just stop your crying .| clementina & emberly, day one

just stop your crying
it's the sign of the times
welcome to the final show
hope you're wearing your best clothes

If it were possible to drown in tears, Emberly would have been long dead by now. By the time they had all dried from her face again, it was time for the anthem. Despite knowing who she will see in the sky tonight, Emberly knows that she should watch anyway. Through all of her anguish-fueled screaming and sobs as she hid in the shelter of the trees, she had drowned out the sound of the distant canon fire from the bloodbath.

Emberly stood on the edge of the yacht, her front leaned against the rails. She stared down into the bubbling pool of crystal-clear water beneath her; the surface glistened against the light of the moon seeping in through the trees, and Emberly could see its reflection in the pool. Sitting on the edge of the yacht, there was a soft amber light illuminating her face from a lava lamp. The koala that she found at the waterfall sits at the lamp's side, staring at Emberly intently with wide dark eyes. She still hadn't decided a name for it, but it seemed to be a new companion for her; she had more pressing matters on her mind than a name for her new friend.

She runs her tongue across her lips, tinged with salt from all the tears that had kissed them. It wasn't going to be easy to watch the anthem, she knew. The national song of Panem begins before Emberly is ready to face it, and then sound sends a chill down her spine. She braces herself, tries to steel herself, but she is not strong enough and nothing can prepare her for this moment.

As she stands before the anthem, a blue hologram in the sky, looking out to the stars from the opening in the trees, Emberly is made of glass.

The first face appears, but it is not McCarthy; it is Gregor McGregor, the male tribute from District Two. Her eyes widen at the sight of his face — if she recalled correctly, he had scored an eleven in his private training session. He had been almost perfect, and yet he was the first dead. Gregor was certainly a thousand times stronger than she was — he could have likely snapped her in two like a twig if he wanted — and yet Emberly was the one still breathing.

The Games do not discriminate between the strong and the weak, it seems.

Next is McCarthy. When his familiar face appears in the sky, a blue ghost against the stars, Emberly breaks all over again. Her knees began to tremble, sending tremors through her entire body; she was shaking, shivering as if it were cold outside, but it the air was warm and humid in the hot springs. Her vision blurs with a surge of tears, and she blinks them away, allowing a few of them to fall onto her cheeks. She keeps her eyes trained on the anthem rather than wiping them away, leaving them to be blown away and dried by the wind.

Only two dead; twenty-one others had to die if Emberly were to go home. It was a thought that she tried not to dwell on.

Tap tap tap — light footsteps sound behind her, a familiar pattern that she recognizes by now. It was the same footsteps that she heard on the roof of the training center only a few weeks ago.

"This is the second time you've snuck up on me now," Emberly remarks, glancing behind her just to confirm Clementina's presence. One could never be too careful in the Arena.

"I've just been watching the anthem," she tells her, wiping away a fallen tear on the back of her hand. Emberly's eyes are still on the sky, where McCarthy's face has just disappeared. And just like that, he is gone — completely dissolved into oblivion, as if he never existed. His body had been taken away; she watched the hovercraft lift him into the sky, away from here, away from her. The only thing that Emberly had left was the memory of him and his dried blood on her hands —

he had died with his bloodied hand holding hers, and she remembers feeling the last drop of blood from his body trickle down her skin and how cold he became in a matter of seconds, like ice had frosted over his paling skin —

She still had not washed all of McCarthy's blood off of her skin. There was still a line of crimson-brown on the palm of her hand and her wrist, but she didn't want to wash it off. It was the last physical remainder of McCarthy that she had, and that meant something to her. Perhaps it was strange to leave that thin line of blood on her hands but wash the rest of it away — she just couldn't bring herself to do it. There was a part of her that believed if she washed away that blood, McCarthy would truly disappear.

"That boy in the sky," she goes on, "was my friend. McCarthy Balmain, from Eight." Clementina did not need to know all of this — but she was her friend, wasn't she? She was a shoulder to lean on, someone Emberly could worry or rant to. Almost like a mother.

Her hands tighten around around the rails of the boat, white flooding her knuckles against the pressure. "I watched him die." Emberly's voice wavers as she speaks, unable to keep the tension building inside from boiling over once more. She was swallowing down an ocean of despair, holding sobs in her lungs and tears in her mouth. Emberly had cried enough for today, she decided.

you can't bribe the door on your way to the sky
you look pretty good down here
but you ain't really good
if we never learn, we've been here before