don't you ever tame your demons

The rhythm was back now. She hated it, but it helped. Just swing, and duck, and breathe and breathe, and swing, and block, and breathe and breathe, and step and swing and duck and breathe, and swing, and duck, and block, and breathe. She recited it in her head as she moved, carefully as she could with her injuries. Auralee's arm hurt like crazy, and for a moment she missed the numbness. She didn't know why she was fighting the other girl, but she knew she had too, because she didn't want to fight Leon. She was clinging on to him as a last hope of slight normalcy, anyway. Auralee struck at the girl with her knife, then bounced back to attempt to parry the other guy's attack. She didn't know how long she could last, especially if she was counting on Leon to last too. The thought dawned on her that he might even try to kill her, but she put it out of her head.

Auralee shook her head. "Why should you get to live? We're not gods. We shouldn't get to decide this. We shouldn't have to decide this. We don't get to tell people when their lives end!" She struck out at the girl again, projecting her own troubles onto her. "So we have to be logical, right? We can't be emotional, because everyone just wants to live, and then it's anarchy. You seem to be doing fine on your own. If he died, would you even care past the point of worrying about being outnumbered?" Auralee grasped at the thoughts in her head, trying to organize them, but they were constantly moving and changing and trying to adapt and she knew what she was saying probably didn't make sense. That bothered her, because either they were her last words or they were the last words that these people would ever hear her say, or anyone say, really, and they didn't even make sense. She'd lost herself already, but she wished she could at least make sense of who she was now. She had no base point to go from. The Auralee she knew was gone, and the one standing here was a mystery to her. "Some of us aren't so lucky, or unlucky, or whatever. We're dependent. I'm dependent. I can admit that. It's not necessarily a bad thing for me. Well, it is, but worse things have already happened to me. It's a bad thing for you, because however crazy the games have driven me by now, that's nothing. I have one thing left to hold on to, one more tether, and if you cut it, it'll end up hurting you more than it hurts me. Physically, anyway. Now, I don't know what will happen, exactly. I don't really know what's happening now, to be perfectly honest, and no, I don't know who I am anymore, but I know what I feel when you try to take him away from me, and it's not a good feeling. I don't love him, I don't even know if I'd like him if we weren't in the Games, but I need him, and that is the only thing I have left." She thrust out her knife to try to stop the girl's attack on Leon. "Do you not understand me? I don't have myself anymore, but I have him, and if I have nothing, I will have nothing to lose but my breath and my blood and my beating heart and I don't think I'll care what I do to stay alive. I won't give up. That's not how it works, because I guess it's not nothing, because the revenge and desperation will remain, and there will always be a hope somewhere in the back of my mind, buried under weeks of psychological torture, that maybe I can get even slightest bit of myself back, and I will fight for that. I will lose everything, and I will keep fighting, and I might die, but I will kill you." She turned to the boy who had called her Angel in a moment of introspection. "Yes. It hurt, it still hurts, and it will never stop hurting." She couldn't believe the words that were coming out of her mouth, but that was almost easier. It was so ridiculous that it couldn't be real. If she followed through, which she wouldn't do, that wouldn't be real, and if she killed people, that wouldn't be her, so that wouldn't be real. It was so easy she wondered why she hadn't done it before. What she had to do was not something she would do, so if she did it, if it happened, then it couldn't be real. She smiled. "But it doesn't matter, because an angel out of heaven isn't an angel, so the angel never fell. Once the angel fell, it wasn't an angel. Don't you get it? Angels can't fall from heaven, so what you see as a fallen angel isn't the real angel, and it doesn't matter what the thing that fell is or does in relation to the angel. Angels can't fall from heaven!" She returned to facing the other girl, still grinning. "So I can't kill you... so you're going to die."