i can see { five } hundred years dead set ahead of me »train

[✨ zozo.]

and all you can hear
is the sound of your own heart
and all you can feel is your lungs flood
and the blood course

S A M I R A  H A R T

but oh i can see
five hundred years dead-set ahead of me
five hundred behind, a thousand years
in perfect symmetry

The last time my hands shook this much I woke up in a ditch.

Skin itches like there's a rash crawling underneath my skin and I wonder if this is relapse. Life, living, whether or not I would wake up in the morning, it was all a risk I would take - a choice. Now I sit here with Death pointing his finger straight at my heart and calling me bluff. (Pop a pill, laugh, pop another, laugh, pop another, cry, pop another, scream, pop another, death? Not quite.) Here I stand, trembling hands and all. He never used to scare me because it was always my choice. Death, a gamble, and the gambler in all her washed up glory.

A glass shatters on the floor below me, I don't flinch. Instead I let it sit there, shards glittering as the tears I refuse to cry. The weight of the liquid inside of it still hangs at my fingertips and I can smell the defeat I almost drank - no. This is no time for games when I'm not the dealer. My life, a card in death's hands.

If I sit on my hands perhaps they'll stop shaking. It's the least I can do because the itching won't cease no matter what I do and I'm scared that if I start, I won't be able to stop until I am nothing but a skeleton ripped into shreds from the inside out.

Fighters come from District Five, I know that all too well. Survivors come from District Five, born and bred and raised up to be admired. I am anything but the latter, but I am something of the former - fighter, survivor. Not for me, but for them. (Thinking of their names, their faces, their grief: too much.) The girl who wakes up in the ditch and gets up and walks until she finds a temporary home night after night after night. Fighter, Survivor. Addict, Lost Cause. Damned if she does, damned if she doesn't.

So she does.

"Tell me," she murmurs to her fellow damned soul from Five. "Are you a fighter, or a survivor?"

D I S T R I C T F I V E

[rook]

p a t r i c i a v a l f i e r n o

i heard the tv
and it told me you shouldn't grieve
there is something more if you believe in god's love
but i've seen too many scenes
in which the people i love fall to their knees

It starts how it always starts. First came an obstinacy of trucks, barraging through the streets in the early hours of yesterday. Their cargo ranged from scaffolding to high-end expensive camera equipment, but each truck looked identical to the last. Through the engine fumes emerged the mass of Capitol-hired workers, lugging the framework and lighting units to their required positions. It always used to amaze me how they set it all up in less than a week, but these days I don't invest my awe in such trivial things as event organisation, even if said event is the Hunger Games. Next, came the officials. The project managers, the on-screen pundits, the experts, and of course the representatives who draw the names from the pool. They always look ridiculous. I'm starting to think that I'm used to it. The Peacekeepers, of course, arrived long before anyone else, making their presence known with a frankly terrifying display of numbers across every street intersection and rooftop. The white army, dotted on every corner of District Five. Finally came me and Lethe, positioned for all to see on small wooden chairs at the rear of the stage.

It ends how it always ends. Two poor souls being fished out of the hoarde and thrusted into the limelight, their faces agape with the horror of it all. Oh, how I remember it so vividly. My face was just like theirs - full of absolute terror. I said my goodbyes that day, not expecting to see this place again, but here I am staring at the same sun-scorched grey buildings with the all-too familar smell of manure drifting in from the fields. I made the experts look stupid. They said an outsider would never win the 68th, not with such prime Career talent in the mix. The nature of the caves would send middle-District Tributes insane, they claimed, and they were right. Plenty lost their minds down there, but not me, I found something different altogether. I found my purpose.

Lethe and I traverse towards the station as this year's Tributes are taken to the Justice Building to say their goodbyes to their families. I cannot begin to explain how difficult it is to say goodbye to the person you love most in this world, knowing for a fact that you will never see them again. Somehow I betrayed that goodbye. The words I said six years ago to the day are burning like a cancer in my brain, and I just can't tell myself that they don't matter now.

It's not long before the Tributes are forced onboard and the locomotive strains into a steady pace. No going back for them. One of them is going to die, if not both. If I can make it the former, then I'll have achieved something this decade.

No sooner than we in the main carriage, I reach for a wide glass and neck back a whiskey. Lethe gives me a disapproving glance.
"Give over. It's for the chest pain." I say, not entirely sure if I'm telling the truth or not. Sometimes it helps me to forget that I was stabbed clean through the chest, sometimes it's because I can't deal with the emotions that come flooding back on days like today, sometimes it's to help me compose myself before I speak to the Tributes, and sometimes just because.

"Suit yourself, sister." I set the glass down and playfully punch Lethe in the arm as I walk past, heading towards the carriage where the poor souls are being detained. Better do this sooner, rather than later.

Lethe has been incredible these past couple of years. She's really taken mentoring into her stride, doing everything in her power to keep these kids alive. Thus far, we haven't been successful, but we've sent them in knowing that we've done everything we can. That's all anyone can ask for, really. I'm proud of her for stepping up to the plate. She did it completely on her own last year too, given my suspended sentence away from the Capitol. I guess people really can change, given the right amount of time and aggression.

Samira is a scarecrow of a girl, with faded blonde hair and an expression that is more lost than I can possibly fathom. She is impossibly thin, and her eyes are hungry - but for what? She looks a bit like Pearl, but I reject the thought as quickly as it arrives, as it makes me feel a bit sick.

Alexandre, or Sacha as the media are now saying, is altogether a different mystery. The blood has drained from his cheeks, and his eyes are straining as he attempts to keep it all together and not break down. This is understandably difficult for both of them, as it was for me, as it was for Lethe, as it was for the countless others.

"Tell me," I hear Sam say to Sacha as I slip into the room quitly, "Are you a fighter, or a survivor?"

I've always claimed to be a survivor. It's an interesting question. In theory, all survivors are fighters, but not all fighters are surviors. The difference is that survivors change who they are to win, whilst fighters resist it. You can't afford to have morals in the Hunger Games, else I would have died in that cave. Some other survivor would have worn my crown.

"If you're not here to survive then tell me now so that I don't have to waste my time on you." I interrupt, "I understand this is hard for the two of you but the worst thing you can do right now is shut down. You need to come to terms with where you are, where you're going, and what that means. Yes, you'll have to fight, you'll even have to kill, but if you want to survive then you'll need to adapt, and fast."

As usual, I've probably gone in too hard on them, but going by previous years, I've been too soft on those who "give up" in the first few hours.
"Patricia Valfierno, by the way. I know this sucks, but you're not going to die if I can help it."

so as i am without faith
tell me what should i dream of
oh tell me
why should i do anything at all

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

☆

S a c h a

A glass falls from her hands.

You grew up from tripping over your own feet. There are habits learned in adding five astronomic inches in one year, and you are used to scraping your knees on pavements, used to picking yourself up without second thought of what it was you had left broken across that floor. A pile of yourself is of District Five, accidental castaways you lost to carelessness.

Before Seve, you carried a pocket full of band-aids, tended to your own wounds after each fall – you survived. You breathed. It was how people moved to live.

But it isn’t you who dropped it.

She is shaking. Or your eyes are. Vision in prisms, she rattles as the glass glitters to the movement of the train. Something is shaking too hard within split skeletons; something is wobbling in the spaces between cardboard cutout people, and you’re afraid it’ll fall apart – that you left too many cleft bones behind to stand against this ache.

You don’t want to die. To leave bits and pieces and dust. To find out exactly how impermanent everything can be, will be, fleeting.

To not be in District Five anymore.

To be missed.

Because death is a lot like disappearing.

The glass breaks, but no one moves to fix it.
The train is quiet and quaking until,
"are you a fighter, or a survivor?"

You existed symbiotically.

You forgot what it was like to live disjointed. Fight, survive – both melted into circadian rhythms. The tempo of movement changed; you fell differently, senselessly from all those times before. Expected the earth and found the sky. There had been no chance in surviving that fall; you had always so stupid on your feet.

Fight, kill, survive. Two more inches into adulthood, and you grew into him, found the sound of his pulse a body away every night and softened into a new way of breathing still embedded into a cotyledon, a sense memory unfaltering as you forget. It is not gone.

“I’m not –”

You don’t remember how.

Patricia does not remind you.

And you find something to hold onto before you answer, cling onto anything for some kind of grounding. There’s barely a stutter, just a sway when you ask,

“how?”