vanish beneath the surface :: fleur vs love

The metal tip of Love's spear arcs forwards, killing blow highlighted in the red of his vision and he slams his teeth down onto his bottom lip with the exertion, pain blossoming up in red from the wound in his forearm as he does so. The blood droplets fall like rose petals when he moves, slipping from skin and staining the once vibrant green of the grass below with a sickening maroon. He's watched this arena ebb and flow under the lives its taken, draw forth blood only to swallow it whole and reflect it back like a shattered mirror. With every step he takes he feels it pulling at the seams of his life force, cracking away chips and pieces of diamond and glass just to see the broken soul that's housed beneath it.

His spear goes for the jugular but only grazes the skin of her neck, pulling forth a faint hint of red that drips and fuses with the edge of Fleur's mask as she stumbles backwards, desperately putting more distance between the two of them. Love stays agile, flexible, shifting the weight between his feet to prepare for the knives he knows are going to come his way.

"Lucky you." 

The words slip from Fleur's lips and feel earth shattering when they reach his ears, muscles tensing and grimace evolving under the harsh curves of the mask that is locked on his skin. Seven days ago he would have taken the comment with a pinch of salt and thrown it back with sugar and spice, slip poison onto his lips and dance into the sentence like he'd been trained to do his whole life. 

What can I say, I'm a lucky guy. 

He can almost hear himself speak it in the back of his mind, slip back into that facade of faux diamond and bloody sins and feeling like he owned the world. Monsters and men seemed so easy back then because he didn't know the difference. One is the other and the other is one, two sides of the same coin and two halves of the same reflection. 

Now, it just seems hollow. A monster and a man can never be the same, there's always a choice made for you on which you'll become.

"Luck didn't have anything to do with it." He's not lucky and he's not fortunate. The steel of his weapon hadn't carved bloody lines into Ariel's skin just by chance, the blade of his axe hadn't shattered Mauve's skull by the roll of the dice. He swallows hard, feeling his bones ache and heart harden inside his chest. He's a parasite, with shadowy tendrils and a bloodlust designed to be insatiable. Julian had recognized it so many days ago, had done his best in shallow touch and gentle roar to pull him back from an edge he'd already been pushed off of. 

He's more monster than man. Always has been.

"Love. Two." He says simply, and for a moment it's like time has thrust him all the way back to the Training Center, effortlessly introducing himself to everyone he could find under the guise of smoke and mirrors. He thinks of Emerson's scowl and Areto's fury, how much everything has changed in the days he has been here. How much it hasn't.

"You might just be the one person in this arena who doesn't hate me, Fleur."

Yet. His mind corrects him.

He leaps forwards without warning, muscles flaring and firing off to close the distance between the two of them. And he knows how Fleur will react, watches her hands curl around the knives she wields and the moonlight bounce off the metal of the blade. Love knows what to expect this time, arching his body to the left as the first knife flies past his head with a shallow wind behind it, hardly felt underneath the holes in his mask. He presses his right foot into the ground and pushes back the other way, rolling into a somersault to dodge the second knife that Fleur underhands at him, the blade embedding itself into the dust and the dirt behind him.

He thrusts his spear forwards, just to give her a reason to hate him.

His spear scrapes against her forearm, pulling a sleeve of red rose petals out in its wake and Love immediately bounces backwards on trained heels, spinning the spear in his grasp and adjusting the distance between them until he sees fit. Curses echo out from his lips under the mask, slipping and falling to the ground below in a wave of anger at the shallow wounds he’s inflicted.

This arena has a way at pulling at all the seams and making even the most trained into amateurs. Even now, Love’s mind wanders in between the heartbeats, assaulted by the thoughts of everyone who has passed and everyone who is still living, even if only for the moment.

He sees the knife a second before it hits his stomach and rips muscle and flesh alike in its path. He gasps, feeling red and black fill his mouth as iron scatters against his tongue. The breaths are heavy in his throat and he nearly doubles over, battling against his body’s instinct to immediately grasp the handle of the knife and rip it free from his stomach in a glorious blaze of red and blue, spill out the sins and the innards and everything in between as he falls.

The downfall of a million Careers before him and a million to come after: He’d underestimated her.

Nine was known for killers, a heartless land of the unwanted and the already dead. He’d passed horror stories amongst his lips with his fellow classmates back at the Academy, of gangs and rivals and guns and bullets and the wounds they carry. He thinks of Avriel, his body slammed against the Training Center wall so many nights ago and the fear in his eyes. And then he thinks of the anger and fury he’d seen dancing on his face yesterday as he’d thrown his knives with deadly abandon. The Games changes people, none for the better and none for the wiser.

”I don’t know about the only person, but no, I don’t have a reason to hate you.”

Yet. The voice in Love’s head responds, and he narrows his gaze as she speaks, ”You might hate me. If you knew me, that was.”

The words sink in slowly, against the chorus of a million heartbeats hammering in his chest and the crashing waves of adrenaline that echo and ricochet from the pit of his stomach and into the paths of his veins. When they finally hit his mind, monstrous and toxic as it is, he laughs. It’s shallow, forced, laborious as it spills from his mouth with a wave of iron hitting his tongue.

”I only hate one person in here.” He says, and Julian’s face flashes into the forefront of his mind. A knife in the stomach feels different than the boys hand against his flesh, the warmth that he brought in the dead of the night. It’s an inside joke that he’ll never get to tell, he realizes it as the red hits the inside of his lips while he grins a blood-spilled smirk.

”But go ahead, Fleur Adroxis, spill your guts to me.” He says, readying his spear. ”I love the theatrics of a tragic backstory.”

Metal meets flesh and red spills out from the source, eye for eye and blow for blow and Love instinctively twists and turns the weapon as soon as it enters Fleur's stomach, shaking hands wrapped tight around the hilt before he wrenches it free from her body and dances backwards before she can return the hit.

Pain is returned with pain, and there's no pleasure in the deep wound he inflicts on her skin because his body repays him with a wave of pain worth double the prize. Adrenaline surges and ebbs and flows through his veins as he tries to adjust his stance, the knife deep in his stomach burning at the source and teeth gnashing into each other as he fights back the urge to keel over. His hand presses against the wound, postmarked against the uniform that hangs in tatters around his chest by now. It's the first time he'd fully bled in this arena, dancing around the blades and the fury of his fellow tributes for six days straight only to run red through and through on the seventh. Some desperate part of him, his heart, he thinks, tells him that the knives that lace themselves into his forearm and his stomach are nothing more than a penance paid and a life owed. No one left to take the fall, no one left to comfort the wounded and no one left to save those that are already gone.

Maybe he deserves this. Maybe he doesn't.

His mind wants to say that he doesn't know, that he couldn't possibly know, and as he sways in the wake of his own morality he pictures Areto's shaking form clutching cassette tape in front of him. Pictures, for a moment, the fact that they existed in the same wake of a crashing wave and were stuck watching themselves crumble and fall and crack and shatter. He hadn't known anything, then, mind too tired and body too trained to come to an agreement on what was deserved versus who was the deserving. Slumped back against a tree and face buried in bloody hands he'd convinced himself that a boy like him could be saved if only he'd wanted it, an eternity in five days of Julian convincing him the monstrous aura that he cloaks himself in was nothing more than a facade waiting to fade into the dust and the dirt.

Now, as he stands facing Fleur and watching red meet red as they bleed into the grass below, he's entirely sure of one thing.

He deserves this.

"Less tragedy than hamartia."

Love's eyes roll until he sees the ghosts and the shadows in the back of his mind. Speaking like kings and queens and souls and martyrs, he'd heard it all before in between Julian's whispered breaths. As if they were anything more than bodies waiting to drop at the gallows. "What, want my sob story so you don't have to face yours?"

"I've faced mine ten times over in here." He chokes out at the accusation, trademark smirk a laborious task as he sways back and forth in practiced stance.

"I'm only here because I fucked up." And Love's eyebrow arches, head tilt and tensed muscles as the black spots dance at the edges of his vision. "Ran from said fuck up. The person I hurt most was never in this arena and I hope he'll never see it. He didn't even see it coming."

And there it was, cracked wide open and loud in the shatter and the fall.

"No." He mutters under heavy breath, "No no no..." The words slip from his lips and hang heavy in the air between them before slipping to the ground below. His hand clutches the wound at his stomach now, red seeping out between the digits and staining the palm of a monster red.

"Listen Fleur, I may be pretty but I'm not dumb. We're both dying here."

Reflection stained red, he's staring in the veins of a shattered mirror just to watch himself crumble. "So I'll give you a bit of advice before one of us goes down." He remarks, clutching the spear tighter in his grasp.

"I don't give a shit who you care about. Not supposed to." He says slowly, venom in every word. "But that little hope you have? That they'll never see this? That running from it saved them?" 

Emerson and Ariel and Chad and Six and-

"Throw that away, Fleur Adroxis. You hurt him." He's speaking from experience, blood red rage and pain washing over his form. "Probably hurt him bad."

He stares for what feels like an eternity, fog and mist from choked breaths rising up through the mask. 

"The least you could do for yourself is own it, Fleur. Monsters don't get any less terrible just because they run."

He would know.

Pound for pound and blow for blow, his spear scrapes against the front of her mask and he curses a million expletives laced into shallow breaths, struggling to keep himself standing as Fleur swings wildly back at him with her sword. He sees it before he can move, body slow to the draw and coated in red and he gasps in pain as the machete's dull blade opens a new sin along his calf. He stumbles, falls to one knee and buries his fist into the dirt just to make sure he doesn't crumble and fall into the void. It's almost as soon as he feels the cold soil, stained with the scent of his own blood, that he's forcing himself back up to standing, fighting against every broken nerve and torn through muscle that rings out in protest from his body. 

Swaying softly, he feels his body giving into itself with every heartbeat. When he bites as hard as he can into his lip just to remind himself that he's still here he feels the soft warmth of his own blood greet his tongue, mixing with the last few globs of saliva that hang from his lips.

"I'm not a monster, Love." And he breathes out in mock amusement, choking breath ragged against the inside of the mask on his face. "Neither are you..." And he chokes a laugh out, feeling the taste of iron and salt on his tongue as he stumbles backwards, hardly managing to catch his balance by driving the tip of his spear into the ground below.

The black spots at the edge of his vision dance and tumble over one another, ghosts and spirits primed and ready to swallow him whole after six days of waiting for him to shatter for the final time. He holds himself steady against a wave of crashing pain and searing wounds, every breath a chore and every thought that runs through his mind a blur as he tries to focus in on the fight at hand.

He can't, the ghosts are too loud. Emerson grasps him by the hand and he feels bone and skin crack and shatter like he's back in his nightmares. Ariel rips out his spine with shaking fingers and Six screams until eardrums burst and he can't hear anything besides the sound of Fleur's hollow words.

"They can, for a time." He says, nodding. "But they can't co-exist forever, Fleur." He unhinges the axe from his back and feels its weight crushing his form as he holds it.

"But go ahead, believe what you want." He thinks of Areto. "Ignorance is bliss."

It's all he can do to stay standing as he swings the axe, a million pounds and eighteen years of expectations and failures behind the swing and he gasps in pain as the blade only manages to scrape against Fleur's hip, a desperate bid to kiss flesh with steel only leaving a shallow mark of red. She swings back in turn and Love can hardly raise the armor on his left arm up to block the swing, the metal falling in tattered pieces to the grass below as the momentum hits him.

He stumbles backwards, gasping in pain and choking back the tears that spill down his cheeks. He doesn't know if they're from pain or fear anymore, doesn't know anything other than the path that is laid out in scarlet stone in front of him and the gun at his head telling him to walk forwards.

There's a million words behind Fleur's empty stare as she looks at him, caught between labored breaths and bloody soul and Love feels hatred and innocence mixing into one in the empty void between them. His arm rises up, pain in every swollen muscle and torn through flesh until he feels the bloodstained fingertips wrap around the upper edge of the child's mask that the Gamemakers had forced onto their faces.

Hiding true intentions behind the skin of a monster. The familiarity burns like poison.

Torn, cracked through with the kiss of steel, his hand presses into the mask before pulling with whatever mute strength is left in his body and tearing a small chunk of the mask off from his face and revealing a bloodshot, puffy blue eye from underneath. He gasps at the exertion, revels in the exhaustion, and stares down Fleur Adroxis one more time. 

"To the shatter and the fall." He mutters under his breath, hardly audible in the sway of the dead air.