OUR FOREST OF THORNS | tbosas ✔️

012 || If This Isn't Love

CHAPTER TWELVE —    If This Isn't Love ..

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          Everything that came after the first explosives went off in the arena was perceived by Coriolanus from an altered point of view, either of the boy who used to hide with his cousin and grandma beneath a marble table or of the young adult whose soul had been frightened out of the carcass of his body, shivering helpless in front of a final answer to his earlier in the day morbid realizations — of course the war had never really ended.

To say he was conscious to everything that happened to him and around him was to challenge what meant to be 'conscious' in the first place.

Yes, he had a basic understanding of it all, enough to even appreciate that these were no bombs being dropped on them as they had been during the war, but rather explosives planted in the arena and waiting for the Hunger Games to come around in order to claim victims in the name of the rebellion. However, his cognitive capabilities were by far the only sensibility he could still cling to, which is perhaps exactly why his instinctive reaction to get to the ground after the first blast was outshined by his immediate incapacity during the explosions to act on the appreciation that he was laying under parts of the roof that weren't going to hold.

So his consciousness was relative at best.

After all, what more could he expect from himself?

Adrenaline was rushing through his veins and soon, pain added into the mix because his inability to respond fast enough to the last explosions that went off had Coriolanus pinned under a burning piece of the roof. Smoke entered through his flaring nostrils and made his whole respiratory system sting in ashes and dust.

He observed much within his panic, but understood very little past his own fearful desperation to get away. Only one thing stuck with him from that arena, apart from a bitter resurfacing of childhood terrors he had no wish to ever recall again: Lucy Gray helped him up from beneath that fallen part of the roof and had it not been for her, he wouldn't have made it to the hospital.

It was in the hospital that Coriolanus finally begun cursing his apparent consciousness and its resilience to keep him awake — as awake as a man can be while his agony grows. His condition had worsened on the way to the hospital, having him reach that place of blindingly bright lights with begs on his parted lips. Adrenaline was abandoning him to the pain of his injuries.

"Let me through!"

Hearing Daphne's voice felt like a cold sheet had finally been placed over the burns on his chest that had until then only made everything, even breathing, hurt. If he had had only a gram more of strength to himself just then, Coriolanus would have demanded whoever doctor that was he saw blocking Daphne's path to just let her through. She was as much of a family to him as Tigris or Grandma'am.

"Miss, you can't be here," the doctor argued, pushing on Daphne's shoulders. "I assure you, the victims of the attack are all being taken care of and are our top priority."

"How much morphling did you administer him then?"

Coriolanus had never seen Daphne that angry before, and to witness her turn so incredibly confrontational as she existed at the very center of his blurred sight only growing more unclear the further he was taken from her, was challenging him to ask himself if he wasn't just imagining things at that point. If he was administered morphling, as she had assumed, who was to say what was real anymore?