smother || k.j. day seven

Kahinta can feel the beach that hides underneath the clouds, running her hands distractedly across the coarse ground beside her, weaving patterns that don't last again and again until the tingle of sensation from her movement grows to irritation. Just a little, but her skin smarts at the tips of her fingers, smooth and buzzing as she wipes them together, scraping sand off with her nails and feeling the zing of it up her arm.

Red, all across her skin, clinging in the wrinkles of her palms and under her nails, up her forearms, against her cheek. No amount of rubbing removes it all. Kahinta stares at her hands, face lax, eyes still glazed and unfocused, in the clouds. She can't get it off. She'll never get it off.

She'd always thought she would love the shore, but the longer she sits, the more she hates the sand, the sound of the water, the rush of salt on the wind.

Her legs itch where the girl had managed to get in her scrapes, but she doesn't bother patching them up. The water had cleaned them well enough. She goes through the motions of things all the same, wringing out her hair, and collecting the other girl's belongings, and trying to catch a goose that circles low nearby. None of it helps clean her hands.

Part of her wishes feebly that she could trade in her red-tinted glasses for the rose-colored lenses of her youth.

The red doesn't fade.

The sound of movement in the sand snaps her from her daze. Far off, and then closer, she can hear footsteps on the beach, the shifting shuffle of sand as it moves in her direction. A mutt maybe, or another tribute pushed in her direction.

Kahinta Jones has lasted longer than the Gamemakers are pleased with, she's sure.

Stoking another fight would be the easiest way to seal up their loose ends. Her body sags at the thought, gaze drifting from the photo to where the water lies beyond the fog, where the body lies beyond the water. She doesn't want to fight.

She doesn't want to fight. She wants to go home.

Her chest seizes at the thought, breath caught in her lungs, throat too tight to be anything other than a sob strangled before it has been given life. Kahinta wants to curl up in her bed and press her face into Temple's pillow long after her sister has taken her leave, wants to sit on the fence and sing to the cows that amble past, wants to ask Melora how her daughter is doing after her first Reaping survived. Each thought burns like she's been set alight, skin cracked and peeling back to expose her nerves until she feels like she must be a pyre, smoke signal of her grief muddying the clouds.

But the sky stays white, and Kahinta stays quiet.

"Zenia!"

A shiver runs down her spine, a shallow breath all she can manage. She knows that voice. Dominic, the boy from Four, the one she'd broken the arm of just the day prior. His voice is panicked, high on the wind as the sound of splashing carries closer. Kahinta moves slowly into a crouch, careful not to make a sound, and slides her boots around her neck, her bag across her back. The other girl's bag is slung across her body, her cloak draped over it at her hip. In her hand, her morning star.

It grows quiet, and Kahinta creeps forward despite the way she knows the victors from Ten must be screaming at the screens. Step by careful step, just a little closer, until she can see the outline of a figure kneeling in the shallows.

"I'm sorry we couldn't be there the second time either. You… You deserved better."

She did. They all did.

Kahinta backs away into the fog without a sound.

Nothing is visible.

Weightless, drifting. Reaching out, but there's nothing there to find purchase on, stretched thin as her fourteenth year when she'd started losing her baby fat to long nights and refusing the food Temple tried to push onto her plate when she thought she wasn't looking. Thinner still, hip-bone ridges and bumps along her spine, a body fraying at the seams. Splintered fingertips grazing nothing and curling tight around it as if the loss was a triumph. Her body recoils, arms circling her legs and pulling her back into herself with every brea-

She can't breathe.

Kahinta's eyes open, darkness pressed close to her face, obscuring everything completely as she unwinds and stretched out again, searching for something to grab onto. Hands still on her chest.

Not her own.

Pushing, a deep, settled weight against her collarbones, against her hips, deeper as she scrambled, wide-eyed into the cold face of nothing above her. Sinking, sinking, sinking, her fingers woven tight around hers-

The last bit of light in the sky seems to linger, casting shadows of things unseen and painting the fog in luminous colors. Surrounded by sunset sky, and yet Kahinta can't take her eyes off of her shadow.

It stands off to her left, hardly moving unless Kahinta moves first. Days of this, and yet Kahinta still can't ignore it, reaching into her bag for the camera she'd gotten from Niko's things. Slow, she raises her arms to put the camera before her face, peering through the sight before pressing down, hearing the telltale snap of the flash, photo dispensing into her hand.

Moments, and the light begins to fade, magic hour disappearing as if it never existed. She only just gets the visual of the indistinct figure amongst the sunset sky before dusk drapes over the arena properly and obscures her vision enough that she has to put the photo away. No fire, for the first time in days. Kahinta waits in darkness for the light she doesn’t want to see.

She doesn't look, keeps her eyes off to the side so that she can see the change between districts, but doesn't look at their faces for the first time since the Games had started. Maybe it had been Kenji, or Jade, or the one who had returned when it could have been Daemon. Only two, but there had been four more cannons. How many more would go tomorrow?

The sky goes dark.