//this is the way the world ends// [victors]

[Rosetta]

Alma Coin

Alma Coin traced her finger along the grain of the circular table in former President Snow’s office, feeling the cool wood, smooth like silk, under her skin. “No, this will do,” she said finally, firmly, to her advisors, who were asking her if a different location would be more appropriate. “Tell them I’d like to speak with them in an hour.” Her manicured fingernail delicately slid into a tiny crack in the table; how peculiar. Peculiar that anything in Snow’s home would be flawed. And yet, she saw these sorts of things everywhere. Her new bed in the presidential suite creaked if one put pressure to the lower left corner of the mattress. The hallway directly outside of the President’s office was drafty. A tile had been inputted incorrectly above her new sink and it stuck out, raised only slightly above the rest. How peculiar.

“I’ll be here,” she said looking up at her advisors in the final sort of way that hinted heavily that she’d like some alone time. They both nodded and turned to go, closing the behind them in that heavy final sort of way that told her they wouldn’t be returning without the Victors.

Alma turned from the table, resting her gaze at a window directly across from her. Snow fell softly just outside, the glass glazed and frosted. Alma was reminded of the gingerbread houses her mother used to make in the wintertime. As she breathed, she could feel her heart rate kicking, rising, racing, her breath growing faster and faster as a giggle escaped through her lipsticked lips. She was standing utterly alone and at ease in President Snow’s most private office. Her own guards stood outside. If she called, they’d come to her. If she called the Victors, they’d come to her.

And it was the Victors who interested her. It was them, more than anyone, that everyone seemed to agree have suffered the most at the hands of the Capitol. Bearing both physical and emotional scars, they’d surely come to her harboring the most hatred for the Capitol’s regime; they’d surely come to her, lending to their voices to her own, making her voice louder and stronger.

A smile still wide across her lips, Alma turned back to the circular table where eighteen chairs had been set out. Her fingers found the crack on the table and she swiped her long nail up and down it again. Snow had had flaws. She would have none. She’d call the Victors and here they would come.

***

To her surprise, they arrived in small packs. Even after many had betrayed and been betrayed by allies in the Games, they seemed to have formed their own allies and clung to each other as they treaded lightly into Snow’s office. Several glanced around, their faces obviously uneasy, while others barely gave the room a second look, their faces stone as they took their seats. Alma Coin didn’t sit until everyone else had. She stood straight up, her hands folded in front of her, nude lipstick re-applied, giving the occasional half-smile at Victors who acknowledged her. She could name them all. She’d studied up. She knew who had killed with their bare hands and who had stumbled their way to victory. Finally, with the last scraping of a chair, Alma Coin pulled out her own and sat down, interlocking her fingers in front of her as she leaned forward.

“Thank you all for joining me today.”

Outside, the snow had picked up. One could barely see outside the window now. At the top of the glass, Alma could just make out the peak of the greenhouse. She returned her gaze to the table. “I’ve called you all here today to ask your help in making an important decision.” Here, she swung her gaze around the table, stopping on each individual face, pushing through their guard as she spoke. She didn’t want them to just hear her voice; she wanted them to feel it.

When she explained, some faces changed, others remained stony. She explained her idea: one last Hunger Games. Capitol children would be Reaped. It would be commemorative of all of the Districts’ suffering, of all of their shared suffering. One last Games. And then they’d move into the new age together, Capitol citizens and District citizens alike, hand-in-hand. When she finished, her hand only briefly tread over that table crack, before she returned them to her lap. There was silence. Just as she expected.

“I thought we could vote on it.”

More silence. Contemplation was thick in the air—or, at least, she hoped. Interim President Alma Coin returned her hands to the table, palms down, over the crack, and said in her firm, final sort of way: “Majority vote wins.”

[анзие (Anz)]

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in the things i didn't say

[attr="class","anziescroll"] The last time Leon saw his own reflection, he couldn't recognize anything of himself. Not in the bones that stood out in his face, or the mangled hand that was once good, or the rope-y scar that blinded one blue eye to cloudy grey.  What unnerved him the most was the look in the other one, the eye whose gaze he can meet. Hardened beyond belief, if he were a stranger to himself Leon would believe the eye's owner soulless, or practically dead. The lack of life disturbed him, sending pulses of emotion across the weight in his chest that was his heart. Katelyn once expressed some measure of surprise that he didn't give a damn, and he'd told her that he did. If the conversation was to repeat, Leon doesn't think that his words could be taken for truth now. He doesn't look at his reflection very much. They march as if in a funeral, in tiny packs of the grieving and the broken trying to find comfort in one another. Leon has the arm on which his crushed hand is attached hooked around Patricia's, the both of them leaning wordlessly on the other as they wander in a crowd of equally brow-beaten 'victors'. She is his rock, his foundation; he dared to say that he functioned as the same to her. Today they were all brought out of mourning to talk about the future - the what-ifs, the consequences, the aftermath. "We're going to discuss what needs to happen," the note said. "The Capitol has fallen, but our country must survive."  Occasionally, Leon will look down at his hand and consider the what-ifs. What if his hand hadn't been crushed by a rampaging mutt through the streets of the Capitol? Lucia would still have her leg. Nike would not be in a coma, perhaps. Glamour would still be alive, doubtlessly. Finn- His name catches in a cell of Leon's brain, unable to pass through without earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and all manner of destructive occurrences that threaten to drive Leon back onto his knees.  Patricia, as she always has, catches him. He grips her arm tighter in silent gratitude. Shared suffering. Hand in hand. Leon can see them both side by side if he lays both hands on his lap. Metal and flesh, broken and enduring, Capitol and Mockingjay; but it doesn't feel as though either side has won. He still feels nothing with the hand made from Capitol technology. He still has no strength in the one crushed by rebellion. Where's the victory when both are crippled? "I thought we could vote on it. Majority vote wins." Leon raises his one good eye to Coin, distantly wondering where she was when he was digging blindly for his twin sister in the rubble of Four. Probably at Thirteen, safe and sound. Taking a deep breath, he looks around the vast table, meeting the eyes of people he's come to know better than almost anyone. Haunted eyes in pale faces, each of them were - once again puppets of a greater calling. He wonders what they would say. He wonders, because when he blinks Leon sees Nat's decapitated head in the hands of Heather Tenley, and the look of terror in Glamour's eyes as he reaches out for Leon one final time, and Lucia's screaming in the dead of night when the war came for his family. When he blinks, Leon feels the shadow of Finn's lips on his temple, the final comfort before it all went to hell.  "Yes," Leon breathes, when the silence has dragged on for far too long.

[attr="class","anzieside"] [attr="class","anziehover"] leon krigel victor of the 67th games i'll tell you something: it's a double-edged sword

[Rosetta]

Lethe Turner

Lethe had an appointment that evening.

She tread carefully behind the other Victors, counting her steps in counts of three. One, two, three, one, two, three. She was reminded of the rounds of gunshots that been counted off each night in the distance. One, two, three, one, two, three. She held her children close and counted until the fighting ceased.

It was no surprise that the Rebel President, as Lethe called her in her head, wanted to see the Victors. As talk spread through the camp Lethe was in that the rebels were closing in and the Capitol was about to fall, she began to wonder where she, a Victor, would stand in all this. The night before victory seemed imminent, she lay against her threadbare cot, heart racing, hand tight around her necklace, knowing they all had to play a part and desperately hoping Patricia and Klaus were alive.

Where was the little eighteen year old girl now? Lethe caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror as she walked. Her pale cheeks were filling in again, but her hair was already graying in some places. Though just midway her 30s, Lethe's insides felt as though she'd lived a hundred years, all hollow and hard, rough and tired, and it was no surprise her outward appearance was following suit. Where a sort of triumph and excitement should lie inside of her, all Lethe felt was an aching, hungry pain.

***

They came for him first. The message was clear. Stay quiet, don't fight. Or your children will be next.

She prayed that he went quickly as she lay against his chest, stroking the hair just above the bloody bullet hole. That they didn't torture him or hurt him in any way. Her chest was tight, but she could not cry. It was like she'd been hit in the stomach. She could barely breathe when she found him into the bedroom, barely speak, let alone scream. She wasn't sure how she got here, besides him. She brought his cold hand to her lips slowly and kissed his fingers, one by one, before closing them around her ring finger and resting their hands against his empty chest. Her children would be home any minute. Their father was dead. And they'd be next if their mother didn't sit quietly.

It wasn’t the first time in her life that she wished she were dead, but strangely, even considering the day she lay in pouring rain, blood thick in her mouth, eye punctured out of head, this day those thoughts of lying dead next to her husband were the most powerful. Maybe that’s because in the Games she had had even the smallest sliver of hope.

***

She took her seat around a table far too large for her petite frame and shrunk further into it, legs tightly pressed together, arms stiff at her sides. She had an appointment that evening. She wanted to make herself scarce as Rebel President, Alma Coin, began to speak.

“I’ve called you all here today to ask your help in making an important decision.”

A buzzing filled Lethe's ears. She stared straight ahead, cracked lips slightly parted, staring out a white window...staring into her husband's eyes.

###

As she lay with him, heart barely beating, ready to lurch once she heard the children enter the house, she knew she had choices.

The Capitol had given them to her. She could join her husband or be a good Victor and do nothing.

Her hair was warming Jasper’s chest, but even that couldn’t bring him back. How long would she have to lie against him until the cold took her as well? Was that what waiting was? If Lethe had waited around in the first place, she wouldn't even have this decision to make. She hadn't waited. She went and found Razor and met him in the boneyard. She wasn't quite like the other Victors; she knew she wouldn't join the fight, but she certainly wasn't waiting around, especially with her own life and the lives of her children in danger.

They left that night, Jasper's ring on a chain around Lethe's neck. She'd left a note and a bundle of food for Patricia, but had not invited the girl; she knew Patricia would see her as a deserter, believing that she was fleeing. Lethe didn't see it that way, knowing full well that Patricia was going to fight. They just had two different definitions of survival.

***

Outside President Snow's former advising room, the snow was thickening. Lethe remembered fearing that the light flurry would get worse the day they left as she held Phelix’s hand and Eden trailed nervously behind them. Her mind was already working like a gear. She would cut the children’s hair first, perhaps even shave their heads. She would dye her own. She might even take out her glass eye and wear an eye patch—unless that was a dead giveaway? What if cutting her children’s hair would give them away as well? Around and around her thoughts went as they crept under the fence and set out into the woods. Lethe remembered shouldering her backpack, filled with food to last them about two weeks as she surveyed the white landscape before them. The tall, snow-colored trees with their weighed down branches shielded them and a family of deer crept slowly away, eyeing them nervously as they walked forward. Lethe didn’t know the cold, but she’d survived one Games. Her eyes strayed to a few wet branches on the ground and then her ears pricked up, listening for the soft trickle of a moving water source nearby. She’d survived one Games. She would survive this. She had made her choice. The Capitol couldn’t hold her forever.

“I thought we could all vote on it.”

Coin had given them a choice. Lethe Turner held in her hands the power to turn the tables.

***

It was by pure luck that they were found by rebels, not by the Capitol, a week into walking. Her children were pale, emaciated and Lethe had frostbite on her toes. They’d made it by hunkering down in caves, abandoned shacks, even sneaking into the outskirts of Districts they came across. They were brought to a refugee camps on the outskirts of District 2. There Lethe Turner heard her name repeated to her several times. The Lethe Turner had arrived. The Lethe Turner that had turned and ran when the Capitol had come for her family. The Lethe Turner now with two less toes. She carried her son in her arms, her husband’s ring around her neck, tears in her eyes, a swollen pain in her heart. And it was there Lethe learned she was carrying something else, too.

***

She laid a hand against her lower belly to feel the heartbeat of her womb. She wasn't showing yet which was a good sign.

She wished her womb was dead, a hollow mass of dead cells, unable to carry life anymore. She wondered if the poison inside of her would poison future offspring and deliver them with the knowledge that that world was pain, the world had cruel rules, and that the world was relentless.

They'd be orphaned. No father and Lethe, herself, so absent, feeling nothing for whatever stirred in her womb whatsoever, but rather abhorring it, refusing to see the photos the doctor had offered when she first met him, refusing to even acknowledge that she was making something. She’d made a quiet appointment tonight. Midnight. No pain. No wakefulness. No memory. No nothing. Lethe felt nothing. She couldn’t do this alone anymore.

***

She’d received a letter from Eric a day ago, but she hadn’t opened it. She knew what it was going to say. I’m alive. Are you okay? Is our daughter okay? Can I see you? She held it in her hands, her finger pad pressing into the corner of the envelope, staring straight ahead. In front of her, her daughter was playing a card game with her brother. They were playing cards the day before their father had died and Lethe could remember her laughter, high and clear. She saw herself in her daughter, from her clear green eyes, to her long blonde hair. Her daughter used to be a fussy infant, who gurgled and cried, who was shy, but sweet. Her daughter used to be lively and used to love horses.

Eric knew a 19-year old Lethe, trembling in shock as she followed him to a bathroom, happy to be alive, but wondering desperately how. Eric was building a castle on the cobwebs of a girl he thought he knew, of a child he had fathered. She knew he would offer her his love, his home, his safety, his comfort, his everything. Lethe could re-marry and live comfortably with Eric who knew nothing of the 35-year old woman who slept besides him every night. Lying there, she knew she would constantly be haunted by his 16-year old touch.
Phelix made a face at his sister, but Eden barely cracked a smile as she laid down another card. Lethe saw a lot of herself in her daughter. And so, she decided to burn the letter.

***

Leon had spoke first, a yes, filling the silence with even more uncertainty. Lethe’s hands were tight on her lap, hugging the hem of her skirt. If this was Snow’s strategy room, it was very likely this was the place where he ordered the death of her husband. That achy hunger was welling up in Lethe’s stomach again, the heartbeat growing rapidly in her womb. Her lower lip trembled, a word trying to leap free from her.

Yet, as the overcoming support rose to her throat, her eyelids suddenly became very heavy. She was exhausted. Should she nap before her appointment tonight? All she wanted to do was wake up on the other side of today, new, whole, different. She wanted to wake as Lethe Turner, not Somerset or Rhodes, not one thing or another. She was exhausted with today.

And that’s when she said it: “No.” Her voice wasn’t soft, but it wasn’t a shout. It was a resounding, firm word. She drew her chin up, staring from Patricia to Leon to Alma Coin. “I want to start over. I’m tired. I say no.” Something tight and heavy, clenched up and crying in her stomach, was thawing.

[cass]

opal earnest

She'll wake up in the dead of night to a silence that beats down on her. It encompasses the entire room, a breathing, beating being that weighed on her body, that stilled her heart, chilling her insides, leaving her ragged, as though someone had stolen the air from her lungs. It left an ache so deep in her chest that time could not heal, bleeding, breaking wounds that could not be stopped. It was a weight that was worse then death, a blinding testament to the agony of each second that passes. On those nights she doesn't move, her veins leadened, her eyes staring dully at the roof of a room she did not know.

She's scared. She's scared to both move, and shatter that unbearable silence, but also to remain buried beneath it, fearing the moment when it might take her alive. When all is said and done, beneath this torment she did not want to die, she wished she could, she wished she was already dead. She'd become a pitiful existence, she was sure of that. The face that met her in the mirror was a ghost, sullen, sunken eyes, as lifeless as the graves she stood by every day until the sun set and she stumbled bare, broken foot back to this room. No longer could she feel the pain of the wounds that litter her body, the burns that marred the side of her face, the cuts that laced her skin; skin she refused to have treated. If she couldn't kill herself she'd find some way to end it.

Her insistent heart waited for him to come knocking on her door, to hear him call her name. But during those nights she shattered the silence herself, flinging her body over as an anguished sob tore at her heart, spilling past her lips as her desperate, broken mind tried to tell her; it's not real. Everyday she'd walked by that stone with his name carved into it, denial as thick as the air she breathed wrapping itself around her mangled body.

It's not his name, she'd tell herself. It's not him. Again and again and again, and those swirling, raging words of darkness had begun to consume her, a chilling creeping being that whispered over her shoulder, ash and death that whispered the same story. It clung to her hand, a numbing coldness that promised death filled her veins, and some small echoing note of relief graced her soul, knowing that soon, very soon she'd be there with them.

The disturbance to her routine had her feeling nothing, a few guards stopped by as she opened the door to leave. The spoke to her, and she didn't listen, every word bouncing against her skin, grating on her mind. When she pushed past them they grabbed at her, and she couldn't resist, any fight, any life that had once burned in her had vanished. Each step was a step in her shadows, a ghost of her past, the same way she had walked after her husband had died, but it was so incredibly different. There was no light at the end of this tunnel, there was no one, there was no Mace, nothing to save her from herself. It was dizzying to be in the light, and she blinked rapidly as she was placed in a seat. The room took no shape, hushed voices a whisper beneath the blanket of torment that settled itself over her.

In the midst of the darkness a voice rose above, each word an agonising sting to her stolen heart. She was empty, she was nothing and no one could save her this time. One last game, the voice said, it would be commemorative. What? The first cohesive thought to slip into her mind was beaten down as soon as a single word slipped into her mind. Children. With it that one word, it brought down with it a terrifying barrage of memories that overwhelmed her.

"Mummy-" the fear in the word set her blood to ice, and she stumbled through the house, an echoing boom rattling the foundations of their broken home. "Ky! I'm coming!" She screamed his name like a promise, desperation clawing at her movements, "Mum, I'm sca-" She screamed as the bomb hit the house, shattering half the building, tearing it down, in one moment that threw her to the ground. The world spun, and she gasped, pain echoing through her movements as she stumbled to her feet, "Ky!" She screamed, slipping over the broken rocks, the shattered remains of their home. It didn't matter, "Ky," the word tore from her lips, terror embedding itself into her movements as she tore her way through the rubble.

"Ky!"

Children- the word echoed, a resounding tone that clawed at her mind, children. Children. They'd die. Her fists tightened, her knuckles white as she stared lifelessly forward. Boom. The sound hit her mind. Boom. She could remember, the noise, the pain, her heart thundering in her chest, as she tore her way through the rubble, hands bleeding as she tore the skin off them as she tried to find him. "Ky!" It was an anguished cry that was met with silence, desperation clung to her like glue, but she wasn't moving fast enough. "Ky, please," she breathed, the words a terrifying plea that flowed into her actions, as tears stung her eyes. "No, please, no, Ky, please just-" before she knew it her screams were flowing into sobs, they anchored her heart as she slipped through the mess, just two minutes, she'd left his side, two minutes to get him some food. He couldn't- no he couldn't, two minutes, they'd been meters away.

"Ky!" She screamed through her sob, her feet slipping on the concrete, cutting into her skin, blood oozed through the wounds. But as her blood mixed with the broken pieces of their home she kept searching, frantically, uncaring for her own body, because she didn't matter, she'd never matter, not compared to him. "Ky, please no." She sobbed, as she shifted through the stone she unearthed a patch of blood, and she froze, her entire world coming to a deafening halt. It wasn't her blood, it wasn't hers, and suddenly there was nothing on her mind, as she slipped to the ground, fingers clawing and scratching madly at the rocks, tossing them, but no matter how much she pushed, and clawed she couldn't make the rock move. Blood flowed over the ground, stretching its crimson fingers towards her feet, and she fell. She fell to the ground sobbing, "no, no, no, no." He was gone.

"No." Opal Earnest whispered, as the figures around the table took shape. "No," she breathed. No, she could never let anyone feel what she was suffering. No one deserved to lose their child.

[charade]

KATELYN PERSIMMON

Mace Emberstatt died four days ago.

Katelyn wiped the tears forming in the corners of her eyes and tried to stop thinking about the vid that the techies had managed to hijack from the Capitol feeds again. The group home he had been raised in was behind him in flames, Saffron’s broken body in front of him. He took down five peacekeepers with a longsword before they had ended him in a hail of gunfire, all the while hollering something about brothers, funeral pyres and someone named Alexander, over and over again. She slumped forward in her chair, resting her elbows on the table as other victors entered the room. With that vid, the hope that she wasn’t the last surviving victor from the lower districts dwindled further away.

They had come for Arbor first; surprised him in a bar even though he had known they were coming. After finishing his drink he welcomed death with open arms. An eyewitness swore his last words were “It’s about damn time.” Aranica they had gotten in her house, but neither side was sure what had happened to Heron. Her boys on the other hand…

Poor, brave, sweet Kirito. Poor, brave, loyal Harbinger. 

It had been a normal day, the sky drawing towards dusk when it had happened. She’d been tending to the plots in the tribute graveyard when she heard the bullets being fired. Her feet couldn’t take her to the victors village fast enough after that, but it hadn’t been fast enough. Her boys were there, a small crowd of people at war with a detachment of peacekeepers. She had sworn she’d never kill again, but in that moment she had known she’d have to. A peacekeeper hit her in head, opening a gash above her brow, only to get tackled to the ground by one of Harbinger's brothers a second later. She threw herself at the offender, bringing a trowel down on his neck again and again until his trachea was crushed and blood was everywhere.

Kirito had fought like a man possessed, focusing on her with his good eye for a split second and roaring that the peacekeepers had orders to take the district eleven victors alive, wanted to make an example of them. The trowel gouged out the cheek of another PK as they fought tooth and nail. A bullet took Kirito's knee shortly afterwards and he’d screamed at her and Harbinger to run, calling her Circe and cursing the dopplegangers to hell. She had known then that he was seeing his phantoms, that he’d never truly gotten rid of them despite her best efforts. She prayed he was at peace now that he was going to join them. And so she had run, bleeding from wounds she’d hadn’t known she had suffered, covered in blood and not all of it hers, a small group of civilians following in her wake, out into the great unknown.

The peacekeepers had caught up with them half a mile into the forest, and it was there that Harbinger stayed, alongside a few other volunteers; stayed behind to buy time for Katelyn to get the children to safety. They had shared a nod of understanding. This was the penance that Harbinger had been searching for ever since striking down Chloe. But as much as she wanted to dwell on it, she couldn't. 

Now, she had to focus on the meeting that had been called.

Alma, the president of the dead district, the one that had led the original rebellion and then left the other twelve to pay for their sins in full wanted to hold the seventy-sixth hunger games. Katelyn couldn’t stop her lips from curling in disgust. What did anyone in thirteen know of suffering? Safe in their underground fortress, they had never had to worry about their siblings, friends or relatives being chosen by the Capitol. There were no district thirteen mentors that had buried tribute after tribute as the years marched on. Katelyn folded her arms and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. No one wanted to be the one to kick things off.

Leon’s answer came the swiftest, a breathy yes floating around the table from the ruin of his face, reflected in the hollowness of his eyes. She’d heard rumors that the fighting had been fiercer in the career districts, The Capitol sending in the big guns to offset the fact that many of the citizens in one, two and four knew how to fight. The silence was deafening until Lethe broke it with a firm no, declaring that she wanted to start over, followed by Opal's whispered agreement with the victor from five.Katelyn nodded as the older victor finished and turned to the president of district thirteen, her emotions at war within her and the anger seething to the forefront.

“How progressive of you, Coin.” She said with a snarl of sarcasm. Follow pain and suffering with more pain and suffering. It's an insult to everyone we've lost." she scoffed. "Close the chapter on the hunger games. We don't need to stoop to their level. Execute the politicians if you must. Line ‘em up for a firing squad, there’ll be no shortage of volunteers. But I will not send more children to their deaths. No more. I vote no.” she finished, gripping the edge of the table until her knuckles turned snow white. They'd lost too many people to keep digging graves. 

"When you’ve lost your way, when you have no words,
we are your strength, when you don’t have anymore. "

table coding (c) ghosty