L'enfants Sauvages [SB vs. CoA vs. Enzo Day 6 Fight]

I can’t take it back
I wish I’d never opened my mouth

It seems easy enough to keep a promise when she might die at any moment. Lex could strangle Denali in her sleep or the earth might just suddenly swallow her whole the same way it did the goldmines. Simply because she didn’t come here to die doesn’t mean that she won’t. Denali knows this. It shouldn’t make her words worth less, but by being sent here her value as a human being has been declared to be so small that she finds herself second guessing everything.

Wandering conversation is a welcome distraction. Denali knows her world is in a sorry state when talking about the environmental damage that her family’s oil drilling practices have wrought on District Five feels like a relief. A year or so ago the water in her own home went real funny and when her father held a match to it, it caught fire. That’s when they disconnected from the public water system and began strictly using a private well. Her father used his connections to have a pretty fancy filtration system installed. Denali tries not to think about it, but she can’t forget. It used to keep her awake at night before Zion was reaped, before she wound up here. When she brings the memory up to Lex, she doesn’t know what she’s hoping for. Would it be better or worse for other Districts to share the same problems as her own — for the damage to be so wide spread that flammable water couldn’t be her family’s fault? Lex says it’s not something that ever happens in Seven and Denali knows she should be glad, but instead she’s just quiet.

In order to fill the silence, Lex begins reattaching wine jugs to the side of the landship, the bottles becoming battle drums once more. Denali hands the one she’s been using for water over once it’s empty. The drums give her an excuse to talk about her sisters and how Tallulah and Peregrine are a singing, dancing force to be reckoned with, an array of instruments in their musical repertoire. Denali... lacks their talents, but confesses a tendency to give their instruments a whirl now and then. Maybe the drums. Maybe if she lives she’ll grow up to be the greatest drummer who ever lived. But probably not, she catches herself thinking, uncertain which part of the idea seems the most unlikely at this point. It’s too bad. All of this angst would make fabulous songwriting material if she and Lex did start a band together.

With the battle drums repaired, it’s Denali’s turn to find busywork. She begins mending their battle jackets and swapping damaged armor out for some that’s in better shape. It may not have been enough to protect Minx or or the boy she killed, but Denali has no doubt that she and Lex will be putting it to use. Without seeming to realize the implications of her words, Lex begins casually boasting about the tears in her jacket in a way that makes her sound untouchable. Denali can’t help taking her down a notch, but once the snark calms itself, everything else does too.

Night settles in and Denali whiles a few hours away embroidering her jacket and telling Lex stories from Five while the blonde dozes. "Our house is pretty big. It’s three stories with this little attic-y space and mostly brick, but there’s a lot of carved wood detailing and stuff. I don’t know if you’d like it. Probably too showy for you," she chuckles a little, thinking back to Lex’s rambling opinions about coffin aesthetics. "The door is bright red." On her jacket, one skull in the lion’s hoard of the fallen is stitched in the same bright red for the blood she witnessed being spilled — Minx’s — and two more become solid white for the as-of-yet unknown ghosts of other cannons she heard, but was not present for. "I remember the Summer my mom painted it. She stained her hands from it. The tree outside my bedroom window was smaller and there were no flowers or shrubs lining the walkway to the house yet. We planted those a couple years after, the spring that Zion asked why our neighbor had so many peonies and we had none. He was so jealous." For the first time a skull is filled in with black thread, for the life Denali ended with her own hands. She pauses and takes in a deep breath, glancing over at Lex. The other girl certainly appears to be asleep by normal standards, but there’s a suspicious absence of earth quaking snores or swinging fists.

"At the far corner of the yard, past the fountain and the new garden, there’s a little cemetery — old pets and house mice that Zion insisted still deserved a proper funeral. The family burial ground is out back of Grimgram’s house a couple miles down the road." Stitching delivery birds swooping around the button holes of her jacket, Denali yawns and drags a bit more thread through her tar to turn it black. "Her wolfdogs are so cute, but I swear to Ripred that they get dumber every time I visit. Like if you wave a leaf at them they get so bamboozled they’ll just go — woah woah woahhh there, hooman, what is this witchcraft?! — and tip right over in drop dead astonishment. Boop!" Tapping Lex on the nose for emphasis, the blonde gives a little twitch and a few words of incoherent protest. "One of them even wound up on the roof once? We never figured out how he got up there and barely figured out to get him down. Spoiler: The answer is shameless bribery. Grimgram's table scraps are so good they could probably be bartered for world peace."

Pressing a piece of thread into the newest gash on her cheek to turn it red, Denali begins adding a morbid shadow to the embroidery of Minx sleeping in the ferns two days prior. "If you veer off into the woods and get lost in just the right place then sometimes there's this scary cool abandoned zoo. It's mostly only there on Tuesdays and I've never found it on a Sunday, but there are all these cages with holes hacked into the bars. It feels like," pricking her finger, she sucks on the small wound before continuing, "an old battleground. Like freedom fighter lions and bears broke in to jailbreak all their friends." She attempts to stitch dust in the air around the goldmine she embroidered yesterday, but it mostly ends up looking like failed stars. Close enough. "The signs on the cages are my favorite part. Totally terrifying. I can mostly only make out bits and pieces of the descriptions, but they sound fake either way, so I just fill in the blanks however I want. Like... arctos horribilis," she quotes the North Panem Brown Bear sign as well as she can remember, "weighs up to fifteen hundred — well, pounds, I assume, which is obviously insane — once highly endangered until Capitol scientists — lost their damn minds and thought it'd be a good idea to start breeding them with — introgressive hybridization between various — other scary bear-gods of mass destruction?! Renewed survival today! Probably here. In this place. Getting ready to eat us in our sleep. You totally owe me for watching out for you right now..."

Bear-gods of mass destruction transitions — somehow — into rambling tips and tricks on the under-appreciated craftsmanship of macaroni artistry. "If you use too little glue then it won't hold. Too much glue and it will get squishy, thinking it's food instead of a raw material carefully selected to communicate the vision of a creative genius." Lex clearly appreciates fine craftsmanship and so it's only reasonable to expect that she would admire Denali's imaginative handiwork with pasta as well, if only —

The anthem blares so loudly that Lex jolts upright and Denali instinctively throws her arms up to block her left hook. Fool me once, shame on you... The punch doesn't come. Both girls stare up at the sky, knowing what's coming and both thinking they're prepared for Minx's face to light up the night. Everything has been felt, argued over and reconciled, and there's nothing that remains but to accept what has come to pass.




A sharp, strangled sound blurts from Denali's mouth and she immediately closes her eyes to the announcement, missing the following projection of Minx's face entirely. Pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, she huddles into the silence that punctuates her own shock. No, she wants to gasp, but she can't. Objection isn't an option for the aspiring victor. By wanting to live, Denali Lyons wanted Wander Sibley to die. She willed this to happen. Fingers absently plucking at the whales she stitched onto the sleeve of her jacket while Wander told vis ghost story to everyone gathered around the campfire, she stares blankly into the dark and tells herself to be happy. What a wonderful day. Minx was killed for her and Wander was killed for her, like gifts. Denali should only feel thankful that she didn't have to kill them herself. So thankful...

Like breaking the surface of a lake after diving in, she becomes aware of Lex's rambling in one quick, swooping moment. "I think I was six. It was a footstool, rectangular, ten inches high. I made it out of one-inch stock — pine, actually, if you can believe." Denali's face must look something akin to the day she saw Faux Rhodes's head bashed in, his brain pushing out from the cracks in his skull... pushing out from the cracks in his face. BAM! "Not that pine is an outrageous choice for a six-year-old's first solo work, mind you. That was definitely the right call — I fucked a leg up pretty badly and wound up having to make another. Plus, pine is pretty forgiving when it's been cured right, actually." It's impossible to say how much time passed between one moment of awareness and the next. Maybe she blinked. Maybe it's been hours. "Anyway, the joinery was the hard part — obviously, it always is — since I'd insisted on mortise and tenons. That's when you cut a cavity into one of the pieces — the mortise — and when you shape a projection on the other end so that you can stick it into the mortise. Like this —" Glancing over, Lex is suggestively ramming two fingers into the hole of her other hand and Denali knows she should laugh and antagonistically call the gesture out, but she can't. Instead she swallows the spit that pools on her tongue and considers it an accomplishment. "So those cuts have to be precise, and of course I made it harder on myself by angling the legs ten degrees inward and supporting the top with a stretcher that joined everything — so there really wasn't any room for error. I really didn't make it easy on myself at all." She killed some kid named, apparently, Maxwell Temple and she's not sorry about it. It isn't as if she knew Wander much better and yet there are photos in her handbag of ver the same way there are photos of Denali in her father's wallet. "My dad wasn't letting me use the table saw yet, and I was enamored with the coping saw at the time — they're a fun shape — and tried to use it for everything. Ridiculous, right?" Completely ridiculous. "Anyway, the whole thing turned out just a little wobbly. I keep wanting to replace it, but Arthur still keeps it tucked under one of the tool benches in the woodshop."

Curling up on her side, Denali empties her mind of everything except Lex's steady voice and a persistent sound that is, undoubtedly, whittling. She would bet her family's entire fortune on it. "They're adorable, like floofy little bear skunks, and their paws were hilariously oversized for their tiny little bodies. They were so clumsy and so curious." Slipping from one story into the next, it becomes easier to forget the horrors of the day. "Dad said we should leave before the mama wolverine came back, but they were too precious and I didn't want to... so I stuck one in my pack when he wasn't looking. We didn't get very far before the thing started snorting, which gave me away." Someone once told her that a person can only remember seven things at one time. Baby wolverines. Pine stools. Missed opportunities for jokes. That's three. "I got in so much trouble after we put it back in the den — I can hardly blame my dad for being mad, though." Four: ...wonder what she's whittling? Wonder. Wonder. Wonder. Wander... "I was already a handful without adding a murder otter to the mix. But how cool would that have been?" Don't think about what could have been.

She blinks. "I would've liked having sisters, I think." Sevy. Lulu and Ginny. Rio. "Or a brother." Zi. "Or whoever." You. Wander. Minx. Bette. Temple and Eve. "It's just been me and my dad since I was little. I was four when my mom died —" The front door was painted bright red. It stained her hands. Her fingers were like that for days. "I can hardly remember her." She cried in the Justice Building and kissed my face and held me, telling me how much she loves me. How brave I am. How stupid I am. "Just the way she always made my dad laugh — he's a big grump, so that's not an easy thing to do." Dad was exactly the same, except that he gave me a picture Rio drew of me once because he gave the family photo to Zion last year. Wonderful, brave, stupid girl, he said. I love you so much. You can do this, I believe in you, but it's okay if it's too much. I love you. Don't forget to love yourself too, even when it's hard. "And how I'd curl up on the foot of her bed so she could read to me. But everything else is sort of like trying to remember a dream in the morning. You know, pictures and fragments but it's all fuzzy and there's no plot." Yeah, I know what you mean.

Light cracks the sky like a spiked blunt to the face. "You'd laugh at me if you were awake, but my favorite place in the world is a tree." Denali doesn't laugh, but she almost smiles. Of course her favorite place is a tree. "There's this one majesty oak out in the forest I like to hike in." Obviously Lex is nothing if not unpredictable. "It's really tall — not quite on the same level as the trees here — and has amazing branches for climbing. But the best part is there's a little cave in its trunk about five feet up, and it's just big enough to have a picnic in." The corner of Denali's lips twitches as she imagines a tree that is secretly a cave whose entrance leads to a magical picnic realm. "As long as bugs don't bother you — silkworms love it, too." There are several bookcases in her bedroom in Five and only a handful of books occupy the shelves, mostly borrowed from her parent's study. Instead the storage space is scattered with found feathers and strange-looking dried flowers, rabbit bones and coyote teeth... dragonflies and shimmering beetles, butterfly and bumblebee specimens, numerous jars of cicada shells. "It's really peaceful there, especially when it's raining. You should track it down if you're ever in District Seven, Freckles, I think you'd really like it."

"I would," Denali rasps, her voice uncertain of itself but not of its words, "I would like it a lot." Pulling herself up, she turns to face the dawn and begins packing up the camp, trying to ignore the way the air smells of rotten water. Of home, in all the worst ways. It gets easier once the ramshackle landship leaves the tar pits behind in favor of the coast. At least, it's easier until she spots familiar faces in the distance. ("If we pick up a little more speed then we could just run all three of them over!" "If you ever helped me to shoo some of these birds away, maybe we'd be a little more aerodynamic! If we crash into those kids, then what're we gonna do about that one over there?" "I think I can dangle my sword over the side just far enough to reach him...") The RLS Trolley Problem hits a tide pool and nearly doubles up into itself, jolting so suddenly that Lex is thrown over the side, directly into the path of an attack. Spikes dig into her arm and Denali growls at the sight of the blood.

When Denali promised that she'd stop allowing herself to be sliced and diced, it certainly didn't hinge on any intention to cower from battle. Picking up Lex's flint, she cracks the stone against her knife sharpener until there are sparks enough to light her tar slathered knives ablaze once more, gripping three in her left hand as she readies the fourth for throwing. There is no doubt that she holds enough hellfire to wreak fatal havoc, despite struggling to convince herself that anyone else's life is worth sacrificing for the sake of her own. No story can distract her from what must be done. Sometimes silence can only be filled by silence.

listen to the sound of my heart beat slow
yeah, my heart's like yours, my heart's like yours

Denali Lyons is not a good person. Anyone decent died early, unable to will themselves to put any force behind their attacks or throwing themselves into harms way on someone else’s behalf, desperately hoping that something worthwhile might come of their death. No one brought here was truly good or they would have stepped off their plate before the gong sent everyone running for each other’s throats, opting out of this soul destroying madness. The twelve children who lived to see this sunrise are not the better half of this year’s tributes, despite anything Games commenters may say about their fighting skills. Instead the twelve children who raise their weapons to the sun are the worst the arena has to offer, desperate enough to agree to the terms of a devil’s deal: kill or be killed. Fine, they said, signing their names away in blood upon each other’s bodies. Let’s do this.

Carving a signature of damnation into Quest’s neck, Denali wishes for many things. None of them are the other girl’s well being. They’re all past that, no matter the lies they tell themselves — I’m doing this to protect my allies. I’m doing this because you attacked me first. I’m doing this because I have to. We’re all doing this because we didn’t have a choice. Lies. All of them. Everyone is doing this for themselves. Everyone is doing this because death is fucking scary. The end.

Denali lies and tells herself that she throws her knife at Quest because Quest swung her weapon at Lex. This is defense, not offense. The truth is far more selfish and ugly: Denali was always going to throw her knife at Quest, sooner or later, in this moment or the next, because every beat of Quest’s heart threatens her own. Over the years Denali has clawed, bitten, and scratched at her own skin, leaving jagged scars up and down her body. The cuts and bruises provided places for her darkest thoughts to escape. It was never because she hated herself or because she entertained ideas of suicide; Denali loves herself enough to fight anything that comes for her, including her own thoughts. She loves herself enough to kill, despite knowing this makes her horrible. She can think about that later... while digging her nails into her palms, until the thought is bled from her body and all that remains is her own heartbeat and no one else’s. For now, the lie that the knives she throws know no other option is enough to get her through this.

Standing tall amongst the wreckage of the landship, she wears a gown of crusted blood and ash, but does not flinch when the others lay eyes upon her with disapproval. This is a girl who has been stabbed in the heart, whose own ally pressed her nails into the open wound and threatened to tear the still beating organ from Denali’s chest with her bare hands. A hellcreature tree attempted to gut her, a gaping hole torn into both her dress and stomach, and yet she lives. One of the children in this arena attempted to stab her through the eye the same way her brother was publicly slaughtered last year and yet she lives. The scars from the past few days are no more hidden than the ones she arrived here with because it takes far more than the judgement of strangers to hurt her. It always has.

She is covered in rhinestones for the same reason she is covered in scars: because she wants to believe that she is shameless. Go ahead, I dare you to stare. The Lyons girl will not apologize for herself, will not cower or pretend to feel that she should bow her head in order to appease the people who declare her to be overprivileged. Lowering her chin would only be an insult to those same judgmental souls. After all, the only thing worse than having more than she rightfully needs would be not to value it. This is why — despite the cancer, despite the tainted water supply, despite the growing poverty in Five that her parents may or may not be responsible for — Denali will always love her family to a fault. Regardless of whether any of that blame ought to rest upon her own shoulders, Denali will not love herself less for it. No matter how many of her fellow tributes scream in her face or send her jars of piss or simply sneer in disgust, she won't accept anyone's accusation that she should relinquish any advantage she has managed to gain. She will remove her armor when it is forcibly torn from her body; she will douse the hellfire she wields when the heavens above unleash a storm wild enough to counter her own; she will lay down her knifes only when twenty-three bodies have hit the ground first.

Denali Lyons is not a good person, but the only way for Quest Hertz to prove herself any better is to die.