i wish i'd see a field below

O U R C R A C K I N G B O N E S | a cally windheard...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 19:52:00 -0400

O U R C R A C K I N G B O N E S | a cally windheard playlist

i. howl, florence + the machine be careful of the curse that falls on young lovers, starts so soft and sweet and turns them to hunters

ii. field below, regina spektor and so the day starts out so slow, again the sun was never called, and darkness spreads over the snow like ancient bruises

iii. help, roxette help me if you can, i’m feeling down, and i do appreciate you being ‘round, help me get my feet back on the ground, won’t you please, please help me?

iv. let the morning sleep, reamonn it’s too late to hate, what we’ve done is done now | it’s okay to say what you’re thinking, now that the moment has broken you can’t hide anymore

v. breakable, ingrid michaelson and we are so fragile, and our cracking bones make noise, and we are just breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys

value pride and stability | lyra + cally + grayson

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:31:00 -0400

graysonmercer:

No. No, no, no, no.

He asked her in absolute certainty that she could do it for him. She’s a killer now, with every bit of ability to do it. He’s killed no one, what right does he have anymore to life, sitting like a rock, unable to move himself? He’s got to have just a little control, he thinks. Something he can decide, and he’s decided this is it. This is his time to be done.

He grips her again, by her neck, presses his lips to her’s and pleads against them. A pain, dull like the shifting of sore muscles pushes him like he’s falling. His breath is hot against her. He can give her fire back if it means that she’ll take it all away.

“I want you to do it. Please god I need you to do it.”

His heart pounds in his ears and his voice is cracked and dry like stone. He thought she understood him. He thought that Cally Windheard was the one to understand. Thaddeus Mordre did not understand him. He liked him but what does that mean if he does not understand?

Five, six, maybe seven canons and he thinks there must not be a Thaddeus Mordre anymore at all.

Lyra is here and Cally is here. He wonders about Kalya and Ritter, who did not understand him and did not try. They are probably gone now, too. He should thank the gods, but an ache sharper than his mace splits through him.

We won’t let you live.

I’m still alive now.

“Please,” he says over her mutters. She has to understand. She has to be the one to understand him. His fingers brush through fiery red hair and fumble over her neck and he tries his best not to touch her with the bad one. “Please… I want to go home.”

He can’t go home, but District 2 was never very homey, anyway. No, and what’s left for him there?

His family is dead and now, as he finds the desire to join them, he can’t. His jaw shudders and he holds Cally tight to him. If she hears how hard his heart is trying to stop beating, she has to help it. But it betrays him, beating harder and faster than he even thought it could.

“Okay.”

Not Cally. Lyra.

Pain.

At first it’s a shock. It pins his breathing in his chest and he worries that the point will stretch through him and kill them both. He slumps against Cally, giving in to the pain that shears into his skin and rips his muscle and bone in two. His vision fades away and his sight, his taste, his feel becomes a cold, steel pain. It doesn’t feel like he thought it would, and his body buckles.

The tip of Lyra Reiser’s rapier is sharp and, slowly and shakily, it’s opening up a hole for him to escape through. A hole to go home. A chill runs over him and shakes his bones to the core and, just for a moment, his eyes flash open and he fights against the tip of metal in his lungs, through muscle and skin and bone.

He screams when it breaks his skin one last time, touching Cally’s thigh just a little from the front of him. He curls around the weapon and his body shakes. It fights back, and he can feel cold spread where his beating heart falters.

“Grayson.”

The voice is soft, hands softer. Lyra kneels in front of him. His hearing has swallowed all noise, and it’s difficult to make out her words. Maybe Cally is screaming. It looks like it, but he just doesn’t know anymore. His vision is closing in, a black netting like a funeral veil dabbling at his vision.

“Thank you,” she says slowly, touching his face. His eyes are wide and his breathing comes away in blocks, forcing him to keep living and keep wading through the pain that rips him apart.

He wants to die, probably, but he thinks to ask her if he can live. His hand grips at hers. He holds her tight like he was sure he couldn’t since they met. But she does not fight him away. Her spare hand strokes his jaw. Her voice is forced; cold, but she is trying to take away his fear.

“Thank you for being my friend.”

She kisses his cheek with ice cold lips that feel like fire to him. One beat. Two. No more breaths. Blood bubbles at his lips and he can feel his throat try to get rid of all of the excess. He chokes and it stains him red. He was cold before but he is freezing and cracking, now.

He reaches for Lyra again, or maybe he’s reaching for Cally, he doesn’t know. His hand will not cooperate, though. Nothing more for the dying boy. Nothing more for the cursed boy who didn’t fight his fate. The boy who got to control one thing so now he can have no more. It’s time to send him home, no more time for goodbyes or explanations.

He didn’t tell them, though. He didn’t tell them anything at all, and his story will burn away to ashes with him. He parts his lips and tries to scream. He has more to say.

One breath. He was a Mercer, a trained Career from District 2, the youngest child to his parents, one of the last Mercers. He has become a statistic, he thinks.

One more wheezing, gasping breath that falters to find a place to go. Five Mercers went into the Games. Make that six.

The fire crackles, sends sparks flying towards them. It is too far away, and she too cold. She shivers and her hands shake—she’s hell frozen over, covered in ice from the inside out. And it is all cracking open.

“I can’t,” she repeats, like a mantra, sounds whose meaning she’s almost forgotten. There is no warmth, no matter how far she runs trying to chase it. It’s gone. He pleads through cracked lips, pleads with words and without, pleads with everything he has left. “I can’t.”

District 5 is far behind, her mother and her brother and the man who killed him. The cracks that sprawl inside of her have eaten at them, forgiving nothing, turning them into distant victims of the cold and pain she feels. Only Candice remains in full relief—she’s watching now, isn’t she?—Candice and Darling, and she doesn’t know where one begins and the other ends. They were the same age, weren’t they?

It is so cold.

She can feel the cracks spreading, everything else splintering, unraveling.

“I can’t.”

Her eyes close in pain and grief and hopeless as it may be, she still tries to find warmth in Grayson Mercer’s arms, never mind his pleas, never mind his words. She wants to apologize, but she can’t. She wants to apologize for not giving him what he wants, but her lips seem unable to form any other words.

“Okay.”

Cally’s eyes fly open and she sees Lyra, the Ice Queen Lyra Reiser with tears in her eyes and rapier in hand. She looks like she could fall apart, break and shatter where she stands, but Cally knows she won’t—she will do it, she will go through with it. Their eyes lock briefly and something passes between them in both directions, something that could be an apology or an explanation or an agreement, but is probably all and possibly neither. It doesn’t matter, because the moment is over and the point of Lyra’s blade has gone through the chest of Grayson Mercer.

Warm blood splatters all over her, all that warmth she couldn’t reach. She still can’t, and she turns her head and looks away from it. She will not see his eyes darken like Harris’ did because of her, like Darling’s on the screen, like Emmy’s and Carson’s both, somewhere out of her reach. Like Candice’s might have, and she wouldn’t have done anything to stop it. No, she will not look. To have his blood cover her is enough, to feel the heat that would not appear before, radiating off him as though it wants to break free through the cracks.

Maybe she’s screaming, but like before, it dies in her throat and there is no sound. It’s Grayson who screams now, but her eyes are closed, shut as tightly as she can manage. If she could cover them with her hands, if they were not stained with blood, she would. The blade pricks at her thigh, barely causing any pain, and for a fraction of a second, the three of them are joined by the sword.

Lyra says something to Grayson, but Cally can’t hear her over the sounds that escape her throat, whether they are whimpers or screams or something in between.

A cannon booms.

Everything is so cold, and she feels so small. She could curl up and draw her knees up to her chin, make herself smaller still, try to keep the cracks within her from spreading. Her eyes open—everything is blurry. Red like before. Red and white and Lyra sits there, still as a statue carved out of ice, and she’s melting. Tears fill her eyes once more. Breaking again now that he’s gone.

“Lyra…”

Now they are the same, aren’t they? One’s cracking and one’s breaking and they have no warmth left, neither of them. Grayson lies between them, warmer in death than they are in life.

“Lyra… Lyra…”

Her voice breaks, like the rest of her. She wants to tell her it’s okay, but more than anything, she wants Lyra to say it to her. She wants to turn away from this. She wants to close her eyes and she wants to go back home. She hasn’t wanted it so much in a thousand years.

She stretches out a shaky, blood-stained hand, the same hand that wielded the sword. The sword that ended two lives, the sword that tore through Lyra’s districtmate without even meaning to.

Lyra’s eyes finally tear themselves away from Grayson Mercer’s lifeless face, her hands finally stop tracing his cheeks, his jaw. She turns her face towards Cally, glances at her outstretched hand, but the look in her eyes is too much. It’s burning and frozen and nothing in between; questioning and demanding and pleading without words. She will fall apart if she speaks.

But she does anyway, and her voice is less than a murmur, less than a whisper, less than any human word will ever be able to describe.

“I didn’t…,” she begins, but the words die as soon as they’re spoken. A sudden tremor goes through her, and she closes her eyes. Cally’s hand goes to rest on her arm.

The cracks within her grow larger and larger. She can almost hear them.

“No,” Cally says, and her voice hurts coming out, it strains her throat and burns it. “You didn’t…”

You didn’t. I didn’t. None of us did.

Her hands shake so much, and it is so cold. It threatens to seep through the cracks and spread itself all over her.

Not yet, though. Not yet.

“No, no, no…”

It echoes in the cave. It is all the same, isn’t it? It’s the same and they’re the same, everything is the same except she’s not alone this time, she doesn’t have to be, neither of them has to be.

“We didn’t…” Her free hand fiddles with a stray thread, where the fabric of her parka was ripped. The wound has healed and it doesn’t hurt anymore, it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t bleed… “I’m sorry, too… Harris…”

They are the same, aren’t they?

Lyra’s eyes widen in understanding. It doesn’t take any more than that.

The motion is quick, too quick—the rapier wasn’t even in her hand—and at first, it doesn’t even register. For half a second, it doesn’t even hurt, not like the axe. There’s just cold and blood. But the pain does come. It’s small and sharp and deep and precise, unlike any sort of pain she has ever felt. She could almost handle it, if it weren’t for the air.

Iliria Temper’s hands had choked her, bruised her neck, cut off the passage to her lungs. She thought she would die then, but this is different—no matter how much she breathes, it’s never enough. It becomes shallow and too quick, too quick in an effort to gather as much air as possible, in the hopes that some of it might go through—but to no avail. Her throat is closing and she almost feels Iliria’s hands on her again.

Lyra.

She tries to speak, to say something, anything, Lyra’s name, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, anything, but the sound that comes out is an unrecognizable gurgle. Clouds swim before her eyes and she can barely see anything else.

The cracks spread, the cold worsens. Pain radiates from the tiny pinprick in her chest and she has stopped breathing. There are two different kinds of pain, now.

She can hear the fire crackling, the sparks that fly. Another sound that might be sobbing, though she knows it can’t be her own. She tries to gasp for breath, but nothing responds.

Glowing embers, dying embers. It’s all the same.

value pride and stability | lyra + cally + grayson

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 21:31:00 -0400

graysonmercer:

It’s his first time outside the cave in hours, but it doesn’t feel like it’s been nearly long enough. His feet dig deep into the cold and he shakes. First guard duty falls to him and, though he can’t guard much of anything, he quiets his shaking and forces his eyes to stay locked to unending white. After a few minutes that seem like a lifetime, he can’t see anything else at all, only a flurry of white that becomes the earth, wind and sky.

He imagines that Artemis Mordre could loose an arrow and split his skull and he wouldn’t know he had died until someone came out and informed him. He grips hard to the snow, but the cold no longer phases him and, without a parka, he begins to shake hard.

You’re going to die.

I know.

One breath. Two. Breathing isn’t hard. His lungs have opened up since eating and, though he shakes and though frost bites at his skin, he survives. His heart beats. He can hear wind whip against snow.

Eventually a hand touches his shoulder and he finally strains to turn his sore neck. Lyra Reiser’s eyes are like ice and she eyes him with equal chill. She’s become a cold slate he slides from, but she holds him like skin to ice. She always did, he supposes.

“My turn,” she says softly. He struggles, propping an elbow to the rock behind his back to pull himself to his feet, but Lyra presses her hand hard to his shoulder again and grips his good hand like iron. With a grimace, she pulls him to his feet.

“Thanks,” he breathes, and he think maybe the clouded heat of his breath will melt her, but instead her eyes smile, just a little.

“If you fall asleep on your next guard, I won’t help you at all,” she says, trying her best to stay stern, but her lips twitch up in a reluctant smirk.

We’re not going to let you live.

“I won’t,” he says, his voice a shaky rattle. Lyra nods firmly and like that, the atmosphere shuts down. Lyra Reiser is done speaking to her ally, and her guard duty will commence. The coldness of her shoulder sends a chill down his spine, so he crawls into the the cave.

Cally is still asleep and the fire is still flickering. He wonders briefly how long Lyra has been awake, but he shakes the thought away. She likes the cold, she embraces it, but he still remembers her eyes when he woke. They’re frenzied heat. The way he thought her tears might melt away the frosted skin of her dirty face. For an Ice Queen, she has let it consume her.

He sits in silence for a long time, watches small yellow and red flickers bounce off of Cally Windheard’s face. Every once in a while, he stirs a little. Watches her chest rise and fall to make sure she hasn’t left him alone. He doesn’t know when she became his lifeline, but somehow she did, and he can’t cut it.

When she wakes up, he watches her a while longer. The way her eyes adjust to her surroundings as though she can’t remember where she is. It’s understandable, he thinks. Every time he closes his eyes now, he sees home and it’s not a white smudge over his eyes or a black veil that hints at death. It’s home and, though he’s struggling to even stand, he’s clutching for ways to get there.

It’s okay.

It isn’t.

“Are you awake?” he asks, and something turns in his stomach. Cally Windheard still struggles to wake up, and Lyra peers around the cave entrance, watching them both carefully before turning back to the snow. Grayson pulls himself from his wall to where she lays and he tries hard to see life in her eyes.

There’s some there. Some will to keep living. She looks puzzled with him, but she’s alive somehow. Even if it means she’s taken the life from her districtmate, from Lyra Reiser’s districtmate, even from him in exchange for his cold, she will keep living.

And Lyra Reiser will keep on living. He is a rock, though. Thick and stuck deep in an awful frozen lake. No wave can move him, no matter how hard they try. He thought maybe he had found life huddled against Cally Windheard’s warmth of in the invigorting ice of Lyra Reiser.

But he traded his life to Cally Windheard for a taste of her fire, and he can’t move anymore at all. One breath, two. He thinks he’s finally figured out what he wants, but his hands shake and his fingers feel numb when they brush over her defined cheekboes, and touch her neck in a fluttering movement.

He seals his quivering, cold lips to hers because he needs one more taste of fire before he burns away.

His resolve drains from him in a fraction of a second after the days it took to build, and though his heart beats in his throat and his lips fumblr against her’s, he’s got nothing left to fight for it.

He’s empty of resolve, empty of life, and empty of fire. Even the ice hates him now. He can’t fight and he can’t sink anymore. He isn’t falling. He’s stuck.

“Cally,” he whispers against her lips. “I know I promised I would protect you, but I need you to do something for me.”

His voice fades away at the end of his sentence as his throat swallows the noise. He’s shaking more than he should be for the temperature. His hands cup her face and he thinks, if there’s any life in his eyes, she has to see it.

“I need you to end it.”

Once it’s hit the air, it feels as though the air sits still and stagnant. His breath shudders and he tries hard to find her in her eyes. It’s time to go home. He has to go home.

When the first cannon goes off, she closes her eyes and sees Harris. Even when she opens them again, she sees the dried, brown blood come alive with ripples and bubbles, steaming, boiling. The blue eyes and blond hair of Lyra Reiser are next to her, but they are those of her Districtmate, cold not with the eternal paradox of their burning ice but with the empty stillness of death. Maybe she screams, a small choked sound that begins at the back of her throat.

The sound resonates within the cave walls, lingering long after it stops. Still shaken, with trembling hands, she holds onto Lyra’s arm for support, gripping her so hard she could’ve dug her nails into her skin. But the blonde says nothing, and her eyes—her own again—are cold as always, cold and yet so terribly full of something that makes Cally’s breathing even out and her heart beat faster, both at the same time. She lets go of Lyra’s arm and presses her lips into a tight line but nods once, shakily, as if to say it’s okay, I’m okay. Lyra nods, too.

The second and third cannons go off a few hours later, and it’s Darling and Candice she sees this time. The flames of their fire become Candice’s hair, the resonating boom of the cannons remind her of how the same thing happened last year, of how little Darling covered her ears, her mouth, how she scaled the red, dry canyon walls to her death. She doesn’t scream this time, but the tremor of her hands worsens and the wind freezes her tears before they fall. She is on guard and the booming sounds only make the others stir slightly in their sleep.

A few minutes later, two more, and she feels numb by then. She can’t even summon up the will to really wonder who’s gone, which of them it is, if it’s Xander or Iliria or one of the others whose names she doesn’t know. Maybe it’s Artemis—Emmy had been yelling for Artemis,so she was still alive, so maybe it was her… She struggles to remember any other names, to no avail. But it doesn’t matter, because in the end they’re all dead, and now it’s just the sound, boom, boom.

Boom, again.

And again, and again.

And finally, silence, and she sleeps.

The three of them sleep and eat and exchange glances, warmth and ice and a semblance of life, and barely any words. Time passes like that, minutes and hours and maybe even days bleeding into each other, in an indistinguishable blur that goes back and forth between white and red and black.

“Are you awake?” Grayson asks in the midst of it—on the edge of it. And she is, but just barely. The blur is white now, that is her only measure of time. White and black, white and black, with splashes of red that exist only in her mind. She doesn’t even know what day it is, or how long it has been since she saw the life leaving Harris Tellmach’s eyes. She sees them all the time, in any case.

But it’s Grayson’s grey eyes that look at her now, not Harris’ blue ones. Lyra keeps guard just outside, a carved statue, a beautiful dark outline against the unforgiving snow.

Next to her, Grayson moves—shifting closer, like the first time he walked into the cave. His hand brushes against her face and her neck, and she drinks up the warmth of the fluttering touch like an elixir that will miraculously keep her from madness. In her mind, it’s gold and light and entirely separate from the bleak heaviness that has settled within her since she first brought down that sword of hers. She raises her hand to touch his face, and when their lips meet it’s simply a natural continuation of what came before; a deeper touch that is still not enough to breathe true life, true fire into her lungs, but it almost, almost is.

It’s a sort of limbo, one she wishes she could stay in. The images of home are starting to blur and fade at the edges, swallowed by the cold and the fear, but this is solid and that is what she needs.

“Cally,” he whispers, still as close to her as he can manage, so close that she feels his breath, the movement of his lips against her own. She can never stop wondering at how hollow they all sound. The thought had come to her when she saw Lyra, but they are all hollow and struggling, flickering flames struggling to keep alive and shining icicles desperately hoping they won’t melt. “I know I promised I would protect you,” he continues, and her eyes close for a moment for the pain she feels at the word, though she’s not sure which word. Promises nobody keeps or protection everyone goes against, “but I need you to do something for me.”

He pauses and she swallows, waiting, not even daring to guess at what he might ask of her. What could she do? What could any of them do, except try to live? They’re hanging on a thread as it is, barely holding on to the edge of something, one foot hovering over the abyss.

“Tell me,” she urges him, though the sound doesn’t form fully.

“I need you to end it.”

If they’d been outside, or if the wind could somehow manage to filter its way into the cave, she would think the words had been carried away from some distant corner, so still are they, so quiet and dead. Dead, dead, dead. The word echoes in her mind, joining the ranks of the cannons and all those other words that she has heard spoken since her reaping.

I need you to end it.

It could mean anything and yet she would be so foolish to misunderstand. End it. It can only mean one thing, there’s only one surefire way out, her eyes close and she sees herself lying down in the snow, the way she’d wanted to, no blood and no pain and just as easy as falling asleep. That isn’t what he wants, though—no, but she can’t do that, she can never do that, not again, not to him, not now, no, no, no.

“No,” she says, like before, and like before her hands shake as she inches back, away from him. Like before, tears fall from her eyes though she hadn’t noticed when they started.

“No,” she repeats. She repeats it over and over and over. “I can’t. I can’t, I really really can’t, I…”

I can’t. You can’t.

Lyra sits still at the mouth of the cave. She’s turned towards them now, and she watches.

No, no, no.

“I can’t.”

But the third time she says it, she shakes her head, I’m sorry, and she glances at Lyra.

Final 8

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 19:50:24 -0400

Final 8

al·li·ance/ʌˈlaɪ.əns/ n. an agreement to aid and/or accompany...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:56:00 -0400

al·li·ance
/ʌˈlaɪ.əns/

n. an agreement to aid and/or accompany another to prevent harm, until such a time that all involved parties can safely depart.

Aunque el frío queme,Aunque el miedo muerda,Aunque el sol se...

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 13:55:00 -0400

Aunque el frío queme,
Aunque el miedo muerda,
Aunque el sol se esconda,
Y se calle el viento,
Aún hay fuego en tu alma
Aún hay vida en tus sueños.

Mario Benedetti

value pride and stability | lyra + cally + grayson

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 19:44:00 -0400

graysonmercer:

I won’t let you die, Cally Windheard, okay?

Her form shifts and turns in front of him, shimmering like the surface of water. Flashing from the girl in the elevator to the killer on his chest. Rippling between the two as though they aren’t so different, but they are.

The ground slides out from under him and he’s tugged into the air, tumbling upward with gravity nipping at his heels and pulling him toward the ground. At one point he wanted to fall but not anymore. He grips Cally hard and forces himself to hold her while they hover up and away from the ground.

They rise and rise and rise until the break some glass ceiling above them. It shatters and cuts him along his arm, sharp and cold.

“Wake up.”

The fire has gone out. Grayson isn’t sure how long ago, but it’s entirely gone now, and the cold has set in. Cally Windheard now has skin just as cold as his own. There is a heat on his skin, tight like pain in his arm, but he only dreamed of glass.

The cool tip of a rapier, though. That is far more real.

No guard. He slept and Cally slept and neither of them guarded. Now, he thinks, they’ll both die.

Another promise broken without even trying.

Grayson’s eyes, wide in shock, trace up the weapon to shaking hands clamped at it’s hilt. Further up is a tattered parka and further, further is a puffy, tear-streaked face with wide, crazed eyes and light, wild hair. It’s a face he prayed wasn’t in the sky each night he couldn’t see, and now he’s questioning those feelings.

“I said wake up. Wake her up.”

Lyra Reiser’s voice shakes deep in her throat. She moves her weapon from Grayson’s arm and points to Cally. Slowly, he nudges her until her eyes flutter open. Then, his eyes are back to their captor warily.

“Lyra…” he says slowly. He breathes in, pushing himself just a little off the wall with his good hand. Lyra steps back, swinging her weapon threateningly.

Blood coats its tip like rust. She’s become more dangerous than him, too.

She volunteered for this. It was what she wanted. She knew that this would happen. She had to know, or else why would she ever want it? It’s the same question he’s asked himself constantly since the sixty seconds sounded off and no one fell to his swing.

In one motion that can only be described as rash, her reaches forward and grabs the point of her rapier. Flakes of dry blood break loose from the sword onto the palm of his hand, but Lyra doesn’t take the final blow. She still holds an intense air of coldness, but it’s different now that she’s fallen apart. He expects to die and is left staring face to face with the girl who should have killed him.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” he says and immediately curses himself. He’s doing it again. Speaking without thinking first. How many more people will he promise not to kill?

Lyra’s eyes travel to his hand and he nearly tucks it away in embarrassment. Now she knows he can’t kill her anyway. Her eyes snap to Cally, though, and maybe there’s a moment between them that promises Lyra the same thing, but he just can’t read her. Not even a little.

“Okay,” she says softly, and she jerks the rapier away from him. Her lips settle themselves again into a stoic line and her eyes narrow. “But you don’t touch my weapon, neither of you.”

Grayson looks quickly to Cally and he doesn’t know what he’s hoping for. Confirmation or support or anything.

“Why were neither of you on guard? Were you just hoping to die or what?” Lyra snaps, moving the ashes where their fire used to flicker around with her weapon.

“Do we let her stay?” he asks Cally, hand falling over her’s almost without thought.

It’s not your fault. It wasn’t our fault. It wasn’t us.

So many echoes, all of them overlapping. Maybe slightly louder than the old ones, but not nearly enough to drown them out. It’s not comforting—can’t be; she’s beyond any and all comfort, now—but somehow in the midst of it she finds herself hanging onto those words as though they were the only thing keeping her from falling to her death.

And they could very well be.

Saying it’s okay was never a comfort, and this isn’t, either. But it is something. The light pressure of Grayson’s hand on her neck is something, the warmth that passes between them is something, the closeness and shared breaths and shared words. It is something. She might still be alive.

She closes her eyes and lets herself imagine it isn’t like this at all. Despite the cold and the pain and the dread, she’s so far gone that it isn’t hard at all.

I won’t let you die, Cally Windheard, okay?

With her eyes closed and her mind drifting elsewhere, she almost, almost smiles. Her head shifts slightly and for the first time in the arena, she does not dream. There is no blood, there are no deaths; just a warm darkness that envelopes her and carries her from one moment to the next.

The only hint of warmth left when she wakes up is that the frost on her eyelids isn’t as thick, and it breaks when she opens them. Though still unfocused, she becomes instantly aware, as she regains consciousness, that there is a different kind of tension in the air.

“Lyra…,” Grayson trails off, and Cally sits upright as she glances at the new arrival. Lyra. Lyra. Lyra Reiser. The blonde is alive and all things considered, does not seem all that worse for the wear—and she’s swinging her rapier at them. Bile rises up in Cally’s throat but she swallows it back, fighting to keep calm against the current of thoughts bubbling up in her mind.

Cally had liked Lyra—she would’ve wanted to be her friend, in different circumstances. She would’ve wanted it so much. And though they’d only spoken once, her face would come up in her mind along with the others. Cally isn’t sure how to react—will Lyra attack them?—but the idea of dying at her hands fills her with panic and a wish to run and cry.

There is something else adding to her terror, though. Something entirely irrational that causes her breath to quicken even further and her heart to beat its way to her temples. The sight of Harris had once made her thoughts wander to Lyra, and now the inverse happens… they were districtmates, after all, and it is only a logical association. But worrying about that when the blood-crusted rapier swings so near her must surely be the height of madness, and yet she can’t help it.

Grayson’s movement happens in a split second, and by contrast, the expectant, draining moment that comes afterwards, even after he speaks, seems to stretch for an eternity. Cally’s eyes lock with Lyra’s for the first time since she woke, and she has to force herself not to look away. She still radiates coldness—but don’t they all, now, isn’t that all they are?—but there’s something else that for a fraction of a second Cally thinks of as pleading, like the silent screams she knows all too well. She takes a deep breath and holds her gaze for a while longer, noticing every detail. Lyra’s face is covered in scratches, and when at last Cally tears her gaze away from hers, she catches sight of a large red stain on her leg. Finally, she speaks.

“Okay,” is all she says for a moment. Okay, okay, okay, what does that word even mean by now? But she continues. “But you don’t touch my weapon, neither of you.” A pause. Cally’s breath is starting to return to her. “Why were neither of you on guard? Were you just hoping to die or what?”

Were they?

She wasn’t thinking, though.

She hasn’t been thinking since her name came up in that stupid slip of paper and look at where that’s landed her, now.

She is so tired, and she is so cold.

“Do we let her stay?”

Grayson’s voice interrupts her thoughts and she looks at him for the first time since waking up. She holds his gaze for a moment, frowning, and nods once, almost imperceptibly, before looking back at Lyra. It’s almost as though she’s forgotten her question, and is completely ignoring his—she stirs the dead ashes for a long time, her body stiff and tense, her gaze intent on the task.

“You did it,” she says, breaking the thick silence after a long time, without looking away from what was once a fire. Her voice is strained, even moreso than the first time they spoke, but there’s something like the hint of a smile in it.

Cally’s mind goes blank. She bites her lip in confusion, raking her mind for any clue as to what she might be talking about. Her thoughts are so slow now, so dull when they used to be so sharp. It’s maddening. Her hand twitches under Grayson’s, but Lyra turns her head by a fraction, and looks at her. It’s the first time Cally notices how hollow she looks: her cheeks, her eyes. She’s all hollowed out.

“You got him,” she adds, in the same strained voice, and after a second of panic—Harris, Harris, Harris—she has it. The corners of her lips twitch upwards just slightly, an almost alien, meaningless gesture by now.

“I did,” she answers, and her voice, too, sounds hollow.

Still standing, Lyra’s gaze drifts towards Grayson. She winces then—in pain, and Cally steals another glance at the other girl’s calf. Her back is turned, so she can see more clearly, though the fabric of her pants obscures the wound. It’s not new, but it hasn’t healed.

“I have medicine, if you want it” she says, biting her lip again, wincing. The time for caution and guardedness is far behind, it seems. “Your leg.”

NO

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 19:04:00 -0400

Photo

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:02:33 -0400

Photo

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 03:20:54 -0400

the dead weight | grayson + cally

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 02:56:00 -0400

graysonmercer:

Grayson can hardly catch up to his own breathing. It whips from his lips fast like a Capitol train and it’s impossible to latch to, so he stops speaking let’s it be. He can’t comfort Cally, he can’t even understand her. She doesn’t hold her sword. It tumbles from her hand and lands between them as she mutters.

“Oh God, no… I’d said I would- oh, please no, please… I just…”

His jaw drops and his lips part and he wants to say something, but the words are gone. He had expected searing pain. It’s something he’s learned to deal with. Blade cutting into skin as a punishment for his wrongs. A slap across his face, even. She could tie him up again, that would make sense, too.

This is a pain of a different kind. A whole new type of punishment.

Tears swell in her eyes as she fights to control herself, but Grayson knows this feeling too well now not to recognize it, and he turns away from her. There’s nothing he can do, anyway. Dealing with guilt that tremendous can only be done one way, and that’s alone.

He pushes supplies for a fire into the middle of the cave when he notices blood dotted at the mouth of the cave. He wonders how many battles she’s won now, but he leaves the subject to hang in the air like a thick mist. He’s left so many questions that way he can hardly breathe.

He blinks and it all comes rushing back to him like a sandbag swinging back. It’s barreling up his throat and hammers behind his eyelids. His knee throbs and his vision spots as though he shouldn’t be able to see at all.

It’s sick, but he almost misses them.

A spark hits the damp wood and struggles to stay alive but he stokes it, wincing each time Cally sucks in another breath to feed her soft crying. He doesn’t know what it is about her, but it’s some magnetic force that makes him want her to be okay. Of all the people that could have been in the cave with a sword under his throat, he was undeniably lucky that it was her.

Or maybe it was unfortunate for both of them.

He ventures a look at his smashed hand and every bit of training he’s ever had has told him to wrap it. He clutches at the water from his parachute and a small slip of paper stumbles out.

Your Welcome.

He looks to the camera and says ‘Thank You’ aloud before pouring a bit of water on the extremity.

Nothing. No pain. Nothing at all. It’s more worrying than comforting.

He turns to Cally and pauses. She looks entirely broken, and he supposes he does, too. Is Panem rooting for them? The broken survivors who should already be dead. He wasn’t meant to be an underdog, but here he is.

He props up onto his knees with a wince and inches toward his new ally. She looks up at him and he sits beside her.

“It’s okay,” he whispers. It’s not okay and it never will be, but something about the phrase is somewhat comforting. “You can tell me what happened. About the blood and about your wounds. You can tell me everything.”

And he reaches for her without thinking, parting her parka. He doesn’t ask or wait for permission. His arm reaches around beside the small of her back and it’s a heavenly warm. He pulls her to him and drapes the heavy coat around them and finally his shivering stops.

“I won’t tell anyone.”

(I’m sorry.)

She stops trying to speak, she stops trying to be coherent. If she tries, she chokes on tears and on guilt and on excuses she cannot make. It’s not my fault, she thinks, but it must be. It must be because she had said she would try, and she didn’t, so what kind of sister is she, then? What kind of sister is she that she would not even worry about Emmy once, that she would not even see her face on the sky, that she would not even think about her?

The same kind of sister that would not have volunteered for Candice at the Reaping, who would’ve abandoned her; bold, loud, brash Candice, who is all of fourteen and likes to act older than she is. The same kind of girl that would send small, broken Darling Auberguine to her death because she was too scared of her.

(I am so, so sorry.)

It doesn’t matter that she loves Candice and it doesn’t matter that she didn’t know about Darling, it doesn’t matter because she should’ve known better. She should’ve been there for Emmy and she should’ve been willing to be there for Candice and she should’ve known something was not right about Darling Auberguine. But she was too selfish and she is too selfish and that is who and what she is, and who and what she is is a wretch and a wild thing that is alone and mad with grief.

In her mind, she sees other things, too. She sees her mother’s tears—you have to come back, wasn’t that what she’d said? But she also sees Harris’ eyes as he died, she hears the word help ringing in her ears, and she chokes and begins to cry again, with renewed force.

Selfish, and stupid, too.

She’d had no idea, no idea at all.

No idea she would break like this. No idea what having the blood of another on her hands would do to her. No idea that the cold, the solitude, and the despair would seep into her and freeze her to the very core. She’d always been a tiny flicker of a flame, nothing more, but it had always danced, laughed; it had always fed on her relative happiness and even through the past two years it had stayed alive.

She feels like even that smallest of sparks is gone now, snuffed out of existence by the lack of room to breathe.

Soon the tears stop, but the sobbing doesn’t, and it only makes it worse. She is dry as bone and frozen, and she tries to hold herself together as tightly as she can, as if that will prevent her from breaking any further.

It’s hopeless, and she knows it.

She is startled when Grayson sits next to her. Her eyes are dry now, but they cannot focus and it is hard to breathe, so hard, too much to even fathom concentrating on anything else—but she does catch the glow of fire.

She thinks she cannot cry anymore. She is sure that she cannot, that there are no tears left, that they have all dried and gone to nothing.

(She is wrong.)

When he speaks, it’s a whisper she must strain herself to hear. “It’s okay,” he says, like a soft, distant echo, and tears spring to her eyes again. She buries her face in her hands.

It’s not any less a lie than when she’d said it. Nothing is okay.

“You can tell me what happened. About the blood and about your wounds. You can tell me everything.”

She can’t breathe.

There is an eerie tranquility that surrounds them, but she doesn’t want to speak, she doesn’t want to say any of those things out loud. And she doesn’t want to listen. The palms of her hands press against her eyes and she chokes down a sob.

She doesn’t want to be alone, but this hurts, this hurts so much.

(Like an axe.

Or a sword.

Or a slip of paper with a name on it.)

She jumps at the touch. It is unexpected and her first reaction is panic, but it does not even last a second. It cannot last any more than that, not after what seems like an endless field of white where time and loneliness and pain and guilt are one single thing.

Not after she thought the warmth had gone out of her entirely.

It doesn’t occur to her to recoil, then.

“I won’t tell anyone.”

She doesn’t speak for what seems to her like a long time.

She breathes in the closeness, the contact. She lays her head against him and her hands slowly stop shaking. For a moment, she rests them on his arm and leaves them there, and all the while, her breathing evens out, little by little.

“I…,” she finally begins, her voice hoarse and unused. It is too much.

You can tell me everything.

“I killed him,” she says, and she feels the tingle of something that might once have been pride, but is now too washed out to be recognizable. “My—districtmate,” she adds. His name has not passed her lips in two years. Her voice refuses to speak it. “I killed him. He did this… he did all of this.” She motions slightly with her head. Her wounds, the walls.

But she means more than that, too.

“And then…”

And then.

And then Harris.

It all comes so quickly.

“The boy from Seven, we were allies, he and a couple others, but I split from them when—,” the name, still the name, but he’s dead, isn’t he? “But he came to find me again, and I was asleep, I didn’t realize, he wanted to help me, he’d said so, I’d laughed then, but he came here and I just—the sword went through him just like that and I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, I’m not like him.”

The gates are open, and it all comes flooding out. Harris and Emmy—even Darling and Candice, briefly. Her voice isn’t steady and tears threaten to choke her at every second, but it comes out all the same.

the dead weight | grayson + cally

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 07:56:24 -0400

graysonmercer:

They open their parachutes together. A small bottle of medicine for Cally’s wounds that he’s just begun to notice. There’s a streak of red painted across her shoulder that stains her parka scarlet, and another on her side. They’re deep and short, as though someone had tried to hack her apart.

Maybe the medicine can hold her together, but something tells him it can’t.

He scoots roughly into the cave and takes one look before his stomach drops. There are long, spindly words written on the walls in thin strokes, barely visible, but large enough to catch anyone’s eye. The words are alien, though.

Scrawled out with such anger.

She will die.

Just like Carson.

He looks for a moment with wide-eyes at his new ally. She smiles into the medicine that will save her life, but for some reason he can’t share her joy, and that reason is the sketchings on the walls. Either she wrote them, or she doesn’t mind them, and both are equally frightening.

But Grayson Mercer has learned better than speaking his concerns. He feels a twitch in his wrist that carries no further and remembers his lesson well.

He picks up the roll of gauze and bites down, dragging out an adequate strip. He reaches to press it to his wrist, though, and he sucks in a deep breath. It’s the smell of his flesh against his nostrils and the feel of loose skin and torn muscle on his cheek and the inability to sense anything with his hand that forces him to drop the gauze to the cave floor and turn back toward the snow, taking in deep breaths.

He can’t recover. He can’t even look at it.

“What happened?”

He pauses. His eyes are on her, on her eyes, on her sword, on the wall, swerving around his own hand but ultimately locking to it before sliding back to her.

Cally Windheard likes him. She wants to know the truth.

Kalya wanted to know the truth and now look.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he says, but she knows that, right? She doesn’t know what, but she knows it wasn’t him, so there’s nothing to lose. His heart races and his lips fumble over words he can’t seem to speak. His hand slides for her sword and her eyes widen, but he’s not going to hurt her, because Cally Windheard is his friend and what threat is a handless Career, anyway?

“She died because of him, not me. She came in yelling for Artemis and he was so fast. He moved so fast no had time to… I didn’t mean to she just…”

His breathing is too rapid. His lips move to fast to catch his own words or to properly form his thoughts. Oh, she’ll hate him. She has so much reason to. She likes him now but what about that monster? Kalya might have liked him before.

“Please you have to know that if I had known her it would have been different.”

But because you didn’t, it was okay that she died.

“It wasn’t okay how she died. I didn’t. They made me remember, though. It’s my fault because I watched her. Please, I’ve already paid for it. I promise.”

He hands her her sword back; takes her hand and opens it to place the hilt in her palm. If she’s going to do something, maybe she’ll be kinder if he accepts it. Kalya and Ritter were nicer when he behaved.

He can’t stop himself, though. He touches her cheeks again and tries hard to look her in the eyes. She has to know he didn’t mean it. He didn’t mean to watch. She would understand him.

“Remember when I changed your mind?” he says quickly with a nod as though it will jog her memory. “In the elevator. I changed your mind about Careers and we were friends. We can still be friends… please.”

Please. He’s said it enough times he’s forgotten what it means other than a thin rope tying him to life. Please. He clutches at her against and feels the stiff fabric of her parka where blood has dried. They’re not so different.

They have their battle scars.

Her breathing is still ragged and irregular, and the medicine, a clear liquid, stings like fire on her shoulder. For a moment, she must close her eyes and will herself to stay conscious, to not scream, because it is like a second blow of the axe, like sharp metal and burning coal. But it soon cools down, and she’s left with an icy trickle seeping into her parka. Her skin feels hot now, and she hopes this will be enough.

Carry on, Lysa said. Carry on.

She blinks and watches as Grayson tries to bandage his own wound, but the state of his hand is too much and he drops the gauze to the floor. Her own hand twitches, as if to reach out, but it stays where it is.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he repeats again, and she just stares at him. But a second later he’s grabbed her sword, and she can do nothing but flinch and notice her back is against the walls of the cave. Her eyes dart furiously from one place to another but she cannot move, and one hand instinctively reaches towards her neck, where the faintest of bruises have formed, barely perceptible—a reminder of Iliria’s. A reminder of what happened the last time she’d had her guard down.

Harris’ guard had been down, too.

She swallows, but Grayson only continues to speak. He speaks in that same raw and scared voice, almost too fast for her to follow the words, words that little by little, paint a picture she does not want to see.

He will not talk clearly—it wasn’t my fault, if I had known her it would’ve been different, I didn’t mean to—but the dread inside her grows and grows and grows. She could not say why, she will not allow herself to think why. But soon, it becomes too much to ignore.

She came in yelling for Artemis.

Artemis, the Career girl from District 1. The predicted victor and everyone, everyone would be wary of her. Intimidated. Even scared. So who would—No. No, it can’t be, except it can, it very much can, isn’t this the Games after all, wasn’t she—oh God, but who else could it be?

“No,” she says, hollowly, in the smallest, most pitiful voice, and the moment the word escapes her lips she knows, she knows.

Her hands shake, her lip quivers. She loses track of Grayson’s words. She loses focus and everything becomes a slightly sparkling blur, the white glare coming from the outside of the cave, the darkness around both of them, the red patches that are the pool on the floor and Grayson’s hand. The words on the wall are too blurry to even make out. She’s vaguely aware that he’s placed the sword back in her hand, but she’s not looking at him. She’s not looking at anything.

A smile, a laugh, a tiny voice. Bread and jam and a child’s innocent questions that stung somewhere deep.

Do I look like Candice? Do I?

She didn’t. Not much, anyway. Candice was many things, but she wasn’t a child anymore, not the way this girl was. Her brother had been murdered and she didn’t have this wide-eyed innocence, this naïvety that hurt. Candice was a strong girl, wasn’t she? She could’ve held her own in this. Right?

That’s what she told herself. But she’d said yes all the same.

Maybe we can be replacement sisters until the Games are over, right?

Yes, of course I’ll be your sister.

There’d been tears in her eyes even then.

I’ll try to be a really, really good sister, okay?

She’d said that. She had. So where had she been?

“Oh, God, no…”

She didn’t—she hadn’t—and yet there it is, what about Candice and what about Darling and what about Harris and what about Emmy.

“No, please, no…”

Her voice is nearly a whimper and she does not notice the words as they leave her lips, or the tears, or the way she’s clutching her own arms, as if for warmth. What she does notice is Grayson’s hand on her cheek, and she hears his words, and it finally breaks her, because it is too much.

We can still be friends…

“Yes—I—I remember, yes,” she manages to say between sobs, but then she falls apart again. “Oh God, no… I’d said I would—oh, please no, please… I just…”

I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

But who can she say it to?

the dead weight | grayson + cally

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 06:10:00 -0400

graysonmercer:

She’s the first thing he’s seen in days. And then it’s the white. It’s too much and it floods his sight with pain he hasn’t felt in what seems like a century. He’s felt the snow like knives but now it’s like liquid, molten white, singing into his eyes.

“It’s okay.”

No, it’s not.

“What… how…?”

He’s forgotten how to speak. At least, he’s forgotten how to speak to her. He recognizes her now. Late night, stuck in an elevator. It’s hard to believe it was mere days ago. He sees it now as though he never lived it at all.

“I didn’t…” he mutters, and he grips her hands hard. He opens his eyes again and sees how entirely dead she looks. Her skin is pale, almost blue, and she’s chapped and gray everywhere. The hair like fire that made her famous has dulled. Her eyes are alive only for the tears dotting them and making them dance blue.

She liked him, right? She liked him then, he was nice to her. She doesn’t know he’s a monster. She doesn’t have to know. He smiles and touches her face, and maybe even embraces her.

She dropped her sword because she likes him and she doesn’t have to know who he is. What he is.

“I promise I didn’t do it so you have to promise you won’t hurt me anymore. Please… please.”

And that’s when he feels his grip on himself begin to fade away. It’s crumbling beneath his fingers and he gropes for it, but it’s gone. He’s falling again. He buries his face in her shoulder and feels her warmth and with one breath, he breaks.

“I didn’t mean to… it wasn’t my fault.”

But now he’s crying. Soft sobs, but he knows she can feel them. He should be embarrassed but the feeling is too relieving to stop. He sucks in another breath and sobs harder against her. He shivers and he clutches her to him and, just for a moment, he forgets about Panem and Mercers and curses and snow and the Games and he just runs his fingers through the soft fur of Cally Windheard’s parka.

Cally Windheard.

He told he would remember her name and he did.

One promise he hasn’t broken.

“Cally Windheard,” he chokes. “I remember, see? Can I … come in?”

Soft beeping. A parachute lands behind them and digs itself deep into the snow. He holds her hands again, and for the first time since that elevator ride, he smiles.

Grayson Mercer’s eyes are scared and desperate and his voice is raw and broken. She feels raw and broken, too, and when he grips her hands and touches her face and embraces her it’s almost painful, like standing too close to a fire after having fallen into a frozen lake. That is exactly what it is—but she is starving, starving for warmth and starving for humanity and so the shock can only last a moment before it’s swallowed up in the feeling—because it is a feeling, an impression, a raw thing; never a conscious thought—of not being alone. The tears that well in her eyes feel hot against her frozen skin.

“I promise I didn’t do it so you have to promise you won’t hurt me anymore,” he says, and though she doesn’t understand what he’s talking about she winces at the way his voice sounds, at whatever it is that could make him sound like this. “Please… please.”

Please please please please.

The word echoes between them like a prayer, and though it never passes her lips it is on her mind, too, it has been since Gregor Daedrin’s axe connected with her shoulder, since she saw the hovercraft taking him away in two pieces. She doesn’t speak it aloud because it is nothing defined; she wants everything and nothing at once. She wants a way out and a way to stay alive, something to keep her from madness and something to bring her back home.

Please.

“It’s okay,” she repeats, even more shakily than before because it is clearly not, nothing about this situation is okay, nothing is ever okay. The cold is not okay and her wounds are not okay and neither are his, but she says it anyway because it’s what she has. It takes her a moment longer to realize he’s crying, still saying things like I didn’t mean to and it wasn’t my fault.

“I won’t hurt you…,” she finally manages to say, and it makes her think of Harris. They were allies, they were allies and he wanted to help her and she killed him. Her words falter, and she clings to Grayson Mercer as he clings to her, as though everything had just happened, as if no time had passed since yesterday morning and she was still blindly grasping for something to hold on to. It’s too little and too late, but it hardly matters. Her own voice is choked up and protests as it leaves her throat, when she speaks again. “I won’t… I promise, I promise I won’t.”

He says her name and smiles and she feels like she will burst into sobs, too.

“Yes, okay, of—,” she begins to say, but the parachutes cut her off. They land within a few seconds of each other, a small one with a container the size of her fist and another, much larger one. She stares at them as though she doesn’t know what they are, and then swallows. “Yes, you can,” she finishes without taking her eyes away from the parachutes, her voice hollow and barely audible. “Let’s just…”

She reaches for the small container, and once inside, as she stares at the note attached to it, she figures she hears the words in Lysa Ranton’s voice.

Sorry about the delay. Carry on. —L.

She is alive and she is not alone and she thinks she might be about to break.

Grayson’s parachute has bandages and water and kindling, but the medicine she cradles in her hands must’ve cost a small fortune. She looks at it as she looks at everything now, with a mixture of dullness and disbelief, before turning her eyes towards Grayson. I didn’t mean to… it wasn’t my fault.

“What happened?” she ventures, quietly, but for the first time in ages, she recognizes her own voice.

the dead weight | grayson + cally

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 23:00:00 -0400

graysonmercer:

There’s no more pain, and there’s no more sight. He can’t feel it or see it, but he can taste the tang of blood still poignant in his mouth from teeth gritting and digging into his tongue. If he thinks hard, he can remember the pain a little. It’s hard to imagine it in any fullness anymore, though. They hate him and he deserves it. Even the kindest of hearts can’t love a monster.

He can’t feel it or see it, but he can hear it now.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Boots in snow.

Heavier than a child. More confident than a child. More determined than anyone he knows. No, not anyone. Not more determined than him.

Grayson remembers maybe fondly the time he visited him. Him, the reason for the pain and the hurt. Made of gold, but black inside. Did he know he was dark inside? Probably. He wears the cape of gold like a champion, and wields the black like a sword.

‘You’re going to sit here until they decide you can die, my friend?’ he had said so coolly it chilled. Grayson said nothing. He should hate, but he felt nothing. He feels nothing.

‘How weak. Do you hate me yet?’

‘No,’ Grayson said.

And Thaddeus Mordre faded away.

It wasn’t reality, of course. In reality, Kalya and Ritter would catch him in a net like a fish and gut him just as well. Maybe they will now.

Crunch, crunch, crunch. He’s getting closer. Ritter’s stiffened and the atmosphere is tense. They know he’s here.

They haven’t even bothered to retie their captive. He’s just a cripple now afterall. Impaired by the mace he can no longer use, shivering and blue and groping to find warmth from solid slabs of stone.

His mother is shaking her head and his father is swearing at him. He hopes Marya hasn’t gotten into too much trouble. She tends to overreact at times.

Moving.

Thaddeus doesn’t call to him, but Grayson knows he’s there. Everything is about to go wrong. It’s written in the air and he can hear it.

As if in a dream he pushes back against to the wall and slides to his feet. They don’t kick him and they don’t slap him, because he’s like a shadow. Silent. More silent than Thaddeus Mordre, but he’s not deadly anymore. He hardly exists.

He moves but his leg is shaky where his knee is sore. Another step. He slips into the snow instead of crunching onto it. The snow isn’t his friend, but it accepts him now.

Are they cheering? He imagines the news reports now: Mercer makes an escape!

He moves to pull away his blindfold but he feels mound of beaten flesh that is supposed to be his right hand, and he kneels over and vomits. He doesn’t stand again, but he trudges through the snow on his hands and knees and he lets the sharp ice split his palms and leave a trail of scarlet behind him. He can’t see and he can’t feel.

Wind wraps around him and chills his spiked skin even more, but it pushes him forward. One final spurt before he slumps. This is it. This is where Grayson Mercer dies.

Fingertips skid on stone.

Tap, tap, tap. Footsteps.

Cool metal pressing at the underside of his chin, shaking with insecurity and possibly cold.

Grayson Mercer cannot see. Cannot know who it is, but his purple lips twitch down and his chapped fingers push him up to his knees. The sword follows him.

“Please,” he whispers with a voice like a splitting twig.

Please kill me please let me live please give me warmth please let me die.

Please save me.

The day passes in a blur of white and cold. She drifts in and out of sleep, but not because she’s tired; she never truly finds it for more than a few minutes at a time, but she refuses to stay awake for too long, refuses to face the emptiness, the blackness, the aloneness of the cave. To face the pool of half-frozen blood and the words on the walls. She is afraid to even breathe it in.

Keeping warm proves impossible and she has long given up on trying, instead letting the cold soak through to her bones. It settles within her, and she forgets what it was ever like to be warm. In the haze, an image comes back to her, and it is the strangest thing: cool rain falling on cobblestones, rapidly disappearing daylight. Dark and narrow alleyways that had a mystery and a beauty all their own, and she was not afraid, she was never afraid. She loved the rain and the cold and she was alive then.

Her hands shake and she shivers, out of cold or something else she doesn’t know, though she would be sure to recognize a fever by now, having suffered so many in the past couple of years. She runs her fingers along the blade of her sword, where the blood—Harris’ blood, and his—is now half dry and half frozen on the cold metal. Parts of it flake off at the touch, and she feels as though she might be sick.

Her gloves are stained with red, too, and her parka and her face and it is all around her. The gashes on her shoulder and side hurt and sting and immobilize, but they are as something that might have happened to someone else a long time ago. Her senses are too numb, her mind too empty and yet not enough.

Only once does she leave the cave, shortly before nightfall, when hunger threatens to drive her madder still, and she traces her steps back to the dying, squalid forest. The dimming sunlight reflects softly off the thick layer of snow on the floor, and the wind rustles the naked branches of the grey, thin trees—once again she is overcome with the desire to simply lay down in the snow, lay down until everything else falls silent. But she is moved by inertia, and so she doesn’t.

The berries she finds are just as bitter and just as dry as the ones she’d found before, but she eats them by clumps until the empty ache in her stomach subsides a little. The dizziness and lack of balance do not go away, cannot go away, and neither do the cold or the feverish despair.

When the anthem plays, to mark the end of another day, it seems to Cally as though a century has passed since the last time she heard it. This time, too, she stays inside the cave and does not look at the sky. What difference does it make, anyway? Day and night, light and dark, dead and alive… there is no difference, not when everything is cold and colorless and there is no warmth within her reach.

She wonders how long this can keep going, how long until she dies or goes mad or something happens. And she forces herself to sleep, because what else can she do?

It goes on and on and on, sleep and wakefulness, cold and maybe fever, shaking and nothingness. Night turns to dawn turns to day and nothing ever changes.

She hears him first, or senses him rather, because sight and touch and hearing are muddled and distorted by now, and her brain isn’t sure which signals come from which. But she senses before she sees, that is certain, and maybe she thinks there is nothing to be done now, maybe it’s out of fear or simply an instinctive reaction. But she is on her feet and the sword is clasped in her hand, and she walks to the mouth of the cave as though she were someone else.

She doesn’t recognize him at first, even as her sword presses against his throat. He is blindfolded and bloody, his hand a mess and his parka gone, but the most striking thing, the one thing that prevents her from making the connection with the boy she met in an elevator a thousand years ago, is how dead he looks. How hollow, how worn, how desperate.

She knows that look, she does. She must not be far from it herself.

“Please,” he says, whispering the word like it means everything in the world, like it is a lifeline. And although the voice is hoarse and broken and not something she has ever heard, that is when it clicks and she recognizes him. Grayson Mercer.

Please.

Her hands shake and she doesn’t move and it echoes in her mind—please please please—and she thinks of Harris and the look in his eyes and she wishes she could close hers and be somewhere else but she can’t she can’t she can’t. Her breathing is shallow and rapid and she thinks she might faint, and she doesn’t know why.

The sword falls to the floor and she to her knees. Her vision is blurry —tears, maybe, or sheer light-headedness— and she covers her face with her hands, in horror, before she settles for what had already been decided from the moment Grayson Mercer approached the cave, maybe even before that. She thinks of their conversation in the Training Center and she is horrified, she thinks of Harris and she cannot bring herself to kill.

She thinks of the cave and the emptiness and the loneliness and she doesn’t know what to think, but with numb and shaking fingers she fumbles at Grayson’s blindfold until she manages to remove it.

“It’s okay,” she says, her voice shaky and foreign to her ears. “What… how…?”

No, it’s not okay.

OOC no seriously GUYS WHERE ARE YOU i just started uni again i need this rp to maintain my sanity...

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 23:19:00 -0400

OOC

no seriously GUYS WHERE ARE YOU

i just started uni again i need this rp to maintain my sanity WHERE ARE YOU

Photo

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 23:18:54 -0400

ooc: guise

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 01:08:00 -0400

artemismordre:

wut

where is everyone
;A;

guise come on WE CAN’T GET STALLED AGAIN

If you are a monster, stand up.If you are a monster, a...

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 02:16:00 -0400

If you are a monster, stand up.
If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,
If you’ve built a steam-powered wishing machine
If you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,
If you kidnap maidens or dabble in dreams
Come stand by me.

If you have been broken, stand up.
If you have been broken, abandoned, alone
If you have been starving, a creature of bone
If you live in a tower, a dungeon, a throne
If you weep for wanting, to be held, to be known,
Come stand by me.

— A Monstrous Manifesto, Catherynne M. Valente (x)

faded and torn | cally

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:21:00 -0400

The sound of the cannon is deafening and final and louder than it should be, louder than it has ever been. It makes Cally’s ears ring and she hears it over and over again, a constant boom that makes her head swim. Her hands shake as she puts them over her ears and shuts her eyes, hoping to silence the noise, to erase the sight.

“Go away,” she murmurs, and her throat feels raw. “Go away.”

Scorching pain radiates from her shoulder where Harris’ hand had touched the open wound, where she’d imagined a knife tearing through flesh and muscle. Tears well in her eyes and she still does not dare open them, she does not dare uncover her ears, she does not dare move at all.

On the rooftop of the Training Center, Harris had reminded her of her friends, the ones back home in District 5. All friendly smiles and offers to help her, a stark contrast when compared to how guarded everyone else had been, how guarded she herself had made an impossible effort to be.

“Do you go around helping people in the Hunger Games?”

Now, with her sword soaked in his blood and his inert body lying next to her, she shudders and her own words sting and bite. She wants to scream at them to leave her be, but there’s nothing to scream at and they won’t listen anyway. She presses her hands harder against her ears, shuts her eyes even tighter, brings up her knees to her chin and tries to filter out the world. Her breathing is ragged and choked, half-formed noises leave her throat.

“…his death was a terrible accident…”

No. That was a lie, and she is not like him. She is not like him because he was a murderer, a cold-blooded, monstruous murderer that tore the life away from her without hesitation, that left her with nothing but cold and rage to keep her steady. She is not like him.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Tears roll down her frozen cheeks and still the sound of the cannon does not die down, still a million voices echo in her mind, no matter how hard she tries to keep them out, how hard her hands press against her ears, her temples, how they pull at her hair and rub her eyes. When she finally opens them, one first, hesitantly, then the other, maybe she expects the world to have turned upside down. Maybe she expects to be frozen in solid ice, or back in her house in District 5.

What greets her, though, clear and sharp with the light of day, are the same cave walls, the same pool of blood, the same dead blue eyes. Blue, ice-blue, dull and empty. Like Darling Auberguine’s.

She didn’t know. She didn’t know she didn’t know and she is not like him.

“Go away,” she whimpers again, barely audible even to herself, but of course he can’t. It hits her like a stone and a shriek rises up in her chest but it never reaches her mouth. She swallows and breathes deeply and rubs her temples, looks around trying to find something to hold on to, something solid, something tangible, something human and she doesn’t find it. She is alone, alone, alone.

Slowly, clumsily, still shaking more than ever in her life, she begins to move. Her hands grip the sword and she closes her eyes and bites her tongue as she pulls it out of Harris’ body. She sets it aside, and almost begins to cry again when she sees the blood all over her hands. She contains it, though, and with deep breaths and many pauses, she begins to drag his body to the outside of the cave.

and doomed to hell | cally + harris

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 04:57:00 -0400

She is alone, surrounded by him even after he’s gone, surrounded by his words and his presence, and every inch of the cave walls, every scrawled word and call for blood, remind her of what he has done to her life. She hears Carson’s laughter and Candice’s screams and her mother’s repressed sobs when she thought nobody was listening; she sees the axe, the woods as they must have been, and the Peacekeepers dragging him away only to tell her he would not be executed.

Wishing him dead used to be enough, but she sees his blood and his severed head on the snow, the image burned onto her eyelids, and it still does not wash away the rest of it.

She hears the familiar notes of Panem’s anthem, and a faint light floods the cave from its mouth. She shuts her eyes tightly and burrows herself further in her parka —cold, cold, it’s so cold—; she can’t see the sky from where she is, and not even the knowledge that his face will be among the ones that appear tonight is enough to make her go outside and look.

Names flash in her mind, names and faces one right after the other. Emmy Turnidge (I’ll try to be a really good sister), Lyra Reiser (It’s been nice to meet you), Grayson Mercer (I think I can respect that), Harris Tellmach (Go away, Harris), Xander Oritas (Can’t we just talk about something else?)… too many people, too many to keep track of, too many to think about.

Who knows where they are, who knows which of them died today? And who’s to say it would make any difference? She is alone, alone, alone. Alone with her wounds and the cold and Gregor Daedrin’s ghost.

The anthem finishes playing and she drifts off into restless, fitful sleep. She dreams of nothing, a white, vast, overwhelming nothing, where there is no up or down or left or right. She walks through it with her mother’s voice echoing in her mind, but the words sound far away and too low to make out. If only she could remember them, she’s sure she would find what she’s looking for, but she tries and tries and she can’t. She keeps wandering until her knees falter and still she sees nothing but the same endless void, and pain sears through her like a burning knife and she screams and screams and never stops screaming.

She wakes up with a start and she is not screaming, but the pain is real and the cold is worse. She bites down on her tongue and sees the wound on her side is bleeding again, the dark stain on her parka growing larger by the second; she brings her hand up to it and it comes away red and slick with the warm blood. There’s that scream again, frozen in her throat, a weight bearing down on her; there is nothing she can do, nothing at all but grip her sword and squeeze her eyes shut and try to go back to sleep.

Maybe this time she won’t wake up.

You have to win. You have to come back. She remembers the words now. They ring loud and clear above all the noise, and there is so much noise. She is not in the white void anymore, but this is just as overwhelming and just as heavy and she feels like she is being pushed into the ground. She hears her mother and Odyss Blackwell’s booming echoes, and she sees Candice leaving the Justice Building and Darling Auberguine pierced by a spear and Arielle Bracken’s sad eyes. It’s a whirlwind and someone calls her name, she thinks it’s Candice but it may be someone else entirely, and it’s loud, insistent.

“Cally… Cally!”

She hears it and shifts and still can’t make out who it is, but suddenly it’s as if a knife was driven right into her shoulder, and all she can think of as the shriek escapes her is that maybe he’s not dead after all, maybe he survived somehow or came back to life just to haunt her. She is still half asleep and her eyes won’t open because of the frost but the sword is in her hand and it’s not hard to thrust it forward and feel how it buries itself into flesh.

“Ca…lly…?”

The voice she hears is choked and confused and wrong, wrong wrong wrong, and an enormous feeling of dread and panic rises up in her chest. When she opens her eyes, dawn is breaking and the first thing she sees is blue.

Blue eyes and the life rapidly draining from them.

Go away, Harris.

Go away. Disappear. Don’t be here.

Don’t be here because if you’re here it’s all wrong.

“Oh, God, no, please,” her voice is nearly a whimper and her vision is blurry, her hands are covered in blood that isn’t hers and she doesn’t know what she’s asking for. “Please.”

Empty blue eyes stare wordlessly back at her, a cannon booms, and Cally Windheard is alone with her ghosts again.