Watching Katniss at the lake reminds me of how to feels to want--
I remember how I wanted death once, how it rolled around and around in my stomach like a heavy world around a sun. I remember seeing red, red, red, each time I closed my eyes. There had been blood behind my teeth each time I smiled, iron and gore. Each night part of it comes to call, the black sea or the red blood. But I don't want like I used too.
Behind her the lake is the rose-gold colors of new beginnings and the leaves are rust red around her hooves. The lake is lapping gently at the shore by her hooves and I wonder if it's nothing more than a memory to her of the last time she knew what the fire of hope felt like. Somewhere out in the dark sea Fable is prowling the borders to our land. I am glad for it. As I start to move towards her when she collapses, I am glad.
He hates seeing me be cruel.
My knees ache to fall with her, to brush our weary brows together and say only, I know, I know, I know. I tell myself there is steel in my jaw and a sun in my eyes devouring every tear that is begging me to dissolve. Grass ripples against my ankles and turns to pearls, and stone, and everything cold, hard and sharp in the world. Morning sunlight is hanging on my horn like god-blood.
I hope, oh I hope, that I look as terrible as I feel. And I hope she will forgive me for it.
“Get up.” My voice is iron and gore, steel and stone, wrath and war. The shadow of my form stretches over her in the same way Fable's wings stretch over the sun. Beneath my skin all my bones are rattling with the urge to curl against her for an hour. I toss my horn into the morning wind so that she won't see anything but the war-hungry cruelty of me.
The time for softness and sorrow set with the summer.
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