The Boodbath

s e r e n a f e n n e l

do not go gentle
into that
good night

New day, new age, new girl, the last sunrise she may ever see.

Freshly eighteen years of age, the whispers of Sardonyx in her ears and the quiet melancholy of Justice at her back, she steps forward towards a destiny that she always knew was inevitable.

Dreamless sleep invigorates her, her last full meal before the games energizes her, anticipation sets her senses on overload - and Ripred, she is ready.

A score of eight, matched by few and exceeded by fewer still, a sword hand that itches with anticipation and the prospect of drawing real blood instead of whatever made up the interiors of dummies, it is only with the faintest bit of reluctance in her step that she ascends to the steel plate. The last connections with the real world slip away as, with barely a squeak, the queen rises to her destiny.

A literal statement in this case, for the Gamemakers had deemed it fit to stick her in the garb of nobility. Black lace dress that only barely covered her shoulders, several elegant necklaces around her neck, shoes as fancy as the pair of dress heels that remained back home in One, and, a fitting completion, a fancy silver crown resting on her brow. Even though her training score was merely average for a Career at best and dwarfed by some boy from Seven of all places, there was no doubting the symbolism behind such garb.

The Gamemakers had tossed their cards into her bowl, and now it was upon her not to disappoint.

Through darkness she ascended, and for one crucial moment she let her mind wander.

To her cowardly district partner, now three years younger than herself and how he had received a score equal to his district - a mark of pride, perhaps, for anything past District Five but nothing short of an absolute embarrassment for her home.

To her so-called truce with Hayden and Samson - one built on trust that, at least until the final eight, there would be no infighting - and their tagalong from Nine.

To each individual she had interacted with personally since her name had been selected - Hammerfell, Staite, Shim, Rasoio, Emerson - and those that she hadn’t, and how each and every one of them stood between her and her victory.

To, at long last, her estranged father. She could only guess as to how his feelings towards this latest turn of events were - but she had a pretty good idea.

Heir to the Delgado legacy was she - her father, the only child of an only child, had naught in the realm of immediate relatives, and thus she, the only child of him, had been his heir apparent. But though he was loving to his wife and daughter, his true love had been his business, leaving her to be raised by her mother.

Not that she complained, then or now - her mother had been the best thing ever to have happened to her. Kind, quick-witted, and beautiful, it was no mystery as to how her father had fallen in love with her. She’d come from a powerful family in her own right - the Roses were as much a power in jewelry as the Delgados were in cosmetics - but she’d seemed right at home as a stay-at-home mother as her husband ran his own empire.

Then she’d died, victim to an assassin meant for him.

She’d been only eight years old at the time.

Even now, the memory was bitter - almost a full decade later. She’d tapped as deep into her Rose roots as she could, but nothing could change the fact that first and foremost, she was a Delgado, much to her chagrin.

Well, regardless as to how events would play out - whether she made it to the very end or was the first to fall - even that fact would soon be eliminated from her father’s control.

Live or die, she’d be a Rose first and foremost, even if she had to drench the arena in blood to make either a reality.

So it was with a laugh that she rose into the graveyard, the irony of the situation not lost on her. The quaint orange fruits - including one so large that it could only be this year’s version of a Cornucopia - were largely forgotten, so great was her mirth.

But to get too distracted for too long was fatal in a setting such as this, and composure was quickly reasserted.

At least, until she gazed upon the outfits of her competitors.

A nurse, a butler, a ghost, two lumberjacks that could only be the Sevens, a mouse, a cowgirl, even a getup worn by the sour-faced girl from Three that could only be some interpretation of a demon.

This was a fucking costume party.

She suddenly didn’t care that the fancy getup was hardly the ideal gear for survival or even for combat - that would be a disadvantage shared by most everyone - for she was their motherfucking queen.

She could be queen of the battlefield or the graveyard, dead in five minutes or fifty years, it wouldn’t matter.

Freedom had already been achieved.

Everything that happened to then were mere details to fill in the blanks.

rage, rage
against the
dying of the light

[dars]

It feels like its perfect
I know, I know
It'll be like the first time
So take it slow

Cross my heart and hope to die, I cannot stop falling in this bleeding darkness. I grip the fraying hopes if sanity in my burning hands, clutching the nine tattooed onto my neck and across my heart. Behind the black lights and the white darkness, all I see are enemies, watching the seven horseman that ride with their reigns and branding me as the rotten apple set in stone to kill. Marking me in the same light as the likes of One, Two and Four -- it feels like the icy tundra of fate thrust into my veins and frozen over in stone. A destiny to kill, a fate to be killed and I don't know which one terrifies me the most.

I can't stop falling between the intricacies of this bleeding darkness and I can't find the lion's heart in this garden of bravery I've let myself get entangled within. I'm going to die and my hands won't stop shaking, my lip won't stop trembling at the sight of the picture that anchors me to this ground that only knows to slowly break with every glass footstep I take.

One foot in the grave and one hand on my heart -- I've been reduced to the number nine and set myself in stone to be a killer.

Seeing this, I took Teddy's hand and pulled him to the side; a calmness in my eyes but a biting desperation in my voice. "Teddy... please..." And I swear, the words embedded themselves in my throat before as I made desperate grabs for a sentence and held the hope for a promise. "I- I won't make it out but I..."

White darkness and black light; this isn't an environment where sentiment flourishes but festers.

I pulled out the picture and showed it to him. "When I'm gone I want you to take this, it's my dad but I can't let my family have it," I let my gaze flicker down, breaking eye contact with him before daring to stare back up into the eyes of a killer. "They'll burn it so I need you to take it and I need you to hold it." Tick-tock, how does time break faster than my heart? "Don't let him fade with me."

He left me with promises parting from our lips, he left me to fall for an age.

For an eternity.

They pierce my arm on the hovercraft and I bleed in sequence with the gale of the fallen wasteland within my heart. I think I'm dying, no, I think I'm festering, I've always been an ugly tear on the skin of the people around me. A rotten apple fallen from the rotten tree, a forbidden fruit grown from a deadly seed and it's obvious in the way they all twist and twitch in the bending of time. Mother; broken, father graveyard, Serena kill or be killed and Dani,Alfie,Sirrah brothers and sister in arms and acquaintances in death. If they can only be called that, we only exist under the same white banner and keep our blades from each other's flesh. I wonder if that's friendship.

Did I ever have friends?

I don't know anymore, I don't care anymore. All I see now is a broken family sitting in my pocket and a stylist who's name I still haven't remembered. "I will not fight looking like that." I sneer, recoiling at the sight of whatever that is he intends to put on me. But he won't relent, he tells me I have to because the Gamemakers demand it and by extension the president demands it.

I relent instead, wearing the dark cape lined with crimson and buttoning up the rest of the outfit, shifting backwards and forth uncomfortably. Panic rises like bile in my throat when he wishes me luck and tells me to get in the tube.

Fate it set in stone and destiny awaits.

So I rise to the sound of countdown and the sight of decay and I swear, it takes more willpower to resist the urge to empty my stomach across the ground than to keep a brave face.
Eyes watering, the sight of gravestones leaves the past tattooed across my eyelids and the face of Doctor Khiev in my peripherals. Yet I'm stand in the presence of slain kings, fallen heroes and the justice brought to the villains in this world dominated by flames and canon fire.

Yet this is not a song of heroes burning down haunted houses and this countdown is not our chorus. Sixty second, fifty seconds, forty seconds -- what's the fucking difference anymore?

The difference is at thirty when I know that I do not belong here. With an ice cold mind and a heart rate that only knows to accelerate, in a world rules by the Hayden Harvards and the Cynthias. Those with synthetic heartbeats and gears and cogs driving their logic and movements. Yet here I am with the remains of a paper kingdom at my back and the shadows of seven sinners looming over my back.

When we come to the final ten seconds, my mind of reasoning becomes one of desperation -- Doctor Khiev in the back of my mind and tributes, both living and dead, the center of my attention. This pumpkin patch surrounded by twisted vines, reeds and littered with supplies will not be the place I stop falling.

"Teddy... please." I call out.

Cross my heart and hope to live; at the sound of five seconds, I feel the corner of his picture brush against my thumb; an embodiment of a better time and a better man. A better man who deserves more than to burn along with our paper kingdom at the hands of a grieving mother and a spiteful wife.

At the sound of the gong I become him; falling through this never ending darkness that bleeds with the seven sins I've embodied since the opening of that trapdoor.

It was as if the song was written for us
When we sang along to the chorus

[ dars ]