Bang Bang Bang :: [Lust △]

She was busy picking at her the dirt under her nails with a throwing knife, surveying the other tributes, when Elya had caught the attention of someone from a district that was actually worthy of her attention. "Anybody ever told you you got pretty eyes?"

She snorted, caught off-guard. "The windows to the soul," she mused. The retort came to her tongue more easily than any curse, a side-effect of a full youth inadvertently spent practicing the chase. A smug grin broke over her face, straddling the line between mischievous and cruel, where a bored Elya Johnwayne so often found herself. She winked, wheeled on the District Four, and flipped up her eye patch, revealing the empty scarred-over socket beneath. "What do you think of my soul, Gunner La Torre?"

Elya held her eye shut for a second, for two, but she could leave herself vulnerable for no longer than that. She dropped her patch and met Gunner's brown eyes with her single slate one. When she noticed that Gunner's self-satisfied smirk matched her own, she dropped that too. Still, her face retained its shape of mischief.

Her challenging stare was broken when something left Gunner's hands for the ceiling. Elya reflexively tensed up, tracking the object with her eyes, where it lodged in the ceiling among a dozen of its brethren. Nooses.

"I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing until I saw you."

Elya forced a chuckle. "And you settled on hanging?" She spun the knife around in her hands — as much a nervous habit as a power play. She took a step forward, tucking the knife behind her ear and folding her arms across her chest. "I think you can kill me better than that," she dared.

If it was good for nothing else, at the very least Elya's eyepatch was catnip to the sort of girl she often found herself with an interest in. By extension, it served as a reasonably accurate litmus test for who was worth her time, and who would bore her. With her borderline-unimpressed "I've seen worse," Gunner La Torre had steered herself in the direction of the former category. And though she still had plenty of time to ruin it, the choosing was slim from there on out: ten other girls, most of them uninteresting.

"You don't look like someone with a death wish."

She just shrugged. Truth be told, Elya hadn't wished for a damn thing in years, death or otherwise. Wishing was unactionable, and therefore useless. If she wanted something, she worked for it, planned for it. Angry or inspired, Elya's mind followed a single track, and would not be derailed. Dan had always taken what he wanted, when he wanted it, but his sister was no slave to instant gratification — and was all the more dangerous for it. No one ever seemed to be as intimidated by discipline as they ought to be.

Gunner pressed two fingers into her forehead. Elya didn't realize it was meant to be a gun until the "Bang!" The muscles in her face twitched in response, heart rate rising as the pair of fingers traced their way down the side of Elya's broad face, down her firm jaw, across her neck. It took all of her focus to keep her breathing even as the other girl put her halfway into a chokehold, halfway into a hug.

"Now this feels better."

It didn't, not for the girl who'd despised being snuck up on before getting blindsided and savaged and left for dead some four years prior. Her pulse pounded, anxiety threatening to overpower arousal. But still, she played along.

Elya leaned back into Gunner, gently, gently, and rested her hand on top of the other girl's. Then, in one ear: "I might like taking your breath away." She turned to face the words as if to respond to them, smile small across her face — 

— then unlocked her knees and threw her entire bodyweight back and upward and over, hurling Gunner to the ground at her feet. Elya didn't give a shit if that was some sort of violation — someone had said something about not fighting with the other tributes until the Arena, but this somehow didn't seem to qualify; the venn diagram of fighting and flirting was practically a circle for the one-eyed girl.

She planted her feet on either side of Gunner's head and folded her arms back across her chest. Her smile spread into a triumphant smirk, lips parted to allow a low chuckle to escape. This was where she was meant to be: in control, staring down at her latest prey.

Smirk maintained, she bent forward, locking her single eye on Gunner's pair. Tumbling forward into a tunnel, her brown hair shielded everything but the District Four from her view. "And I might like getting you on your back first," she murmured, voice low and deliberate.