Darkest Before the Dawn // [Calliope + Mace]

[d10f ekta ram // [earthling]]

a note from the desk of

Mace Emberstatt

of District Ten

when you never thought that it could ever get this tough,
that's when you feel my kind of love

He had recently started a list of all the things he hated about the Capitol. President Snow, obviously, the impossible to understand accent, the constant babying of the victors, how much everyone stressed etiquette, and the lack of phone cords. If he didn't have a wire to twist around his fingers, he'd never make it through a conversation with Calliope Bloom.

But he had to try.

It was actually his fourth attempt. The first time, no one answered. The second, they dismissed him with a she's not here. The third time, they denied anyone named Calliope Bloom worked there. He wondered if he'd gotten the number wrong even as he punched it into the slim cordless phone. If he couldn't talk to Calliope, maybe he could find someone who knew her. He couldn't wait until he returned to Ten. This was too important, too weird, too catastrophic.

"Hello?"

"I need to speak to Calliope Bloom. Please don't hang up. It's urgent."

"She shouldn't be taking personal phone calls."

"It ain't personal. It's..." He drew in a deep breath, filling his lungs and for a second, stilling the shivering of his fingers. "It's Mace Emberstatt."

The line crackled. He pressed his ear close, listening to the fuzzy connection. He heard a chair squeak against tile, and for a time, it was just him in an spartan room in the Capitol, clinging to a dangling line. It was stupid. Every reporter in all of Panem would be asking him about why he had reached out to Calliope Bloom. He couldn't imagine she'd enjoy the attention either. But what choice did he have?

The moment the connection clicked, breath warming the opposite receiver, Mace plunged ahead. "Calliope, I'm sorry I ain't called in awhile. Do you know how hard it is to get a hold of you? Like tryin' to herd cats. We gotta find a better way, if we can after this. Can't imagine the sort of questions Flickerman's gonna have, but I needed to talk to you. I don't even know where to start or how to say this or how to make you believe me..."

He let out the last whisper of breath he'd been holding. The shivering had started again in earnest, seizing his spine, taking control of his body. His teethed chattered as he spoke again, "I saw Sundra Wie. Alive."

[L△LIA]

CALLIOPE BLOOM you make me so angry for no reason turning me into a loser who picks fights with you why do I care so much about you I stopped believing in coincidence the same way children lose faith in Santa Claus or God. There are things that can't be unseen. Maybe you walk into the wrong room at the wrong time or it could be that you're just sitting somewhere and turn your head ever so slightly too far to the right. It happens just like that. Out of nowhere something you've believed to be absolutely true for your whole life is revealed to be a lie and your heart breaks and you hate everyone and trust becomes a stupid, fragile thing that you hoard away in the most secret place you can find because you realize it's the rarest resource on earth. If you have any left, it's not worth gambling with. Take a deep breath, Callie. My brother lost his virginity on national television. It's not as if I watched, but I'm not an idiot. I figured out what was happening quickly enough to run screaming from the room — ohmygod ohmygod oh my god there is no god — as Poe began applauding and howling with hysterical, yet proud laughter. ("Get it, baby bro! Tap that ten!") Back then I was still the kind of kid who blushed when I so much as thought about a boy making eye contact with me. Sex was like... storks and babies left on stoops, because I was too busy solving math problems and writing history essays to stop and think about how messed up the reality of that would be. Reproduction by stoop. ("More like stoop-ing," Poe taunted, forever snickering. As if that even made sense... and people wonder why I hate his halfwit guts?) Enough time had finally passed that people had stopped caring about the Bloom family, forgetting who I am and that Aesop ever lived at all, but it's the ten year anniversary of Mace fucking Emberstatt's quote-un-quote victory, so a few Capitolite reporters decided to dig the corpse of my memory up from their brain-dead heads, coming back and asking the same old questions all over again. Most of them want to know what I think life would be like now if Aesop hadn't been one of the Tributes who bled out on that glacier. Some of the idiots ask what my house looks like when it snows. Every single one still wants to know what I think of Sundra Wie. I dragged myself into work at the clinic today looking like I've been stabbed in the eyes. Just over and over and over and over and over, all night long. Some guys talk about how girls look pretty when they cry, but fuck you and Santa Claus's lovely, sobbing daughters. You're all liars. If anyone dared to look me in the face right now and compliment me, I'd punch them in the balls so hard they'd never stoop again or at the very least I would wipe some of my leftover crusty eye-gore on their shirt as I stomped past them. Between the reporters hounding at my door and the televisions replaying "anniversary" segments on the life and love and death of Aesop Bloom, I'm just going to — Exhale. One of the other interns walks over, giving me a look up and down that is both incredibly judgmental and pitying before unceremoniously shoving a phone receiver into my hand. I have to turn my head ever so slightly to the right to look at what's being offered to me and there's a television behind her. Aesop's fingers are drawing imaginary wrinkles on the cheeks of a girl I never met, but know all too well. "These are from all the times we would laugh about it afterward —" My brother's technicolor ghost says and I'm glaring at the telephone with my bleeding eyes and my hardened, Santa hating heart and I just know. "— because I should have known better." My hand cradles the receiver with the entirety of my distrust. Mace's voice crackles across the line, apologizing as if I've missed the sound of his voice, like I've been waiting for this anniversary comeback of his with an ache in my chest. The pain is there and he's not entirely wrong when he says something about the two of us needing a better way, but only because we're already having two opposing conversations at the same time. I haven't even opened my mouth yet. There's a strange sound snared into his voice though and I'm sort-of listening to him talk while I stare at that television and Aesop's father time hands, haunted by my own ghosts and the prying voices of reporters knocking and knocking as I curled up against the other side of the front door crying and crying because in the other room my favorite brother was drawing houses in the snow of another world and putting his hands all over some girl and I can't watch, can't listen, not to any of it and so by the time he finally says it ("I saw Sundra Wie. Alive.") I can't even begin to find the words to explain how: I don't believe in anything anymore. Not fat men in chimneys. Not a puppet master in the sky. Certainly not in the idea that Mace's voice could ever be unrelated to badly timed television specials or questions about my personal life a decade ago. That doesn't mean I think he's not speaking truthfully. "Of course you did," I say and there isn't an ounce of sarcasm in my voice, only resignation. My follow-up is meant to be muttered more to myself than him, "she won't leave me alone either," but I'm too busy ironically shooing away the girl who handed me the phone to pay attention to things like the volume of my own voice or how closely my mouth is pressed to the speaker. "Just start at the end and go backwards. If I have to hear the beginning one more time, I don't know what I'll do." A sigh. "I just want it over with." It's nonsense... maybe. Except I'm shutting myself away in an empty lab room and sitting myself down on a stool as if this is something the two of us can talk out. Out as in out of our minds or out of the closet or out with the garbage. What do I think of Sundra Wie? "What do we have to do," her whispering ghost passes from his voice to mine, "to get this over with?" I think that she was there and I think that I don't believe in coincidence and I think that neither of those thoughts matter because either way... I never had any intention of placing the last of my trust in the hands of a dead girl who can't even be counted on to stay dead.