little but bright // [windy]

[sbeeg]

I started chewing on the skin around my nails by the time we hit district eight. The train moved so quickly it didn't give any of us enough time to think about life would be now. Just like that two more tributes gone back into a world so alien to my own. Peering out the windows of the train car, I tried to memorize the buildings and features we passed so that I could imagine where everyone else was. District One was gorgeous and neat, with paved streets and painted store fronts. District Two was well organized, with mountain peaks poking up behind it. Each area had its own flavor and style. The doors would open and as everyone got final hugs and goodbyes in, the rush of air would bring all sorts of smells. Four smelled like salt, and nine smelled like burning hair. I liked seven the most. It smelled like earth and campfires.

I wondered if I would recognize the smell of my own home or if my time away would only make it smell like cow shit.

Standing with Enzo and Mace, I waited in front of the doors. There wasn't as many tributes to say farewell to now. Only four would be left after us. The train was mostly quiet now, after the loud rambunctious first days where everyone was still around and the looming thoughts of the future were easily swatted away.

I swallowed hard, tugging the sleeves of my jacket down over my fists trying to hide my abused fingers from my own teeth. They had use done up to go home. Nothing expensive the stylist had said you may be alive but you're not a Victor.

Finally, the train pulled to a halt without jarring its occupants and the metal doors slid open.

Cameras flashed and voices raised as we were revealed. I put a hand up to shield my eyes from the lights, searching the crowd for familiar faces.

And I found them.

My mother and father, in their work clothes, standing close to the platform and in between them:

"Kahinta."

Emotion surged in my chest and I threw myself off the train, boots slipping against the gravel below the tracks as I ran towards her. I pulled her close, hugging her frame to mine. She was thin and bony and a terrible person to share a bed with, but she was here and close.


And finally I was with her again.

"I missed you," it came out choked and fractured. I burrowed my face into her hair in an attempt to hide my tears. I'd already cried plenty on camera, I didn't need any more of them aired to the country. "I missed you so much."

table credit griffin^^

[wimdy]

k  a  h  i  n  t  a   j  o  n  e  s

The stars seem dimmer.

Kahinta stares at them with wide, bloodshot eyes the night before Temple is due to return home, unable to sleep. It doesn’t seem real. Her left arm is covered in mottled bruising from every time she’s pinched herself in hopes that she’ll wake up from this surreal dream that she cannot align with her reality. It doesn’t seem real, and she cannot rectify the reality of the situation with the mess that the world has made of her. She is not the same, and she doesn’t quite know how to piece together the splintered remains of what she once knew when they’ve all slid out of place and left her world inverted.

Overnight, the train platform becomes a refuge. Sitting still upon the steps of the platform, flanked by Peacekeepers who dare not move, Kahinta keeps a watchful eye on the dark skies, but she finds no answers in trying to weave cosmic patterns or divine tales from the stars. Salvation never comes from stories. Perhaps it never comes at all. It’s taken her a long time to realize it, years of crafting words and spinning memories into gold-trimmed wonder, but she knows now that the birds don’t sing for her, and the trees don’t dance for her, and the stars were never meant to guide her way home.

She’s played pretend for long enough. It’s time now to grow up.

The morning passes quickly in a haze of hunger pangs and excited chatter. People have been filtering in and out of the platform area all morning, making sure the area is presentable for the spectacle that is sure to be made of the train rolling into the station bearing children who should be dead. As the sun travels higher through the sky, Kahinta draws her cardigan closer around her to stave off the cold that has settled into her bones. Her mother and father find her that way, standing rigid in anticipation by the platform in front of the growing crowd, and flank her. She can’t say for sure, but they may be the only reason she stays upright when the train rolls to a stop on the track before her.

Temple is alive.

It’s like a bomb goes off in her chest, a cannon-fire echo in the hollow places underneath her ribs that have grown sharp with anger and shame. She can feel the aftermath of smoke cloud up inside of her, stretching her apart and filling her up until she cannot breathe for the pressure. And yet, when Temple launches herself from the platform and squeezes her tight, Kahinta deflates. She breathes in and it’s wrong, a mixture of vanilla and some sickly sweet imitation of some far-off flower the likes of which Kahinta has never known, but it’s not Temple, who is earth and salt and rain.

Kahinta raises her arms slowly to wrap around Temple’s back, fingers finding purchase in her sister’s too-clean shirt and on her sister’s too-neat braids. Despite her hesitation, she feels the sleepless nights compound upon her, her eyes welling with tears that do not fall as she blinks sightlessly at the cameras that capture this moment that is not meant for the world. She holds her sister tighter as this new Temple shakes in her arms and tells her she missed her in a way that Kahinta had never thought she’d hear.

It doesn’t seem real, and her world fractures further to the core as she hushes her sister soothingly, hoping that Temple feels warm and loved despite the cold feeling that blossoms in Kahinta’s chest. She stares up at the train that has brought her sister back to her in a thousand little pieces, and wonders why.

“You’re home,” she murmurs. It sounds flat, even to her own ears. She hopes Temple cannot hear it. “You’re safe now.”

[sbeeg]

I don't move, my face still buried in Kahinta's straight brown hair. It smells like her, like the house. Wood and earth and old quilts, but also something else. Something I can't place in my memories from before the Games.

My arms grip her tighter, afraid of letting go. If I let go, they might drag me back on the train. They might dress me up again and make me watch Wander drift into the ocean and the light leave Eve's eyes. They'll make me watch Enzo's face in the sky, and watch my knife slip into Hellion's eye as if it was butter. They'd make me push Bette again, limbs twisting in the air smeared by my own shameful tears.

I take a breath.

It won't happen, not again.

"You're home. You're safe now."

The words themselves are comforting, meant to be a soothing balm to my aching heart. Yet they feel off. They don't sound... I'm not sure what welcoming your dead sister back home is supposed to sound like.

My arms loosen around her body and I gather the bravery to lean back, exposing my smudged face to cameras' flash bulbs. Yet, I'm not concerned about what I'll look like on television. I'm worried about the emptiness in my little sister's voice.

I take her in and she seems older. I was gone less than a month but she looks taller, more like our mother than ever before. Her eyes- I always remembered them as big and curious. The baby I'd follow around the fields on dutiful orders from Ma to keep her out of trouble. She always felt so full of life, a brightness when my mind was shades of gray. Yet now they were as hard as flint.

It's not supposed to be this way. We came home, we all came home. She gets to be happy.

Had she always been this way?

"Kahinta, are you okay?"

How didn't I notice?

table credit griffin^^

[wimdy]

k  a  h  i  n  t  a   j  o  n  e  s

There are so many eyes on them, and Kahinta shudders through a breath, steeling herself as her sister pulls back, away from her, away, away always away, she’s-

“Kahinta, are you okay?

A blink, and the world seems to disappear, the clamor of the crowd like a wave cresting at the periphery of her perception. How is she supposed to pay attention to the call of a Capitol photographer when she can’t rip her eyes from her sister’s concerned face? Temple had died, and here she stands resurrected and fresh from the Capitol, and she asks is Kahinta is alright. She has half a mind to scoff at her older sister’s concern, but cannot help the way it morphs into choked sob the moment it begins to leave her, her hands trembling where they fist in the fabric of Temple’s shirt. There’s a warmth to the tone of her skin, she thinks, a warmth that usually gets lost in the winters, and Kahinta lifts a hand to soak it in, dabbing away the tears that trail Temple’s face with the cuff of her cardigan. Squaring her shoulders, she shakes her head quickly and wipes a little firmer, willing her eyes to dry even as she can feel the warmth rolling down her own cheek.

“I’m fine. I’m always fine, Temple, but you- you just-“

How is she supposed to breathe?

“You died. You died. We watched, and you-“

Her mouth shuts with a click as her vision swims, another shuddering breath shaking through her as she shakes her head, feeling her hair fall into her face as she gathers herself for a moment. She only has a moment. There are so many eyes. Kahinta wonders if it had felt like this in the Arena, like the world was watching and waiting for her to break, because it was, it was waiting with baited breath while Kahinta was sobbing into her sister’s pillow that didn’t smell like her anymore and praying to whatever might be at there that her sister would come home.

But what do you do when she does?

That hollowness insider of her blossoms brighter in the spaces left empty and cold with Temple’s death, with Bette’s death, with their living. It burns like curiosity satiated while holding a match burned to the quick and farther, skin blistered and broken without thought for the pain of it until it’s too late.

It’s terrifying, and Kahinta doesn’t want Temple to see the way her bones had cracked when the earth of her had been scorched. Maybe she’s a coward, but Temple doesn’t deserve to bear any more weight than she already has. For once, Kahinta wants to look back and know she has done her part to make her sister breathe easier, even if she can taste the ash on her own tongue

“But you’re safe now,” she says, firmer as she rolls the words between her teeth with a slow precision, trying them out in the space between them as she ducks her head closer to her sister’s face, quiet but convicted as she sniffles through an inhale. “They don’t get to keep you. You’re safe. We’ll keep you safe. We’ll keep you. I promise.”