.:wait and {bleed} :. shores

I try to make it through my life,
In my way, there's you...
I try to make it through these lies
And that's all I do

Thin tendrils of smoke drift lazily upwards from the smoldering tip of the cigarette between my fingers, one arm dangling over the arm of the couch and the other clasping the remote as dawn breaks in the Arena, the screen across from me flicking between tributes as they begin to stir from whatever sleep they had managed to get. Day Four has begun and twelve are dead – the Games are already halfway over, three more deaths closer to the end. I’m not surprised Emerald has made it this far - of course she has. She knew how to swing a sword before she knew her ABC’s, and I know that, had she not been Reaped this year, she would have been up and about two hours ago, flinging knives in the training center instead of getting ready for school, despite that fact that she’d be too old to go into the Games next year. Training is all she knows, all she ever cared about. The Arena must feel like nothing more than a bloody playground to her, a disturbing dream come true. No doubt she's absolutely reveling in it.

“Bam, bam!” Five year-old Jasper sits cross-legged in front of the TV, several toys strewn about on the floor around him, though his main focus is on two vaguely humanoid action figures clasped in each tiny fist. He seems to be playing out a battle between the two, running them into each other and swinging their stiff, armor-clad limbs in a mockery of a fight. He’s too preoccupied in his game to notice that I’m having trouble seeing the television over his curly blonde head, nor does he realize that his sound effects are drowning out the commentary between the two Capitolites covering the Games.

“Jasper, move out the way,” I grumble, too tired and lazy to simply move to the other end of the couch for a better view. I’m in nothing but a t-shirt and sweatpants, not having even taken a shower yet. I don’t mean to stay for long anyway, just a few minutes to see how my sister is faring. I haven’t exactly been keeping up with the last few days, going on simply what my siblings tell me has happened, and I’m not surprised to see Emerald relatively unscathed. I would expect nothing less from her. “And shut up, I can’t hear a thing with all the noise you’re making.”

“Daddy told you you're not s’posed to smoke in the house.” Jasper ignores me and goes about his game, and I scowl before taking a long drag of the cigarette between my fingers, blowing the smoke in his direction. He coughs, dropping the figures momentarily to wave his arms about in an attempt to fan away the fumes. “Stinky, gross!” He scoots a good three feet away, dragging his toys with him and leaving me with a clear view of the television. He sticks his tongue out at me before going back to his game, and I let out a dry chuckle. I hate kids.

The screen drifts between tributes before finally settling on Emerald and her ally, the District Four girl whose name I haven’t bothered to remember - something cliché that has to do with water. Emmy is awake and keeping watch as her ally sleeps, nothing interesting happening at the moment, and I’m just about to go back upstairs and start getting ready for school before an odd, buzzing sounds begins, humming through the speakers and waking the District Four girl from her sleep. The lake suddenly erupts into a horde of slick, black bodies that swarm toward the two girls on the shore. They scramble to their feet just as the screen goes black for one, two, three seconds, in which I’m left staring at the TV with a raised brow and a frown, curious and a little annoyed at the two Capitolites as they start gushing about this "exciting turn of events", and then its gone, revealing Emmy’s ally standing unharmed with a can of insect repellent and my sister on the ground with the dark, swollen things attached to her skin. She pulls them off one by one, and I resist the urge to laugh at her facial expression. She never did like getting her hands dirty.

“Beryl! Beryl, look at my action figure!” Jasper is suddenly clambering up onto the couch beside me, waving his little toy in my face and almost causing me to swallow the cigarette between my lips. Sputtering, I shove him off and shoot him a murderous glare. “I don’t care about your damn dolls, Jasper. I’m trying to watch TV.”

“Oooh, you said a bad word.” He points an accusing finger at me, but at my responding scowl he simply giggles and scurries back to his toys. I roll my eyes, reminding myself to never have kids, and turn my attention back to the television set just in time to see a flaming arrow suddenly embed itself in Emmy’s forearm.

I blink, startled and confused – what the hell did I miss? – before I see Viridian Harper and the District Twelve boy facing off against Emmy and her ally, axes swinging and arrows flying and taunts being thrown into the wind. A quiet, serene beach by the lake has suddenly become a battlefield in the span of mere seconds (nothing in the Arena stays peaceulf for long), and I find myself leaning forward, watching each flick of a knife or thrash of a flail carefully. Viridian Harper’s knee seems to be shattered – now when did that happen? – and the District Twelve boy looks a little worse for wear. It seems as though the odds are in my sister and her ally’s favor. I try to divide my attention between each tribute, looking for slip-ups, weaknesses, anything that could turn the battle around and leave my sister either one step closer to victory or one step through Death’s door.

But when another flaming arrow goes sailing into Emmy’s neck with a scarlet spray of blood and a swirl of smoke and fire, I feel my heart stutter over a beat, gray-blue eyes widening with surprise and locking on to her.

The next few seconds pass quickly, almost too fast for my mind to even register. What I can see, though, is quite a sight. Emmy is severely wounded, the bright green of her cloak billowing about her, flames swirling from the arrows embedded in her arm and her neck and blood pouring from the wounds, and she still keeps swinging. She looks every bit of the Career our parents made her up to be, chopping off Viridian Harper’s ear just as the boy from Twelve quickly notches another arrow and lets it fly. I don’t quite register what happens at first. There’s the whistle of the arrow through the air, a sickening crunch of bone and cartilage as Emmy’s head jerks back and she falls to the ground behind her, her cloak fluttering as it settles around her limp form. An arrow protrudes from her skull where her eye should be – she has bluish-gray eyes, bright and fiery and always narrowed in determination, and now that I think about it they’re a lot like mine – and even after the cannon has fired, it still takes a few moments of blinking dumbly at the screen to realize that she’s dead.

She’s dead.

I should be horrified, grief-stricken, lamenting the loss of my eldest sister and cursing the heavens for her demise. I should cry, I should scream, I should throw something or hit someone or clutch at my heart as though a piece were being torn out of it at the sight of my sister’s blood spilling across the grass in crimson ribbons, but all I do is lift the cigarette to my lips and take another drag, fingers trembling a little around the smooth cylinder. The smoke is warm as it fills my lungs, but it does nothing to alleviate the coldness that seeps into my chest and finds its way into my veins, spreading a cool, numbing chill throughout my body. My sister’s just been killed and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

Was she really even my sister? We grew up together, we trained together and sat at the same table for meals and shared toys and argued about stupid things, but she was always more of a peer than as sister. More like a classmate who happened to live with me. Almost all of my sibling feel that way, actually – there’s a vast and empty cavern where the deep, unbreakable bonds of family should be, competitiveness where there should be love and indifference where there should be concern for one another. But the only thing most of us share is the same blood, the same hair and skin color and genes. The same eyes. We were raised that way; it’s what our parents wanted. Affection was reserved only for those of us who pleased Mom and Dad and did as we were told, and it was not to be shared between siblings. It’s better that way – it’s better to not feel anything for one another, not in Career families like mine when any one of us could be Reaped or volunteer and be killed, just like Emmy. But I feel something in the wake of Emerald’s death – I don’t know exactly what it is, just that it’s cold and heavy in my chest and it almost hurts. Almost.

“POW!” Jasper smashes the two figures together and lets one fall to the floor, holding the second above it as though it were gloating in its victory, reveling in the mock death of its opponent. Jasper looks up at me and giggles, an odd, out-of-place sound in light of what had just happened on the screen behind him. Does he understand that his sister has just died? Does he care? Am I the only one? “Oops.” He grins wide, and for some inexplicable reason I almost feel sick. “They died.”

Yeah. Oops.

My jaw clenches, an uncomfortable, sinking sensation yawning in the pit of my stomach. Not sadness. Not for someone I never bothered to love.

“Pity,” I say, staring blankly at the screen, and somehow I manage to convince myself that that’s the only thing I feel.

If you were dead or still alive
I don't care, I don't care...
And all the things you've left behind
I don't care, I don't care...
At all