see what trouble brings [I/I/B/K]

[pogue]

B  O  W  I  E

His first day inside of the Training Center greets him with steel walls cased in ice and fluorescent lights that singe his skin whenever he finds himself under them, familiar feeling of a burning spotlight clashing with the knowledge that he is completely surrounded by the unknown. His eyes follow the movements of tributes far more well trained than he could ever hope to be, watches the way their fingers wrap around steel and the way the targets fall and the way they grin with fangs bared and blood between their teeth. Stoicism roots itself on his face out of habit, but it's underneath all the blood and bone that he can feel his heartbeat thumping rapidly, playing a heavy beat of nerves and adrenaline. Stick in the mud, Sierra would have said to him if she were here, standing still and doing nothing but wasting away. It's why he clamors for something, anything familiar, goes back to the dying roots he'd had no choice but to grow from.

Grab a rope and tie it tight, swing it above and feel the rope begin to burn against calloused palms. It's in the movements that he knows so well that he allows himself to find comfort, standing with a lasso swinging above him and a focused stare plastered on his face and looking across the way at the mutt as it stares him down. One, two, th- the mutts eyes waver towards the rope above and he strikes.

It squeals at first when he ties the legs together, saunters towards the weapons table just to grab a knife and, with all of the knowledge that he has done this countless times before, pulls the mutt from a life of misery and into a new life of crimson and fire.

By the end of the day he's tearing cooked meat from the bone and spitting the fatty pieces back into the fire in front of him, ignoring the blood stains all over his uniform and the shocked stares of tributes and onlookers alike.

The second day he finds the mutt pen removed, foreign and alien and uncomfortable feeling slipping into the void left in its wake.

They leave him with nothing but a whip and directions left unsaid, staring down the target practice with a familiar weapon in one hand and a lifetime of emptiness rotting in the other. He guesses that's just how show business goes.

[rook]

I am fourteen. We are walking along a dusty trail that stretches out to the crop fields. A farmhand raises a hand of thanks towards my father, and he nods regally in response. I ask him again to consider violin lessons for Aiza - she has been putting her soul into playing that instrument, a little direction would really help her stoke fire into her passion. Instead of acknowledging my question he gestures to the workers that buzz between the rows of crops.

He asks me if his clothes are dirty, or if his body aching. I confirm that neither is a true statement. He continues, asking if he has much free time today, and if his days are long and hard. Again, I confirm he has a good life with as much time as he needs. He then asks me why this is, and I stumble.

He tells me why. The worker in the field is happy for employment, but receives but a marginal share of the coin for his graft. I don't think this was fair, but I keep my expression neutral and my mouth closed.

Hard work is for fools. The clever man seeks solutions. Minimise effort, maximize output. This is his third lesson.

I'm eighteen. My hands are raw from hours of spindling wood between my palms, trying to force enough friction to form an ember in the dry board at my feet. Sweat lines the nylon of my shirt, and stings in the corners of my eyes. My lungs burn, the taste of exhaustion metallic in my throat.

Once I've had enough at failing to spark a flame, I move on to the next station, where I see a solitary figure standing broadly between a range of training dummies. He is as motionless as they are. I recognise him as the boy who caused the commotion yesterday. I didn't see what happened, but someone said something about fire. I should try and scope him out, see if he is worth getting closer to.

He looks handsome, strong, muscular, like one of those military types - but if you gave him a rifle would he really know what to do with it? He's from Ten, I already know that much. He looks like he's spent a life on a farm, hauling feed for the cattle.

There's plenty like him back in Eleven, except there's less livestock where I'm from. The terrain in Ten makes it easier to raise cows and sheep, whilst our soil is more nutrient rich, better suited to crops.

Besides muscular, does he have any other identifying traits?

Relatively tall. Alert, even when there's no danger. He holds that whip like an extension of himself, and I am curious to know just how much damage he can uncoil with it.

I think back to my deceased father, who would tell me to use this boy's strengths as my own. His body is expendable, mine is not. His lesson to me would be to work smarter, not harder. I hear his deep voice chanting *innovate, innovate, innovate*, right hand chopping into the open palm of his left with each repetition.

The farmhands grateful for work were plagued with Stockholm Syndrome. It wasn't innovation, it was exploitation.

I look to Bowie Gamble, and I know I will not exploit him. I will offer him fair terms.

I take five confident steps into his line of sight.

"Ally with me."

[pogue]

B  O  W  I  E

He's got the whip half raised with his eye on the training dummy in front of him, white-knuckling the handle with muscles firing and adrenaline starting to cut softly into his veins. There's a sense of focus that washes over him whenever he raises a weapon like this, carved into his memories with the sin and the spotlight, a million and one shows laced into every healed bruise and unhealed scar that dots his skin.

When Kareem Hasim cuts into his vision, everything in his instinct tells him to strike anyways. It's a delayed reaction that fights against memory and the will for survival, only subsiding when Bowie blinks away the tunnel vision and lowers his weapon, relaxes his muscles and breathes out nothing but dead air. It curls to the ground in deadly abandon, a coiled snake waiting to strike, fangs bared.

"You got big balls stepping in front of a weapon like that." Bowie arcs a finger into the air, traces the spot across Kareem's chest where the whip would have sunk into his skin, blinks, sees the crimson that would seep from the wound in the dead space between them. "Or you're just stupid." 

He spins on his heel towards the weapons to the right, feigns away from Kareem's dead stare and dusts powder against his palms, eyes glued to the metal veins of the table instead of the boy next to him. He hates to admit it, would never admit it if asked, but there's a bundle of nerves that threatens to rise up when he thinks of who just stepped into his vision. He'd seen the reaping from Eleven, watched Kareem Hasim take the stage and listened to Mace Emberstatt whisper softly into the empty air of the cabin about his history, of red and silver and the news of a murder. "Bad idea." 

Of all the tributes in this building, Kareem is the only one to have already taken a life, held it in his hands and curled his fingers just to crush it. But they'd all reach that point eventually, would have to reach that point if they wanted to come home.

Of course he's a bad idea, but aren't they all?

He leaves the whip on the table, a leather monument to his life and his history sitting in steel. When his gaze meets Kareem's he does not falter, fights back the unnerving feeling that cracks in his gut and looks the boy up and down.

Selfishly, he wants a confession. Selflessly, his eyes tell Kareem that he will take him for his word. Objectively, he doesn't know if the latter could ever be fully true.

"Ain't you the murderer?"

[heather - d2 [mylee]]

I  S  A  B  E  L  L  A

Last night, I laid in bed and wondered what they could have possibly done with the mutt roped and killed in front of us. I wonder who had to wrap their hands around that cold neck, if they stripped out the spine. Surely not.

I don’t know the name of the boy who managed it, never caught sight of his face, but I like to think I’d know him by his hands, the quick turn of the knuckles away from the wrist. I’m not sure my own know touch like that, or the speed required to create that much distance. Is it possible to be loved and kept at arm’s length? Does such a delay, as that which exists with light, matter here?

~

[ Izzy discovered something that first day in the training center—she liked the station meant to teach one how to improvise. The intention, of course, is that one uses these skills to create weapons and tools for survival; knowledge buried in an understanding of duality, utility, as in, there are simply so many ways to be used. Today, she’s returned to the station and taken twigs and string from the table, wandered away and found herself watching the brewing interaction between Bowie and Kareem, though she cannot place these names to them. ]

~

My mother used to tie cotton string around her ring finger so tight it seemed the circulation was bound to be lost. Sometimes, I thought she was trying to excise that part of herself, the place where I assume there was once a wedding band, even if not of silver or gold. When the finger would go ghost, I’d point it out to her, and usually she’d say nothing, hand me a knife so that I might set her free. But I remember the one night I missed the warning and the digit turned blue. I imagined a sea underneath the skin as I sawed away at the thread, and how, when the blood rushed back in, she laughed until she fell asleep on the couch.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s wrong to want a sea underneath my own skin, what high tide could do to my heart.

~

[ Izzy takes the supple, white string and cuts off a length that she’s wrapped around her wrist a couple times, the edges fraying from her sloppy execution and dull blade. She ties this first piece around her neck, a bow in the back, and then spins it around so that the knot rests visible over the jugular. She cuts another piece, shorter now, and ties it tighter around her pinky, another, loosely around her thumb. By the time she’s spent most of the spool she was allotted, her wrists each have their own wrap, some odd number on the fingers, too.  She’s about to reach down for her waist and ankles when she hears Bowie’s voice, Ain’t you a murderer? She stuffs the remaining string in her pockets, leaves the knife behind. ]

~

When I make my way to the two boys, I’m thinking of their bodies, how in the fluorescence, it’s hard to read anyone as anything but tense and hostile. Each gesture, pithy and quick, but we might attribute this to the shadows. I don’t know anything about anyone who’s murdered anyone else, but I did see the bloodstains on the floor yesterday, did see the body of an imagined and ungodly animal in my dreams last night. When I look at the boy who’s asked the question, I recognize him by his hands, how his eyes turn toward them, as if inevitable. I want to ask him how far he thinks we all are from murderer, if maybe we’re there already, there’s just a delay between the decision and execution of the act.

When my vision drops to his knuckles, I forget this and see instead my whole body, hogtied and stripped clean, the nerves peeled one after another from the spine. It’s not hard to imagine that it was him, not me, that made the knot sitting taut at my throat. I want to believe he can do the unmaking, too. I reach toward his hand and wrap my own around it, the string wrapped around my thumb pressing uneven against his palm. I bring it to my neck, place his hand over the thread wrapped around it and ask, Can you untie this for me?

[ table: pogue ]