a conversation with death // self para
A conversation with death;
Except he can’t hear you.
It was raining when he first met him. It smelled of salt everywhere, and he didn’t have boots for the weather, but at least he was, for the first time, so far away from home he didn’t know how to walk back there.
It wasn’t raining anymore, but the water dripping from Carol’s hair made room for a similar feeling. He never cared for goodbyes, now less than ever, but this wasn’t a situation to walk away from. It was not about remorse, and it was not about pain. It was about not knowing how to leave a dead man after having left and come back a million times when he was alive.
He didn’t move for what felt like the longest time. If he moved, he would explode or something. He was still expecting something to break, to blow up, to burn. Something to seal the deal. The stillness was driving him crazy. It was all denial, painted over his face, as he took stubbornness by the hand and refused to look death in the eye.
His fingertips turned white from how deeply he dug his nails into the back of Rio’s palm, holding his hand like one last, desperate grasp on life. Carol really needed to remind himself he was not the one who was dead. His skin felt transparent, and his heartbeats too loud. Was everybody in the world now watching him curiously, to fish for a reaction? As if every camera fly in the arena was about to rest on his cheek, annoying and a slap away from privacy. It freaked him out, so he stood as still as he could, more dead than the corpse. If he didn’t move, they wouldn’t know about his heart rate. They wouldn’t know about everything boiling inside him in sheer shock.
So he didn’t move for the longest time. Rio’s laughter still lingered, circling the corners of the room. He knew it by heart. He could play it anytime in his mind. Maybe because of it, half of the time he spent on that floor, Carol could swear he heard him breathe, too. An arrogant scoff, or, maybe, just I’m still here, for once. But he wasn’t, because if Rio Odair were here, everybody would know from a mile away. Carol stared into the distance for the longest time, not knowing what came next. This was supposed to be at the very end, but it just felt never-ending.
Carol didn’t make it into a tragedy. He swallowed the tears before they attacked. He decided this was no time for tears. A strength he hadn’t known before revealed itself. The way he was holding his chin slightly pointed upwards was called damage control. The way he was searching with his eyes for something that didn’t exist was called a lifeline. Half of the time he spent on the floor, he imagined things the other way around. The boy next to him, alive, impatiently spinning the dagger in between his fingers, as he watched Carol’s skin turn into porcelain. Rio wouldn’t have cried, either. He would have broken something. Carol learned there was nothing left to break.
Then, Rio would have left. That had always been the main difference between them.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. That miracle strength -- or dignity, or pride -- cut off emotion, but not the ache behind it.
For the first time, he glanced at Rio from now. There was no difference, just a stillness that never characterized him. And, oh, all that blood. Carol reached out and wiped off the blood running from Rio’s mouth with the wet sleeve of his shirt. There. Even in death, it wasn’t an affectionate gesture. Even in death, he wanted nothing more than to laugh at it. The way he looked like a statue, like something made of wax by the hands of a peasant girl, to sell at the fair. It made Carol want to throw up, but he didn’t let go.
There it was, the body of the only one he’d ever loved. It just didn’t feel real.
And then, the sign. From the ceiling, everything fell and crashed in a heartbeat.
The same way his father smiled when rain interrupted a burial from their village, the glass all shattered as some sort of protest from the above. His lips almost moved upwards -- no, a protest from below. He glanced at Rio’s corpse. Carol had never been a spiritual person. He knew it for a fact that death was code for when things stopped existing. And yet. And yet. When all the glass shattered, with thunderous noise, it screamed Rio. He didn’t care that it wasn’t real.
There was no shock left in him when the crystal almost crushed him underneath. It felt surreal and out of reality that he was now caged in shards. Sharp cuts painted blood on his face and neck and palms. A piece of crystal was in his foot, and that distracted him for a moment. In the greater scheme of things, all that meant nothing. A concealed, low heat chuckle escaped from his throat, but he didn’t open his mouth to deliver it.
There it was, their shiny little prison, except Carol was the only one in it really. Thin cuts spread all over Rio’s face too. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Escaping this one was going to be fun, but, for the first time, he wasn’t sure he wanted that. “Oh, you would have hated his,” Carol muttered, hopefully for no one else to hear.
There was no rush. He could feel his face burning, and the blood dripping, gathering at the bottom of his chin like tears he refused to cry. Then, for a moment, he was angry. This was not the time to try to escape a deadly trap. The deadly trap was the silence between him and the dead man. Carol wanted to groan and punch the crystal until it cut some more of him. This totally ruined his moment of coping.
But that wasn’t smart, so he did not. Instead, he let go of Rio’s hand. It was time. They’ve never been ones for sappiness. It was, indeed, time to stop thinking so much. If he didn’t pick himself off that floor now, he would never get to it. So, he stood up, cracks entering his palm as he pressed it against the floor, feeling the cold dangling of a crystal shard still holding onto the frame. Carol lowered his head. In that position, he felt the cold, the wetness, the blood draining from him more intensely than ever.
The Hunger Games were a trap he could not defeat, a trap that already got one of them. But he took the knife anyway, to try. For a moment, he hovered over Rio, holding his breath, maybe more nervous than the first time they’d kissed, and Finnick Odair’s necklace, some dumb shell and, incidentally, District Four’s main symbol ever since the man’s victories, shone louder than all the broken crystal. Carol thought about it -- he would, of course, retrieve it, one way or another, dead or alive -- but he couldn’t steal it away from Rio’s body. As epic as wearing the token of the one that came home twice was, Carol Eyre did not want to think of Finnick Odair at that moment, or ever again. Instead, without giving it a second thought, he pressed his own token ring -- made of stone, chunkily carved -- into Rio’s palm and clenched it close.
Better than to take a souvenir was to leave something with him. He needed less, not more, now that Rio was dead. There was nothing left to say, anyway. He was dead. He’d been dead for a while now. And Carol? Carol was bleeding out.
This was nothing but a trap, but he needed to remind himself of that constantly. This used to be his favorite magic trick in the world, escaping.
So, instead of thinking about crying his heart out, he tested the paths he could go on. The entire room was now a labyrinth of glass, but, with a little grace, he could do it. Leaving everything behind in that crystal cage, Carol started sneaking under. It took him over an hour, but all distractions were good distractions. It took some significant scratches from his skin, too. He was bleeding out from everywhere, but he got out.
For the first time in forever, he was out and alone, not knowing the future by name.