Petaline Tiller volunteers as tribute (nofortunateone) wrote in colosseum, @ 2014-02-22 21:54:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | ! 56th games, - arena, tribute: 56th ariel o'connell, tribute: 56th miranda tern, tribute: 56th sephora kohl |
WHO: Sephora Kohl [D1], Miranda Tern [D4] and Ariel O’Connell [D4]
WHAT: Red, red, red...
WHEN: Dusk, Night 10
WHERE: Locker Bays
STATUS: log complete
WARNING: child murder, explicitly creepy
Sephora needed no further prompting as she darted out suddenly towards Miranda, her blade cutting the air. All thought converted to action, her body alight at Aramis’ direction and their friendship sucked by vacuum into the deep recesses of her mind. It was all instinct and reaction now, just as it had been in the Cornucopia. No more worry, no more doubt. Just keep moving, live to the next breath. She would kill her and then Aramis would come to help her kill Ariel. As his senses failed, as even his mind began to deteriorate—Ariel could feel and see it happening, yes, in long stretches of lucidity—Ariel still kept sight of his main objective: keeping Miranda alive. Perhaps what made him unique among the careers, what drove his untouchable calm and direction, was that it had never been about winning for Ariel. There was nothing to win. It was never going to get better than the Arena. So when Aramis yelled and Sephora moved, his teeth bared and he lunged, less graceful than Sephora but no less powerful, and lashed out with his mace to try to bring her to the ground. She ducked to stay out of the path of the mace, sinking low enough that her stabbed thigh screamed with the exertion. Sephora pushed off her back foot for everage and with a deft swipe of her hand, tore a line across Ariel’s belly. For a moment, she paused, watching red bead then spill through the new gap in the fabric, her eyes wide. All of this time, her daggers has been loyal but not especially obedient. It was strange - she thought she’d feel differently. Triumphant. Instead, it was hard not to remember their time together, the strange bond they’d formed. She always knew he’d have to die. When she dreamed of killing careers in her head though, they’d never had familiar faces. She withdrew though, then surged forward to knock him to the ground. More than the other Careers, Ariel and Miranda knew about the violence of the body, about how skin and scale could peel back and expose the pearly pink muscle, still twitching, and they knew all about the one clean slit that would gut the fish. In his haze, Ariel, felt the knife, and its touch was so smooth and so sweet he felt he may cry, in that moment. A dreamed-of moment, if he was honest, and he retched, the nausea coming suddenly, as if trying to warn him his stomach was compromised. He didn’t know if his vision was blurry from his sundered skull or from something else. This was completion; he could feel the blood running fast from his stomach. Even when Sephora tackled him, his mangled thoughts were not on her, but racing from sensation to sensation, imagining over and over again in that instant the image of his guts sliding out, easy as he’d slid out the guts of a hundred thousand fish. The pain was incredible. The relief was overwhelming. His families’ faces flashed before him, no longer faces of disappointment and disgust as he’d always imagined—his injury transformed them to worry, to love. Ariel had always known that dying would be his only redemption; after the things he’d done and planned to do, there could be no other end for him. It was right. His parents, his siblings, could not love a killer. But they could love a misunderstood, disturbed boy, as he lay dying. Yet something else rose in him as his back hit the ground, as he saw Sephora above him, triumphant. An anger, a frustration. He had failed his own ambitions in the arena. His rapid blood loss was compounding with his head injury, and still he bared his teeth and let out an animal noise at Sephora. His mace had been dropped, but he still had his throwing knife. Ariel pulled the knife from its resting place, and in a quick movement both struck Sephora hard in the temple with the pommel and threw his weight towards her, so that as she went down he surged forward and their positions reversed. The blow had either stunned her or rendered her unconscious. Nothing more—he could see her breath in her throat. Maybe in that moment Ariel should have slit her throat and been done with it, but the blood was running thick down even to his ankles through his clothes, and the tussle was leaving them both caked in it. There was no hope for him, and it made him set his teeth, made him let out a noise that was half sob and half growl. He was a failure. He would die. That was certain. But he would not die for nothing. Ariel flipped the knife back to its normal holding position. The expression of anger in his face leeched away, and in its place was one of supreme calm, control. With his left hand he pinned Sephora’s left arm back by the wrist, and he bent over it. The first knife stroke opened her flesh from tip of the thumb to the wrist, curving around the base of her palm, and the second met it from tip of the little finger. The cuts were precise, though sloppy by Ariel’s usual standards. They were made in haste. The blood tempted his knife to slip, but he held it firm, making strokes along each of her fingers, and finally along the back of her hand. It was difficult to see exactly how she was injured when Ariel paused; her hand was so covered in blood. But in one movement he tugged, and the skin of her hand came off as easy as if it were a glove. He looked at it and he began to laugh, a desperate, horrible laugh that sounded as if it came from the deepest place at the bottom of the sea. As he bled, as his vision dulled, he held a piece of her body in his hands. And what was a body, anyway, but something to be peeled and dissected? To be loved. Ariel had seen a fish gutted a thousand times before, and he was gutted now. The blood began to creep from his mouth, and when he laughed it sprayed. One hand went to his stomach and the split was so wide he could almost see his own ribs. It was beautiful. The darkness wasn’t a thing you remembered, but the resurgence was, the bubbling of light into the emptiness. Black peeled, dissolved, burned away until there was nothing but sound and motion and the weight of someone on her. Ariel’s face, calm, serene even, his mouth then opening and releasing a sound that wavered strangely. His eyes bunched up in reverie, she waited until she caught his eye. Then she slammed the dagger into the side of his throat. She breathed, her mouth a thin line, unblinking as she pulled it through his skin towards her, the line growing wider as the laughing mercifully ceased. Everything in her felt cold and detached, even with the warm blood soaking her to the skin, as cold and detached as she was making Ariel’s head. Where was it? Where was the cannon? Her ears strained as she pulled the dagger clean through the front of his throat. The cannon sounded. Miranda let out a shriek, head snapping from side to side as she tried to get her bearings, the sudden feeling of shock like a sharp pain to the chest. Instinct had taken over as soon as the fight had started—after all, the middle was no place for a girl with a broken arm—and she had thrown herself out of the fray rather than in it, assuming, hoping somehow Ariel would get out. The blood pouring out of his throat, copious and thick, meant otherwise. For the briefest moment, her eyes met Sephora's with something like regret; Miranda had liked her, as much as you could, anyway, and despite initial misgivings, Ariel had been her support and a real reminder of home. But there was no question of whom the remaining careers would turn on next, and without hesitating, Miranda turned on her heel and began to run, gasping for breath, clutching onto backpack and weapons with an iron grip. She didn't pause to look back at Ariel's crumpled form. After all, alliances were always temporary. |