𝐂𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐅𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 [𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐤 - 𝐇𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬]

10 | 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭

Content warning at the end notes: please skip down and check if you feel like you should!

This chapter is brought to you by my cracked ribs. Seriously. How do book characters ignore rib injuries? I can genuinely only do tiny breaths or I'm in agony. Respect for the made up people, disrespect for the inaccuracy of people wandering around fine with broken ribs. This hurts.

N E O

            — I REALISE I'M DONE FOR. It's early evening and the sky is pinking beyond the shattered panes in the Mayor's House. I strain my ears for the sound of the verdins, thinking again of the little things crumbling in my palms, which are mangled and red, leaking plasma and blood in odd separating beads. It's as if my veins run with oil and water.

            Hazel and Deckard haven't yet returned, but the vultures, which hover like little landmarks over their distant heads, came in a flock perhaps ten minutes ago and with that cold, calculated demeanour of machinery they pecked and tore at the suspended form of Seth until his eye sockets gaped, hollow. As if not enough blood has been shed already. I think the end may be near.

            The dread encroaches on me incrementally until my shoulders start to habitually roll in an attempt to shake off the tension, but that feeling digs its claws in. With my hands like this, I cannot grip. I cannot pick up a small stone, let alone heft up my sword or throw a decent punch.

            Oddly enough, I think of Teff. I think of his calloused fingers and how the pale of his palm would flash briefly and then hide underneath his dark knuckles whenever he would bind my wounds, a soothing repetitive rotation of his scarred and inked wrist. I think of those hands on my back as my stomach heaved, in my hair during fitful sleep, against the glass of the train window as he leaves me again. My heart aches for him so abruptly and so sharply that I can't help but curl in on myself and bite back a small, childish moan. That rage, that encompassing, suffocating, invasive rage I'd felt when the train pulled away and Teff slipped out of view squirms in my sternum, pressing on my diaphragm and winding me again. I'd felt like an animal nervously pacing in a cage, a sacrificial goat foisted upon an alter, a trembling ewe being tupped before a salivating God. Somewhere deep inside of me aches and whines, sputters and begs for warmth and heat and fire and a little piece of me crumbles and perhaps maybe even allows a match to drop on the hay bale stuffed in my torso and my mind is consumed.

            Finally, that old, ancient thing in me heaves.

            I uncurl my body, sprawl my legs out before me on the floor of Seth's bathroom, watching the pink light of sunset wash over my ruined hands. They shake and bleed still. Yet they remain a piece of me, as is my crumpled body, my fury, my grief. It belongs to me — all of it.