XX. Blood Hit the Sky.

.

Was this quite real? This fear. This silence. Both. They're mocking my senses. In tangent. In tandem. In tremulous lies.

Not so long ago I was kissing you. I could still breathe, and now I'm not so sure.

The cannon sounds and the prison around me erupts.

Something inside me shatters. I cannot stay what, but the sound of that cannon, so terrible and clean. It slices into my cortex. The very hemispheres of my brains are pealing apart, screaming out to the apostles of my mind to save them.

Is this a loss I cannot fix?

I think it so.

The red sky cries as the black marble columns tower about me. Nothing makes sense anymore. All I know is that I am running.

Present, past and future muddle in the fetid shallows of my mind, and all I feel is the ground beneath my feet as I run towards the cauldron that lies before me. The cauldron of boiling children.

Why are they all painted red?

Who is spilling out? Spilling out onto me. I can't tell if they're a boy or a girl, only that their face has been bashed in.

Yet they are still running. And now falling, taking me down as their cracked skull suppurates more and more red thoughts.

Everything is warm and humid and I wonder if I can crawl under this spasming child and hide between their ribs.

I am not living. Surely not? Not in such confusion.

I feel the hot ground beneath me and it is moist. From where I lie, weighted down by this dead child I see the world play out at an angle. It's like they're all dancing. Twirling, spinning in a nauseating game until one lunges and caresses the other too close. Mouths open up from where their stomachs used to be and long hot tongues slip out.

They're calling out for me to join them but I pretend to be asleep. No one awakes the sleeping. I want to close my eyes, pluck them out. Do I still dream? Not until my eyes adjust.

My dancing partner is gone, limply thrown about me with a dwindling effort. They must not have been very good at dancing, for they are too large for me to move, to brutish to be any good. They need to stop sleeping, so I can take the next shift.

A new partner approaches. He lifts away my old one and kicks them in the head. I really don't think that's the right way to teach anyone how to dance. Are they about to teach me? Can they not tell I am asleep.

Maybe they can't and that's why they're reaching for my hair, yanking it about to pull the plug on my consciousness. My eyes are rolling about, shuddering and my mouth gasps for the air that suddenly escapes me.

Their hand is around my neck. A sharp finger presses to my hairline and suddenly everything is white and hot and flashing, pulsating.

"Can you feel the knife?"

Warmth; boiling liquid falling down my face, splattered kisses. Rain, it must be. Rain from the sea above the sky.

They're pealing at my skin, carving it up like hot butter to make a mouth upon my forehead. They want to see my skull, see the swimming thoughts below the flesh.

I close my eyes; sink into a sea of white-hot sulphur, bitter and unkind. My arms and legs begin to spasm, jolts of alternating rigor travelling up my limbs, animating my body in a way I have never experienced. I am dancing at last. But we are not dancing together.

The hand disappears but the pain does not.

And so I run, run because I still can. My eyes are still so tightly shut.

I am lost, and where my heart once led me, I have no guide.

All I have is my empty head, and it's bundle of useless nerve endings.

My eyes open.

But I cannot see.

.

"She looks half mad." Joanna's voice is stung with a bitter empathy, but is too hollow for any use at soothing his worry.

"Sorry. Is that wrong to say?"

He shakes his head.

They're sitting in a corner of a viewing room. By now it's emptied of its earlier capacity. He's slumped in a chair as he watches her narrowly avoiding being scalped. Blood runs down her face and he wonders if he'll ever see it's precious light again.

After too many minutes spent out in silence her voice rises up again.

"Man the fuck up. What use are you moping around? Or is this pity party going to continue even after we've put her in her grave?"

His mouth gapes emptily. Of course the thought has crossed his mind. Far too many thoughts have crossed his mind. Countless spiraling possibilities haunt him. They cloud his vision so much so that he has practically lulled himself into a stupor.

He watches as his mind conjures up the thousand different ways they could tear her apart. And all before his helpless eyes.

"What use am I to her anyway?"

He can hear Joanna's breathing hitch.

She's in front of him, calloused palms raining down hard about his shoulders.

Her face comes up close, leering. She once could have been pretty, but that would have only been a mask. Beneath that layer of pulpy skin a thousand nerve endings smolder in restless confusion and rage. She could never be content with anything other than a contortion.

"Every use. Everything. You want her. People want you. Goddammit Finnick you're a commodity. Put yourself to use and earn her a way to survive," something is awakening in her throat, a large vein throbbing with an ill-earn vitality.

"Survive?" It's a whisper of a word, and yet it still stings him. That's a possibility he's hardly explored.

"Do I even want her to survive?" He's thinking aloud, but even if he'd kept the thought to himself, he'd still feel guilty.

"Do I want her to live like we do? Broken and discarded. We've been spoiled. She hasn't. Not yet," Is he being selfish to wish to end her misery, and not prolong it?

"She can't have my life," he can't condemn her to this; this life of fractured sympathies and hollow promises. He sees her now, sees her spasming on sullied sheets, her muscles twitch as her face contorts, the scar upon her forehead splitting open to join her mouth in a scream.

He hardly notices as Joanna's throws his glass to the ground and picks her way through the broken shards.

She pauses at the door.

"At least she'll have a life."

.

I never wanted to be blind.

What has happened to my head? I cannot see, I cannot think. It's as though that cannon broke some pivotal piece of my mind and I'm disintegrating.

Dissipating,

Distorting,

Disembowelling.

I keep on running, because that's what they tell me to do. Keep running until you can't hear anymore.

Slowly my senses are leaving. First went my sight, and soon all the sounds will dissolve as well.

I collapse now, no longer full of breath. The air is warm and clammy, like the touch of hot hands. It's there between me, between my lungs. Another seizure might be coming. My heart is rapping upon the door, eager to get in.

The ground is hard below my back; I can feel it cutting at my spine, nibbling away with tiny marble teeth.

Shattered memories of a time only just past supplements my inner eye. What I'd seen, what I'd heard, all had been thunderous. The world had been painted black. We were within a bowl. A giant bowl, filled with a soup of sweat and blood. Even the tree's had black bark, those straggly little nubs of splintered limbs.

I want rid of this world. Rid of the stones around me. Come pack them up. Disrobe the floor of its carpet of dying grass. Strip the mountain of its paint and pack up the sky. Dust away the clouds and drain the ocean.

I wish to be in oblivion. White. Black.

Nothingness.

No words, no sight.

No thought.

Nothing.

No.

N

.

The blood's caked her face so that he can't recognise it anymore.

It's in her mouth, in her hair, in her eyes. She's going to drown in her own blood. Just as he's drowning in this bed. Joanna had been right. Stray hands litter the sheets, stained and soiled by a commitment he must uphold.

It had been by the District 1 boy. He'd made his mark across her precious face, carved open half of her forehead.

He traces the line across the enamelled face beside him. He wonders what it would be like to take a knife and sully this woman, just as she had sullied him. The light from the television screen flickers out across the elongated planes of her face. Bile, blood and battered limbs. She sleeps through all of it. He's just watched another kid have their face bashed in.

She's promised antibiotics and bandages but he intends to squeeze a meal out of her before dawn.

The screen fills with a sight of the arena. Two hemispheres of rocky terrain, connected together through a series of interconnecting caves. Two damns border each bowl and he knows it's only a matter of time before they'll burst. The only way Annie might survive is if she begins moving to higher ground.

He watches as she has another fit.

He feels sick.

He is sick. He hopes for a second he chokes, because selfishly he doesn't want to watch this anymore.

She's his Annie. His fearless Annie. The girl who finds secrets in stones. Who swims and takes not a single breath, but lets the sea sustain her. Who glances to the stars and sees not a sky full of rocks, but one of stories and scars.

Where is their story going?

It can't be like this. They were meant to grow old together. They were going to swim out to sea and never come back. To live on that paradoxical island and fear nothing and no one.

He wakes the woman beside him.

He will not let their story stop.

.

I am now the rabbit who eats up the snake.

The bowl of my heart spills out all contests of love. I am done. Finished.

This organ whose purpose had once been to warm and sway the feelings of affection, is now nothing, puerile.

It is useless in a land of lost love.

Now it is reserved to the pure and only use of pumping oxygenated blood round my body, fuelling my bones to keep on moving. My very marrow is spoilt by sweat. It leaked from my pores to run rivets in the blood caked upon my cheeks.

I can now see.

Blood, like a thick crust, covers my face. Flecks of dry red clay are scattered about me, colouring the dirty floor. I prised my lids apart, slipped my finger under the lid and demanded to my retinas that they work.

Blindly, I'd crawled inside a warren and through some superior force survived a single night.

I don't want to leave.

I'm as safe as I can be here. The earth around me is warm and wet. The walls of this warren are made of red clay. And so the ground now bleeds for me. We bleed together.

But I haven't bleed on time, as I should expect.

I am now the rabbit who eats up the snake. And like the rabbit my coated face breaches the air and surveys the land.

Mountains surround me. I am in a hall of kings.

We are in a canyon. A canyon of rippling walls. Walls that move and swim as fingers of milky white penetrate the silent marble.

Canyons and caves. Canyons, caves and corridors.

I am in a corridor. I am below the corridor. A corridor curtained with blood. My own I think.

It's getting dark and so I sink back into my hole and curl up.

I can feel the trees eating up my oxygen. They take my breath and drink it up like hungry children and milk. The stink of the dead is in the air and the night presses in like a zealous onlooker.

It was as though the dark air has coagulated.

From the spilt in my skull something comes pouring out. I can feel it, sense it's breathing. It crawls at first, but now it walks. It's clawing out from between my seams and will soon consume me.

A beat. A pause. A breath.

Someone is outside.