#addy128

[amaranthe-good]

@treelish​

More drinks. Ama could get more drinks. More drinks meant that she could go into the tunnels. They’d been laughing all day, the men in the viewing room. Amaranthe hadn’t had time to breathe let alone process the reapings that had happened hours earlier. The tributes should be getting to the Tower soon. Honey should be getting to the Tower soon. And Lavender. Her friends, doomed to die. Everywhere she looked these days, another friend was dead. Every time, she thought she’d gotten used to it. Every time, she was wrong.

And then she walked into a ghost and the floor went out from under her and she just barely managed to keep from dropping the champagne glasses.

Addy?

[amaranthe-good]

She hadn’t seen it happen. Maybe she’d been on an errand, or maybe she just had her back turned. Or maybe she’d purposely ignored it and ignored the fallen tributes lighting up the screen. But Amaranthe thought about the little girl she knew back in Nine who liked to pick flowers while her parents negotiated moonshine prices. That sweet child had been so full of life and love. That little girl was dead. 

Ama sat on her bunk. There went another tie to her previous life, one she didn’t even know she had or wanted until Lavender had found her in the Tower lobby. And now all she wanted to do was desperately will Lavender to come back. But there was no sign of either of the tributes from Nine in the new Arena. And Amaranthe had known. She had known when she first laid eyes on Lavender Hardsnow all grown up that the girl would die. They all died. That was how the Games worked. It was not Ama’s first death. It was not her first loss. Lavender hadn’t been her family in Nine or her avox family here.

So why did it hurt so much?

When she’d made it back to her little room, her shift finally over, she barely reached the door before her legs gave out and now, sat on a single bed without anyone above her to comfort her or simply occupy the same moment so she wouldn’t be alone, Amaranthe began to sob.

@treelish​