a/n [I haven't written anything in nearly 5 months, so when you find a mistake, sigh loudly in my general direction. I had posted this w/o a revision at first but it's revised now thank god.
The ending quote isn't mine. The street names are made up.
TW: death, car crash.
Written for Caesar's Palace's monthly oneshot contest.]
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There are two, one coming and another going, when they collide.
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"It's not your fault," Annie whispers. "I know you think that, but it's not. It's really, really not. I don't blame you. I really, really don't. Could've been anyone."
A pause. She taps restlessly on the empty box, its tissues spread around her in a way that will make the nurse tsk when he walks in.
"I love you, love you, love you. C'mon, no one will be mad at you. Just wake up. We're all here for you."
Her palms press over her eyes, shutting herself in.
"Please, Finnick."
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A styrofoam cup in one hand and a silent girl in the chair beside him, Peeta waits.
"Are you going to drink that?" she asks.
He is going to wake up this morning, the smell of pancakes already sneaking under his bedroom door. Though it's tempting to stay for a stack drowned in honey, he grabs a smaller, burnt circle on his way out the door with a quick wave to his roommate. His jacket is only on by one sleeve. His hair hasn't dried yet. Delly is waiting in the car, her forehead on the wheel, and as he watches, she slips, hitting the horn.
"Long morning?" he asks, sliding in.
She groans, shifts into reverse, and in twenty minutes they're standing elbow to elbow, him catering while she flicks her camera on and off, on and off. She asks, softly, if he thinks that they'll ever amount to something more than working at backyard weddings surrounded by plastic muddy fences and yellow grass.
With a quick keyboard note and a final on-click, his answer is cut off. Or it would be, if he had one. But he doesn't. The bride smiles in her thrift-store gown and begins to walk.
Then they're driving to the café that sits on the edge of town, the one with the butterfly stickers on the windows, the one with the broken light up sign announcing it's OP N 24/7.
Then they're not driving.
He hands her the cold coffee. "No."
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Under florescent lights and between sterile walls, Johanna's fingers twitch, betraying her. Again, she hovers two fingers over the skin of her wrist, marked with the soft ink of a bracelet of ivy, and wishes she could dig her nails in. Again, with a sigh, she tallies her heart rate instead.
She's on 97 beats, when Annie is wheeled into the hallway, white gown and no-slip socks and all.
"Hey, Jo," she whispers. Her fingers play with the edge of the bandage looping around her chest, keeping her heart from lurching out.
Johanna stays facing the wall, her gaze falling just below the ceiling, right where a clock would sit. She watches the second hand dip around and around. 114.
"You can go in, you know."
And she turns then, and Annie smiles up at her, her eyes ringed red where Johanna's are stained black. She doesn't smile back. Doesn't say a word until Annie shuffles to her feet, her nurse frantically moving to assist her, and reaches a hand up to Jo's cheek.
"Don't," she says then.
Annie wipes the tears away anyway, her fingers returning with traces of two-day old mascara. They both stare at her fingers, inspecting the black smudges, trying to find one of those meanings everyone's always going on about. Trying to understand why it matters.
Falling back into her wheelchair, Annie wipes the mascara off on her gown, tainting it.
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There's a row of maple trees on the corner of Horton and Chestnut, their leaves fading from orange to brown and littering the streets. Behind them is the pumpkin patch closing down for the season.
In front of them, two cars rest nose to nose, a third parked crookedly behind them with smoking wheels, and a fourth pulling to a stop.
Katniss Everdeen flips her emergency lights on with one hand, grabs her phone with the other, and opens her car door.
"911, what's your emergency?"
There's a young woman sitting in the car a yard from the crash, her hands still on the wheel. She is unresponsive when Katniss knocks on her window.
There's a couple in the wrecked Jeep. The driver's torso hangs halfway out of the shattered window, glass sticking in his hair, from his skin, to the blood on his upper chest. His other arm is over the center divider, crooked, where his passenger still grips his hand tight in hers. Her face is too pale, her pupils too large, her chest heaving.
A man stumbles out of the last car, clutching his head and relearning how to breathe. He glances back at the driver seat, where a woman lies draped over the steering wheel, blood sliding down her arms, her chest, past where an airbag should be. He can't look away.
"There's been an accident at Horton and Chestnut."
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In an attempt to apologize for moving out after five years together since college, Annie invited Johanna up to Montauk with her and her fiancé.
"So I can awkwardly sit across the room as you two make out?" she asked.
"Yep."
"Fantastic."
They took two cars, so Johanna could leave early Monday for work. She was to follow them there. They honked seven times that morning before she emerged from the apartment stairway, complaining about the weight of her overfilled backpack, pretending to lose her balance coming down from the curb.
They chastised her for not packing the day before, handing her a drive-through burger and waiting while she ran back up for forgotten keys. What did it matter, she argued, to take a few minutes longer in the morning?
What did it matter.
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"You should drink something," Katniss says, nudging a fifth cup of coffee into his hands.
Peeta looks up, blearily, wondering why she's still here. "You don't have to stay."
She sits next to him anyway, where she's been for the past two days, bringing him coffee and plastic wrapped sandwiches from the hospital cafeteria. Sometimes, she's gone for a few hours, and she comes back with clean hair, new clothes, and a blanket.
"Why don't you go home tonight?" she asks gently.
He hands her the coffee back.
"Peeta?"
"Please, please go away." He closes his eyes, breathes in the warmth of her blanket. "This isn't your mess."
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When the ambulances arrive, the man is crouched on the ground where Katniss told him to sit and stay, worried that in his anxious state he'd rush towards his friend, jostling her, hurting her. He counts pebbles in the asphalt.
Katniss is, meanwhile, hovering over the passenger of the other car, the door cracked open from where she climbed in, the passenger's seat reclined as far back as it can go. She's readjusting her grip on the woman's wrist, ensuring that her pulse had faded only because of Katniss' inadequate technique, when the first paramedic sets a light hand on her arm.
"She's in shock," Katniss explains. "My sister, she told me that if, if someone's in shock then you, you lay them down and, and—"
Two more paramedics arrive at the other side of the car, carefully extracting the man from the vehicle. Helplessly, she watches as his hand is pulled away from the woman's, her grip too slack to keep it. She wants to shout, be angry with them for separating the couple, but her voice is trapped deep inside her. Blood drips softly to the seat as they lift him through the window.
The paramedic is grasping her arm now, pulling her away. "I can help!" she cries, desperately searching for the woman's pulse again, upset that she forgot to keep track.
When they get her onto the asphalt, a police officer turns her away from the crash, sets a blue blanket around her shoulders, and leads her by the hand to sit under the maple trees with a man counting leaves and a woman unpacking her bag.
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The bed is too large for someone so small, Johanna thinks, watching Annie weave her fingers together in and out, her arms around her knees, her cot neatly made beneath her.
"I can't sleep," she says. Her fingers weave in and out, in and out. "I keep thinking that if maybe, if maybe I'd just grabbed the wheel—he was reaching for his fries, you see, looked down for just a second—I was looking at him, but I could've looked up if I wanted to and just grabbed the wheel and kept us straighter—the road was turning anyway—why would they curve the road like so—seems like a very badly designed—you know—I saw when we crashed, though, you know—too late—
"I can't sleep."
"Annie—"
"I don't want to, anyway. Don't worry." In and out, in and out. "They say he's not going to wake up, you know. So he, he's doing all the sleeping for both of us. I'll be awake then. For both, for the both of us."
Johanna sits gingerly on the edge of the bed, wraps a firm arm around her friend. She says, "Sounds like a plan."
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Delly passes away at two in the morning in the ICU. The nurse stands in front of Peeta, waiting for his reaction, bracing herself for the outburst she had received from the deceased's parents.
Peeta sighs, covers his head with his borrowed blanket and curls his feet under him until he disappears.
"Thank you," Katniss says to the nurse, looking at Peeta. She lifts a hand to where she supposes his arm is, awkwardly pats in reassurance that he isn't alone. When his head falls onto her shoulder, she stiffens, but doesn't move away.
He falls asleep seconds later.
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there are no gods,
just humans trying
to love enough to
make the sad reality
of death an illusion.
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