at once, i knew i was not magnificent // talon & quinn, vt.

[✨ zozo.]

↳ QUINN EMBERSTATT

Fourteen comes around like a solar eclipse, rare and beautiful and terrifying. Her mother puts her foot down - "you're fourteen now" a never-ending phrase falling from her mouth alongside a frown or a sigh. Unspoken, its weight hangs heavy on Quinn's shoulders - though stubborn as she is, she pretends that she feels light as air. Unbothered and unafraid, hiding the fact that she holds her breath at every reaping and only lets herself breathe out when they draw for the second name.

Enzo. Mom. Fourteen is a death-sentence, a second birth. Quell twist, she's been so terrible to half of the children her age that it's a miracle they don't call on her out of spite, twisted vengeance, sweet revenge. She would have held her head up high, that childish bravado that comes with who she is and who her family are. Smiled. Been so terribly wonderful, even in death. And she wouldn't be scared - at least, not outwardly.

Not until her final breath.

Fourteen going on fifteen, a summer child - she shrinks in the cold, trudging through post-snowstorm sludge in boots, nose pink and burning. Once upon a time she reveled in meeting these Victors, waiting patiently in her best dress at the gates of the Victor's Village for her brother to finish his tour, for her mother to finish fussing about the house and her father to get caught trying to sneak bites of food from the chefs before dinnertime. Now she is cold and bored and perpetually unimpressed, teenage wasteland of a girl. Quinn glowers at her parents, drags her feet through the frost-covered grass, grumbles about the weather - it's never been this cold in winter before, not ever.

Her Mom elbows her gently on the platform, reminds her to stop slouching. That only a year ago she begged to take over the reigns of the Victory Tour from her brother, throwing a fit when she was told she was too young. "You're fourteen now," her mother reminds her - again.

She doesn't need to say the rest.

Quinn knows what it all means, feels the crushing impact of regret against her chest. When her mother was her age yet half her size she won the Games, when her brother was the same he lived and died and lived again. Her father an orphan, fighting ten other pairs of hungry hands for scraps at mealtimes. Fourteen going on twenty-four, Quinn thinks she knows everything & anything there is to know about being alive.

"I know," she parrots back, scowling at her feet and the puddle of melted ice that pools on the platform below.

Talon Grey, Career. Victor. Twin of the fallen, except won't get their brother back like Quinn did. Damned by their own name, much like Quinn is - but where excitement and wonder once bubbled in her chest now houses anxiety. What did she have in common with any of the victors anyway? At fourteen her Ma was one of them. At fourteen, her brother too. But Quinn is just a sour-faced girl with red hair and a shiny last name, bitten-down nails and a lump in her throat as she nods nervously at Panem's newest victor when they step off the train carriage, shifting nervously into step behind the Keeper escorts as she and her mother make their way outside.

"I'll see y'all later for dinner," Saffron smiles. Her gaze shifts to her daughter: "Behave yourselves" - and then she's gone, daughter adrift in teenage responsibility.

There's a nervous beat, another. She looks to Talon awkwardly, as if to ask the Victor what to do now - not that they'd have a clue. This was supposed to be Quinn's gig. Enzo was always so good at this. Charming, energetic, so full of enthusiasm at this age. Easily loveable - no wonder her Mom took him in as her own. But Quinn is polar opposite of her brother - gangly and awkward, legs aching from growth spurts and walking down to the town square from home.

So this is fourteen? It's absolute ass.

"Um..." she breaks the silence, shifts nervously on her feet, acutely aware of the small crowd they'd accumulated of photographers and official-looking persons bristling in the cold, dressed for much warmer weather. Quinn crosses her arms over herself, nestling into the comfort of her quilted down-jacket, not quite able to meet Talon's eyes with her own. District Ten, District Ten - what was there even to do in this shit-hole of a place?

Well, there was always-

"Wanna go see some horses?"

[ coding by griffin ]

[Arrows]

t a l o n .

"you are weak
but not foolish
you have learned
how to die."

There's a quiet that comes with winning that no one seems to talk about. Ever since that Scrapyard shifted into the shadows that same silence has followed me everywhere. An empty room in the Capitol without a smoking partner next door. An empty house made of marble without so much as a flickering fire. An eternal wandering with my own thoughts and no one to fully understand them. It's like I've gone from running from tributes to running from the quiet.

I thought I was done trying to hide. Isn't that why I drove my dagger straight into the chest of Ellis' mech? Why am I still on the escape then? Even now I'm fumbling out of bed in the middle of the early morning hoping to put some distance between myself and the null. I'm pulling some maroon hoodie over my skin barely staying for a second longer alone in that room than I have to. I'm pacing down the curving corridors of the train's hearth searching for any sign of a sound other than my own racing heartbeat as my breaths are actually beginning to show in the cold chill of the season. I only stop all the panic once I'm outside of Beck's door with my hand hanging in the air, yet it never falls.

I slink several steps back until my frame slides down against the opposite wall. Forehead heavy with the weight of worry, it falls forward onto the knees now pulled tightly towards my chest. It's been six months and I still feel like I don't know how to do anything. I'm still running, still putting the pieces of my life together back in Four, still trying to somehow stave off temptation to stay sober, and it all just makes me feel selfish. It makes me feel like I was the wrong Vic- fuck, I can't even call myself a Victor without wincing, but that's what I am. I'm a mess of a Victor with the same problems that I had before the Games now coupled with the shittiest sense of imposter syndrome I've ever felt. What would Ellis, Maze, Kiibo, Rafael, Lottie, Parker, anyone else have done by now? Probably a lot more than me.

My head lifts only to fall back against the wall behind me. Am I even trying? My gaze stares at Beck's door just a few feet away. "Please be okay." My eyes slide shut as my lips slightly quiver. I want to be okay Beck, I really do. I want to feel like more than my own worst enemy. I want to feel like my own personal hero. I want to look in the mirror and love myself more than I did before the Games. I already do in some ways, but I don't want to feel like I dragged myself out of the ocean just to be stranded on the beach. I want to live like I said I would. I need to live like I said I would.

I never end up knocking. Instead, I make my way back to my room and accept the silence for now. I watch from my perch on the windowsill as the sun begins to break through the crest of the horizon. Each of my exhales leaves a web of fog against the frost of the glass. Everything since Twelve is so much flatter than in Four. There's no cliffs or even really any mountains, just orchards and pastures. I feel like a stranger to this place, but I am no stranger to its people. I've learned that quickly enough on this tour.

By the time the brakes of the train are squealing in a sequence of screams, I've changed into the outfit Sailor has marked with a tag saying 10. A sigh of relief actually leaves my lips when I stand in front of the mirror. The navy turtle neck, red scarf, navy beanie, blank skin-tight jeans, and brown boots feels like something I'd wear on my own. To be fair though, Sailor has always gone off of my own tastes. I think that's probably why I see her as more of a friend these days than just a Stylist.

Outside the air is even more crisp with the curtails of the season. Instinctually, I bury my face a bit into the warmth of my scarf as I walk across the station. It's not hard to see which of Ten's resident Victors has come to welcome the newest owner of the title: a mother and daughter duo undeniably by their shared features. As I walk up to Saffron Lowe and her daughter, Quinn I think Nixie mentioned, I can feel a tightness in my throat. Could I ever be that put together? Have a family, a kid? I force myself to quickly push the thoughts aside because right now I can't even make it through a night on my own. Some things are just too big to think about at this point.

Saffron only says a couple of words about dinner before leaving and instantly I'm back to not knowing what to expect. Here I am in a District I know next to nothing about with a younger girl I know next to nothing about and I have absolutely no idea what to say. It's kind of crazy to think that the only real differences between us are a couple of years and five bodies. I can feel my teeth grind against each other. Wild, what a few years can change.

"Um..." She speaks, thank fuck. Cause I sure as hell don't know what I'm doing in case it isn't blatantly obvious to her. Raising my eyes from some random stone I've staring at for the last couple of seconds, I wonder what she is going to say. I'm sure it has to be hard for her, trying to figure out what to do with someone who- a camera clicks and I naturally shift my body away from the angle. Who is anything other than just another sixteen year old. "Wanna go see some horses?"

"Uh, sure." I shove my hands into my pockets as my feet shuffle. "I've never seen a horse in person." Again I don't know where I'm going with my own words, but I feel like I shouldn't just leave it that short, right? "I've seen a sea horse though. Uh... it was kind of ugly though to be honest." Nope, that's not it but it came out of my mouth anyway.

elegant

[✨ zozo.]

↳ QUINN EMBERSTATT

"Cool!" and then a pause, hands in her jacket pockets and strands of orange hair caught in the cool breeze.

"What's a seahorse?"

Quinn imagines a shetland pony with gills and a tail, the image morphs into a stallion with fangs and flippers. She frowns at her unknown, usually so sure of herself and her expert handle on agriculture. Those field trips as a child to the Justice Building to watch old, flickering footage of the other districts from the 40s had never interested her. She'd spent too much attention on giggling at the back of the cluster of children, throwing crumbs of her ham sandwiches into the hair of some poor kid she'd taken to pick on that day.

A flush of embarrassment rises to her freckled cheeks, half from the memory of being so awful and the other looking a fool in front of their nation's newest Victor. "I mean, like -" she stumbles as they climb on to their horse-pulled cart - the most opulent of District Ten transportation - "I've never seen one before. A seahorse, that is. Actually-" and she flushes again, as if it were so uncommon and strange for a child of Ten to have never caught a glimpse of the other districts past the view from a train window, "I've not seen the sea either."

She bites down a I can't even swim, three strikes and she's out. Not ten minutes into meeting Talon Grey and she'd already made a fool of herself twice. The cart lurched into action, the polite trot of hooves on dirt roads and gentle creak of wooden wheels pulling their entourage along.

"Sorry," she takes a breath of fresh country air and gathers herself, closing her eyes and slumping in her place. "This is my first time doing these tours. And I'm... well, my brother used to do them. And he's great at talking, and great with people, like Dad and Mom - and I'm...


not."

The confession rushes out of her hot and ugly, adding to the rising heat in her cheeks. Quinn figured she looked as red as the hair on her head. How she had longed to join Lorenzo on these tours when she was younger, teen yearling and practically clinging to his legs like she had as a toddler. He'd made it seem so easy, her brother, but she hadn't quite realised that Enzo was the kind of person that excelled at this. A people person. Born and bred to be polite and good and relatable, a young buck from the orphanage more than happy to pull his weight. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. Someone people actually liked.

And Quinn? Well. It was a miracle she still had one friend left after fourteen years of raising hell.

"But, um-" she blinks rapidly, pointing out a cluster of buildings against a red oak tree - its arms, now barren in winter, stretching out to the sky. "That's my school!"

An awkward pause, what would Enzo do?

"Mom said she used to climb all the way to the top of that tree to hide from her teachers. I pushed a kid out of it once and..."

She trails off again, choosing to omit the end of the tale with a boy carried off in the arms of his father, back at school five days later with plaster wrapped around his ankle.

"...nevermind."

Quinn swallows, hard. Awful, unlikeable Quinn Emberstatt. Nothing like her mother, father or brother - and what a goddamn shame it was.

[ coding by griffin ]