when shadows remain in the light of day {gabriel v iaghoul}
Feb 27, 2018 2:57:38 GMT -5
Post by Lyn𝛿is on Feb 27, 2018 2:57:38 GMT -5
It takes an eternity for C'rizz to fall.
Several heartbeats of time pass, the spear you have whittled soaking through with rapidly clotting crimson. Twin wounds blossom on each of the boy's arms from yours and Gilly's weapons; you are close enough to see yellow beads of fat spilling out beneath his skin and giving way to blood spurting onto the snow from the void beneath.
Then he is collapsing, and his body thumps into the pink snow with a sickening finality. A cannon booms.
"Gilly!" you shout in an attempt to snap her out of her frozen gaze, staring down at her district partner. The unnatural beast in your midst screeches and lashes towards the Career, and you hobble away as best you can, far from its foul rasping breath and the body you have left to it.
The snow spins around you, spots of color dancing in your field of vision. Fatigue makes the backpack you are carrying feel three times as heavy as it should, and you spend several minutes just stopping and recovering your breath before you finally catch up with the others.
One axe. One camera. A roll of bandages. A headache pounds behind the lids of your eyes, and you pass the time counting and double-checking the items you have taken from C'rizz's body. One armored vest. One pair of goggles. You'd seen them running through the bloodbath with their arms full, but only now did you realize just how much stuff they'd managed to get on the first day. One blanket. One vial of -
Antivenom! You toss the jar to Raven, whose wound was already beginning to turn a sickly green from the mutt's poison.
One bundle of firewood. Two sets of needles and thread.
Was it worth it?
One axe, given to Gilly. Now all of you had proper weapons instead of stupid things like tent stakes - although she seems to have done just fine with one today. One bundle of firewood, to keep the four of you warm for one more night. You feel you ought to be responsible about dividing up the spoils from your fight, even though your head is spinning and you'd like nothing more than to go to sleep and ignore everything that has happened.
The anthem sounds, and you're left with the lingering face of the boy you killed even as it disappears from the sky and the trumpets fade into stillness.
Two years ago, you'd cheered with the rest of your family when Raquel had put a sword through the District One boy's neck, when his allies had been so shocked she'd done it they'd let her run away instead of taking the chance to kill her off.
You'd cheered because the boy's death gave her one more day of life. C'rizz's death meant you could stay alive, meant Gilly and Mercy and Raven could stay alive. Let the boy unafraid of death, the boy who'd volunteered for this, face it instead -
Somehow, it didn't feel the same.
"Are you feeling okay?"
Gilly's voice, as usual, breaks the silence.
"Because I feel like my stomach's all squeezed up together."
"I feel like my head's all squeezed up together," you mutter. It was beginning to throb like a particularly bad hangover, and you would have chalked it up to the exhaustion of the fight if Mercy hadn't mentioned the possibility you were getting sick from the altitude.
"Well if it makes you feel better, thank you. I don't think I ever had someone who'd..."
And for all the words that have come out of Gilly's mouth since you came here (probably more than the three of you put together), she stumbles over the word kill. Whether out of desire to protect what little remained of her innocence, or simply because you didn't quite want to mull it over yet in your fuzzy mind, you refrain from filling in the blank.
"...do what you did, and even though I don't know how I'm supposed to feel... I'm glad you're here."
"Yeah." Your voice is sleepy, but clear. "Yeah, it does make me feel better." You ruffle her hair, as you so often did with your younger brothers; there was something in Gilly that reminded you of home, something that made you think she could've fit right in with the Izars if she'd grown up in Eleven with darker skin and a less Eight-ish name. "I mean - that's what your pirate crew's here for, ain't it? Yarrrr!"
With that, you huddle up by the fire in C'rizz's blanket and fall asleep.
*
You wake to dawn peeking over the mountains, a deceptive sunshine that brought no warmth and only served to bathe the snow underfoot in a cold, sickly light. Your sleep had been restless, haunted by C'rizz's voice that followed you into a blank white dreamscape -
Where am I, C'rizz? What have you done with my allies?
Why do you care? he asked. You want to win this, don't you?
Five bodies lay in front of you, face down. Raquel. Salome. Gilly. Mercy. Raven -
You're dead, C'rizz! There! I said it! Now will you go away and leave me alone?
Ah, but you see, Gabe, death is not the end. Behind the veil is another beginning...
You remain under the blanket even as it gradually grows colder, still holding on to C'rizz's words from the dream. You cared about Gilly, about Mercy - even Raven, who you hadn't gotten enough of a chance to talk to, yet. And if it was impossible for all of you to live for more than a few more days - even if the creepy Six boy came over and stabbed you to death - you figured you might as well spend these days making each other a little less lonely.
At least, that's what you're thinking when you get up and pull out the camera, the film capturing the three of them frozen in time - Gilly at the front, waving her axe around and wearing her new hat (whatever in Ripred's name those sponsorship notes were about, you certainly weren't complaining), Raven softly smiling in the center, Mercy peeking out behind him.
Soon after, you split up. Your headache has gotten better, though you still don't feel up to walking around much, and you task yourself with packing up camp while the others went searching for plants or anything else that might be of use.
Without your allies around, the mountaintop is as quiet as death. There are no footsteps, no rustling trees. Even any footprints that might have been around have been erased by wind and snowfall, save for those freshly made by the four of you.
So when you hear the shuffling of footsteps in the distance, not far from where Gilly went, you whirl around towards the figure, hopeful it's her. You're tired of the silence already, of your brain set on edge from the cht chttt chttttt of the howling wind.
"Gilly?"
No response. Gilly was a chatterbox, it didn't make sense for her not to say anything -
But as they drew closer, you realized three things. First, that it was a young boy, bent over but evidently taller than Gilly, trudging through the snow at you. Second, that he walked with an awkward, shuffling gait, as though he was a puppet whose limbs had frozen stiff from the cold. And thirdly, that he looked very familiar...
"You."
You had never seen him before in life, but you recognized his face from the photos on your family's mantle. To you, he was more the stuff of rumors and legend than someone you'd actually known, and when you were a young child you and your friends would make up ghost-tales of him to try and scare each other.
He's out there, y'know. Still haunts the old countin'-house - my cousin's friend passed out drunk behind it one day, next mornin' he woke up an' his tongue was gone. Jus' like that.
He's still family, your father simply says as he continues to place offerings in front of the picture frame every year. He died an Izar.
Now, though, you find that he looks smaller than you had imagined, or perhaps it was the stories - Iago the demon, Iago the monster - that have made him to be larger than life. When you were five, fourteen-year-olds seemed very big and very scary indeed, but you have grown and he has not, and all you see is the corpse of a child not much older than Gilly.
"Goooo... toooo... sleeeeeeeep........."
The corpse lurches towards you, raising his ski pole as a spear.
"You're not a demon."
He's shorter than you, even if he weren't deformed by death, with what little muscle he had possessed in life half-rotting from his bones. You wonder how you'd even managed to mistake him for Gilly at first glance; other than the vaguest similarities in stature they had nearly nothing in common.
"You're just a fucked-up kid."
A kid who'd come closest to winning for Eleven until Katelyn Persimmon, a kid people talked about for years until Harbinger Rhodes took the third crown in a row and that started drawing a whole lot more attention, a kid still notorious for his cruelty - but that didn't make him some sort of invincible, fantastic monster. Just a scrawny kid who'd done terrible things.
"I think it's time you got put back to rest."
[Gabriel attacks Iaghoul Izar with spear]
ZA_j0YKRspear
3186 -- Stabbed in Forearm -- 8.5 damage
(Spear)
Several heartbeats of time pass, the spear you have whittled soaking through with rapidly clotting crimson. Twin wounds blossom on each of the boy's arms from yours and Gilly's weapons; you are close enough to see yellow beads of fat spilling out beneath his skin and giving way to blood spurting onto the snow from the void beneath.
Then he is collapsing, and his body thumps into the pink snow with a sickening finality. A cannon booms.
"Gilly!" you shout in an attempt to snap her out of her frozen gaze, staring down at her district partner. The unnatural beast in your midst screeches and lashes towards the Career, and you hobble away as best you can, far from its foul rasping breath and the body you have left to it.
The snow spins around you, spots of color dancing in your field of vision. Fatigue makes the backpack you are carrying feel three times as heavy as it should, and you spend several minutes just stopping and recovering your breath before you finally catch up with the others.
One axe. One camera. A roll of bandages. A headache pounds behind the lids of your eyes, and you pass the time counting and double-checking the items you have taken from C'rizz's body. One armored vest. One pair of goggles. You'd seen them running through the bloodbath with their arms full, but only now did you realize just how much stuff they'd managed to get on the first day. One blanket. One vial of -
Antivenom! You toss the jar to Raven, whose wound was already beginning to turn a sickly green from the mutt's poison.
One bundle of firewood. Two sets of needles and thread.
Was it worth it?
One axe, given to Gilly. Now all of you had proper weapons instead of stupid things like tent stakes - although she seems to have done just fine with one today. One bundle of firewood, to keep the four of you warm for one more night. You feel you ought to be responsible about dividing up the spoils from your fight, even though your head is spinning and you'd like nothing more than to go to sleep and ignore everything that has happened.
The anthem sounds, and you're left with the lingering face of the boy you killed even as it disappears from the sky and the trumpets fade into stillness.
Two years ago, you'd cheered with the rest of your family when Raquel had put a sword through the District One boy's neck, when his allies had been so shocked she'd done it they'd let her run away instead of taking the chance to kill her off.
You'd cheered because the boy's death gave her one more day of life. C'rizz's death meant you could stay alive, meant Gilly and Mercy and Raven could stay alive. Let the boy unafraid of death, the boy who'd volunteered for this, face it instead -
Somehow, it didn't feel the same.
"Are you feeling okay?"
Gilly's voice, as usual, breaks the silence.
"Because I feel like my stomach's all squeezed up together."
"I feel like my head's all squeezed up together," you mutter. It was beginning to throb like a particularly bad hangover, and you would have chalked it up to the exhaustion of the fight if Mercy hadn't mentioned the possibility you were getting sick from the altitude.
"Well if it makes you feel better, thank you. I don't think I ever had someone who'd..."
And for all the words that have come out of Gilly's mouth since you came here (probably more than the three of you put together), she stumbles over the word kill. Whether out of desire to protect what little remained of her innocence, or simply because you didn't quite want to mull it over yet in your fuzzy mind, you refrain from filling in the blank.
"...do what you did, and even though I don't know how I'm supposed to feel... I'm glad you're here."
"Yeah." Your voice is sleepy, but clear. "Yeah, it does make me feel better." You ruffle her hair, as you so often did with your younger brothers; there was something in Gilly that reminded you of home, something that made you think she could've fit right in with the Izars if she'd grown up in Eleven with darker skin and a less Eight-ish name. "I mean - that's what your pirate crew's here for, ain't it? Yarrrr!"
With that, you huddle up by the fire in C'rizz's blanket and fall asleep.
*
You wake to dawn peeking over the mountains, a deceptive sunshine that brought no warmth and only served to bathe the snow underfoot in a cold, sickly light. Your sleep had been restless, haunted by C'rizz's voice that followed you into a blank white dreamscape -
Where am I, C'rizz? What have you done with my allies?
Why do you care? he asked. You want to win this, don't you?
Five bodies lay in front of you, face down. Raquel. Salome. Gilly. Mercy. Raven -
You're dead, C'rizz! There! I said it! Now will you go away and leave me alone?
Ah, but you see, Gabe, death is not the end. Behind the veil is another beginning...
You remain under the blanket even as it gradually grows colder, still holding on to C'rizz's words from the dream. You cared about Gilly, about Mercy - even Raven, who you hadn't gotten enough of a chance to talk to, yet. And if it was impossible for all of you to live for more than a few more days - even if the creepy Six boy came over and stabbed you to death - you figured you might as well spend these days making each other a little less lonely.
At least, that's what you're thinking when you get up and pull out the camera, the film capturing the three of them frozen in time - Gilly at the front, waving her axe around and wearing her new hat (whatever in Ripred's name those sponsorship notes were about, you certainly weren't complaining), Raven softly smiling in the center, Mercy peeking out behind him.
Soon after, you split up. Your headache has gotten better, though you still don't feel up to walking around much, and you task yourself with packing up camp while the others went searching for plants or anything else that might be of use.
Without your allies around, the mountaintop is as quiet as death. There are no footsteps, no rustling trees. Even any footprints that might have been around have been erased by wind and snowfall, save for those freshly made by the four of you.
So when you hear the shuffling of footsteps in the distance, not far from where Gilly went, you whirl around towards the figure, hopeful it's her. You're tired of the silence already, of your brain set on edge from the cht chttt chttttt of the howling wind.
"Gilly?"
No response. Gilly was a chatterbox, it didn't make sense for her not to say anything -
But as they drew closer, you realized three things. First, that it was a young boy, bent over but evidently taller than Gilly, trudging through the snow at you. Second, that he walked with an awkward, shuffling gait, as though he was a puppet whose limbs had frozen stiff from the cold. And thirdly, that he looked very familiar...
"You."
You had never seen him before in life, but you recognized his face from the photos on your family's mantle. To you, he was more the stuff of rumors and legend than someone you'd actually known, and when you were a young child you and your friends would make up ghost-tales of him to try and scare each other.
He's out there, y'know. Still haunts the old countin'-house - my cousin's friend passed out drunk behind it one day, next mornin' he woke up an' his tongue was gone. Jus' like that.
He's still family, your father simply says as he continues to place offerings in front of the picture frame every year. He died an Izar.
Now, though, you find that he looks smaller than you had imagined, or perhaps it was the stories - Iago the demon, Iago the monster - that have made him to be larger than life. When you were five, fourteen-year-olds seemed very big and very scary indeed, but you have grown and he has not, and all you see is the corpse of a child not much older than Gilly.
"Goooo... toooo... sleeeeeeeep........."
The corpse lurches towards you, raising his ski pole as a spear.
"You're not a demon."
He's shorter than you, even if he weren't deformed by death, with what little muscle he had possessed in life half-rotting from his bones. You wonder how you'd even managed to mistake him for Gilly at first glance; other than the vaguest similarities in stature they had nearly nothing in common.
"You're just a fucked-up kid."
A kid who'd come closest to winning for Eleven until Katelyn Persimmon, a kid people talked about for years until Harbinger Rhodes took the third crown in a row and that started drawing a whole lot more attention, a kid still notorious for his cruelty - but that didn't make him some sort of invincible, fantastic monster. Just a scrawny kid who'd done terrible things.
"I think it's time you got put back to rest."
[Gabriel attacks Iaghoul Izar with spear]
ZA_j0YKRspear
3186 -- Stabbed in Forearm -- 8.5 damage
(Spear)
