~Backwater~
There is nothing she can ever complain about again. Nothing she ever had complained about mattered at all, nothing, not when Mandy Carter cheated and beat her on the huge science final, not when Zack Fields spread rumours around the district that she'd kissed him by Valentine's Creek, not when Alma got a doll bigger than she was at the holidays and Cirrus got another booklet about space with facts she memorized years ago.
How did she complain? How didn't she think those little quirks of normal life were blessings and comforts, when now she's, she's had to-
Limp, sobbing and retching, into the trees. Start a fire while blood loss made her dizzy and ate at the corners of her vision. Pull out the blade- heat it quickquick before she passed out- and, fuck oh fuck, press it to her slit-open belly to cauterize it. That was it. That was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
Sheer, mad determination kept her conscious through the pain, pain so blinding it wasn't white but something a thousand degrees of magnitude brighter, because if she didn't stay awake, keeling over and driving the machete fully through her seemed sort of bad.
She'd clenched her teeth on her sleeve and wailed like a dying banshee. It took five tries to unclench them. Now, Cirrus lies on her side with her skin sizzling and tears tracking down her face as her brain takes her on a tour through her fractured memories, and all she can think is I want them back.
Everything that had ever happened to her had been fine, hadn't been anything to complain about, because-
Mandy cheats. She does. And it grates down Cirrus's spine, and there's nothing she can do about it. Yeah, it blows harder than Mandy with the teacher's son on their 'study nights,' because how else would that doesn't-know-a-proton-from-an-electron devilspawn get her hundred, but the thing is, it doesn't matter. It's not even news. Five is a quiet district, and what Cirrus thought was the greatest outrage since genetically modified cats (They're perfect as they are. Who do you think you are, changing the greatest animals to walk Panem? They're better waking up in a dumpster than you are after a spa weekend) doesn't even ripple the surface. So Cirrus forgets. It didn't change anything. It just didn't matter.
Zack is an ass. Yeah, so what? She already knew that. She's a frosty flat-chested dull-eyed kid who everyone knows would rather eat ants than look at a boy and he's saying she came onto him. Like anyone thinks it's true. Right, big man he is and all he can get is an eight year old? People laughed. They moved on. The world? It kept turning. Why did she care? Why?
Alma has a doll with dark ringlets and sloe eyes and lashes like splinters of ebony. It looks more like her sister than Cirrus does. So what? And Cirrus has read most of the information in her book a lot, but she'd still rather have it, wouldn't she? So did she want a doll like herself, one with straw hair and narrow sullen eyes avoiding yours? No, she wanted whatever Alma had. She forgot later, didn't care, read her book, and everything was the same. What would she even do with a doll? You needed love to know what to do with one, so much love, spilling out of you, overflowing like, like-
Cirrus is bleeding again. It would help to sew up the wound, but she's got no needle or thread, and you can't sew up a deflated heart, and that's not what she means but it's okay, it's not sunken anymore, the sameness crushed it and now something's happening, it's coming back because in the Games it means something.
