a contemplation of humanity // kenji, day seven

It's not your rock thing, blood dried and dripping all at once, that puts the final nail in the coffin of the beast. It's your knife, the cursed blade that held a piece of your soul locked within, the blade that was both a reminder of a curse and a granter of your salvation all at once. Grappling with the beast, tearing away at each other with tooth and nail, it was only by a stroke of luck that you walked away from its steaming corpse with life still beating beneath your chest.

You can still see it, if you squint. A battered, broken, bleeding boy can only walk so far while bleeding from wounds old and scarred and new and fresh alike. Dimly, you remember something told to you a while back, something that a formless voice had grunted as you nursed a black eye and bandaged a cut on your knee that was still oozing crimson, that a human could only lose so much of their lifeblood before it seriously started to fuck with how they operated.

You wondered if such rules still applied to the living dead.

It's almost gotten familiar, patching yourself back up after the trials of war. Steel's fingers sewing your slices back together and patching up your bruises already seem like a faded memory, lost with the memory of the girl herself. Killed by a stray mutt two days ago, died for good yesterday, and here you are - a shell of a boy with hardly a friendly face to turn to in a world of hostiles.

But it always had been you against the rest of the world, hadn't it? You, the stonefaced orphan who made his living with his fists and threw himself into the line of fire for one last hurrah before meeting a death on your own terms. Except you had died, only for it not to stick in some twisted attempt at man playing god.

And as you tear away the shredded pieces of your shirt, patch the wound on your bare chest to the best of your ability, you can't help but think back to Perdita from Four's words. Were you still a person? Were you no more than just a Capitol puppet dancing along to strings you couldn't see?

You decide that, at the end of the day, it didn't matter. You'd seen what creatures without a soul looked like - hell, you'd just killed one - and the delusions of a single girl, reinforced by the barbs of boys who were dead or dying, wouldn't change that.

You grit your teeth as the last of your bandages are spent wrapping around the gash on your leg. Your medical supplies are nearly exhausted, with many foes and few friends out in the world around you. The fighting will only get fiercer as the conflict continues - and it's a war of attrition around you.

So be it.

You look out into the fog, wondering where the hell Lys was. Or anyone else, for that matter. No one had come to your position upon the conclusion of your fight despite the chaos and screams that had been emitted, and you likewise were unable to hear much of anything else. And the thought that maybe you should be up on your feet searching for your district partner turned tenuous ally crosses your head, before deciding against it - better one person has a fixed location in this fog as opposed to two blind idiots searching for each other through echolocation.

So you cross your arms around your knees, and wait for a friendly face to arrive.

Steel wouldn't come back. Couldn't come back. Not after yesterday.

But maybe Lys would.