dreamboarding [Klaus x Safina]

[D3B Safina Roy [Tyler]]

[googlefont="Cinzel Decorative"]

Safina Roy

dreamboarding - I

I am trapped. The flames lighting up the giant factories around me only make the darkness fill up everything else. I cannot run, I cannot think. My legs have been pinned by a fallen beam, impossibly heavy and bringing the fire to me. I keep trying to pull myself out from it. Dina's there, pulling my hands and tearfully hurrying me to the path that now swims into place: I look behind her and see no flames; just the faces of mother, and father, and Tevin, and Sadiya, and Portia Maybach from District 2. Their faces bear the neutrality of no hope. I am a lost cause. Dina continues to pull my hand. Junie St. James pulls at my other. I am pulling, I am melting. Dina turns into Serelis. Circe Murdock sits on top of the beam, taunting me. Emon is holding out a gun to me. Tide climbs a tree with a spool of wire and some flowers. The boy from District 10 is in his underwear, winking at me and posing as the flames engulf his muscled body. The Capitol seal appears in the sky as I melt away, my eyes only seeing my face light up the sky as I cease to be…

I jolt upright in my bed, chest racing to gulp in the clean air, heart beating hard to make sure I'm still alive. My legs are still thrashing to get out from under the beam for a couple of moments until my brain registers that the beam never existed. No burning factory, no family members, no arms being pulled by tributes around me. It's only the silken sheets cocooned around me after a night of twisting and turning. The darkness is only that of the night. Another nightmare.

Tears start welling up in my eyes as the adrenaline wears off. Alone in my bedroom I allow myself the freedom to be vulnerable. I gulp down the sobs of a girl overwhelmed with the circumstances of her fate. Oh, how I wish the faces of my family weren't only available to me in my nightmares. I wish I could have Dina's sweet hugs of reassurance, Tevin's kind words, Riyaad making me his own particular tea blend that would always leave me feeling warm inside. Even Emon's stern reprimands would comfort me now. You're upset over some dream nonsense? Pull it together. I force myself to believe he's really said it to me to muster the strength to wipe the tears away.

It's even worse now that tributes are making appearances in the hellscape of my dreams. My allies, the closest thing I'll have to a family in that arena, make some sense. The others serve only to torment me. Circe with her taunts and tests, little Junie who I will not be able to save. Even the boy from District 10, who I haven't spoken a word to, whose name is not yet locked into memory, has arrived. I don't even want to dissect why he did so naked and ripped. Sure, I may have thought he was kind of handsome, but that's not a thought I can afford to have (although I do make a note to remember his - and of course all of the other tributes' - name).

The real darkness out my window indicates it's still way too early for the day to begin. Afraid to go back into the dangers of sleep, I decide to hoist myself out of bed, wrap the soft velvet housecoat they gave me around my body, and head to the dining table of the District 3 quarters to have an Avox make me a tea, perhaps give me some company. It would be nice to not be so alone for a minute.

A light is still on in the dining room as I arrive. It is not just an Avox that I am in the company of tonight; I am in the company of a Victor. Klaus sits with a tea half-gone. A million questions surrounding why my mentor may also be up at this hour swirl through my mind. Perhaps I'm not the only one here evading their nightmares.

I ask an Avox to bring me some tea as well, and take a seat across from the man training me to win. I don't ask for permission to start talking to him, but I don't sense that it's unwelcome when I do. "I can't take these nightmares anymore. I feel like I'm being haunted by ghosts that aren't even dead yet!" My cup of coffee arrives and I clasp my hands around it. My tone goes from exasperated to pleading. "How do you do it, Klaus? How do I kill all of these kids and come out the other end without taking them with me?"

I brace myself to hear the answer I already know.

[WC:812]

[junie st. james d7 ❁]

Klaus Goravich

It's been thirty years since Klaus has spent sleepless nights rocking a discomforted infant, but the motion comes back to him easily. 

Now he is no longer young, there is an ache in his bones that was not there the last time. He had almost forgotten the sleepless nights that came along with Daisy and Penelope; the midnights were buried beneath a thousand sunny days, and destroyed by the tide of long afternoons. With the child in his arms, it all comes back to him. 

There is a stoicism in experience. Unlike with Daisy, he does not watch the rise and fall of the small chest every moment, convinced it will stop. He has gained faith in the strength of babies, who, although fragile, have an untold strength, an ability to endure. And with Penelope-- with Penelope, he had paced the halls fearing she might never quieten, that she would be unhappy forever, that they would never emerge from the bout of croupe or teething episode. There is none of this anxiety now, only the wizened truth of it: that the baby would cry, and the baby would smile, and the baby would sleep when he slept and wake when he awoke. Klaus was content with this. He had nowhere to be. 

It was in the midst of one of these midnights that Klaus heard the crying. It came through the walls of the District Three suite as he swayed the crib. He stopped singing, letting the last words of his lullaby fall to the floor. Listening closely, he confirmed it; somebody was weeping. 

It was not an uncommon thing to do in the Training Centre. After all, Klaus himself had done it at least a dozen times over the past thirty-odd years. He tried to ignore it, to give whoever it was some space, but he found himself unable to. Instead, he was drawn to the sound, and followed it all the way to Safina's door. 

He places a hand on the doorknob, pauses, and decides against it. Instead, gratified by the silence from the nursery, he sets the kettle to boil. 

Little time passes before Safina emerges, enshrouded in a soft velvet dressing-gown. Klaus looks up from his tea.

"Couldn't sleep?" he asks her. 

She beckons for the Avox to bring her a hot drink, too. "I can't take these nightmares anymore. I feel like I'm being haunted by ghosts that aren't even dead yet!" 

Klaus nods. He understands this feeling all too well. 

"How do you do it, Klaus? How do I kill all of these kids and come out the other end without taking them with me?" 

He shakes his head slowly at her, sips his tea, buying for time. She already knows the answer, he knows, but she has requested he say it: confirm the truth with his stamp of experience. 

"You don't. You die or you live and you carry them with you, every day. You struggle to make it right, make it worth it." 

This is the real reason for the documentaries, for the house, for the children. The real reason for the endless journeys to the Capitol: to try and make it worth it. Why did Klaus Goravich survive? There needed to be a reason. He needed to make a reason. And in Daisy, and Penelope, and Goravich House, in the child who slept across the hall, he had created one. And he knows he will keep on in desperation, trying to ensure he is worth it, until the day he dies. 

He wants to apologise to Safina. "It's a terrible choice to have to make, but it's something only you can decide, Safina. Can you bare it?" 

He is not being unkind. He has decided, somewhere between the day he and Atticus decided it was time to change things for District Three, that a new approach to mentoring is in order. For the first time in his life, he is trying honesty.