person that she wanted to talk to here, because she knew that they were all the same.

Yet, someone very different walked into the main party room. Had Ilanora not been looking, she wouldn’t have notice the girl, and yet she stood, as does a sparrow in a room of parrots. Her hair soaked with the rain that rattled the windowpanes, her everyday clothes were completely out of place in the swirl of expensive bejewelled dresses and pressed tuxedos. The effort that she had put in to her outfit seemed to be non-existent, and so Iosanna decided to talk to her, for want of anyone human to talk to.

“How’d you manage to get past the bouncers, then?” ‘Sanna said creeping up beside the sparrow-girl, her conversation as per usual kept to a bare minimum. It was, after all, her party, and surely tonight if ever she could talk to whomever she wanted, even if they didn’t fit the typical career stereotype that the party was aimed at. It was the stereotype that Iosanna no longer could fit into

OOC: Lol same lyrics