from the ruin [Tom]

[WT]

Nothing feels quite like walking through death and emerging on the other side with a shattered sense of self and the looming task of coming to terms with the things you never wanted to know you could do. The world refuses to crystallize into a perfect disastrous moment, a state both irreparably altered and unable to move on; it turns like it always has, and you keep up or you don't.

Watching someone you love walk that path without reaching the other end feels worse.

There will be an avalanche of reunions in the coming days, some easier than others: family, friends, young loves, beloved places each tribute thought they might never see again. Against all odds the Theft twins will ride another train together; young Carmen will see the sister whose life she would have died to save. Bidelia will see Hellion, perhaps—Aranica never did hear the story behind that volunteering—and Hellion herself will see her family. Carter will only see most of his.

Will they stop asking me how I feel about siblings? Aranica asked Kette and Illario weeks that feel like months ago, thinking of Mitchell Laws' last stuttered words and of her own hand tiny in Dru's and shaking in Anani's and already knowing the answer would be never. Tributes are the only people in Panem, after all, with less privacy than Victors. Death dampens that indignity in some ways, passes it to someone else's shoulders, but sharpens it in others. Gloating is part of the entertainment—and mourning as well, among Capitolites who consider themselves compassionate, and both all the more so with another child or five from the past to laugh at or cry for. Another Keeni. Another Shim. Another Izar, Moreno, Rhodes. Laws.

Mitchell lasted three days and change unscathed. Bellezze held Aranica for a long time after she woke up in the hospital wing, two days before a first aid trainer whose name she never learned laughed casually to her face about how she must have ruined Anani's chances—three Twelves going home in three years, what Gamemaker in their right mind would allow that? Three Twelves in three years, now, of course, but it could have been four, six—they could have brought any of them home, any of those hundreds. They could have left them all alone, damn them, Dru could live miles and miles away in another life where they never met and it would be worth it because she would be fucking alive and the Capitol could put all this money—

Aranica, her rock breaks in as the dispenser sputters to a stop.

Yeah.

She pats the machine in thanks, wraps each hand around a mug, and lets the disparate sensations—things always feel muted against her left palm, even heat, even pain—drag her back to the present.

To her relief, she doesn't have to carry them far. Carter sits in the lounge the next room over, alone but not tucked away in his room as she had half-worried. (Those were long minutes, that first time waiting against a door on the District Six floor for some indication that Teddy—Theodore, still? she'll have to ask—still breathed on the other side.) She offers him a smile, softer and noticeably drier than when he and Hellion first walked in but just as genuine, as she approaches. Whatever else about this situation churns her stomach, she wrote a statement in this boy's memory, held her rock tight to steady her voice as she failed to offer adequate words for his courage and his heart—and here he is, heart still beating, on the other side of death.

It's a terrible and lonely path to walk, knowing whose footsteps you have to leave further and further behind. But it's a path that hasn't ended, and she means to keep that promise from the train for as long as he doesn't want to be alone.

"Tea?" she asks, lifting one mug slightly before settling it on a side table at his left and herself onto the arm of the couch across that same table. "Only if you want it, but it's easy on the stomach." Even if he and the others were fed reasonably in holding—and she has her apprehensions about that, given the state of them otherwise, bandaged and grey—she remembers all too well how long it took before she could choke a meal down, let alone keep it there.

Her smile settles too, into something still gentle but more somber, as she pauses for a cautious sip of her own drink. All things considered she likes the process of tea more than the taste, and the dispenser has no kettle to boil or leaves to dunk, but the warmth of steam counts for something. "How are you?" Pretty fucking bad, she could fill in well enough without the personal experience, but she means it and hopes he hears it as more an invitation than a question: How much do you want to say? What do you need, now?


Title song is "Anticipate" by Metric.

[Tom]

Get out of your head
the voices don't know what is best for you
in the pouring rain
I head the devil call me out

Nothing can change this.

There's no cards in his deck, only the empty box of a time before where everything is hollow.

Now all that's left is his own stupid mind and the damned images of Carter Laws throwing away everything for others. An entire hand thrown out for others like Mitchell had done. Ripred, Mitchell deserved to be standing here and not him, never him. Carter Laws, once a young boy who didn't know better, now a young boy who got all that he wanted. Was having everything he wanted really what he needed?

The answer was no.

As they travel back to the floors where they started the longest week of their lives, Carter can't help but to retraces the lines along the wall with his eyes, until he can reach the ceiling where dots of black stars scatter amongst the white background. Like a fire, he's burned everything up on his way out into death, leaving ashes behind. Mitchell's legacy. Jack's love. His family. He's set them aflame to watch everything built up inside of him burst and leave them all hollow, just like he had been for years since Mitchell.

I'll always love you.

Mitchell may love him, but he would spit on Carter's real, yet not real grave if he were here. Call him all the worst things he could come up with and then crush that into the dirt. A sigh from Carter's throat as the elevator stops and Hellion and him march out into the empty walls of an empty floor. Not that it bugged him at all, but he can't help but run his finger along the walls, until the tips tingle with slight pain. Retracing the feeling of a place where Mitchell had walked past time and time again.

Carter Laws was born to live.

He was born to live.

And yet he hated this truth.

No matter what he did, he could only suffer through it all, alone. Alone and terrified of everything else to come. Eyes staring at him as if he's a ghost and will vanish right in front of the people's fingers. Ripred, he should. He should be nothing more than a ghost that occasionally walks these halls, but instead he lingers with life and disappointment in himself.

The lounge feels safe. There's some light coming in that shields the darkness of the vault that lingers in his vision. A comfortable silence filling him as he does nothing, but stare into the blank space of oblivion. His own thoughts taking over in swift lunges like the sloth and coyote that tore him to shreds. Silence in the room, except for the slight buzz in his good ear. The hum of technology that he will never see again, but that doesn't bother him.

It's the home that he'll see once he gets out of the capitol.

The place where his family will gather with every tiny child in their wake, accepting him home, except Jack won't show. His dad will look at him like he's a wounded animal. And his poor mother, who will be a teary mess, he's sure of it. There was no preparing for the reunion of the Laws Family, but they'll reunite and then it'll go silent. Silent because everyone knows that Carter Laws didn't deserve to go home. Mitchell Laws was meant to be home, not him.

There's a silence that settles as he resolves himself to his own head.

There's a moment where everything is still and he's staring ahead and doesn't notice anything.

"Tea?" Aranica Petros was a hero on this earth. If there's anything he needed right now it was death or a good cup of tea. "Only if you want it, but it's easy on the stomach."

He nods before reaching for his glass and taking soft sips of the warm drink to sooth his exhaustion. Tired and yet not tired at all, he can't figure out heads or tails of what he needs anymore. Only hollowness lives in his chest as he reminisces of what Mitchell could have done instead of him.

What his family would look like if it were Mitchell and not him.

"How are you?"

Her smile is easing to take in. Not a nuisance in the slightest, but he can't help but think of her words. How was he? Tired. Hollow. Alone. Messed up. He didn't even know where to start with that sort of question. Not that it was meant to be deep, but everything feels deep. Sometimes, he thinks getting ripped up by the coyote and sloth would be better than all of these emotions.

"Honestly, I don't know."

A sip of the warm liquid as he glances out the window tot he rest of the capitol where people live their lives. People who've also watched him die and come back again.

"I should be glad I'm alive."

Fists clenched at his knees as he continues staring out the window.

"I just don't think I can, when I can only see Mitchell's death and how much more this is going to impact everyone. It's.... It's really fucked up."

A hum on his lips.

"I mean, I'll be okay, eventually, I think. Who knows. I just, I can't help but feel this isn't a gift, but a curse. I'm gonna go home and face my parents and siblings, many of whom have a closer bond with Mitchell. I'll see families of past tributes who think that I didn't deserve this, but their lost loved one. I'm going to be a walking image of that lost hope. A reminder of everything that they lost and what could have been."

Carter doesn't feel like a kid anymore with these burdens on his shoulders.

"I'm just a boy. Just weeks ago, my favorite thing to do was card tricks for others. To see people smile was my favorite thing, but now it's all I'm going to ever remember. I'll only see the pity and the jealousy of people."

A sip of tea as he places his cup down again.

"How am I going to be able to face anyone? Raisa? Dad? Mom? Jack? I don't know how I am. Everything's different and I... I... I can't."

His chest feels like it's tightening as his breath goes shallow and everything floods through him like a hurricane. Tossing his thoughts around back and forth, back and forth as he feels the room growing smaller and small and his vision gets a bit harder to see. The silence in his right ear growing more and more.

Deep breaths.

One. Two. Three. Four.

"I-I don't know."

I finally feel okay
in the pouring rain
you say 'leave from the fog
inside my head'

song: rain

[WT]

quick content note: this post is more direct than the last one about Aranica attempting suicide after Anani's death; to skip that, skip from "For lack of anywhere better to start" to the end of that paragraph.


For a moment Aranica worries Carter won't talk to her at all, but once he starts, he doesn't stop. She interrupts only with soft, wordless sounds of acknowledgement; he fidgets the whole way through—looking down and then away, shifting his hands, sipping his tea here or there until he sets it down—but he seems to need to get this out more than he needs to hear someone else right this second. There's something urgent if never quite rushed in the way he speaks, whether he's talking about strangers or himself or, more often it seems, circling back around to his family.

Inside the grief at his words and the relief at his willingness to say them and the patient, understanding face she tries to put on over both, she wonders how often the Laws talk—really talk—about Mitchell, and how many conclusions Carter has drawn in the last six years in relative quiet. She's watched too many people grieve to say there's a wrong way to go about it; all the same, she hopes her guess is wrong.

That lasts until Carter starts to stutter. He's still looking away, but the way his breath catches and changes rings all too loud in the quiet of the room, and Aranica sets her mug down so quickly that she clacks it against his in her haste to lean forward to take his hands. "Deep breaths," she says softly, even as he starts to do exactly that. "You don't have to. You don't have to know anything right now, you're doing fine."

She waits long enough to make sure he really is done talking for now, then takes a deep breath herself. Conversations like this—both halves, the admission and the consolation, or at least the attempt at both—come more readily than they used to; twenty-five years will do that. (Speaking to tributes and families year after year, until it's an effort not to let their names blur together, will do that. So will the disjointed practice of one moment of decision after another—deciding that her friends deserved honesty, that Kieran deserved a mother who wouldn't check out on him without warning, that she deserved to be heard—and a thousand steps forward and backward and forward again.) But easier doesn't mean easy, and she wants to get this right.

Twenty-five years of searching for the words people need to hear—one more thing no Victor was trained for, because they were never meant to succeed at of it—and she's still not sure that a way to get this right exists.

For lack of anywhere better to start, she says, "I'm not you, and I'm guessing my family wasn't much like yours." An understatement, she hopes, for all that she wouldn't trade away a moment with Anani or the fleeting memories of her father or any of the people she's folded into her family in her new life. "And I don't know how much you already know about old Games." Anani died half again his own lifetime ago, at the same age that Carter is now. It's strange to think of him—of all of them—as names on lists and old footage, when she can still hear their laughter on her good days and bones crunching on her bad nights. "But—I killed my sister, and the next year I couldn't bring my brother home, so I tried to make up for it by killing myself. It took... a long time, before I could thank Arbor for saving me." For a lot of that time, she'd been outright furious. Less so in her hospital bed, where she was drugged past the stomachache and the tears, than at home in the months following—but this isn't her story, right now. She shakes her head once. "What I mean is—it's okay if you can't be glad you're alive right now. I think more of us have trouble with that than we like to talk about. And people are going to tell you all kinds of bullshit about how they think you should feel" —live to honor the dead whose time you stole; no, the dead are past help, make yourself useful to the living; no, that's not sustainable, live for yourself whether you're ready to or not; no, you haven't earned the right to want things for yourself— "but there's no should about any of this. You're right, it's fucked up, this is all so fucked up, and that part's not your fault.

"But Carter, neither was Mitchell's death. His or any other tribute's." She tries to channel the way Illario talks when he knows she doesn't want to hear him: steady and matter-of-fact, as casually inarguable as commenting on the hum of electric lights or their cooling tea. If she doesn't quite reach it, at least her eyes are dry. "They all deserved to come home as much as you, but that goes both ways. No one else gets to tell you it's time to finish grieving, or—or have fun doing card tricks, or anything else, but whenever you get there... Whenever life seems like a good thing again, you're going to deserve that. And if you need someone else to believe that until you're ready to, that's okay, too. You have people who already do." She smiles again for the first time since Carter started talking, still somber but heartfelt, remembering the even way he said so be it on the train. "We're still not going to let you go through any of this alone."