go easy { d12 train }

[🌱 kaitlin.]

The years go by, and I never seem to get any better at being a mentor to teenagers.

My younger self was too abrasive, too interested in them believing me better than, well, anyone else. Everyone else. Crueler. More indifferent. Everything awful, I sought to be the best at. In hindsight, sometimes I wonder exactly how much of that was me being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole, and how much of it was self-flagellation. It's hard to avoid responsibility for one's own self-inflicted prison of pride when age brings both sobriety and mandated therapy thanks to the new high council.

Something about early trauma, they'd said. I'd avoided the visits until a doctor showed up at my hotel room and threatened to put a tracker in my arm so they could have sessions whenever they wanted to show up.

As if I don't already have one.

But I flexed my prosthetic and rolled my eyes before ultimately, begrudgingly, accepting. Last thing I need is to have my therapist show up knocking on the front door of a one night stand's apartment. There's no way in hell I'm ever going to process that with them out loud.

Still though, years down the line, I frustrate myself with caring about them. I go to sink into the couch opposite the pair of them when I finally manage to make my way into the carriage. I'm late to the party, managed to keep myself busy enough after the reaping to avoid Carter's eye's with phone calls to sponsors in the Capitol. I don't know how to apologize for missing his birthday, again, or how to explain I'm still figuring out how to keep my head above water by burying myself in things that make me feel like I'm doing something. That I don't know how to stop treading water. So I get Caroul's people on the phone instead of thinking about it, and I don't give in until Cresent herself comes to the phone. Twelve's tributes are going to kill the opening ceremony this year.

Before propping either of my arms up on the back of the sofa, I fuss with my pant legs as I sit down, adjusting them so they lay correctly. It takes me a moment before I look either of the children in front of me in the eyes.

"So," I begin, ever abrupt. "I figure you both have questions. Let's start there."

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

I'm scowling across at Nico Thorne's pretty face and can't help thinking about the way he smiled so brightly at the carnival earlier this year. Like all the song & dance from the Capitol was supposed to make me forget that my best friend's little brother caught the flu last year and never recovered. That my Dad has a permanent wheeze from working the mines his whole life and every day my Mom has to press the button to send him down there, potentially damning her lover to death. That my bones will rot in a graveyard and I'll never get to sing or dance or celebrate. Not that I did much of that when I was alive, but still.

Fuck, I'm talking like I'm already dead. I mean - I'm a girl from District Twelve. I basically am. And if I've got to become a Capitol darling in exchange for my life - marrying one, introducing their festivals, smiling at the families of the kids I fail to save - I think I'll stay dead thanks.

Texas is quiet. He's got that brooding stillness, the same one that my friend with the dead little brother buried in his front yard because they don't reserve gravestones for anyone under the age of 12 has. Thank fuck I'm an only child - then I swallow, guilty, thinking of Mom and Dad who won't be able to call themselves parents anymore.

"Yeah, I got one," and here comes that rebellion, that angst for no god damn reason, the same I used to spit up when my parents asked me how my day was. That violence that made the whole house shake when I slammed the front door - here it is, gritted teeth and a slanted head and a glare at Nico Thorne.

"What're you gonna say to our parents when we come back in coffins and you throw another carnival anyway?"

This tongue is going to get me killed in there. Might not even make it to the Capitol, talking smack in front of a killer. But fuck it - I'm already dead, right?

elegant

[pogue]

T    E    X

His parents don't visit.

He can't blame them, a heart can only hurt so much before it goes numb completely. To walk into that room and see their only son nothing more than a walking tombstone would be to pry open half-closed wounds with dirtied fingernails, muscle and sinew pried apart at the seams just to feel oneself bleed. In the wake of their absence he rots in his own silence, feels it pull and peck at his flesh and soul as if there was anything left for it to have, anything left that it hadn't already taken. He wonders if they'll miss him like they miss his sister, a wound so fresh it had no hope of healing. He wonders if they'll allow themselves to miss, to grieve, to feel anything at all. He knows the answer, it has everything to do with Twelve and nothing to do with them.

He's a tombstone rooted deep by the time Nico Thorne finally enters the room, the train long since having started moving, a District never truly worth it slipping off into the distance. He's still, stoic, small frown drawn tight onto his face and his eyes shifting between the windows and the floor, muscles tense and heart heavy.

The room shifts once when Nico enters, turns itself upside down and then slips the knife deeper into their guts when the victor finally speaks. Another shift follows suit, electric and fire sparking up from his tribute counterpart sat to his left.

Tune lights the dead spaces between them and their mentor up in flames, scorching the earth and the air with a silver tongue stained red. He's left to catch the embers that sit in the air afterwards, feeling them press into his skin in the empty spots the silence hasn't already chewed clean. They make his bones feel heavy, like his entire form is sinking into a couch too soft inside of a carriage too large inside of a train moving too fast to look back. He's drowning in his own humanity, watching it fade as it sinks. Time moves slower when you're a dead man already, and it feels like an eternity and a half passes between Tune's words lighting the room ablaze and his own following them to match. When sewn shut lips finally split, pulled apart at the seams but no blood left to spare, it's with the same stoic and heavy tone his life had forced him to perfect. 

Tune was a fireball, tossed into the air just to watch the spectacle it causes once everything starts to burn. He's the kerosene that follows suit, drizzled over dying flames just to keep the burn and the pain alive a little longer.

"Ni-" But it cuts off at the edge of his tongue. -Nico, he'd almost finished, but it's as if the name feels wrong to speak, all heavy and burning on the inside of his lips. Like he's speaking to some sort of god who was just writing off a requirement with the two teenagers in front of him, staring through them instead of at them.

He realizes it in the span of a dying heartbeat, somber and faint: to Nico they are ghosts already.

"Mr. Thorne," He says, staring at the faded splotches dotting the carpet, remnants of tributes and ghosts long since forgotten carved into the floor. 

We're going to die. Unspoken words, but they all know that truth already.

"How long you think we'll last in there?"