we could live near the beach. pt 2 — kaatje & storm blitz

[fox]

You can hear the sound of footsteps in the sand behind you. The shore is the colour of bone, and when the ocean laps at the beach, the blue of the water fades in and out. He comes quietly to the edge of the earth at dawn.

You wanted to see him and he obliged. It must be the guilt, you think. It must be the guilt that makes him pliable now.

Guilt spoils, as does grief. You think of your mother too. How there is a tenderness to her now. Tender, not like soft. But tender like a bruise, like a wound that never heals. She watched you scream, she watched you rage in your room and said nothing. She took your hands afterwards and fixed them in the parlor, picking out the fragments of glass.

Your father is buried somewhere in Will's garden, always toiling in the earth.

The tide crashes, a bed of foam trailing over the pebbles. The seagulls cry overhead, gliding in the light autumn breeze. You tug at a loose thread on the gauze around your hands. Your sweater slips off your shoulder, wind brushing against skin.

It takes a long time for you to find your voice.

"I think I want to kill you," you say, quietly, rolling a smooth shell in your palms from the sand. You don't look at him. You feel him, sitting beside you, but you can't look at him.

"But then it would be for nothing, wouldn't it? – my foolish brother, who gave you his life."

The shell cuts into your palm. Your anger over your brother might kill you. You've lived so long hating the people you love, it feels like it's the same thing. You taste the same undertones of bile and bitterness. You feel the same uncontrollable anger, the shakiness, the ache in your throat. You've never known love without it.

[lance]

Some districts on the tour were easy. In Eleven and Six and Five, elder victors ushered him aside and greeted him with nothing but warm smiles and comforting words, gestures that seemed genuine in the face of reality. And why wouldn't they? Storm hadn't done shit to the kids from their districts. No murder, no savagery, hell, not even any action whatsoever.

And some were not. Seven and Twelve and Ten were awkward at best, despite the latter's own victor duo doing what they could to assure him that no, there were no hard feelings despite Storm's own butchery of their kids. Texas had no one who'd bothered to show, and neither had December. As for Cachi, well, at least Saffron and Mace and their daughter were bright spots amongst the sea of guilt.

But he hadn't dreaded any of them like he had now. With Twelve and Ten and Seven, he'd killed in the throes of war, a deadly conflict fought equally by each side in which he knew that if he hadn't, he would have died.

With Four, with Willem, he'd butchered a boy who'd done nothing of the sort. Willem had no intention of killing him whatsoever, and yet Storm had ended him all the same.

In four, he stands on the very shoreline that Willem had grown up with, his sister at his side. "I think I want to kill you," says the sister after a silence so long he'd nearly cracked from the tension.

I think I'd let you, plants the response right at the tip of his tongue. Six months on, and each and every one of his wounds within have been torn asunder once again and coated in brine.

"But then it would be for nothing, wouldn't it? – my foolish brother, who gave you his life."

And how ironic the world works, that he could take a death threat - however empty - without flinching, yet one word against Willem and-

"He wasn't foolish," Storm responds, too quickly, too emotionally. Six months removed from the trauma, and it may as well have been six hours with how heavy his heart sits in his chest. "I'll never understand why he chose me over himself, but-"

Deep breath. Regain composure. He'd face Kaatje the same way he had each and every conflict in the games - to the best of his ability.

"-it wasn't because he was stupid."