comes && goes(in waves) // leon; vt

She was the only one on the platform. Much like they had for Dan's funeral, the other Johnwaynes had found something better to do for the day. Her father and his brother were both working, as was the norm; John Johnwayne had missed too many birthdays, too many sparring matches, too many dinners and breakfasts and bedtime stories in between for Elya to consider being disappointed. Her grandfather, on the other hand, was simply being his old sour self, with a frown too permanent to open in acknowledgment of his relationship to the disgraceful deceased. It came as no shock that his young wife and their son — sons, far as the old man knew, and Elya wasn't about to tell him otherwise — had bowed out as well.

It was for the better. Elya Johnwayne, as the sole person who had ever given half a shit if Dan lived or died — including the Cowboy himself — was the only one who could rightfully claim her place under her brother's two-story scowl that matched her own.

(They were opposite sides of the same coin, always had been — Dan, the improviser, rugged and careless and driven by impulse alone; Elya, the planner, disciplined and deliberate and calculating in every single thing she did. And yet, held up to a mirror, they overlapped in all the right places. She and her brother shared the same stormy glare, the same burning disinterest, the same stubborn intensity.)

Though she'd braced for it, though she'd known it was on the horizon, Dan's death left her feeling as if her eye had been cut out all over again. He was just as much her own flesh, though it would be more conspicuous to patch that hole. When she was ready. For now, she stared hard at the stage, steel-set jaw tugging the corners of her mouth down ever-so-slightly. Enough to betray her coal heart's utter indifference to the ceremony.

She vanished from the small platform in a blink and buried herself in the crowd. After the festivities, they'd spirit the champion away somewhere for safekeeping before the celebratory dinner at Mayor Rohan's house, an affair that would be attended by those who'd gained enough influence to be boring as shit.

Her brother's too-large coat billowing around her, she ducked around a corner down an alley. The narrow passageways between the squat, brutal buildings set the career girl on high-alert, but the gloomy sunlight filtering through the clouds provided enough visibility to provide her some comfort, even if she never dropped her vigilance for a second. She stuffed her fists in her pockets, and soldiered on, steadfast and unfaltering.

Security had tightened marginally in the recent few years, but Elya would be damned if she couldn't slip past the whitecoats to the reigning champion, hoping to catch him alone. On her brother's behalf — nothing more. She understood the policy of separating the victors from the commoners, of course; had Leon Krigel held the blade that ended her brother, and had Elya never been given a better reason for anger, she might act impulsively. But the one-eyed girl meant no harm — she was just overcome with the inexplicable desire to share a few words with the blonde fish-district who'd watched as her other half drew his last breath in the dustbowl.

Silent as silhouette, she crept past the security detail. It was easy — too easy — and yet the menace of peacekeepers at attention drew a hammer out of her heartbeat. She'd calmed quickly before reaching Leon Krigel, enough to When she reached the victor, she just stared until she had his attention. And then she spoke, voice bristling with wrought fences and railroad spikes in defense of the honor of her brother who professed to having none — expecting the boy in front of her to recognize who she was and who she meant without any cause for him to do so.

"Don't flatter yourself that you had any hand in his death," she asserted, her single iron eye boring a hole through the newest victor a thousand miles long and six months deep, piercing down to the cluster of dusty buildings, down to the overlarge scorpion, down to the covered wagon that her only blood crawled under to die. The pair of scratches that the victor had given to Dan so paled in comparison to the wounds the Gamemakers had inflicted that Elya knew her brother would not have so much as felt them.

If it were possible, her face grew a shade more serious, a shade more somber. "One arm or two," she started, raising her one eyebrow at Leon Krigel's mangled right. Her voice was heavy as steel and dark as storm, but gave no indication of malice, of spite. Nor was there pity — nor piety — as she finished her thought: "you thank your lucky stars for the scorpion king."

Elya had seen just enough of the District Four duo to know exactly two things about them: One: they fought well in concert — well enough that the finale between them had been a grueling spectacle, the most talked-about in her district since Cricket Antoinette's near-loss to the wire-haired Four of those Games. And Two: their storm, by itself, was one Dan could weather a hundred times over and come out no worse for wear on the other end. In a fair fight, either Johnwayne still came out on top against two opponents nine times out of ten — and her big brother never fought fair.

Neither, it turned out, did the Gamemakers.