big bad wolf down {mauve's death thread}

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k!ah
Retired Staff

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last seen Nov 10, 2024 20:35:35 GMT -5

#expensivetrash

big bad wolf down {mauve's death thread} Aug 8, 2021 7:44:37 GMT -5

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Post by k!ah on Aug 8, 2021 7:44:37 GMT -5

M A U V E

Run.

The word is stuck in her throat, she chokes on it as her eyes skim past Robin, landing on Areto who moves with a speed that he dying body cannot contend with. Fear surges through her, sudden and crippling, and it was in that moment she realised that this was it. That this was the moment that she craved in her victims, the moment they realised that death was imminent. She didn't need to see her reflection to know that the ghost of defeat lurked within her.

And when Areto's spear plunges into her stomach the careers name dies on her lips, eyes meeting her killers with disbelief as she looked down at the steel that her stomach had swallowed. Hands cup bloody steel, pressing into the wound as though she could save herself, as though she couldn't comprehend that this was the end, even though she already knew it was.

I will never love you.

Bloody gurgles in the back of her throat, bubbling from cracked, pale lips.

You're a monster.

It dribbles down her chin, and she realises she can no longer feel her fingertips, or her feet, or much else for that matter. In fact, she was so fucking cold. Body trembling, her knees give way, smashing with grass, which might as well be cement, her teeth grinding together roughly from the impact.

When you die for your sins, Mauve,
no one will cry.

Lips tremble as her vision blurs, tears forming like crystals in there corner of her eyes. "I-I..." The tears feel foreign, spilling down her cheeks involuntarily. Hastily she wipes at them, smearing blood and tears and dirt into her skin as her world spins. As her mind reels. As her heart weakens.

I will be grateful when you die,
even if your death means my own.

Areto rips the spear from her stomach and she falls, her back hitting the earth, eyes staring up into a sky that surged with angry dark clouds and for a moment she can heart nothing but the fading sound of her own beating heart.

You can't give up, not yet.

A surge of blood floods her throat, choking her and she rolls to her side, growing from the inside. Coughing and splattering she spits blood onto the grass, her body convulsing and she desperately fought to live even though she knew it was futile. A well known pattern from victims, their last wind striking, fake belief that they might somehow survive their fate which would usually be sealed by her own bloodied fingers.

In her haze she see's the girl from ten fall, and for the briefest moment she feels relieve because that meant that they had succeeded, that she had broken the boy who proved to be her largest challenge, his strike the killing blow. Then Robin hover's in her vision and behind him she see's the monster that she had created.

"Robin," she croaks through blood soaked lips. "Robin,

Run."

Last Edit: Aug 8, 2021 8:52:53 GMT -5 by k!ah

✮ UPAT ✮

pogue
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last seen Oct 19, 2024 11:07:44 GMT -5

Is she trying to interrupt our henna session?

big bad wolf down {mauve's death thread} Aug 8, 2021 17:51:32 GMT -5

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Post by pogue on Aug 8, 2021 17:51:32 GMT -5

L O V E

All it takes for Ariel to finally fall is the soft graze of his spear against her flesh, a final line of red opening on her skin as if the crescendo of his favorite song. She falls under the guise of a drumming solo, deafening and loud before a sudden end. Her final look is one of betrayal and fear and he can't blame her for either, can't blame her for being afraid of the cards she was dealt, the choice she never had an option of taking. Love breathes in once, as if in disbelief at the feeling of a life taken by his own hands. The breath is cold, ragged, filled with ice and arsenic and shattering his body from the inside out.

This must have been how Julian felt, how Waverly felt when they'd taken Six and Evan's lives. The cannon echoes and booms throughout the arena, one final note for a dying girl. He feels like a monster.

But he knew that already, right?

He hears Areto before he sees her, footsteps pounding and slipping in the muddy soil and Love spins around, guided on instinct and bloodlust and eighteen years of familial expectations. Areto is fury incarnate, lashing out wild and uncontrolled and taking every easy shot she thinks she can land.

He knows she's capable of more. She should be.

But his spear blocks one hit with ease, Areto's weapon bouncing off the edge of his weapon and he spins the spear in his grasp, anticipating her next hit before she swings and blocking it all the same. He kicks out with his leg, pushing her backwards and into Avriel's grasp and for a moment all they experience is a silence between them. He knows he should apologize, should beg for forgiveness, should double down on what he's done, should say that there was nothing left to do. But he bites back every word that threatens to slip from his tongue, instead only raising the spear at the two of them with a hollow stare.

They feel foreign now, when he looks at them, a far cry from the tapes he sent to them in the shatter and fall he'd walked through just days ago. It's a good thing, it isn't.

He only reminds himself to breathe out when they finally turn away from him, softening his stance and muscles relaxing as he turns towards Robin Keeni, opening his mouth to speak to him. Mauve beats him to the punch, though, choking out the words run and Love casts an annoyed glance at the girl.

Even in death Robin still listens to her, his muscles firing up and his form quickly darting towards the tree line as Love turns away from Ariel's corpse. His gaze follows Robin's shaking form as the boy runs, one hand moving to pull the axe from the sling around his shoulder and white knuckles wrapping around the wooden hilt. He raises the blade and closes one eye, carefully moving the steel along with Robin's path towards the forest. Hammering heartbeats and shallow breaths are a chorus to his own thoughts as he considers launching the axe into Robin Keeni's back, watching red spill forth and turning two to three in the span of minutes.

Instead, he's interrupted by Mauve choking on her own sins, blood dribbling down her lips. He lowers the axe and turns back towards her, taking in the sight of what he'd sworn to never become, what he never had a choice in being. He's looking at himself in the glass of a shattered mirror, hardly recognizable amongst the veins of the jagged edges.

"It was always going to end this way." He says quietly to a dying girl, walking slowly up to her fallen form with the axe resting in his hands. When his gaze drifts downwards he's met with a screaming parade of blood and guts, it explodes from Mauve's stomach in a messy retelling of her final moments, her last chapter written in blacks and reds of gash and wound. The fight is still there, and he cocks his head as she rolls to the side and and spits a glob of blood and sin onto the grass next to her, killer instincts falling to the wayside as Death drags sharpened claws over soft flesh. She's clinging to life the way a child clings to its favorite toy, with shaking hands and shallow breaths and a grip that is far too weak to fight against any outside force. "With you dying, and me watching." He thinks of Emerson, then Chad, Six, then Ariel.

He almost pities her. Almost.

"But at least you got what you wanted." He says somberly, venom rising from the back of his throat as he watches her limbs twitch and contort in a desperate plea to remain alive. He's seen it before, in countless Games replays watched in the light and the dark flitting through his mind as he stands there. They're replaced just as easily with the memories of watching Emerson fall in the Bloodbath, smirk splattered across his lips, of Julian's spear writing a story in red from the flesh of Six's throat, or Ariel's look of fear and scorn as he betrayed her trust for the final time, connecting steel to skin. "Hope you enjoyed the show."

He should be used to seeing death at this point. It should be written into his skin in between the lines of his own story, carved in red into the torn pages of a diamond legacy and splattered proudly in every somber grin that he'd sewed into the facade he'd slipped into. It should seem consistent, redundant, familiar at this point. It does. It doesn't.

It's the rewind of a cassette tape and the pressed play to listen again and again. He's stuck hearing the same song over and over, picking up on new notes and words each time.

Emerson's death was pride, Chad's was shock, Six's was somber, Ariel's was innocence. Mauve's is fury, unavoidable.

He crouches down next to her form, pressing the end of his axe into the soft mud to steady himself as he nears Mauve's face. She sputters out labored breaths, her gaze taking an eternity to long to meet his eyes. "We don't get a lot of choices in here, Mauve." He's speaking just as much to himself as he is to her, watching ribbons of red ebb and flow against her skin. "We're told to fight, so we do. We're told to kill, so we do. You were always going to die, you didn't have a choice. Neither did Ariel."

or Emerson, or Chad, or Six, or Blade, or-

He cuts his own heart off, forcing the memories of those he's watched die to the back of his mind and into the void. He doesn't care about them anymore, he can't. "But I'll throw you a bone, Mauve. I'll give you a choice." He says, letting his words sink into the dead aura that seeps from her body. "Do you want your casket..."

"Open.." He points to her chest, tip of his finger brushing against a wave of blood and stained red.

"...or closed." He moves his finger up to her face, leaving a little line of red on her cheek when he pulls it away after a heartbeat and a half. "Choice is all yours, Morganstern."

Wonder
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last seen Aug 11, 2023 10:06:03 GMT -5

everything is zoe's tbh.

big bad wolf down {mauve's death thread} Aug 9, 2021 3:29:13 GMT -5

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Post by Wonder on Aug 9, 2021 3:29:13 GMT -5

robin keeni, district 6

Run.

The last order she'd ever give.

Run.

The word burned through his body, bounced around his eardrums, ricocheting. Do you hear her? Run. R-R-Ru-R-R-Ru-Run. The world, it all seems to fade in and out. It's like a series of quick tableaux jittering across his pupils, blinking and changing the picture. Click one. A knife lodged in the girl's back, her sullen eyes begging out for him to break from his sacred contract, but the knife had already hit its mark, that was not something he could take away. Click, two. Picture two. Love, gladiatorial in stance, spear primed, the light seeming to clutch around him becoming a radiant aura. Much like an old age painting, statuesque, a Goliath spearing a David that could not overcome.

When the cannon sounded, Robin knew who it was for. Run. The ringing radiated through his fragile frame. Run. Like electricity surging through his bones, he couldn't move. Not at all. As much as he willed his feet to budge, they would not move. If he swung his arms to gain traction, his feet would stick. Run, he told himself, run. The window was there, Ariel lay slain, Love basking in his glory, the cannon sounded. It was the last thing she wanted him to do. Mauve. Her last command. All she'd asked was for him to run. Why couldn't he do one simple fucking task? It wasn't hard.

Maybe he had to come to terms with what was behind him. Regardless of what pictures painted themselves before him, behind Robin lay the film he didn't want to see. Robin had promised himself one simple thing coming into this arena. The last thing he would do was find a connection and experience heartbreak over the loss of an ally. After years of watching the Games, Robin knew the true pains of the tributes were not the gashes that lined their hollowed limbs, but the loss of hope and care by the hands of Death. Before Ariel's cannon, seconds before, Robin had heard another cannon, one he'd refused to take account for.

Run, she'd told him. Robin could do that, sure. But perhaps that was why he couldn't move? His body was holding him accountable for what his brain could not comprehend. Robin had refused to take an ally out of fear, and in being so adamant in that not happening, by pairing himself with the most monstrous of creatures to ever set foot in an arena, he'd somehow found the thing he never wanted, a friend. And that friend could be dying or dead, and he wouldn't know any better. Unless he turned around. Turned his back on the gloating Love, and allow him to spear him dead, all for what? To say goodbye?

Yes.

Like a series of chains coming undone, Robin's feet rushed with blood. No longer stagnant or rooted, he gambled with fate and made a choice he knew would make Mauve angry. Pivot, not run. Collapsed on the ground like a broken doll was Mauve. Blood pooling visibly in the grass, scout uniform ripped and beaten, Robin was alarmed at just how fragile she looked. From the moment Robin had laid eyes on Mauve, he was afraid of her. Her stare would sear into you from across a room, her tone would make your legs quiver, and Robin had been convinced that he would die at her hand. But there, in the grass, he couldn't gather the words to describe it. Seeing the strongest person he knew, no longer be that - just, there, on the ground, was more than he could take in.

That's when he felt it too, that's when he knew that Mauve had broken him, killed him as she had promised. Of course, not literally. But at that moment, Robin felt the hope. The hope that he'd been so desperate not to feel, because just as he felt it, the second he acknowledged that it was there, it was ripped away. Mauve had killed Robin as promised - by building that hope, being killed before him, and taking it with her. Robin felt sympathetic, something he knew Mauve would hate. Her sharp gaze was dulled and round, hazy. "Robin" she croaked, he heard her call. At any second, Love could just spear right through him and take him out. "Robin," she called again, he couldn't move, he couldn't hear her, that wasn't Mauve, it couldn't be.

"Run." runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun

"Mauve" Her name sputtered across quivering lips. He was blubbering, his eyes welling up, he felt swollen. Was he crying? Robin looked on her broken body, her hair strewn about her, her ax to her side. What could he say? What could he say that would encapsulate every feeling he needed to say? There was no perfect answer to that question. Time was fleeting and he couldn't stay. Her last order was clear, and Robin would stay loyal to the cause. Of all the things he could think to say to Mauve, of all the things he would want to say, the only thing he can manage is a, "Thank you."

And then he runs, as fast as he can.

ilyilyilyilyily