like gold dust | dars

[alex 🐺]

Ex knew before she did because of course she did. The watchful eye of the Capitol, the mouthpiece of those in power (although some would argue that Turing Ayres and Astrid Demander were giving her a run for her money), Ex was lazily scrolling through her Twitter feed one night when the email came through. Stella was perched in bed, a book in her lap as her right hand ran up and down Ex’s left arm. A present reminder of her presence as they shared the same space. Stella lived] for these moments, and they were stolen moments. Fleeting times when the cameras moved away from them and they could just be.

”Darling, you should see this,” Ex’s voice broke Stella’s revery, the words on the page of her novel lost in the rising and falling of the timbres of Ex’s tone. Stella sat up straighter, the blanket falling around her waist. A blank tank and matching black panties clung to the blonde’s frame and the heat in the room spiked up by twenty degrees. Stella pulled down her glasses - another gift from the Capitol and her stylist thanks to Aeson Kight. She threw them on the cream bedspread wordlessly. The boy had left her scarred, her cheeks blackened burned with his wrath, his anger damaging her vision and nearly breaking her spirit. Taking the phone from Ex, Stella read the email, her eyes dancing across the screen.

”That little piece of shit!” Stella was up in a flash, grabbing the black silk robe from behind the Penthouse door and moving silently through the room. She pulled it on, the exquisite fabric wrapping around her body like armor. Ex was powerless to stop her and Stella knew that the woman wouldn’t dare try.

”Babe! There’s nothing you can - “ rang after her as the door slammed and Stella angrily punched the down elevator. She was fuming. The words stuck in her throat, burning to ash, and she exhaled it like smoke. Punching the number Seven with disgust, she rehearsed what she would say to him, the words failing her as the floors dropped below her.

They never told you about the pain after you won. They never told you that the Capitol would stitch you back together with parts that no longer belonged to you. A body made of flesh, muscle, bones, and ivory that was not yours any longer. Property of the Capitol stamped on your smile. Chaos covered in roses and the gods could not save you now. They were suffering in their own right. A tyrant with a rusted crown. A derelict body of a beating heart turned dark.

They never told you how to play the game. How to act gracious and maneuver yourself through the crowds, but respect was inherently built into any interactions. Or so the young blonde had thought as the Seventh Floor bell dinged and the elevator opened. She whirled through the doors and approached the door, her fist a ball as she slammed it against his apartment.

“What the fuck, Mackenzie?!” she yelled, not even waiting for him to open the door. The Avoxes who stood on every floor watched her in silence, obviously. They saw all but said nothing, and Stella sometimes envied them their place. To see without the bias of words. To observe without the pain of interacting. To watch quietly, knowing all but having no hand in the game.

What the fuck Mack really think he was pulling with poaching sponsors out from under her like that? She had groomed them. Hours spent plying them with alcohol, touches on their arm, promises of a return on their investment (blood for blood, wrath for wrath, the thrill of the kill). Ex had come in as her closer, the older blonde wrapping herself around Stella, promises dripping from her silver lips.

She pounded the door again, her anger smoldering as she shivered in the hallway, her warm bed abandoned for a fight with another Victor that would bring nothing but ill will and burnt bridges.

“Mack, seriously!”

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

When    you    walk    away
Nothing    more    to    say
See the lightning in your eyes
See 'em running for their lives

No one was on his side. One of the gamemakers had paid Mackenzie a private visit just to ensure that much: he was alone. Jacinta, numb and afraid all at once. Jacquelyn, too corrupted by the pretty view her birth in the Capitol had allotted her. Even his tributes seemed set on getting him into trouble and he didn't know what he was doing. He was beginning to wonder if anyone really did, or if this was all just smoke and mirrors to hide the ignorant truth from the general public.

He had attended every single sponsorship banquet, drank himself past his own comfort zone in order to appease the Capitol elite, allowed their fingertips to cling to his arm longer than necessary in order to feed their insatiable appetite. He'd made himself a purchasable item for them, and it was dehumanizing but it worked. When the silver parachutes rained down from the skies, Lex and Angel were among the recipients.

He wanted, more than anything, to cease feeling for just a while. It was strange, how suddenly emotions other than anger had hit him. It had been so long, too long, he feared. He worried he no longer knew how to handle himself. He'd worried for so long that he was broken and now he feared that he had learned to prefer the numbness.

But even the thought of alcohol was enough to make his stomach turn. He hadn't ever really enjoyed it in the first place; wine tasted like feet, beer tasted like horse piss, everything else tasted like bleach. So, he resigned to his room, staring blankly at the ceiling, half-listening to the television across the room. No one has died. He knew what that meant, what the punishment for living was. Mackenzie thought of storms, of tidal waves and creatures of shadow. He thought of the very trees around him coming unearthed and crashing, leaving him no choice but to face Belladonna Ruze.

The demons that would come would not be friendly; they never were.

When the knock sounded at the door, his first instinct was to ignore it. Jacquelyn had tried a couple times to summon him, but eventually she'd taken the hint and left him to his silence. He doubted she would've come back all these hours later unless it was urgent, though.

He stood, unshaven and half-dressed, stretched his arms over his head.

"What the fuck, Mackenzie?"

Even through the thick, supposedly soundproof doors, he heard it. He saw the silhouette of a woman who was not Jacquelyn through the distilled glass. He stopped where he stood. Maybe it would've been better to just climb back into bed; he didn't feel up to dealing with yet another person he'd managed to piss off.

"Mack, seriously."

"Okay! Damn," he grumbled, running a hand through his hair and pulling on a button-up shirt.

He slid his key card over the scanner and his door slid open to reveal a very perturbed Stella Blakesely standing on the other side of it. She was a petite thing. Saying the top of her head was level with his chest was generous; he wondered how she had managed to survive against monsters like Aeson Kight and Euley Sarasin.

He leaned against the door frame and began buttoning up his shirt.

"Don't suppose you just dropped by to say hey?"

song: you're gonna go far, kid

[alex 🐺]

She wears a different face in each atrocity. In each moment. In each heartbeat. Her chest heaving before he opens the door, his muddled voice filtering through the cold steel and she hears an “Okay! Damn.” She grows weeds in her chest where her heart used to contain a garden and the poison lingers. Her anger dissolves as she clenches the satin robe more snugly around her torso. Dissolves but burns like embers, a light that never goes out. She’s always angry now, a blame that she wears like a tattered banner wrapped around her shoulders.

He’s taller than her, thinner than the photographs strewn across banners and littering the streets of the Capitol make him out to be. The cameras always lie, though. The stubble on his cheek and chin dark and his eyes distant. He wore the hallmarks of survival on his chest that was quickly disappearing from view as he buttoned up his shirt.

"Don't suppose you just dropped by to say hey?" Stella takes a step backward so they aren’t chest to chest and her eyes find his. They were both so new at this and Stella gives pause before she sighs. What the fuck had she even been mad about the in the first place? Ah yes, sponsors.

“You -” she begins, a hand moving to riffle through too-blonde hair that her stylist was convinced would go great with the burgundies and marroons that were “so this year,” or so the woman had claimed. She glances around, the Avoxes still silently guarding the hallway and looks back at Mackenzie.

“Can I - ?” her question hangs in the air as she enters his apartment, eyes dancing across the walls and the furniture in the room. The door closes behind her before she wheels back to face him.

“Teddy and I came up with a system when I first got here. To help each other with sponsors. So that we wouldn’t step on each other’s toes, if you will. I want to extend the same courtesy to you, even if I did just nearly knock down your door.” S

he reminds herself that he is deadly. That she is too, and if circumstances were different - he would have been the boy she had faced in the finale two years ago. She wrings her hands in front of her waist, unsure. No one had given her a roadmap either and it certainly didn’t get easier. Selling yourself for a drink, for a medkit, for an armored vest never quite felt right, but it was all expected of her. You give them a chance. A night. A day. Two days. And maybe they surprise you and make it out alive. And maybe they don't. 

“I’m not great at this - the talking and the schmoozing and the prostitution for our tributes,” a dry laugh escapes her throat. “But at least this way we can make sure we can give them something before they die, you know?”