disconsolateness [FIESTA]

[*]

Carter's words linger, hurting me emotionally and devastatingly ravishing my mind. Darkness no longer pilfers my way, but it has taken away my want to survive. We are all cursed to be subjected to the capital's cruel humor for keeping us alive. Keeping Quest alive and Faux alike, it is cruel ass torture. Faux's sudden leave in the middle of the argument with Carter blew through my heart. A kind of wound that will never heal and as I had sauntered by him, I couldn't dare look in his direction. If only Wander had taken both eyes in her journey to protect those that needed protection, then maybe I wouldn't have to feel I needed to hide.

Afterall, out of sight is out of mind, right?

My lips crack as nothing has passed my lips since my untimely departure from the arena and landed me here. I am broken, both in spirit and in body, but they don't care about that at all. I can finally waste away from my own accord. At least the docs were more worried about my mortal wounds then the aftercare of the mentality of it's hostages.

Hostages such as Quest, who lays in a coma like state covered in bandages and threaded back together skin. My heart hurts for her in a way that I can't explain. She wasn't trying to win. Neither was I. We were both used and here we ended up.

Perhaps, if only she could attest to what Carter had claimed, then my presence in the vault would likely die away. The games took away something that I'll never get back. But, her slumbering form has only made me feel like I had a purpose in this form of afterlife. Coming here early on, made me feel alone and isolated even with Faux and Oliver here. I don't want her to feel that way. There was always something about Quest that I couldn't figure out.

"Quest? Thank you - for protecting Carmen. It's something that I couldn't do." I whisper out and touch the arm of my most recent ally. Touching her icy skin felt weird. She was supposed to be dead, just the same as I was. What should be mourning was turning into some form of greeting.

I fucking hate this -

Sharp pains resonate in my head, bouncing around the missing orbital that used to house my perfect vision and for once I regret taking off the bandages in the heat of the argument. Going blind once more doesn't seem like an option, unfortunately. Neither does asking for death from Glamour as he's probably highly ecstatic that for the first games all of us actually get to live. It doesn't help as I stare at the IV going into her arm and can somehow taste the sweet morphling that I was weaned off on too early. "Drink up. You'll miss it when they take it away." I scoff, piling my head into my hand, resenting what quality of life I now have.

Fiona Words: c98667
Others Words: e7cbbe

[Deleted]

Quest Hertz

Can't we be seventeen
Is that so hard to do?
If you could let me in
I could be good with you

Lips move, faces blurred around a dinner table.

‘We missed you, hon.’ Mom’s got the same glassy eyes as always. Her breath smells like schnapps (butterscotch, which she switches to in winter). I think about the lines around her eyes, how she’s fifty miles of bad road but loves herself exactly as she is, and that I’m proud of it. Of her.

‘You and Ether can come tomorrow to the scrap yard. Found a whole slew of old engines that we can tear apart. Can get ourselves top dollar for some of it.’ My father’s beard is stubble, ashen and black, of days not sleeping or paying mind to the world. He’d take us down to the junk heap so that he could line his pockets – an exercise in us being together, but for his benefit.

Ether was hunched over the wood of the table, fingers plucking at a lace doily. He stops to stare at me, an up and down, once over. He only has to smile for me to know that it’s love – about the only one that could make me flush, to know that he felt something.

There’s a pot boiling stew on a burner over a blue flame. The little washcloth hangs on the handle of the oven – my face is there, an odd bit of memorabilia from the 80th. A heavy snow drifts across a fogged windowpane, and the radiator along the far wall hisses out a spray of steam. I think about how when I was little, we sat across from one another like this, a whole family ready to fracture into pieces. I don’t think it happened all at once. Nothing like that happens just all of a sudden. There were nights where my father worked late, coming home as the sun rose dressed in his scrubs from the hospital, eyes red and empty. Or my mother made a new friend out at the bar, and made her own way home after we’d gone to sleep. Except Ether and I could hear their voices down the hall when she crept in, stumbling through the living room in the darkness as though her muscle memory would let her through just once without stubbing her damn toe on the ottoman.

I used to wish that we weren’t so imperfect. Then I gave up on wishing because I realized that they were never going to get any better. That was a cold day, knowing your father and mother aren’t gods but mortal just as much as anyone else. I had to love the little pieces of them that I could, and leave the rest to remind me that there were things I didn’t have to love. It’s easier to protect yourself when you can tell what parts of another person just might kill you if you let them close enough.

I try to remember where I’ve come from – how I got back here, but all I can think is that I hope it doesn’t end. I hope that the four of us sitting around the table is forever, that we could just not move, not breathe, not do a damn thing. And I think that it’s so fucking broken, wanting to be a piece of something that’s so worthless. Broken people trying to be a family that was never meant to stay together. But it’s all I have, this thing in front of me, and I can’t let go. Because if I let go, I feel like I’m not going to exist anymore – that maybe this dream, or reality, is the last part of me to exist before it’s just nothing.

‘You’re okay,’ I say, my voice distorted and echoing across the room.

There’s no reply – now no faces, no bodies in chairs, just another hiss of a radiator. I’m alone and I start to feel the world pull into my chest, deep down into me and through.

‘Quest? Thank you - for protecting Carmen. It's something that I couldn't do.’

I could hear Fiona before I could see her. Thanking me for doing my job, as though there’d ever been any question of just who I was. I don’t want to be here, I thought, with Fiona next to me and touching me as though we’re sisters sharing secrets. I don’t want her here, seeing me, when I can’t get away. I wasn’t supposed to be here at all – through all my bad decisions, this seemed the running theme. I opened an eye, and then another to get a good glimpse of Fiona under the white lights. She’s still light and airy, blond and still whole. Aside from the lack of an eye thing, which probably proved to be a major bummer in comparison to my fixable injuries. Drink up. You'll miss it when they take it away.

“Thanks.” I managed, my chest rising and falling with effort.

This is where I was supposed to spill my guts to her, tell her that I should’ve said something about the note she’d written me. Here I was, given a second chance to do the right thing, to make good with someone that’d gone and given her life so the other three of us hadn’t had to. Except I don’t fucking feel like spilling myself and pulling myself apart again. How did I know this wasn’t just another part of the torture, that they wanted us to come apart after death and have some sort of revelation (or feel worse for the things we’d done)?

“Fiona…” I wheezed.

But I can be honest.

“I’m glad you’re here.” I grinned. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, you know? Oh shit – too soon, huh?” I let out a laugh, slow at first, drawing on a little too long. She knew it was the drugs, right? This was the good shit, after all.

“How’s the afterlife treating you?”

*Seventeen from The Heathers