"stars," she whispered. ☆ zoë's victor au's

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

☆

"stars," she whispered. "i can see the stars again, my lady."
a tear trickled down artemis's cheek. "yes, my brave one. they are beautiful tonight."
"stars," zoe repeated. her eyes fixed on the night sky.
and she did not move again.

- rick riordan, the titan's curse.

☆

aria

saffron

tiger
rowan
timothy
samira
scarlett
lace
quillon
wynter

☆

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

A R I A   W O L F E

 

She holds Peridot Myler in her hands.

An aching, an echo, two brothers slain. 

"Peri."

A whisper on his lips, cracked and covered in blood - he's still beautiful. Beautifully broken at the hands of Wednesdae. Despite this, his eyes still shine.

She washes the blood away with her tears. There's a chasm crumbling in her chest at every last shaky breath he heaves and she wipes away his tears anyway, fingertips on his cheek, fingertips in his hair. She rocks gently - for him, for her, for the both of them. For Kiera. For Bran. For Wes, even, laying crumpled on the ground mere meters away.

For all the kings children he should have conquered.

"Peri, please."

Her begging cannot save him. 

In his eyes - his eyes, he is no saviour, no victor, no Career Boy meant for a crown. He is Needleboy, enemy, friend, brother.

In another life, she gives her own for his.

In another life, she dies in his arms.

"I can fix... I can fix... I can... Peri..."

This time, her hands are shaking.

"Little girl..."

Ricochet canon fire, shrapnel in her heart.

Peridot Myler is no more.





She screams.

Howls.

The wolf pounces.

There is a fire burning underneath her skin and it brands her insides with his name. Incandescent, she takes his sword in her hands and howls as the flames reach her throat and the screams turn in to sobs and Wednesdae Drummond falls, again, to the sound of metal on metal and bone crunching and flesh hitting the ground, until he is still on the ground and the sword falls from her fingertips and all she has is her fists. 

So she keeps going. She pounds and screams and shouts long after the canon sounds and the voice of Ripred damned calls her to the stand. Ribs crunch upon impact, sternum snaps, and it  is all she can do until the helicopter comes for Peridot's body and the roar of the Capitol's cheers are silenced by her cries. 

His hair is still soft to the touch as she crawls from Wes to him again. It is all she can hold on to, all she can comprehend. Peri, Peri, Peri.

In another life, he is victorious.

In another life, he cradles her dead body as her soul departs from this world.

In another life, her home is in the sky.

Not in the heart of a dead boy.

Not in a crown on her head.

"Peri, please..."

They take her away from him, one way or another.

In this life - alive.

{  S I X T Y S E C O N D  }

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

T I G E R   C H A U T I N

 

She hasn't laughed in a while.

Artemis notices it before Tiger does. How could she not? All Tiger has done since she came home is smile at crowds and wave at children and hold her sister tightly, refusing to let go. 

The Victor hums the tune she'd played on the harmonica in that damn wagon and starts to sweat.

It's the heat of that place. It follows. Burning her up, all of her energy. But all they want is a smile. That damn trademark Tiger Chautin Victory Smile. Show us your teeth. No matter if your eyes are glazed over, no matter if you're not eating a damn thing, no matter if  you feel dead inside whenever Arty isn't around.

"Tiger?" Artemis asks one evening, curled up in her sisters arms on the couch and basking in the soft blue glow of the television screen. "Why don't you laugh anymore?"

Tiger blinks, turns to her little sister newly fifteen and grins. The freckles on her nose scrunch together like heads in a crowd - crowds she's juggled in front of, balanced in front of, cartwheeled in front of. 

They just want a show. They just want a show. They just want a show they just want a show I'm the show I'm the show I killed Leon Krigel I just want a show I just wanted a show I just wanted to live-

"Tig?"

"Huh?" she asks, voice empty as she pulls Artemis closer to her chest. 

"I said..."

Artemis Artemis Artemis. It's all she can concentrate on. Arty and her dark curly hair, Arty and her freckles, Arty safe in her arms. Not Leon Krigel with a knife in his eye not Siren Baitwell coughing up dirt not Cricket Antoinette looking at her like a prized possession not JEM DEAD ON THE GROUND NOT POTATO WITH HIS HEAD ON THE FLOOR NOT GAVIN WITH A KNIFE IN HIS STOMACH-

Tiger gasps and coughs, swallowing their deaths back down. She chokes on her feelings in descent. 

"TIGER STOP IT HURTS-"

And only then does she realise her sister can't breathe in her prison of spindly arms and Tiger is sweating, humming, unable to speak, unable to-

"STOP IT!"

She lets go and yelps, gasping, "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm-"

Artemis sheds a tear and sighs, taking her sister's hands. 

"You never laugh any more."

As they sit in silence nurturing their wounds, the 67th Bloodbath begins again on their television screen.

{  S I X T Y S E V E N T H  }

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

R O W A N   C O M B E

 

In another life, Gavin Barker ruled with her.

But this was not that life. Gavin Barker was dead and Rowan Combe was somehow alive.

She was an anti-climatic Victor, hiding in the shadows once her allies had died. A disappointing Quell - there was always the 75th, they supposed. From being dragged out of the Bloodbath to bleeding out beside Key to running away when her friends needed her most Rowan was a bore to some, a coward to most, a nightmare to only herself.

She'd lived. She shouldn't have, but she lived. She climbed up to the very top of the clock tower and watched them kill each-other day after day after day. And when that got boring they'd knocked the tower down and she fell with it, waiting for a death that never came.

A yawn, until the Gamemakers sent her to take down Kirito Miristioma. Finally some drama. Avenge her near-death experience, revenge for her own life. And he'd nearly done it too, all rage and desperation in hands wrapped tightly around her throat. But Rowan Combe knew how to get out of nightmares all too well. A rock in her hand had met the side of his head and crack, she had won.

After the first week of nightmares she took so many pills to keep her from sleep that her body went into shock. 

After the second week she slammed her head into her bedroom door over and over and over again just to hear the crack of her own skull instead of Kirito's.

After the third week Tiger Chautin took her in her arms and she wept into the girl's chest until she had no more tears left. That didn't stop her crying.

Tiger let her mourn. Stroked her hair, dried her tears, whispered into her ears. They sat on the hallway floor of the Training Centre for hours and hours and hours until Tiger started to cry too, Rowan's tears now hers.

They wept for Gavin. They wept for themselves. They wept for the lives they once had and the lives they will never have again and all of the lives they could not save.

Tiger stayed with her every night until it was time to go. Every nightmare, every time Rowan woke screaming, every single bump in the night Tiger was there to lull her back to sleep.

Her night terrors from before were nothing but lucid dreams. But Tiger would call her every night before they went to bed and tell her about her day, her sister, Rowan would talk about her grandmother and her new dog. 

Seventy-first, eighty-first, they held each other every year and cried and mourned but the nightmares always got a little easier once Tiger was there.

In their conjoined dreams Gavin Barker would smile - and in every single universe her could see his two girls found him and each-other over and over and over again.

As they slept side-by-side in this universe, Rowan and Tiger smiled back.

{  S E V E N T I E T H  }

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

T I M O T H Y   F E L D O N

 

Six months after Timothy Feldon slaughtered six children and lived to tell the tale, he climbed to the top of the Justice Building to watch dawn break across the horizon.

He spread what was left of his arms wide and drank in the sunlight. He'd cut off his hand himself toward the end, sick and tired of seeing Kite attached to it long after the blind boy had died.

That didn't stop him from appearing, so the Capitol intervened just in time to save his remaining eye from the wrath of a spoon in the Dining Hall and President Snow's rage could be heard throughout Panem, demanding the doctors fix the damned, maddened Victor from Nine in time for his Victory Tour.

They tried. At least he could give them that. Sent him back sedated, Peacekeepers stationed at his front and back doors - they didn't know how to climb up a chimney and escape through the neighbourhood roofs. Timothy nodded and complied until they left him with pills to swallow himself, flushed down the toilet and thrown out the window or into the fire. 

The darkness returned. The shaking. The dark angels, the flutter of wings - he felt them travel up, up, up - he wanted to join them.

So he climbed. Out of his bedroom window. Over the rooftops. Out of sight. Down drainpipes, over half-finished buildings, hopped through factory floors and chased the birds up staircases and over washing lines, faster, faster, he kept up - just.

They led him to the top of the Justice Building, so up he went - just in time to see the sunrise.

Dawn broke and he flew like an angel.

Then he fell, an angel damned.

Boy born to fly, he joined the dead six feet under instead.

{  S E V E N T Y - S E C O N D  }

[[ retro gm ] angel lí ✨]

S A M I R A   H A R T

 

"They're not happy, are they?"

Samira sits in front of her sister, what's left of her right hand clamped tightly around Reese's left, bouncing her right knee up and down.

---

("We jump. Together."

".....Sam?"

"On three."

"Sam. Sam I-"

She's crying now. Thinking of Poppy. Thinking of Paisley.
Thinking  of how much she loves them all.

Knowing how selfish she is for doing this.
For not killing him.

"I know."

Deep breath, she takes his hand and turns toward the abyss.

"One, two, thr-"

"STOP! Stop! Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you the Victors of the Seventy Fourth Annual Hunger Games!")

---

"No."

Poppy was always the calm one. So was Reese. It's why she was drawn to them. Calm before the storm that she was. Calm in the storm she had created, standing over Pillar Fray's dead body on the edge of the collapsed henge crevices, hair dancing in the wind and telling Reese that she loved him too much to kill him.

"No, they're not."

Poppy doesn't say anything for a while. It's not unusual, but Sam wishes she would. Paisley is rooms away but they still keep their voices quiet.

"Shit," her sister hisses, folding forward to rest her elbows on her knees and run her hands through blonde hair. Poppy won't look at Reese. She hasn't since they came back. At first it annoyed Sam - but slowly, slowly she started to understand why.

"It's bad enough you killed the One victor's sister."

The way the Keepers crowded closer and closer around them, fingertips balanced on their triggers. The way that the cameras wanted to film Paisley almost as much as they did Sam and Reese. The single white rose left on their doorstep that morning, now lying on the coffee table sat between them.

"What did Patricia suggest?" her sister asks, gnawing on her nails nervously. Sam shifts uncomfortably, palms clammy in Reese's grasp.

"She, uh - she's staying out of it. Haven't spoken to her in a while. Said to lay low, keep off the drink, don't do anything stupid."

Poppy scoffs at that. "Then I'm getting rid of the liquor."

"I've been sober for three months Pop-"

"I'm not talking about you."

Finally, finally she looks at Reese. Sam follows her gaze and meets a vacant face - blush in his cheeks, chest rising and falling, very much alive. But his eyes. His eyes are as dead as they were in the arena.

It makes her heart hurt. Absent-mindedly she traces the scar left by Pillar under her left collarbone, the wound too close to her heart for the Capitol to try heal completely. She wants him back. She wants, needs Reese. Before it happened. Dancing Reese. Kind Reese. Smiling Reese. The Reese she risked everything for. The Reese that proved what she'd done was worth it.

The Reese that wasn't better off dead in her arms with her spear through his neck.

Sam sighs. "Fair enough."

When they first left that place he had wept, broken and bloody and barely alive. Sam had held him and stroked his hair until he fell asleep in her arms. She was there for him. She was there for Poppy and Paisley, scooping them up from their mothers home prepared for a fight. What was another after murdering five children?

But her mother hadn't said a word. Just sighed, gave Sam a nod and kissed the girls goodbye. 

If she'd known that was all it took to get them out she might have volunteered.

She took care of them. All of them. Poppy helped with Paisley, dragging her away from her biggest sister when she needed a moment. But nobody took care of Sam. Not on the press tour, not in the Capitol, not even in her own home. 

Paisley was her usual self - minus the outbursts, the outings in the night, anything that kept her away from Sam she shed on her fourteenth birthday. Poppy was quieter. Much more stern. She saw it coming before Sam did. The whispers. The murmurs. But Poppy had always been the smartest of them all. Reese... well. He was as good as he could be. Occasionally he drifted back there, as did Sam. Saw red. Saw fire. Saw the mountain collapse and heard the trackers buzz in his ears and felt the ground shake when nobody else could.

So she helped him. She had kept him here, in this universe, after all.

But nobody helped Sam.

Not even the drink. It wasn't enough. She took a pill on her fifth night of the tour and the things she saw were near worse than that in the arena. Flushed down the toilet the next morning, shaking, with the sting of vomit in the back of her throat, she'd crawled up onto the stage and read her script word for word cold and sober.

God knows Reese can't do it, some advisor from Seven had spat on the train. Sam had lunged, an inch from clipping his nose with her fist, it took two victors and an escort to keep her at arms length. Never mind the vile atrocities she'd screamed about killing his whole family.

Afterwards he'd joked over an apology - "At least they can't say you don't love him."

Of course she loved him. She was Sam. Still fighting. Still looking after those she loved. And she loved Reese unlike anyone else - a different kind of love to that of her sisters. The Capitol noticed it. They bought it. So did the people on the tour. She was still Sam. She loved him.

She loved him so much, even if he wasn't the same.

But she was different too. Changed. More terrible, somehow, without the drink and the pills and the poverty. No more excuses. Just memories. Awful, violent memories that woke her up screaming and pulled her into Reese's arms, body shaking like the avalanche she fell through on the mountain.

Like her knee, trembling in the living room, remembering how the force had thrown her around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and arou-

"I'm taking Paisley to school," Poppy says finally, standing up from the arm chair with a huff.

"We can-" Sam begins, but her sister shakes her head and cuts her off.

"I think it's best if I do it."

"She's right" mumbles Reese incoherently. The sound startles both sisters, snapping their heads toward him in shock.

He looks back at Sam - a small glimmer still left in them. Guilt. Perhaps regret.

"Okay." It croaks from her throat, heart lurching, bouncing knee now coming to a frank stop in its place.

When the door shuts and Sam looks out the window to watch the girls trek down the Victor's Village pathway escorted by a Keeper the room spins, dances, with her erratic, paranoid mind. The gun. All she can focus on is the stark white of his gun following them out of sight. A target on their heads, she put it there. 

She put it there. 

"I need the..."

Sam vomits on the wooden floor. Reese doesn't even flinch.

The conversation ends, but the white rose in the center of the room speaks volumes.

{  S E V E N T Y F O U R T H  }