OUR FOREST OF THORNS | tbosas ✔️

009 || Echoes of the Past

CHAPTER NINE —    Echoes of the Past ..

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          "Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu'as-tu donc ce matin?" Daphne recited slowly, as per Coriolanus' request. Too shaken and too tired to be mindful of how vulnerable his plea had sounded, he sunk into the cushions of the backseat, besides her, staring blankly down upon his bloodstained hands.

It was surreal. Horribly macabre. A sick joke at that too.

A moment ago, his hands had held back the river of blood pouring out of Arachne's throat and now, there they were, in his lap, shivering with a stain.

Arachne Crane was dead and he had watched as life flickered out of her eyes, how her lips stilled themselves parted after gasps upon air that would not get swallowed down to her begging lungs. He watched and felt it all, until he had been pulled away from the Zoo cage by Peacekeepers. In that moment, he had turned deaf to everything but his own heartbeat and breath, ragged and matching the rapid shots fired at the tribute that had ended a Mentor's life through the bars, like some animal that no one should have gone close to anyhow.

"Tes yeux creux sont peuplés de visions nocturnes," Daphne continued reciting from memory, her book nowhere close for her to pick up.

Weakened senseless, Coriolanus did not expect himself capable of pinpointing exactly what he needed to crawl out of this state of shock that he had been pludged into by unprecedented events, yet there he was, slowly latching his scattered thoughts onto Daphne's French, and one by one, putting them back in order, to the best that blurs of understanding could even be arranged.

"Et je vois tour à tour réfléchis sur ton teint." Daphne tried to keep her reciting constant, but over that poem which so happened to fit the version of Coriolanus that she had been met with at the Zoo, she couldn't help lingering her pauses in hopes of assessing what happened behind his eyes better.

After the initial morning meeting with the tributes, he had come to her with the proposition of making her support for his tribute known before the cameras that would surely be documenting that afternoon's scheduled visit at the Zoo. Some long hours after she had reluctantly accepted to help him, Daphne worried she was in fact incapable of meeting Lucy Gray without lunging for her throat. Only the sanctity of a promise managed to bring her to the gates of the busy Zoo albeit, fashionably late.

After she had taken but a single step inside, screams filled the air; by the time she reached Coriolanus, running despite Thaddeus' best attempts to keeping her from marching into certain danger, he had already been plucked away from Arachne's corpse, laying besides the cage. On the other side of the bars, a tribute laid dead too, pierced by several rounds, all gushing with blood into the soil — a single sandwich laid besides their body.

There was much for her to understand in regards to what had happened there, but none of that really mattered to her then, not while her hands had climbed to Coriolanus' paled face and he shivered beneath her touch — it was now, in the car, that she finally found it in herself to care with distinct concern about what had disturbed him so deeply.

The sight of his bloodied hands had worried her since the Zoo, but after throughly checking and confirming that he hadn't been wounded himself, there was only one thought left for her to get influenced by back there: We're too exposed.