HERE'S THE BULK OF THE IRONY: creating a human life takes much less effort than keeping it alive. A woman spawns a screaming infant girl, pink-faced and fragile, faultless and clean. Inflorescent into the rough hands of girlhood, she learns about her father's proliferating baggage, the burgeoning weight of the world that her mother carries on her back that she'll inherit once she's grown into her shoulders, studded with budding bruises that'll one day floweret into her parents' sins.When you're young, someone tells you: Out there's a world built for the selfish. So you through life calculating all odds and learning to assume the worst of everything beforehand, grow a skin stitched together out of cynicism so it won't come back to haunt you later, so all the edges of the world stops making you bleed at each time you brush up against something. Nobody's going to have your back, no one but you. People won't understand you; they leave all the time, what makes you think you're any different? Beneath all the armour you never take off so the sun's blazing heat melds it to your flesh like a beetle's shell, you become this hard, cold creature and you don't look like yourself in the mirror anymore. Truth is, cynicism drains you as much as the darker parts of life does. Truth is, it takes and takes and takes away everything worth living for. Truth is, you see yourself in the mirror and you don't look like anybody at all.
When someone offers you a hand to pull you out of the dark, you take it. Because you've been holding onto knives for so long, slashing through the jungle of thorns, slashing other people to ribbons in battle each day to get ahead, your periphery is stained with the penumbras of sharp objects, your vision and skin saturated in so much blood you can't distinguish your fingers from your own silhouette, or where the darkness ends and where your own flesh begins. And finally—finally—you see the sun. You see the boy, but you can't tell if it's the sun in your eyes. Sometimes you think he is a mirage because he is the golden child, his smile lambent enough to shift the orientation of the gravitational field around him, but he is holding your hand and you're not burning. Forever was never an option before. Forever was a goal, something you had to work for, bleed for, cut yourself into the right shape for. Forever belongs to the monstrous, and you are a girl made of blades for teeth and a live coal in your chest. Everywhere you step, you drag that ball and chain. But he tells you about a life that is soft, a life that gives, a life that is nurturing—a tenderness you've never heard of before. One day, you'll stop fighting the world and start leaning into its touch. one day, you can take off your armour and you will not bleed. One day, he swears, he'll show you—no, he'll give it to you.
But, first, the life you know—the only one you've ever known—has to happen.
And then the boy is gone.
(Was your forever worth it in the end?)
* * *
"YOUR TOKEN," Alex frowned, "did you lose it?"
In the melee, she hadn't even realised that her bracelet was missing, but she felt its absence now, as Alex drew away, his hands turning hers over. Around her wrist, where the seagrass beads once pressed into her skin was a strip of cold emptiness, reaching down to the hollow feeling in her gut. Initially, the loss of the bracelet would've been insignificant. Iko hadn't realised how much she relied on it to bind her sanity together. Panic clawed at her chest. She was never getting it back now. She didn't think the Gamemakers would comb the massive arena for it just to assuage her.
"It must've fallen off when we were fighting off the mutts," Iko murmured, snagging her bottom lip between her teeth, the disappointment stinging. "We can't go back for it."
Just then, Alex tipped his head back against the wall, and Iko saw the strain in his face, the pain tugging at the corners of his mask, and her fingers curled around his tighter and she didn't want to let go. Alex rested his head against her shoulder and let out a shuddering sigh. Iko felt his breath hitch, felt his body go rigid one second before the tension dissolved.
YOU ARE READING
¹ THRONE ─ the hunger games
Fanfictiondeath is centrifugal. © taryn → pre-trilogy CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS #1 completed: 07/09/2020 cover by @bayports