one minute / reece.
Jul 24, 2021 3:35:33 GMT -5
Post by sidney on Jul 24, 2021 3:35:33 GMT -5
REECE
JACKSON
I stay sitting between them, Nora and Willa, either of my hands wrapped around theirs, until their bodies are cold and the hovercrafts come to lift them up into the sky. It feels like the least I could do for them and I told Aspen as much when she came over to me and urged me to walk away and move on before anyone else came through.
No, I’d said sternly, though the crack in my voice had surely been unmistakable. They don’t deserve to be alone. So, I waited. I wiped away the blood and gore from their faces - made sure they still looked like themselves - and posted up between them.
“I’m sorry,” I remember saying after a long silence, once I started to hear the the arena splitting open upon the hovercraft’s arrival. “I’m sorry, I -” my breath caught in the back of my throat, I squeezed my hands tighter around theirs, “I should have done more.”
They come with no regard for me or my grief and it feels like a punch in the gut, like a kick to the face. In truth, I barely knew them, but a much harsher truth was they were all I had left. And now they’re gone. Just like that. As quickly as it took me to pierce a spear through Emerson’s throat, it was just as fast when Ariel ripped Nora from this world. In the blink of an eye, really. Here and speaking and swinging her weapon, then lying in the dirt right there at my feet.
I grit my teeth as I still stand there thirty minutes after they’d been taken away, staring at the now faded and drying pools of blood atop the dirt of the trail. Already disappearing, I think to myself quietly and blink away fresh tears. There’s a flash and it’s not Nora or Willa I see lying on the ground, but instead my sister with that familiar bullet hole between her eyes. Another flash and it’s Emerson gasping for air through the hole I put in her neck. No, I plead and slam my eyes shut, shaking my head fiercely as I hear footsteps approach behind me. She can’t see me like this. She’ll think I’m weak, and that’s all she needs to decide I’m next.
“I need a minute,” I murmur over my shoulder to Aspen and take off away from the trail, down a bit of a slope to a thick patch of trees. I can feel it coming, building at the center of my chest, rising up in my throat like bile - all that raw emotion I’ve been swallowing since the moment they called my name outside the Justice Building. Since the day my sister was murdered, really. But we’ve only got enough time for one breakdown today, not two.
I make my way around a large trunk of a nearby tree and brace my palm against the rough bark. My chest heaves as sobs come from deep within my lungs. I pray I’m far enough away that she cannot hear, that she listened and gave me my space. I don’t want to share this with her, or anyone. My grief is my own, and I will mourn Nora and Willa until the moment I take my last breath - but for now, I allow myself a minute.
Sixty seconds, that’s it.
59, 58, 57…
Then I’ll go back to reality.
45, 44, 43…
To Aspen, to whatever - whoever - comes next for us.
33, 32, 31…
But for now,
25, 24, 23…
I’ll cry.
10, 9, 8…
For them.
3, 2, 1…
Now fight.
