Petaline Tiller volunteers as tribute (nofortunateone) wrote in colosseum, @ 2014-02-26 16:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! 56th games, - arena, tribute: 56th miranda tern, tribute: 56th sephora kohl |
WHO: Sephora Kohl [D1] and Miranda Tern [D4]
WHAT: Mortal combat
WHEN: Dusk, Night 12
WHERE: Biali Brothers Beastiary
STATUS: Complete log!
WARNING: If you have to ask, you’ll never know
Miranda was losing track of time in the rain. The hours stretched on, equally grey and equally wet; she was chilled and drenched to the bone and had taken to using the spear as a walking stick as she trudged towards the north of the arena. Furious still at letting Halle get away, she had huddled and sulked near Millie's Mementos for a while, hoping to wait out the storm, but it was showing no sign of letting up. The Biali Brothers Bestiary was quiet; the lions and tigers in the two cages were curled up, fur matted and soaked, and Miranda trudged past them towards the empty cages. Non-animal noises during a brief pause in the thunder had made her think there were people nearby, and as she rounded a corner, she found herself face to face with not Halle, but her former ally. "Oh," she said hoarsely, stopping short and wiping her drenched face. She glanced at Sephora, and then left and right, expression grim. "Fuck." Sephora didn’t want to be anywhere near the cages, but they seemed to be empty as they moved through the mucky ground. She was soaked clear through the bone, but the cold and the damp wasn’t nearly as bad as the pain that shot through her hand. The bandages were wet and the nerve endings, even with the medicine she’d been sent, were still on fire. It was hard to say if it was worse than the concussion. It was hard to say anything at all; fortunately, Brock was happy to be a silent partner. She came from around a tented cage. It was so sudden, so silent in the thunder, so serendipitous that she had the same surprised reaction that Miranda had given her. For an instance, she was relieved to see her former ally. Just an instant. ‘Yeah’, she agreed silently. “Yeah,” she said aloud, the breath she took rising up in her chest, gathering up what little strength remained to straighten her back. A few days ago, she would have brokered something with Miranda. They would have taken on Brock together in a brilliant and sneaky way. Miranda would fill the gaps in her conversation and made her laugh while they hunted, just the way they had. But Sephora was tired. It was a deep bone exhaustion that could not be eliminated in these times of little sleep and no pack. There was only one way to get any relief and that was to kill, as quick as possible. Just kill. No more bargaining or manipulating or deft maneuvers. Just kill. “Okay,” she said, equally to herself and to Miranda as she held her dagger in front of her and gave an experimental lunge. The idea of working something out with Sephora hadn't even occurred to Miranda. Instead of exhaustion, her hours had been occupied by furious counting, and the fierce, glimmering hope of going home. There were so few of them left that it was becoming a distinct reality -- no one had ever gotten three in a row, sure, but why not her? It was past the time when allies were useful, and Miranda had decided she was exceptional. If both her arms had been working, she would have had a dagger in one and spear in the other, but as it was, she only had one arm and it was clutching the spear. Miranda swerved, letting Sephora's dagger tear through the fabric of her sleeve, and she stumbled backwards, trying to regain footing. The constant rain had made the ground practically a swamp, and it was hazy and difficult to see. "You're using it like a sword," she commented, raising her voice to be heard above the thunder. "But at least we only have one arm apiece, so fair's fair, right?" Readjusting her grip on the spear, she gritted her teeth and stepped forward, shoving the spear towards the other girl's neck. Sephora spun on neat toes, the pirouette of a dancer, twisting under the thrust and slamming the dagger home high onto Miranda’s chest. She held there for a moment, her hand still wrapped around the pommel as she waited a beat, a second beat, a third. Where was the cannon? “No. Like a dagger,” she remarked disinterestedly as she twisted the blade. Sephora’s mouth was a thin, hard line, the water sheeting off her bangs, off her cheekbones. Where was the cannon? There was no cannon. Miranda let out a shuddering gasp as she felt the dagger puncture the skin, but a fracture of a second later, she realized Sephora had missed; the other girl had aimed too high, and the metal hadn't skewered her heart at all. It was her shoulder, just her shoulder, and despite the pain that was suddenly causing bursts of stars at the corners of her vision, Miranda managed a weak smile. Tears were leaking out of the corners of her eyes. "Wrong again," she croaked, and with a sudden burst of strength, she thrust her right arm forward, slamming the spear into Sephora's stomach. Did this hurt worse than her hand? Did this hurt worse than the concussion? Did this hurt worse than the hundreds of injuries and burns sustained over a lifetime, compiled and boiled down to it’s purest motivation? No. Yes. What did it matter? She didn’t scream, she didn’t even look surprised as she stumbled forward a little, her hand releasing the pommel in Miranda’s shoulder (shoulder, yes, too high, yes) to catch herself on the slightly taller girl. Maybe for the first time in a few days, she could breathe easy, if labored. “Can I have this?” she asked Miranda, her voice wavering slightly, barely heard over the rain. Sephora looked her dead in the eye; in the gray of the world, only the cool half-light to illuminate them, they looked like intense black orbs. “I don’t want to die screaming.” Miranda's head tilted to stare at her blankly for a second, and didn't respond, busy for a moment in extricating the dagger from her shoulder. With a hiss of pain, she let the blade drop, hitting the mud with a splat. "Yeah," she finally said, almost nervously, kneeling down and, as carefully as could be done, pulling Sephora down with her so the two of them were slumped side by side in the mud. The rain continued to pour, ceaselessly. "But like this, you're gonna bleed out slow." “Yeah well. You know. Extra 10 minutes. Like it’s gonna kill me. Or you,” Sephora deadpanned as the metal floated inside her. She paused a second, wrapping her hand around the shaft of the spear and with a motion that drained a sharp moan out of her, she wrenched the thing out of her body and threw it a few feet away in a brief, sharp fit of annoyance. “There. Now it’ll be 5.” She sat on the mud, the rain hammering down on her shoulders, on her bent knees collapsed delicately to the side, her shoulder butted up against Miranda in a solid way. She didn’t look down at the blood pooling into her lap, into her belly. It was happening and it would happen whether she watched it or not. Every breath she took was loud in her ears, louder than the rain falling. Maybe because she could count them and they meant something in a way they had never meant before. “Th’ told me once. When you die, you’re taken to the afterlife by women on winged horses. Former tributes. Girls. Me, maybe. Coming for you,” she mused, not knowing what to look at. What did she want to be the last thing she saw? Miranda? Not really. Bars? Mud? Sky, but it was gray into eternity. The choices were awful. A sob escaped and she closed her eyes, not seeing anything at all, holding in the tears even though they’d be impossible to detect. Take a breath, she thought. A dwindling source of strength. “You’ll probably die well too. We’ll hang out. It was almost fun when we did it before. The three of us,” she added, slumping a little more of her weight against Miranda. It wasn’t like the world dimmed with her eyes closed - the darkness didn’t feel more real. But she could feel a lightness leaking out of her, not with the warmth of her blood or the cool of her breath. She didn’t know. "No," Miranda said, shaking her head vehemently so that the wet hair whipped painfully against her cheeks. "I'm going home," she whispered, partly to herself. "I'm so close. And I'm gonna die when I'm really old and they'll put my ashes in the water, no winged people or anything like that." Miranda wiped her running nose with stiff, almost-numb fingers, glancing anxiously around. No one else was coming. "But sure, we had fun," she conceded, thinking back to lightheartedness that hadn't been feigned when the Career girls had laughed together. It felt like months had passed since then. "The three of us could have probably made it to the end together, y'know? Well, if we ever get to do it again…" “I’m killing Ariel first,” she snickered bitterly, her laugh coming out somewhat choked as another tear or two fell out from her closed eyes. “Fuck that guy.” She rested her head on Miranda’s shoulder, her heart slowing but not in the way it did when she slept. It was hard to explain and anyway. Anyway. The air in her chest was louder than the thunder now in her head, rustling and broad. Like blankets over your head on a winter morning. Like wings. “Good luck,” she whispered. Every time she’d said it, she’d meant it. And every time she’d said it, she knew there was no luck at all in the world. |