waypoint /avriel+mackenzie

[gamemaker kelsier]

a v r i e l .

"told me
every blessing
has a scar."

The forest is a stranger in the dark.

The dim glow of the Kodama a few feet ahead of him casts just enough light to catch the lower branches of the trees. Ferns glint briefly silver at them from the forest floor as they pass by.

The sound of water lapping at the shore of the lake grows louder, it's the only sound other than his own laboured breathing in the dark. Everything else has been swallowed whole, the moon, the stars, there is nothing left but Avriel and Scout. His heart is racing with nerves, every small sound puts him on edge. There's a knife in his hand, and the scent of blood and sweat and rot all mixed together permeates everything.

He hears the sand shift and then the end of a spear forms out of the dark, lit by Scout's dim light.

"Can you see me?"

Avriel jerks awake, hand closed in a fist over his heart, feet propped up on the seat across from him. Scout's asleep on the seat beside him, the train car is otherwise empty, the lights off. Summer evening filters in through the window beside him, gentle pinks and oranges painting the sky out the window to his right. The world outside is still.

"Why're we stopped?" he mumbles, "Fuel up?"

They won't be in Nine until the morning.

He staggers to his feet, body sore from sleeping sitting up. His foot boots up too slowly and Avriel starts to fall but catches himself before he can stumble into the seats an aisle ahead of his. "Merde," he mutters.

They're stopped at a platform, one of the middle districts but it's hard to remember which one this might be. During his victory tour they all looked the same somehow, crawling with people and he was never quite sure what percentage of the crowd probably wanted him dead.

The door to the next car opens and Gloria steps through, signature annoyed expression on her face. "Something's wrong with the engine, they've said that we're stuck here until the morning."
"Where's here?" Avriel asks.
"Seven."

One hundred percent then.

"It's probably best if you don't leave the train," Gloria sniffs, "Seeing as you killed both-"
"I know," he says quickly.

Gloria crosses her arms and just stares at him for a long moment. Avriel stares right back at her, catching the exact second her disdain for him settles across her face.

"Aspen and Reece," she says pointedly.

He leans back over the seat and scoops Scout up before turning and pushing past his escort.

"Where do you think you're going?"
"Out," he mutters and pulls his hood up.
"Don't say I didn't warn you," Gloria scoffs.

❦

Seven is green.

More than any other district he's been to, more than Nine with it's rows and rows of factories throwing up smoke. The trees are so abundant here that their canopies reach over the dirt roads to meet each other and form tunnels of leaves. The sun filters through them, highlighting the veins within, casting each leaf in golden hues above his head.

He walks fast, purposeful. Dust kicks up off the road and coats his ankles and his shoes in a fine layer of light brown. August has been hot, it hasn't rained much, everything's dry.

There's a rustling in the underbrush to the left of him and Avriel pauses, fingers going to his belt on instinct. His hand ghosts over nothing, his knives sit at home in his closet where they rust quietly in the dark.

There's an odd energy under his surface, still on the outside but electricity runs under the skin. It's almost strange to feel fear again but there it is, biting.

The rustling stops, whatever caused it already moved on. Avriel stands there for a moment longer and staring into the spaces between the trees. The forest seems to go on forever, fading into a dark blur in the distance.

If he was to get lost in there, he might never find his way back out.

A low note sounds from a few yards ahead of him and Avriel turns away from the woods and starts walking again. Scout hops around in a patch of sun and chirps, waiting for him to catch up.

❦

The graveyard is empty at this hour, though the sun won't finish setting for awhile still. There's a bundle of wildflowers in his hand tied together with a long piece of grass. Flowers already wilting from the heat. Houses rest along the edge of the graveyard but the windows are all dark.

Scout and him make their way through the rows of graves, some of them are so old that the dates are impossible to read but it isn't long before they find her.

"If I'd known I was coming, I'd have brought you something nicer," he says and lays the bouquet at the foot of Aspen Peake's tombstone, "'Guess anything's better than a knife though."

Not a good joke, no one laughs.

Av reaches out and digs some moss out of her name with his thumb. It crumbles under his touch, already dried out from the summer. The curve of the letters is smooth under his hand and even after the moss is gone, he keeps tracing.

There's a heat beneath his eyes, and though he knows this moment is real, it doesn't really feel like it is. Two years ago still feels like yesterday. When he shuts his eyes, it's just the same as being in that dark, standing on that beach with Aspen's name on his lips.

"I told you I'd come see you, didn't I?" he says.

It's hard to remember now if he had. Maybe when his palm was pressed into the wound on his shoulder and he was trying to hold himself together long enough to kill her and live, he did.

"Guess we both said a lot of things."

"You're my friend. Just decided."

He can still hear her voice, bright in the dark. It'd been at the end of all of it, they'd both been near on their knees from the blood loss and the pain but before he'd struck the last blow she'd promised him that she'd stay with him.

"Did you mean that?" he asks, "Or did you just want my last moments to be kind?"

And it feels insane to stand here and talk to her like she can hear him but part of him feels cheated out of that friendship. Before the arena Avriel never really had friends. Then he'd lost all the ones he'd made in the span of a week.

He was alone again but not really, known by thousands but disconnected to everyone he loves. Even Billie and Duke feel like strangers sometimes, they don't know what he's been through, not all of it, and he doesn't know how to explain. When he looks in the mirror he can't even find himself in his reflection.

"I killed you," he says, "But I think you killed me too."

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

He sat with his legs dangling out the  bedroom window, a steady line of smoke pouring from the end of a joint in one hand, the other busy absentmindedly stroking the new cat his mother brought home for Violet. It was an evil creature: a puff of stark white fur that hissed for no reason, hid under beds and swatted at feet, constantly knocked glass containers onto the floor, and for the majority of the time she refused to let anyone other than Violet come near her. She was called Luce when Violet was around, and Lucifer the rest of the time. For obvious reasons. Either because she was hungry or because she was planning her escape, she'd crawled into his lap halfway into his smoke session and had taken up purring there ever since.

He couldn't stop his eyes from glancing to the left, where Jacinta's house sat directly next to his own. More particularly, he looked at the glowing ember light coming from her bedroom window. She was home. Of course she was- it was a Tuesday evening and Violet had school- but still. There came an eternal sort of tension living next door to one's ex. A sadness. A what-if, however unwarranted it might have been. If this was two weeks ago, he would have been lying in a bed in that very room, ready for sleep. Of course, he would've just been staring at the ceiling while she took too long to climb in next to him, both of them resenting the silence and neither of them bothering to speak on it.

He did the right thing. He was certain of it. The Capitol might have forced him to change his mind once the news of this broke, but that was a problem for then. For now, he reminded himself, he was where he should be: the exact place he'd been ten years ago when all of this shit first started. Stagnant. 

He sighed.

He changed his view to the cemetery across the street, its vastness stretching on and on, disappearing into the same treeline the sun was sinking into. He thought, at the very least, it was a nice place to spend forever. It smelled floral all the time, the breeze was nice, it never got too sunny, there were lots of pretty picnic tables and oak trees.

He could still remember the first time he looked out and saw the fresh graves they'd dug ahead of time for Lex and Angel- how he'd demanded they be filled before either of them saw once they got back home. He remembered the year following, when he watched both of those same plots be refilled again, this time with the bodies of Diana and Zion.

He loved District Seven, but this part of it hurt to love too much. There were too many memories, too many lives lived. Too many lives unlived. He was tired of suffering, frankly. His heart- or what was left of it- was little more than a fistful of barbed wire at this point. He gave it like a bull gave its horns: sharpened to feel more like a threat than an offer so no one else would bother wanting it.

The fur of his coat tickled at the underside of his chin.

"Okay," he said to Luce, his eyes lingering on the horizon, "time to g-"

A smear of something against the silvery blue of the evening grass. A looming figure- tall and slim and not at home here in the trees. Mackenzie squinted his eyes at the figure, which walked with purpose, until recognition flashed within them.

City boy, indeed. An invasive species. Mackenzie could practically smell the atmosphere and air pollution on him from here: he wore it like armor. Avriel Baptiste.

Mackenzie climbed the stone pathway like he was a knife climbing the day's throat. He slit the light like a blade, left darkness in his wake. By the time he reached the crest of the hill the sun had set completely and he was staring eye to eye with the reason Aspen Peake and Reece Jackson had matching graves, right there at the other victor's feet. Mackenzie fought the urge to spit at Avriel's audacity to come here.

They always returned to the scene of the crime eventually, he supposed.

They.

We.

It was pointless of him to try and distinguish one from the other. Their separation would have been a lie. They could never have been different, not really. They both were winners of the same contest, they both were suffering the consequences. They were exact replicas, look- with skin and teeth and bad habits. Look how they both took in oxygen to live, just as they took lives to do so. Look how at home they were among the dead.

Look.

If anything, their similarities made it all that much easier for Mackenzie to despise Avriel. To hate him for his victory. To blame him for Aspen and Reece when, really, he knew Avriel only did what he did from the same obligation they all did it because of. He still hated him. He delighted at the idea of Aspen's hand breaching the surface of the ground right then and there and finishing what she started two years ago.

Mackenzie'd felt numb for so long but standing there in front of Avriel, he felt as though he'd eaten fire already. This was his home. This was his peace- the tiniest little fragment that remained. And now the ghosts found him once again, as they always did. He sighed, looking down at Avriel. He could feel himself burning from within.

"You know, I could have you arrested," he said, his voice betraying his tiredness, "Private cemetery. Appointment only after 5 pm to non-family members."

The Capitol was very protective of tribute graveyards- had to make sure no one was digging them up to make sure they were there. Rumors and speculation had surrounded tribute graveyards since the beginning of their existence, but after two resurrection quells in a row the people have been more suspicious than ever. People might get the idea to dig up a grave and see if it's actually occupied, for instance. And whatever their reasons were, the Capitol was adamant about preventing that from happening.

He had no intention of having Avriel arrested, though the image of his team having to fetch him from a cell did make Mackenzie feel a bit better. Mostly, he wanted to get him as far away from this- from Aspen and Reece, from the others, from the cemetery, from his home, from his daughter across the road and his mom who'd be home soon from her shift and his brother who'd be waking up for his. District Seven was his. The games already got everything else.

He cut his eyes to the pile of mariposas, camas, and fireweed tied together with grass sitting next to Aspen's headstone. They were all common-enough wildflowers, ones he'd seen a thousand times growing up, but seeing them arranged like this made them feel different somehow- dangerous even. No, the danger was the boy. The danger was the deed.

Why had he come here? Why had he thought to bring flowers? Because he was guilty for surviving, duh. They all were. Well- Mackenzie was guilty for killing. He'd never been sorry for surviving. But guilt made people do stupid things all the time.

"'Course, you could just turn around and leave right now, and it wouldn't be necessary."

He willed Avriel to be make the right decision and walk away.

[gamemaker kelsier]

a v r i e l .

"told me
every blessing
has a scar."

The sun makes its last stand before finally dipping below the peaks of the trees. Scout's been gone for awhile now, always hungry. It's little light weaves in and out of the trees that loom over the edge of the graveyard.

The world turns this cold shade of blue in the dusk's half-light making Aspen and Reece's marble white gravestones look as if they're glowing.

Avriel kneels there in front of them, never having gotten peace like this with them before now. In the arena they'd only ever met as enemies. It was only later, when he watched the games reruns that Av got to see what kind of people they were outside of the times they'd fought.

As he'd long suspected, they were human.

Reece wasn't the first person to place his rage on Avriel but something about it still pisses him off sometimes. If it wasn't for that fight against him, Av might have never made the choice to live. All that anger aimed at him, he knew he deserved it but not from Reece. And for all he bits of Avriel that are wise, he's still just a boy.

Before Reece, he'd never killed anyone before. Fighting him had shown him just how simple it was, how quickly a life gets snuffed out with just the right cut from his knife.

But still, his grave is barren beside Aspen's. Not every little hurt can be rationalized.

"I didn't bring you flowers," he tells Reece, "You got my goddamned foot."

There's a rustling in the tall grass behind him, then Scout wanders into view and ponderously drops an armful of pinecones on top of the boy's grave as if to make up for Avriel's slight.

He sighs and tips his head back in defeat. Stars are only just beginning to appear in the sky, little bits of light against a cornflower blue sky. It isn't so hot anymore, the sun having set awhile ago. It's just nice, a soft breeze runs over him, through the grass, the canopy of the trees. The wind through the leaves sounds like the river in Nine and for a brief moment Avriel forgets about everything else.

"You know, I could have you arrested."

His eyes snap open.

Run-

Always the command comes, but his legs don't move, gone numb from kneeling. Avriel stares up at Mackenzie Pryce and part of him wonders if this is all just a really bad dream. It wouldn't be the first time he thought that he was awake and it turned out he wasn't. And all this feels far too perfect, like Gloria called ahead or something just to make certain Avriel would end up miserable.

If he were dreaming, there'd be a knife in his hand. The dark would be coming, rolling through the graveyard and swallowing everything so this has to be real– just bad fucking luck.

His heart beats too quickly, Av can hear it in his ears. Panic settles over him lightly, he thinks of wooden floorboards, of curtains in the wind, of blood on his hands, underneath his nails– He knows he should stand, put some distance between himself and Seven's Victor but Avriel doesn't move. His hands would shake if he lifted them from his knees, his legs would be too weak, he'd crumble.

So he simply gazes up at Mackenzie, hands curling into fists on his thighs, chin raised as if the other boy has a blade against his throat.

There are shadows under the other victor's eyes, a lack of fire behind them. They hardly even burn at all.

"I'm not doing anything wrong," he argues after a beat of silence, knowing how stupid it sounds as soon as he's said it. That's never worked, not for Avriel. Ever since puberty, when his limbs grew longer than he knew what to do with and his skin lit up like a star field, they labelled him as trouble. Before he was reaped, Peacekeepers used to detain him just for looking sour.

"Mon poor bébé," his mother used to say as she kissed his newest bruises, "tu as inherited your father's angry visage."*

Mackenzie is just another person who looks at him and sees a thug. That makes him easier to understand, not that it's much help these days. Av's always put his foot in his mouth but in the past couple years it's gotten worse, he's gotten bolder.

Or just colder maybe, better at letting nothing touch him.

Avriel stands slowly and dusts his knees off. "And there was moss in the letters,", he says, "If you're that bothered, the least you could do is try to keep their stones clean so I don't have to."

As he speaks, Av slips his hands into his pockets to try and hide the way they shake but it's hard even to make eye contact, he's not half as confident as he portrays.

But you can't show your neck with victors.

Mackenzie wants him gone and there's no point in talking to someone whose already made their feelings about his presence clear, he's got enough self worth to know that. Sun having set, flowers delivered and questions asked, "I'm done here anyway," he says with a shrug and raises his hands like he's asking Mackenzie not to shoot.

Scout must have retreated into the tall grass upon Mackenzie's approach. He looks for the Kodama for a moment, then spots a small bright light tucked behind Mackenzie's calf. He's pretty sure the other victor didn't bring a lantern with him. The mutt's brightness dims as its mouth begins to widen.

"Let's go Scout," Avriel says and steps backwards towards the woods, "You can't eat him, too big."

*frenglish for 'my poor baby, you inherited your dad's RBF'