Jessica Williamson ✖ Johanna Mason (nooneleft) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2014-07-24 00:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | jessica williamson, lucas hendrie |
Who: Jessica Williamson & Lucas Hendrie
What: Night terrors and serious wedding talk
When: Wednesday night, July 23rd 2014
Where: Lucas's place in Dallas, TX
Warnings: Violent imagery and PTSD related stuff
The smell of blood was thick in the air. She didn't always remember everything about her dreams, but she always remembered that. The smell of blood, and the sour taste of real fear in her mouth. The sheer exhaustion was easy to forget, in hindsight. Everything was easier to forget, except for one thing. His eyes. Jess hadn't known him before the Arena. She didn't even know his name, his parent's names, if he had any siblings, or any loved ones left at all. All she knew was the look in his eyes when he died. The look in his eyes after she'd buried an ax in his midsection.
Jess still had a hard time sleeping at night. It wasn't something she ever talked about easily, Lucas only knew because he slept right next to her. Two months ago had marked two years since it happened. Two years later, it was still as if it'd happened yesterday. She still couldn't train properly, not without being mentally sent back there and ending up freaking out with a weapon in her hand. But it was worse when she was asleep, where she couldn't escape the horrors of what happened. Johanna's memories of the Arena and her own would get mixed in together and confuse her subconscious, making her dream about people Jess had never even met. But most of the time it was Hunter, and that boy in the Arena. The boy Jess had looked in the eyes as she gutted him to save her friend's life. That look in his eyes, full of shock and determination, like he was still prepared to fight his way out of there. All tributes knew what that felt like, and it haunted her. Most nights, Jess couldn't get through it without waking up in a cold sweat.
Tonight was no different. She and Hunter were running through the woods, tree branches snapping back against her skin so hard as she ran that the sting of pain felt real, more real to her then anything else. They were almost there, they were so close to victory that she could taste it. They were going home. After that everything happened in quick succession, exactly as it had before. Hunter faltered, Jess buried an ax in the stomach of the last tribute standing against them. Skin broke, blood and guts were everywhere. Jess felt a little of his blood spray onto her face and she hastily wiped it away, instantly ashamed of what she'd done. But she was too late to stop Hunter from eating the berries. She was always too late, in every dream she had no matter how hard she tried to reach him first, she was never fast enough. The hardest thing about dreaming was knowing you could change something and still never quite able to reach it. Jess was already beginning to mumble to herself out loud and thrash around under the sheets.
"... No. No! No-no-no-NO!" She always heard herself the same way as she watched the scene replay over and over again in horror, her screams exactly as they had been the day he'd died. Mere seconds before Camelot had descended upon them and only moments too late. But in her dreams they never came. In her dreams she was always stuck there, or died some horrible, gruesome death to make her friend's sacrifice completely pointless. Tonight was different. Tonight the scene changed quickly to one she didn't immediately recognize, but Johanna did. Surrounded on all sides by concrete walls, tied to a chair and someone standing over her, with an electrical wire. Water began to rise from the floor around her feet and Jess started screaming, only waking up with a shout after her skin started to fry and her lungs had already begun to fill up with water. "NO!"