CHAPTER FIVE — Envy and Wrath ..
______________________
The ringing in Daphne's right ear pierced her brain like a nail driven through a plank of wood, sparking up a pulsing headache that swayed the world around her.
She couldn't look at them anymore. She couldn't bare to watch Lucy Gray twirl that rose around and eat one of its petals before Coriolanus, or she feared she might go insane there and then.
To answer her migraine's wratful storm and actually take a seat back on the bench was a relief for Daphne Ravinstill. An insufficient relief, but a relief nonetheless.
Daphne could close her eyes from down there and fight off the image of them that threatened the integrity of her mind's lucidity.
She didn't know that District 12 girl, but she hated her nonetheless within the span of not even a full minute.
"Fuck," the curse muttered past Daphne's lips in a gasp, accentuated with the remnants of French that lingered on the tip of her tongue and at the corner of her mouth.
A flicker of consciousness left in her mind told her that it's been a long time since her condition had an episode so wildly powerful that it could hijack her world into a static buzz of sirens bleeding through her thoughts. She felt like an old film strip being held over fire, losing her senses to a pain out of her control.
'Lucy Gray' was turning synonymous with this spiraling agony. That dirty girl dressed in an obscene amount of colors was slowly morphing into the only cause behind this Hell, blending in with one memory Daphne despised the most, yet could never find the perfect means by which to erase it from her repertoire of remembering — after the blast, in the hospital, laying half-awake in bed on sedatives that hardly numbed her pain; her brother was on a chair in that very same room, crying besides their father. "Why did it have to be mom? Why couldn't she die instead?" There was no objection from her father that day and there had been no intervention from him since in the way Albert started treating her.
How could she, under such conditions, not hate that District 12 tribute?
There was one relief Daphne could still count on though. So while her head pulsed on the peak of a headache so strong that tears bubbled in her eyes, with every fiber of her body trembling in incomprehensible fear that nothing has changed and she was still the same unwanted and insignificant little girl, alone to her sorrows, she hurried to rummage through her purse for that pack of slim cigarettes and her lighter.
Putting a cigarette between her lips was easy, however actually seeing past her held back tears she was too ashamed to shed in such a public space — that was the difficult part.
Her lighter wasn't cooperating either, sparking up its small flame in fast jolts.
The second a single tear escaped her left eye and she could feel it roll with speed down her cheek, Daphne choked herself on the fear of being seen by Coriolanus this way. Breathless as she was, she stood up and turned around, preferring to stare into the street outside the columns holding up the entrance to the train station rather than sit down and face the platform, from where only one glance back could show him how her war scars really looked like.
YOU ARE READING
OUR FOREST OF THORNS | tbosas ✔️
FanfictionIn which Coriolanus Snow's alliance with the daughter of President Ravinstill during his Academy years proves to be far more; a perfect ally, a bottomless fountain to his joy - Daphne Ravinstill is his equal, the match he long since desired, but has...
