laurel lyndon: ball destroyer (laurells) wrote in colosseum, @ 2013-12-10 22:57:00 |
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Laurel’s run-in with the mutts had left her with a broken wrist and a few more scrapes and bruises to add to her ever-growing injury list. She took it well, as ever, that endless optimism driving her to tell her allies that it wasn’t so bad. It would get better. Bones could mend, wounds could heal. There was even a scrap of crate wood from Buck’s earlier finding to use as a makeshift splint. And, she’d tell them, it was all on the same arm. Not so bad after all! She sheltered with them inside one of the caverns, unable to keep awake for many hours at a time. She’d apologised to Buck for giving him a nasty fright, glad that she hadn’t been unconscious for so long that one of them started to get ideas. Laurel was lucky, really, when she supposed that her death sentence had been set the moment that her name had been drawn at the Reaping. Day Seven, she told herself. There’d be more days, too, and she was doing well. She just needed a bit of luck and she could keep clinging stubbornly onto her life. That night was colder than she thought the others had been. She struggled to maintain any kind of warmth about her person as she sat up, keeping watch while the others slept. In the silence, free of distractions, it was easier to lapse into darker thoughts. She was the weak link, she was bringing them down. Her mentors hadn’t sent anything since the iodine for the group. Somewhere, someone was wondering why she didn’t just die. She shivered, moving feverishly and trying to pull her jacket closer around herself. For one who was frozen to the bone, her skin was unnaturally hot. Warm tears trickled from her eyes as she tried to keep quiet, too stubborn to let her allies see what a state she was in. In the darkness and silence Laurel found it harder to keep lying to herself about her chances. ‘You’ll get better’ turned into ‘You’ll get worse.’ ‘All wounds look a little infected’ became ‘Not all wounds cause this kind of sickness.’ She didn’t need a doctor’s daughter to tell her that she was going to die. |