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v. on butterfly's wings
WHEN APHRODITE WAKES, she's too scared to open her eyes.
Scared darkness will be rolling overhead. Crushing downwards. Pressing in closer and closer and closer like the lid of a coffin. Sealing her in her own coffin. Suffocating her. Killing her. Scared that she'll taste that copper blood on the tip of her tongue the same way she always does when she kills. Her nostrils still burn with the stench of death. Aphrodite's scared, yes, but there's something worse lingering in the hallow catacombs of her stomach.
If she's going to be honest with herself, she'd start here: Winning wasn't supposed to feel like this.
Hollow. Empty. Numb.
But Aphrodite's never been very honest with herself. No reason to start now!
There is a horrible, erratic thumping in her chest. As if a large bird is trapped inside her rib cage and is beating itself to death. Unable to lay there any longer, she opens her eyes.
Her shoulders sag. The entire ceiling is aglow with a soft, yellow light, letting her see where she is. A small room. No doors. No windows. The air is sharp with antiseptic. Several tubes snake from her arm into the wall behind her. She's naked save for the thin hospital gown, and she wonders who undressed. Who had seen her so vulnerable. So weak.
Someone shifts on the plastic-y couch. His voice is still rough and sleepy when he speaks;
"Welcome back, fatass."
Icarus. He's sitting there, and he doesn't look like he's gotten sleep for at least a couple of days. Maybe longer. When Aphrodite peers back into his face, his eyes are rusty; it's like gazing into starless skies, vacant, midnight-black, ten-thousand layers of frozen black cosmos.
His eyes don't light up the way they used to, when they were kids. There's hardly any light left at all. As if tears have glaciated the sun; there's nothing but shadows now.
Aphrodite used to be so angry, when she was 10 and he was 15, when he came back from the games not District Two's golden lion but instead a bone-flayed shadow of a boy. He'd never left the arena. Not really. At night he used to scream and try to wash the blood off his fingers, but you cannot escape what you're made up of.
He's been pumping drugs into his veins ever since. Until words cannot form, memories cannot bleed together, until a numb buzzing is all he knows.
She was 10 and he was 15, and their mom was furious when her lion-hearted son came back from his games not a Victor, but barely even a survivor. They used to argue a lot, and Aphrodite was 10, and she didn't understand. Her brother stopped sleeping at their house. Moved out. Aphrodite's gums bled every time she said the word family. At night, he'd sit on the sidewalk, holding his breath until his face turned blue. He'd close his fists and sit so still she thought he was dead. Corpse-like. Their mom would scream at him to let go. Aphrodite would beg him to let go. He tried. He tried. He tried.
