we burn and bleed as one } jeq vs. hannah; 71st finale 2.0

Lightning leaves a scar in the darkness. It cuts through the murky gray the way a blade cuts through flesh- something I know far all too well.

The only light today was the sunrise. I opened my eyes just to see the sun one last time, and I was met with a collision of canary, rose, and all the pale amber in between them. But it didn't last. When I saw the darkness envelope it, spill over it like ink, I knew that this day would not bring a new beginning, only a cold and dark and miserable ending.

The night my blade was painted in Saxton's blood, it was dark. It was dark, but I was not afraid, because I could still see the stars. But through these wrathful clouds and these sudden flashes of white hot fury, there is nothing. It is oblivion.

But the longer I stand in the darkness, the less and less afraid I become- the more and more I grow to stand alongside it.

I swore I would not bow to destruction- I didn't.
I aligned with it.

"You'll come back home," Abraxas told me in the Justice Building. He said it like it was a fact, but I knew that he didn't say it to assure me. He said it to assure himself that yes, I would be coming home.

And he is right, one way or another.

Yes, Abraxas, I am coming home.
With either a beating heart or a silent one.

A snarl of thunder behind the clouds snaps me back to reality, back to Jequirity, who stands no longer as my friend, but as my opponent. She has become an obstacle, the only thing preventing me from coming home. But she is not the enemy. I can see that among all other things with clarity, that and that I have to live.

I have not forgotten who the real enemy is.

My blade cuts her cheek, marking the trail of one of her tears. When it falls like a little rain drop, it merges with the crimson rivulet my knife left behind.

I'm sorry, I want to say, but I cannot bring myself to form the words. She must already know how worry I am by the look in my eyes- I hope.

She catches the blood with the blade of her knife and then with one swift movement, throws it past my shoulder. I flinch and veer out of the way, but she was not trying to hit me.

Jequirity is as drenched as I am by the incensed downpour, with her hair, darkened by the water, whirling around her in the wind, slapping against her cheeks. Her eyes are shadowed by the tragedy they have seen, and she is rugged, dirty, and scarred.

We match, in that sense.

She does not look the way I remember. The softness has been wiped from the planes of her face, but not completely washed away from her eyes. There is this light that remains there against all of its darkness, like a single star in an otherwise pitch black sky.

Despite her missing limbs, she still manages to look like a fighter. It's like she has been broken and crushed and shattered and rebuilt, remade, into a new being. She has been molded into a warrior- I can see it in the steel in her eyes and the way she holds herself, like a snake poised to strike.

And what have I become?

(A monster?)

I do not want to consider it.

The rain sounds like falling pebbles against the roof of the cottage and the rocks of the beach, and it feels like it, too, when it pounds against my skin. It drenches my hair, turns it dark and sticky as I stand motionless, facing Jequirity. She mirrors me in her stillness- we are like a pair of statues. The roaring wind peels the soaking strands from my face and lashes me with them, whipping my cheeks and my eyes over and over again.

I am unsure if the rivulets on my face are the furious rain or my own tears.

Jequirity's body remains still, but her lips do not.

"Why does it have to be you?" The words erupt from her lips in a tangled, twisted mess. It is as if she is apologizing (I should be the one apologizing) or begging me to disappear (part of me wishes I could disappear, too, Jeq).

The words ignite me, the way the falling sun ignites the sky.

I can feel the fire coming to life upon my flesh, quickly unfolding full-force into a wildfire, relentless and merciless. It consumes me, wholly, utterly, but I do not shrivel to ashes. This fire, as it dances upon my skin so fervently, merges with me- we become one.

I'm burning, Jequirity, I'm burning, but it doesn't hurt.

And then suddenly, Jequirity springs to life all at once. She draws no weapon- instead, she launches herself at her full strength toward me, her outstretched hands like claws.

Before my mind can register what is going on, Jequirity knocks me to ground. Her nails dig into my shoulders, and her eyes burn and bleed into mine as if they are made of fire and nothing else.

Beneath her, it is like I am made of paper. She could break me if she wanted, rip me to pieces with her bare hands. But instead she condemns me to something worse, a torture more cruel than a sword to the chest or a fist to the jaw: she speaks to me. She speaks to me, and I know with a sharp, cold pang in my chest that I will be the one to silence her. When the day is done, I will never hear her voice again.

"Hannah, I have to kill you!" Her terrible scream rips into my eardrums, and then into my heart. "Don't you get it?! Now I'm the one who has to kill you!"

I recoil from her words out of fear that they will tear what's left of me down to shreds, down to ashes.

"I can spare you the pain, Jeq, if I can kill you first," I say. I try to brave, I try to stand tall like a warrior when I say it, but my voice cracks against the tears that force themselves from my eyes. They carve themselves into my cheeks, they burn against my skin like acid rain.

There is a riot in my chest against myself and the sobs that plea to escape. And they do, the moment I open my mouth to speak again. "If I could kill Saxton, I can kill you, too." The middle of my sentence is utterly shattered by a horrible, pitiful sob, pulled deep from the bottom of my chest. I shut my eyes tight to try to stop the tears, but they only pour down my cheeks faster and with more and more fury.

I peer up at the inky sky for a moment and wish, with every part of me still standing, that I could see the stars, so I would not feel so cold and utterly alone. I wish that I could see the stars, so it would not feel like I have completely destroyed Saxton.

But that's just it: I have.

"Did you see the stars last night, Jequirity?" I ask between the tears. They are drowning me, they are drowning me they are drowning me, but I still gasp for air nevertheless.

"Saxton was up there."

And soon, you'll be there, too.

But the bitter words die on my tongue, leaving ash in my mouth.


[Hannah attacks Jequirity; throwing knife (2)]
bC1G3eSvthrowing knife
[9111 -- Knife in Forearm -- 5.5 damage]

I'm bleeding.

("Thick rivulets, from my eyes to my collar bone, racing down to the delicate white lace fabric of my dress.

But I'm not bleeding crimson, no, not yet. My skin has not been sliced open at the hands of a child smaller than the knife they wield. I am bleeding misery, I am bleeding the rainstorms that gather in my shatter eyes.")

No, this time, I am really bleeding.

From the inside and out.

Scarlet gathers on the line one of the ridges of the rocks left in my arm when Jequirity pushed me to the ground. Thick beads at first, and then fragile, thin threads, trickling down my arm.

I bleed from my eyes, too. Rivers that taste like the ocean run down my cheeks and onto my lips.

I bleed from my heart. It is cut open, ripped, punctured, torn- everything but utterly destroyed. It is in such ruin that forget I have one when I am not writhing in agony. And It no longer beats. It throbs.

I don't think I really knew what it was to bleed until the Arena. I did not know true agony until everything I was crumbled beneath this darkness I had not felt closing in on me until it was too late. And I let all my happy moments slip through my fingers like they are sand and my hands are a sieve- I never saw how everything was full of light until I met true darkness.

There was light in the Arena, too. Just two little points, like a pair of stars in the midnight sky- Saxton and Jequirity. They were like a pair of candles flickering in the darkness that threatened to consume us. I cherished them, looked to them as I did to the stars when it felt like the world was crumbling around me and I couldn't wash the blood off my hands.

I snuffed one of them out already, let the inkiness swallow them whole. And now, I am going to do the same to the very last bit of light left. I never thought I would be the one to give way to the darkness. (Until I called it friend, too.)

When I tell Jequirity what I had done, her face seems to break for a moment, but it pieces itself back together within moments. No tears fall with the heavy rain. No screams rip through the air with the lightning.

"I slept through the anthem," Jequirity tells me, stumbling closer. I want to recoil from her, from my opponent, but my body stays frozen in place. "I didn't see the stars," she says. And that is when tears begin to gather in her eyes at last, but she has the strength to blink them away.

I do not have that strength left, or any at all. Her words only make the tears brim over again. But I let them go. I let them carve their path into my skin. I let them burn down my cheeks.

"But if you say she was up there, I believe it." Jequirity's lips hang heavy in silence, and then she draws in a breath to muster her words. "I trust you," she says. The moment she does, I know those words are going to leave a scar.

And then her blade cuts into my forearm, but that is not what sends the agony ripping through every fiber of my body. It is the "I trust you." Because I do not deserve to be trusted. I do not deserve to have a place in a heart like Jequirity's. Because I remember that night when I promised myself I would not kill either of my friends. We fell asleep beside one another every night, each of us taking shifts on watching for enemies- we trusted each other.

I promised myself that it would not be me who would end them, but I have done it already. And I am about to do it again.

("Promises are as meaningful as dust in the Arena.")

As my blood, dark, lurid crimson, oozes down my arm in thick rivulets, as I bite my lip against the pain, Jequirity says, "Just know I'm not being dramatic when I say-" The words leave a pang in my chest when I remember whose lips they originally came from.

("And I thought I was being dramatic.")

My brother's final kill-

Laila Sycamore.

Jequirity must know how I have ruminated over her death for years, how I saw my own fire in her. How it kindled mine.

Her eyes are locked on mine, and by the way she looks at me, it's like she is holding onto something and doesn't want to let go. I know that look- I have seen it in the mirror countless times.

"Either way, no matter which one of us dies," she says with a smile, "I know I've got a friend to hold my hand as I go."

Friend?

Friend.

"Friend," I repeat. A slight smile curls across my face, but I know it does not touch my eyes.

I never thought I would make friends in the Arena.

"I'm glad you can still call me that, after everything," I tell her. And it's true- I am glad that I haven't lost Jequirity as a friend, that someone in this forsaken place still gives a damn. (I haven't lost Jequirity as a friend, but oh, I will lose her in a far worse way.)

"But you should hate me."

I don't want her to hate me, but if she did, it would be easier for me to kill her. Maybe I wouldn't cry if she did. Maybe I wouldn't crumble. (I can already feel the tremors in my legs.)

When I try to speak again, my lungs feel broken and my throat is closing in on itself. It is like there are weights on my chest, like someone's hands are wrapped around my throat and they will not release me until I am nothing more than a pile of bones and cold flesh on the ground. I know this feeling, but I have never felt it with such intensity. It is the guilt, I know, piling up on me like stones until I feel like Atlas holding up the sky. Until I break.

"After everything I've done," I manage to sputter out, "you really should hate me."

Please. I don't want to kill anymore of my friends.

"Look at me!" I demand. But I do not sound strong, I do not sound commanding when I say it. I sound just as shattered as I am- the words melt into the sob that breaks my chest.

I want her to look at me, to see the blood on my hands, the crimson from Saxton's corpse that stains my clothes, the raw, feral desperation in my eyes. I want her to see the truth and spit poison in my face so that I will not have to feel sorry about killing her, so that she will not have to feel sorry for killing me.

"Look at me, Jequirity!"

What have I become?

I denied the answer before, but I have always known.

"I'm a monster!"


[Hannah attacks Jequirity; throwing knife (3)]
pB2pWHQYthrowing knife
[9012 -- Knife in Thigh -- 6.0 damage]