It's the red tears that trail from her brutal face in rivets that surprises everyone that day.
It's warm and the air is slow and soft and the sights are beautiful, but it's only a nightmare to her.
Some kind of cruel joke,
A play on how beautiful her memory was,
A horrid twist of fate,
That the day gets the right to be beautiful.
That her funeral and the camp were thriving with a flourish of life that only the living can hold.
She doesn't care that the angry tears are showing though,
Because Dammit it's a funeral.
It's Her Funeral.
It's her Best Friend's Funeral.
Everyone was crying.
Stupid Aphrodite girl-
Always trying to help-
Always trying to be a Hero.
She watches as the pink shroud-
One that both Ares and Aphrodite made-
One that untied two strikingly different cabins together-
Dissipates in a haze of smoke and fire,
and all she can think is-
But she stops herself from finishing those thoughts.
She knows that it doesn't do her any good to question a dead girl.
She'll only drive herself crazy looking for the answers that she'll never receive.
She knows that the madness is there, because she's already half of the way to finding it.
She's already toeing the line between grief driven insanity
-One that would consume her whole-
and the task of trusting in hope
-A hope in the give and take of death,
A hope in the push and pull of life.
Despite her best efforts, she's still walking that dangerously thin line.
She's still stuck somewhere between the brink of sanity and the darkness that lies around it.
No matter how hard she tries to stop them though-
The halting thoughts trickle through her defenses-
and she knows the battle to keep them at bay was a lost cause to begin with.
Why couldn't you have talked to me first?
Was I really that hard to deal with?
Was I really so stubborn, that it cost you your life?
Why did you steal my armor?
That should have been me!
I should have been leading my troops!
I should have been fighting that Drakon!
It was never supposed to be you!
You were never supposed to die!
Why?
Why did you have to die?
Why did you leave me?
What am I going to do now?
Then the final thought they gets to the solitary girl the most comes around.
There won't ever be another girl like you.
I'll never love another girl like I loved you.
They circle through her head,
Sharp as daggers and coated in a poison that seeps through everything-
ripping and pulling at everything in their way,
Shredding every semblance of peace,
Every notion of a good memory.
She punches an arena wall just to be rid of her own mind for one shockingly painful second and
She almost relishes the peace that the pain brings,
If only for a moment.
It doesn't last long enough though because then the shroud is gone.
The double edged daggers are back along with a profound sense of-
Failure,
Guilt,
and consuming despair,
Bringing another set of red tears and bloody knuckles.