lexandriy // { lex, day 8 }

oh i, whole night, i heard you sing
'o death, where is thy sting?'

The hour or so she complies with the commands to lie still and rest are the most torturously boring of her life. Lives. Either. Both. If she were someone else, she could while away the hours turning over existential angst or philosophical dread or pure elation in her head. But Lex got bored of the resurrection brainfuck in about five minutes. She lived, she died, she lives again. It just doesn't seem that complicated. Instead she counts ceiling tiles, counts the stitches on the inside of her cheek with the stitches in her tongue, and rubs her thumbs and forefingers together wishing for something to distract them. We must always remember to be the change we wish to see in the world.

Lex Lionel doesn't stay down for long.

The medical staff, bless them, keeps encouraging Lex not to do the things that she wants. Naturally, this turns into a game: Lex wordlessly doing exactly as she pleases, the staff trying to bargain with her, like some sort of bidding war over her own well-being.

"I encourage you to lie down and rest."

She sits up,

"At least stay off your feet —"

swings her legs over the edge of the bed,

"— please, your femoral artery was severed not eighteen hours ago, you shouldn't put any weight on it."

and slowly rises to her feet. Gravity feels stronger in this room than anywhere else Lex has ever been. Her whole body is heavy, every small movement requiring a concerted effort. And even through the fog of what must be so many painkillers it still feels as if a big oak was felled right on top of her. Drugged up for the endtimes, her restless mind still demands distraction, and —

"I encourage you to avoid solid foods until your cheek heals."

There's no concealing the ravenous glint in her eyes. Either that or her bloodhound sniffing was considerably less subtle out loud than it was in her head. But after a week of strenuous landship sailing and gear hauling and dueling and dying with little more to eat than a pile of greens and a handful of grapes, it would take more than stitches on her tongue and an extra hole in her mouth to keep her from what smells to be an absolute pile of her favorite meats.

She hobbles past whatever, slipping between two translucent curtains, shoving who cares out of her way, and making the world's slowest beeline right for the mountain of her stomach's truest desire: m e a t. Glorious, glorious meat. Foregoing plates, foregoing silverware, foregoing decorum — fuck decorum, she died yesterday — she picks two roast quails from the stack and sticks them both directly in her mouth. Plum sauce drips from her chin as she chews, stashing the tiny little bird bones in her useless cheek until she's ready to retrieve their miniature corpses picked clean. Her eyes roll back in her head and the involuntary low mmmmmm that escapes her is pure ecstasy. This is the single greatest moment of her entire life. Lives. Whichever.

Carrying a ceramic plate away from the buffet is out of the question — both of her arms are in a sorry state, the right one stabbed and sliced and the left cut so deep it's been stuck in a sling ("I encourage you to keep your arm immobilized while the muscle heals."). But like it or not, she'll need to get off of her wounded leg sooner rather than later. She exchanges the quail bones for whatever else she can stuff into her mouth: three lamb rib chops, a piece of braised oxtail, and a long strip of pork belly. Everything else gets loaded up in the sling: several duck legs confit, fried veal cutlets, a turkey drumstick wrapped in bacon, some shortrib and sparerib and babyback rib, plus an entire porterhouse steak smothered in shallot-and-rosemary butter.

The best wealth she's won in a week cradled in her arms, Lex limps away from the treasure heap and towards the thunderclaps. It's low and muffled, like there's sawdust occluding her ears again, but they are thunderclaps nonetheless. She eases into a squishy chair — under-stuffed, scratchy, and deeply uncomfortable by Capitol standards; after a week curled up in shopping carts with lumpy handbags stuffed with shredded paper and bandages for pillows and sleeping on a thin foam mat on the ground, nothing could be more comfortable beneath her aching body.

The giant screen in front of her prominently displays swirls of nothing. Lex pulls the trio of lamb bones from her her mouth with a satisfied sigh and drops them on the floor at her feet. She reclines, propping her stabbed leg on an adjacent chair and settling into the cushions.

Faces emerge from the swirls of fog: The boy from 2 — Shy Aubergine, according to the banner on the bottom of the screen — tripping and tumbling to the ground. District Four-Fingers — Anatalia Morrisen, apparently — stalking through the grass, knife in hand. Bette — Sublino — resting her eyes at the trunk of a tree, a sole shopping cart abandoned in the middle of the nearby path.

Denali. Her breath catches in her throat — or maybe that's a bite of pork belly too big to swallow all at once. (It's her heart, thrumming against the stab wound on her chest.) There she sits, strapping new diamond-glazed armor to her shins, the protective pieces Lex ruined yesterday no doubt replaced on the whim of some Capitolite benefactor. It's surreal to see her separated by a screen, even in the highest definition missing... something. Something electric, something vibrant, something contagious that had always been so obvious in person — worn on her chest and her face and her sleeves like blood and stitches and rhinestones.

But it's hard to miss much more than that when she's nestled into a pile of cushions, happily chowing down on rib after rib pulled from the stash in her sling. She could be suturing her own wounds, pulling new armor over her damp clothes, passing the tense hours before her next inevitable mortal struggle in the pursuit of any fleeting distraction, alone.

Nah. Lex got the better deal, dying notwithstanding.