VENUS《 FINNICK ODAIR

Chapter 50. THALASSOPHOBIA.

TW: Mentions of sexual assault, violence, forced sex work.

DROWNED, AND DISTRAUGHT.

Manicured hands grasped the shaking girl - she was wrenched from her subversive shatter of reality.

Alive to breathe another day, despite the hollow halls of the theatre filling with a shockwave of haunting screams - for most of them it would've been the first time they saw someone die in front of them and not on a large HD screen.

Edith couldn't fathom where she was, who was dragging her to shore. All she clung to was the fact she had surely caused this tidal wave, and it was cutting her shores clean. She was drowning in a sea of screams, present at her wake, alive for the flood.

All she could surmise was the sweet artificial scent of cherry perfume inducing her into a chemicalised daze.

The girl was barely a splinter, one almost uncannily familiar to ones you'd come crying to your mother over. But yet so tall, so sharp, so unfathomably ruthless it could cut diamonds into seasalt.

Edith was drowning in the shallow haze of glistening blood and tear glossed vision.

She did not know who bled more, her teary eyes or the gash on her head.

Either way, those manicured claws sunk into skin, helping her into a car and scaring off paparazzi with threats of law suits if certain images were ever published.

Edith was blinded by the bright lights of sirens and cameras. Silvanna just huffed indignantly, asking the driver to take them to the hospital.

She retracted her bare hand from its hold on the back of her head, the blood was tacky on her skin. Beginning to fossilise. The girl couldn't remember when she removed the glove, but it sat limply in her clutch.

All she longed for was the arms of her family, the arms of Finnick, the arms of Johanna, the arms of her mother.

Somebody to hold her still. To cover her lonely wounds.

She longed for someone to hold her tight, to bind her splintered shards together with more than a hand applying pressure to the back of her head.

Edith longed for touch. A good kind of touch. A kind of touch that reminded her there were things to love in this world. The kind of touch that proved the existence of love not as a tactless word, but as a living, breathing feeling reaching cataclysm at even the mundane notion of squeezing another's hand.

Parasitic. Drastic. Catastrophic.

But then what she felt was also a need for survival, preservation, to keep breathing in deep water.

Edith was drowning in herself. She could make out the glittering lights fluttering by in the car window, ever changing, like rips in the tide.

It reminded her of him, what kind of love she needed to cling to, what kind of touch was good.

What kind of touch was good.

Water caved in, sinking and sifting like sand in a hour glass.

Delicate death delt in the hands of denial.

Edith's eyes were fluttering, charcoal seas and starry scars criss crossed in symphonic harmony.

It was those smoky tendrils colliding once more, she hadnt seen them in quite some time.

They knocked on her doors apprehensively, even in knowing the progress she'd made in the past to eliminate them from her nightmares.

They knew this woman wasnt the scared little girl they had been able to toy with on their last visit, they knew she was now capable of vanishing her demons with a single blinding grasp of her scarred palms.