Summer's End [Vasco/Celeste]

[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

Crossing the hall is wading across the river’s ice at wintertime. I’m numb by the time I reach the opposing door, hand heavy on the brass knob.

Where the rest had focused on Kareem and his sentencing, I’d trained my eyes on Celeste. She’d had the same opportunity to pick someone to take her place, and she’d been bold enough to choose herself. It should have cheered me, standing at the edge of her door. Except she’s still got a train waiting to take her to the capitol, with all the terror of the coming weeks to weigh her down.

Why had she done it?

Was that even fair to ask her now, would it matter to know? She needed someone to help her get her affairs in order, not to be hounded about the truth. That could live and die in the dirt of eleven. Let the rest of us speculate on what grew out of the earth from what remained.

And still I couldn’t help but hear my heart pounding like a snare to know what waited behind this door. Kareem had been condemned to his fate and at the mercy of his past. But Celeste was free to make her own path, had already determined that eleven could not hold her. What had turned her away from the comfort of home to take a risk that might return her in a pine box?

I pulled the door closed behind me, soft enough that the click of the lock barely rang out across the room. I cleared my throat to break the silence, though I hardly broke more than a whisper. Maybe it was always harder to see the young women in that I couldn’t help but think of Raquel, Sofia, or Yani.

“Miss Brere,” I started with my hands clasped in front of me, “I’m Mayor Izar. Is it all right if I come and talk with you for a little while? I wanted to check in on you.”

elegant

[ines izar d11a 🖤 cait]

celeste brere

I regret the choice as soon as I’ve made it.

The day has barely started, and already it has warped and shifted and changed faces more times than I can keep track of. When my name had been called, I’d been given all of twenty seconds to work through the tug-of-war transpiring in my head – that battle between right and wrong, good and bad, whose life was worth saving or condemning when there is so much more than just my own fucking pathetic life on the line anymore. The pressure to make a decision like that shouldn’t be taken so lightly, and yet that’s exactly what I was expected to do.

In the end, it had come down to stones in my stomach and a tongue slipping into spontaneity – a war of conscience where my intuition had won out, as it so often does.

But just because something feels right in a moment doesn’t make it so.

Twenty seconds turns into twenty minutes. It’s time spent with my demons going around in circles, desperately seeking out the right answer.

Truthfully, I still don’t know what the right decision was. I don’t think I’ll ever know – could be given all the time in the world and still end up right here sat in a cold velveteen chair waiting for the world to end.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a permanent farewell if it wasn’t for a door sliding open and Mayor Izar shuffling into the tiny room, looking so much smaller than he did in that video he’d tried to push out across Panem a few days ago. He wrings his hands together as tightly as the lines pulled across his forehead. A small button hangs loosely on his shirt, pinned just above his heart, “say no.”

I know why he’s here. I know what he wants to hear from me. That I believe in this fight. That we’re living in a time of change.

But he’s wrong. I’m not brave. I’m not a visionary. I barely believe in myself; I’m a paradox.

Maybe he sees my growing uncertainty settle on my face. He’s spent most of his adult life reading people – can probably tell what they’re thinking before they even know themselves. Maybe he can tell I’m already regretting my decision, and maybe that’s why he sounds so broken when he speaks.

He looks at me solemnly, and it’s a nail in the coffin already in the works that he only sees a stupid girl with no hope of surviving. I know this already about myself, but it doesn’t lessen the pain that soon enough, it won’t be just me who loses.

I look down at my stomach, see my hands already laced protectively across my abdomen, and the tug-of-war starts again.

“Is it all right if I come and talk with you for a little while?”

I want to say something sarcastic – that he’s already here and I barely have a choice in the matter, and oh, the irony of it all. I grimace, hold my tongue, and slowly nod at him.