She stares into the river of crimson bl- liquid, she tells herself, eager to dissociate her acts from their fatal consequences.
This is no place for a child, and yet that is all she is. Stuck in a hellhole with no reasonable way out, she is reduced to being just a pawn in their stupid game. Her only options are death... or death.
Not much of a choice really, is it?
The girl shakes her head in a futile attempt to get some of the droplets of red, red, red out of her long, brunette - not brown anymore, she tells herself, they're tainted now and turned scarlet - locks, but they
just
won't
leave.
Amongst all her desperation, her only option is to slice them all off with her pocket knife before the little drops settle and make her smell like death himself. Which they would do, because she cannot see any other result of their presence.
She is becoming too blind to see anything but misery and bad outcomes.
Trembling, she drags the blade across the hair at the back of her neck and winces when she catches her skin. Somebody once told her - a teacher, perhaps - that all humans have warm blood, both district citizens and those from the Capitol alike. But right now, she is beginning to doubt everything that man ever taught her, for as it trickles down her spine she shivers.
And then again.
And maybe it means nothing, nothing at all, but she feels as though she is lost inside now. The sweet and innocent child who picked her mother dainty flowers? Gone.
She is gone forever.
Perhaps someday she may find her way back, retrieve her lost innocence. That is what her mother will tell her - if she ever returns to her, that is. But when she thinks of all the bad, bad, bad she has committed... well, she very much doubts that she will reach forgiveness after everything. With her right hand, that has been spilled and there is no coming back for her now - not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
She shuffles away from the stone cold boy - still a boy, she tells herself, unable to come to terms with the word corpse - and picks up her axe. Though she hates it - detests it, even, what with all its sangria coating, she cannot risk leaving it behind. That would be the end of this... this monstrosity, and as appealing as that may sound she knows that, truly, it would be unpleasant. For her family's sake, she cannot leave it.
She is their saviour, and she shall eternally continue to be so. She cannot just give up, can she?
The girl continues through the forest, continues walking through the 'land of misery', as she has come to think of it. For the world surrounding her is not one of innocence, or joy, or even safety - it is deadly, and she is already living on borrowed time.
And she knows this, and she considers ending it all yet again - as anybody would do in her situation, really - but she forces herself to stay strong. Because if she goes, then what message would that send to her little brother? Not the one she would want for him to receive, that is for sure. So she battles on, praying that each droplet of burnt sienna liquid which she encounters won't be her own, and that it won't be the last.
Because even though she wants it all to have finished already, she knows that she has a lot left to do before victory is hers. And if she gets driven insane in the process then so be it, she tells herself.
To be a shell of her former self would be better than to be totally shattered, after all. And to be covered in red droplets is better than to be covered in six feet of soil.
