women like you drown oceans / self para
Joy and Stella were away in search for supplies. Regan could count a handful of weapons - not enough for the opulence she was used to, leaving her knives in bodies and never using them again, and wasting plenty before the first good hit - and empty bottles. That was everything they had left in the arena. The sky had played dead children’s faces for four times now, counting the fifth day caged, which she wouldn’t have minded if the Gamemakers had played it nice and left the careers their promised food, weapons and water. She’d patrolled the boat - as much as she knew of it, without going too low, for she assumed it sank to an extent.
The parrot caught her off guard, otherwise, she would have stupidly spared one of the three remaining knives on it. The announcement sent cold chills down her spine and Regan closed her rain jacket, finding the temperature lower than before. Perhaps it was just the fear kicking in. Looking at her ally, she didn’t have time to voice a reaction before the wave rose tall in front of them. The window didn’t have glass anymore, so the view was as personal and real as possible. Regan didn’t make the mistake of thinking she was safe, for once.
The blonde from District One reached for the hand of the brunette in District Two, to exchange fear and serve as an anchor for each other. She looked death into the eyes and wondered, for the first time in that split second, if it was her calling, too, to die. After all, she would always dream of drowning, every night she spared a couple of hours (as opposide to the whole six she had got in the first two nights) for sleep. Maybe her dreams were predictions, and maybe now was her time. She tried to smile at Lola, to thank her for being by her side in that one final moment, with too slow of reflexes to actually put it in practice. Before the smile, the wave hit harshly the ship, and Regan hadn’t even taken a deep breath of air to keep her company.
The impact untied the hands the two girls were holding. Lola, slipping through her fingers, vanished with the masses of water, and she felt her body pushed with speed in the opposite direction. If she wasn’t already swallowing water instead of air, her lungs drowning slowly, Regan would have cried for the other girl’s name. There was no time.
The wave swept off the entire surface of the ship, leaving Regan to choke somewhere near the now overflowed pool. Coughing water - so much water that Regan could swear she’d never be thirsty again - for long, several minutes, she wasn’t sure if she was alive or not. She did hear a cannon in the back of her mind while she was still floating, after all. Maybe it was hers.
Or maybe water got scared of her and left her alone, on the dry, for now. She didn’t feel powerful for once. Not powerful, not victorious, not even fully alive. She just felt the water and how easy it was, for even herself, to die.
