For[get] All The Echoes // (Luke; JB)

[L△LIA]

( C A L L I O P E L O R N E B L O O M )

Shoes crack where you walk
Settle down inside
Outside, amazing
Cut it back and get in some clean fresh air
Acute angles divide my path that I had lost

You are terrified about what you will find behind the door separating you from Cyrus Malloc. Last year, it was Ethan Taurus and your thoughts are still a contradicting whirlwind of mixed emotions. All the wrong words slipped out your mouth when you spoke with him, despite your righteous intentions. For being so smart, there are all too many things you don't know. This year is setting itself up backwards, promising to start with confusion and unravel into understanding, instead of the other way around. Cyrus volunteered. This thought nags at you with unfathomable horror accompanied by an inherent fragment of respect. Saving someone is supposed to make this different. He stepped up for a boy named Jon that neither of you know and you don't understand this. You don't understand how Cyrus can step up for a stranger, while your living brother refused to volunteer to save your now dead one. Where was Cyrus when Aesop's name was called two years ago? Where was Napoleon? Why not then?

Maybe today someone had their brother saved, but it wasn't you. Some selfish part of you manages to hate Cyrus Malloc for his badly timed gift of salvation, seething with jealousy and resentment that seem to die the moment you push the door open and step into the room beyond. Everything within you dies when you enter this room. This is the third time you have sacrificed your heart to the crush of the Justice Building and this year, it's a sensation that's beginning to feel familiar. Maybe you'll be used to it next time. Next time. Despite knowing you'll continue to return every year (until maybe a day comes when you are the one being visited), the idea of such vicious repetition makes it difficult to breathe. The echoes of history are not only deafening in their silence, but suffocating as well. "Your name is Cyrus?" Still, voice arcing above the numbness of your soul, your tongue remembers how to start this all-too-familiar conversation. "I'm Calliope Bloom. You did a —" stupid, idiotic, foolish, crazy, "— brave thing." This doesn't feel any easier than the times before, but it's beginning to feel almost natural and that terrifies you most of all.

Tongue tied, couldn't talk
Settle down inside
Outside, amazing
Haven't lost
Haven't cured at all

[/size]

[cyrus]

Here was the boy that had volunteered his life for another, watching as his family disappeared off the horizon, behind another gray building, and into the void. There came a whisper that another had come to see him, and Cyrus did not turn from his spot on the plush carpet. His arms rested gently at his sides as he gazed out at district six. He wasn’t sad to say goodbye to this place. All the roads here were dead ends. Perhaps the most important lesson that I ever learned here, was that it cannot offer me what I’m looking for?

Cyrus had never been inside of his own skin here. He stumbled over his words and drifted into dazes thinking of numbers and about how he couldn’t understand why people would do things that way instead of this way. He’d work himself into a tizzy and flap his arms, or rush out to get away from all of them, those that saw him as different or worse, difficult. His autism afforded him few chances in a world that saw difference as a weakness. He'd been contented only in secluding himself in the confines of his father’s work, scraping and measuring hunks of metal.

But he was not locked away anymore. He had seen the opportunity offered—the chance to break through the wall that trapped him—and taken it. The weight of his anxiety should have crushed him then, and yet here the boy stood, serene in his duty as a tribute. A young woman had entered the room, and Cyrus slowly turned to face her. When she spoke, he turned to listen, a small smile on his face.

“Thank you.

[/b]” Cyrus stared at Calliope. She was the sister of one of the craziest, yet most successful male tributes from district six that had ever lived—Aesop Bloom—and she had come to speak to him. She must have something important to say, or else she wouldn’t be here. Cyrus tried to his usual path of reason rather than feeling. He didn’t think of her pain just yet—he wasn’t ready to acknowledge the hurt the games wrought families. “But I don’t know if you can call me brave. I did this for myself.” [/blockquote][/size]