But We Sing It Anyway [Vasco / Katelyn]

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

v a s c o

It's a sad song
We keep singing even so
It's an old song
It's an old tale from way back when
And we're gonna sing it again and again

We’d set out a little after sunrise. Summer’s sun would suffocate too late in the day, but early morning offered a crisp breeze and a silence cracked only by hoofbeats across the road. I’d wanted to take Katelyn out to the ridge for some time, ever since Yani’s first reaping, but time and other excuses had gotten in the way. Staring down another year’s end awoke something that didn’t settle, and so I’d asked if we’d spend a morning just the two of us, outside of town and away from home.

Away from anyone or anything that could’ve heard us.

I hadn’t fought the gray that’d come to my hair, or the white nestled into my beard. Somehow, being so close to fifty felt more an achievement than being made mayor twice. Not that I’d gotten here on my own.

We’d broken away from the wooden fenced farms and the patches of cleared land out into the country. Dotted with spruce and white ash, hills crept up over the horizon where the road shifted from gravel to dirt. I clicked my tongue to keep the old mare pressing forward, one hand on the reins and the other brushing at her side.

“There’ll be a little clearing up this way, ah,” I pointed at the sign post marking Planter’s Gorge and picked up into a trott. “You’re going to love it, she looks all the way down, it’s such a view like I haven’t seen before.”

The last time I’d been here, Kelvin had gone with me. We’d rode by cover of darkness so that no one could see the two of us together. I’d wanted him to make a promise not to come back, but I doubted he’d ever have kept it.

“Have you ever been out this way?” As well as I knew the district, I’d never spent much time in the in between, as I called it. The patches where no one had tried to grow anything up out of the earth.

elegant

[charade]

k a t e l y n .

When we laughed, When we cried,
Those were the days we owned the nights,
Locked away, Lost in time,

Surprisingly, riding the horse came easy to her. She’d never considered herself someone with an affinity for animals, but she’d gotten the hang of it pretty quick. It was peaceful; though she knew her thighs were going to hate her in a couple hours. He’d wanted to go out past the farms, out into the few untamed portions of the district before the fences. She hadn’t ventured that far out since she was a teenager. The days where she thought she could take on the world, before realizing just how big it really was. She patted the head of the chestnut and turned to look at Vasco.

“Not for a long time. And not this far up, either.” It was a quiet part of the district. The sort of place where things were forgotten and peace was held. She chased away the thoughts of the upcoming quell and how Kirito was taking the advent of his twenty-year anniversary and focused on the trail and the friend riding beside her instead.

Vasco truly lived and breathed district eleven, didn’t he? He bled it too. Had. Would be willing to do so again. But that could wait. It could all wait. For the moment she could enjoy things for simply being. So much of the natural beauty of the district had been lost to her over the years, trapped inside her own head as she’d been.

The image of Yani’s first reaping crept back into her mind unbidden. But her life didn’t revolve around the games anymore. Even if she got frantic at the thought of her best friend losing another child because of something she said to an official five or six years ago. She wasn’t responsible for every bad thing that happened to the people she cared about. Vasco was a vocal presence in the district. If something happened to his family again, it likely had nothing to do with her.

Likely.

Katelyn sighed and reached into her pocket, pulling out a small bag containing granola and blueberries, popping a few of both into her mouth. Vasco seemed excited, mouth quirking at the sides like a schoolboy showing a friend the extra brownie he’d nicked when his mother wasn’t looking. These moments were the sort of thing he lived for, of that she was certain. Moments where he could show someone his home was more than farms and corn fields.

“It would be nice if more people could see the district the way you do.”

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

v a s c o

It's a sad song
We keep singing even so
It's an old song
It's an old tale from way back when
And we're gonna sing it again and again

I ran a hand forward through the black mane of the mare. Our shadows stretched out behind us along the road as we came up along the pass toward the gorge. I clicked my tongue and shifted my weight to ease her direction. She lulled leftward, easing through the brush with a twitch of her ears. I’d taken to riding these days, mostly to cut my time across the district (and not worry Emma that I’d be off walking alone late at night).

“Glad I might show you something new,” I offered with a grin, my hands curling around the soft leather of the reins.

I’d almost forgotten how much we’d been offered along the expanse of the district. I was guilty enough of keeping to the farms my cousins and I had shared, or spending my days cooped in the red brick of the town hall. It’d been Yani that’d begged me on an afternoon to do something besides walking the length of the strawberry patch. To see something she hadn't before. I’d retreated to the gravity of what’d been comfortable for me, and what’d started to stifle a girl coming up on being a woman.

She’d asked me to show her somewhere she’d never known, and so we’d cut out to the woods that me the edges of the cracked road. The same spot where boys went to run away from home when they fell out with their brothers. Or where a clear-eyed girl met up with a nervous boy to kiss underneath stars and saplings. A part of earth that hadn’t been so much as unknown, but out of reach. A retreat for someone young when the world had grown too small, and a space to disappear when middle age creeped in and had gotten too big.

We slowed as the trees started to part, and the echo of rushing water called out to us. I pressed back in the saddle and stiffened my back, giving the reins pressure. We came to a halt, and I stared out at the drop off in the distance.

“And how’s that?” I wiped a hand across my brow as I spoke, tucking back a few sweat stained hairs. I stared back at Katelyn. “I like to think it’s given me everything, bad or good, that put me here next to you. And hokey as it might be, I’ve got to respect what she gives me, and give back what I’ve gotten. Leave it a little better than I found it.”

Even if we could move outside the walls, eleven had seen all the pain and triumphs I’d ever known. From when I’d run around cornfields drinking malt liquor with my brothers to my wedding day, to burying my daughter to being the first one from Casco Viejo elected mayor, eleven colored all the cracks and edges.

“Could you ever think of being somewhere else, if they let you?”

elegant