we ter-might have a problem, here // woodsmen vs mutts

Her skin is bruised and scarred — but the pain has left her. So has Juliet. She shows no appreciation for either of these things, hiding behind her mask of indifference once again. "She's gone," Silas had said shortly, and Sophie only pursed her lips. The world kept on turning.

"Well, that's her choice.
She can be our enemy."

Sophie is not heartless, or bloodthirsty — but she's trying to be. In a way that is both terrible and far too gentle. She wakes up before daybreak, covered in sweat. A boy without hands had visited her in her dreams, and she was forced to relive the moment where she cut him down. "Let me make it stop."

She can't blink away the emotions in her eyes.

"Finish him. I'm bored now."

And worst of all, she finds herself wishing that she were more like Silas. They are both numb creatures, but his apathy is a touch colder — she's the house cat sleeping in the sun, and he's the panther stalking his prey through the night. She is not foolish enough to think that she could take him in a fight.

But that's the thing about shields;
they break, and then you toss them away.

It's a waiting game. One that she tells herself she can win. And she's breaking, too, but in a different way. A way that she isn't willing or ready to put into words. So she walks in silence, with one hand on her sword and the other gripped tightly around the strap of her bag. Like a spoiled child, she's tired and pouting.

She doesn't want to be attacked again.

So when the monsters appear, it is simply by chance that she is the first to react. She shrieks at the sight of the massive spiders, barely noticing the bird-thing that swoops down in her direction. Falling down to her knees is enough to save her, and drawing her weapon takes mere seconds, but it takes everything in her to stand back up. This is somehow worse than fighting tributes. This is a fear she can't ignore.

"Beck, help me with the birds." The words leave her mouth out of instinct, the sound of a broken bone snapping through the air around them like a gunshot. She glances to Silas, trapped against the ground and snarling like he is more angry than in agony. She's not a leader — but she's not a fool, either. "We kill them, then we deal with the spiders." She shudders at the thought.

She's a coward, too.

He wasn't afraid of people. He knew people, knew what made them tick, knew what made them weak, knew what they wanted. It was always, at the end of the day, selfish intention. Making the decision that was in their best interest, unless they were like Martyr, which meant they being self destructive to the point of doing anything they could to fail, just so they could wallow in it, find a way out, somehow feel like they saved the day.

He knew people.

He didn't know these creatures, or what they wanted, or how they fought. The only spiders he'd seen were promptly squished under his boot and he'd never seen birds big enough or strong enough to be considered dangerous. But there they were, Capitol creations born and bred for this very moment.

The first of the spiders slammed into him with enough force to sound a loud CRACK! from his knee and send him toppling feet over head. The second grabbed at him, wrapping its leg around him in an unnatural way, as if there were no bones to prohibit it from bending in such odd angles. He groaned at the mark the pressure left, at the growing pain in his knee, scrambled backwards so that he could regain his footing.

He spat at it, screaming the words "FUCK! YOU!" as loudly as he could, waving his arms as if it might scare the beasts off. The birds flapped their wings, the spiders hissed, shied away for a moment, and then they were all back at it, full force.

His jaw was clenched so tightly he may have cracked a tooth or two if he wasn't careful. He fucking hated spiders.

He tossed a fallen branch at the one closest to him- the one that had run him down and snapped his knee- so that he'd have time to maneuver past it.

Fiend and Princess were struggling against one of the birds, and he'd intended to pick up the slack when the second bird blocked his path from them.

"Fine then," he said. No time to waste, he raised his axe and swung.

The spiders keep their distance, and for that, she is grateful. Good, she thinks. Let the boys have all the fun. It's a horrible, selfish thought — but it's an honest one. Sophie Fray draws the line at bugs.

Not that the birds are much better.

Silas comes to their rescue, and a wing is sent flying through the air. The sickest part is when it lands, twitching for a moment — then stillness. There's something hot on her cheek, and she knows it's blood, but she presses her wrist to her lips and refuses to scream.

Beck just had to say it was calm.

Now it's chaos, and she yelps as one of the birds flaps its wings in her face and scratches her shoulder. She sneers down at the torn fabric, the fresh flow of blood trailing down her chest. "Oh, that's lovely. I'm a painting now."

Her words are full of resentment, and her knuckles are white-hot around her weapon. This bird had managed to deflect her sword, somehow, but that bird is already on its last wing. Literally. She weighs her options, and desperate to help, she chooses the easiest target.

"Beck, uh—" she thinks hard for a moment, "can you shine light in their eyes? They hate light. I think?" Her voice is quiet, and cold; gentle like a winter night.

"Please don't let a spider kill you."

Perhaps it's the sweetest thing she's ever said.

There were only a few things Silas could recall his mother giving him. The first was those hollow eyes- the kind that would've made people wonder, even if he'd never touched drugs once in his life. They were the color of burned coal: various shades of gray and black ash. The next thing she'd given him were those hands that looked so much more ominous on him than on her: fingers far too thin to be so long, skin pale except where the bony knuckles were, fingernails always uncharacteristically well-groomed. And the last thing she'd given him was a saying.

"Say yes!"

She used it all the time, he remembered. When she was asking him to do a chore, or if he wanted to go and get ice cream with her, or help her steal his father's wallet, or help her trick some poor old woman into giving them her medicine, that's what she would always shout, voice perky and warm and, unsurprisingly, too full of youth to belong to an adult: "Say yes!"

He hadn't ever meant to, but sometime along the way, he'd started saying it. To his brothers, mostly, and he thought that maybe it was as some kind of proof that he cared about them; the saying had always had some strange effect over him wen their mother had said it, and since she was never around for more than a week or so every few years, they didn't really get the same opportunity.

Say yes.

He realized that it was that very reason his stomach felt so sour, his teeth were chattering despite the stifling hot and humid air around him. Someone held a hand full of pills out to him once when he was thirteen or so, and he thought, say yes.


It was Beck who received the brunt of the damage this time; Silas could see almost instantly that his wrist was bent in an unnatural angle, the palm of his hand very quickly turning from white, to pink, to red. It was broken. As broken as my knee, he thought.

He and Sophie were having soft exchange, like friends. For a moment he forgot they couldn't ever be friends, but in that moment, he felt particularly invincible. Right then, it was not me against them, live of die. It was us against them. He contemplated if he should stay or go, because that thought frightened him. That thought was what had allowed him to leave Jules. His indifference was his greatest strength; who would he be without it?

He snarled, angry suddenly. At them, for trying to make him soft, at Jules for being so fucking stubborn, at the mutts for breaking his leg.

He readied his axe yet again, and when he swung, a scream escaped him manic with furious pursuit.

He ignored the weight he was putting on his knee until his entire body hissed at him and he buckled, toppling to one side, stumbling as he tried to catch his balance. "Fuck," he said, now using his axe as a cane to haul himself up and keep himself from falling back over.

"You're doing really good, y'know?"

She grins at the boy with bird bones, broken and quiet — her smile, his voice, their wounds. All of it shattered and silent. "Thanks, Hailsham." His name is Beck, and he deserves to be called by his name. But Sophie still wants to be cold, and lonely, and lethal.

Silas snarls. She tells herself not to flinch.

"I am, aren't I?" she replies in an effort to ease the tension, but the joy in her voice is swallowed by a panicked gasp. One of the spiders that attacked her allies makes its advance on her, and she's absolutely frantic. "Get away from me! I don't like this!"

She doesn't like any of it. There is nothing here to love.

The creature's leg brushes against hers, the bristle tearing at her skin. She throws herself back, desperate to be away from its beady eyes and snapping fangs. She can't even bring herself to focus on the pain. "Back off! Just stop!"

She swings wide, and wildly, altogether missing her intended target.

The sickness in his stomach was spreading like warmth: shivers of unwellness bleeding up into his chest, leaving a sour taste in his mouth, adding enough weight to his eyelids that he had to force them to stay open. He felt Beck's eyes on him and so he tried to look better off than he felt, finally steadying his stance and forcing his breathing to remain calm.

One of the spiders swatted at him with its leg, probably trying to knock him over so that it could begin the process of eating him. How would that work, he wondered. He felt like he remembered something about spiders wrapping their pray in little burritos of web before draining them out; he also remembered hearing that some spiders didn't bother with the theatrics and got right down to business.

It was a chilling thought, but an invigorating one. There was nothing like the threat of death to remind a person that they would like to go on living.

Silas shoved the spider's arm away from him, and just as soon heard the ungodly shrieking from the other spider as Beck took one of its legs. Silas smirked.

Wonder where he'd gotten that idea.

He hadn't heard any canons yet; more than twenty people left in this place. He wanted to be the last of them. He wanted to see it through to the end, to know that he was the best, to go home and have a different life and make god damn sure that his brothers didn't live the same life he had to. He was around their age when he was forced to start; there was a very dark part of him that worried their father had already started them on that path in his absence.

He limped toward him, still relying too much on his axe to keep him upright- he'd been lucky to find one long enough that didn't require him to bend too far over. He kept his lips pressed in on themselves to keep the pain from flashing too heavily on his face, and then scowled for good measure. Any amount of vulnerability was expertly masked by the hatred he wore with too much ease.

Two down, he said through clenched teeth.

He let his footing grow steady enough that he could raise his axe into the air and point it at the spider Beck had just removed a leg from.

Steady breathing.

Two to go.

"These things can't die fast enough."

Sophie was inclined to agree. She couldn't care less about the balance of nature — as far as she was concerned, bugs didn't have a purpose. The world would only be better without them, even if other monsters came to take their place. Nothing could be worse.

"We're doing them a favor, really."

It was a hateful, catty thing to say. A girl with a sword, with the audacity to say her actions were justified. But that was the thing; she was bleeding, and she was afraid, and justice came in many forms. It could be merciless.

Sophie was not innocent.

She had been, and then she wasn't — but she was still young, and complex, and unsure of herself. She was so certain that she was lost that she seemed whole, looking out at the world without emotion. She'd always been watching. No one expected her to act.

"Won't be much longer now.
They're running out of legs to stand on."

How cheeky. How cruel.