retrospect | { diana & lex } jb blitz

[D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]]

Hope can take you far away from home.

I've seen it a hundred times before. How volunteers cling too close to the idea of a dream that is already fraying, and how, even when the light is turned on, they still find themselves amongst the darkness. Thinking about it like that puts the consequences of my actions into perspective—the Capitol will brand me brave for calling my own name, and begin to expect that I'm either a girl with a death wish or a child who seeks glory. It isn't like that; I'm not doing this out of selfishness or survivor's guilt.

I am not brave, I am the exception.

And as much as I would like to be brave, I do not think that it is possible to see the good in your own bad. I figure that it is probably not possible to win the Hunger Games without being bad, but if anyone has enough heart to find their way back home—surely, it can be me. Love can go a long way in the right hands, and my hands are not like my father's: they are empty so that I can use both to give.

But the Hunger Games are a trial of how much you can take. When a starless sky is overhead and you have no means of dreaming of home, when you are faced with a face that you've seen become broken and are then forced to fight it, when you are merely a shadow of your former self and need to find a new meaning or purpose that is darker—the rules do not make room for giving when life is what you want to take. The nature of the games hardens you and carves your heart hollow.

"You probably don't think a girl like me can win if you couldn't," I say to her quietly as she enters. Her lack of heart is what led her back home. She's a killer, just like Jacinta and Mackenzie, but a different kind. Lex is a killer who got killed and lived. "Is there a place for heart in the Hunger Games?"

[aya]

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i must have pictured it all a thousand times
i swear to god i think i'm gonna die

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She should be getting home, she knows that, should be checking the television for news from the eleven other reapings. Cursed with distant friends, scattered across the country like pennies tossed haphazardly onto a tabletop, Lex knows the tangle in her gut won't unknot itself until she's seen them all come up heads. If they're that lucky this time around. And it's not just the other reaping-age kids she needs to be worried about — Temple, Wander, Eve, the rest of them. It seems as though everyone has siblings or cousins. (Seville. The mantra recalls itself effortlessly, Denali whispering aloud to herself in the darkness when she'd thought Lex had fallen asleep. Tallulah. Peregrine. Rio.)

But truth be told, it doesn't matter if she runs right home to check her television — names have already been drawn and no paper slips are going back into their glass bowls. Knowing the outcome, not knowing the outcome — reality remains unchanged either way. Lex Lionel so rarely bothers herself with hypotheticals but her brain is still ruined with adrenaline and so her heart has taken the rest of her body on a joyride down roads not taken, forcing her to imagine lives not lived, deaths not died, or deaths died again.

Before she knows what she's doing, she's stormed the justice building, fifteen thousand million questions for the volunteer wrestling in her throat, each more accusatory than the last. Do you even know her? They'd looked like total strangers passing in the crowd. Were you planning on it? Or was it just something about her? Would Diana still have stepped forward if you took the no out of Lenox? If last year was anything to go by... well, Lex knew where that no went.

She enters the small room, whole face searing with too many competing emotions to count, let alone name. They feel like old wounds: most sear, some sting. "Did..." She can't decide on a question before Diana speaks. "You probably don't think a girl like me can win if you couldn't." Lex's mouth stops dead in its tracks, jaw left hanging open slightly while the rest of her face responds to statement. Truth be told, she hadn't even thought about it. Hadn't thought about what lay ahead of the girl who sits where she sat last year, who would soon be taking the train that she took last year, who would — yes, probably die like she did last year.

"Is there a place for heart in the Hunger Games?" Diana asks, and Lex hates the way the tone of the question doesn't consider that Lex Lionel might have one.

"Oh," she says, acid burning the back of her throat, "is that why you volunteered for a stranger? Heart? You must've had something else moving your blood around last year, then." She exhales sharply, eyes flashing and adrenaline still pounding in her veins. Inhale the tranquility of knowing that this bullshit is behind you. She hadn't come here to chew Diana out... at least, she doesn't think that she did. Taking another set of deep breaths to trick her brain into fucking working again, Lex frowns. The left side of her mouth still lags behind the right from where Denali's paring knife had buried itself in her cheek. ("If there's a next time," Denali had warned her last year, "don't forget that caring got you killed.")

When she speaks again, her voice is measured, temper reigned in and venom removed. "I don't know. There might be. There must be. Mine might've gotten me killed, but you'll be counting on Mackenzie's." Lex shakes her head again as her thoughts loop back on themselves. "I don't know. Depends on the heart, I guess."

even julien baker
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[D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]]

Innocence—that is what makes me different to Lex Lionel. 

She has taken life and felt that feeling; she knows what it is like to murder in cold blood. In a moment where there is no room for mercy, and she has grit teeth like iron that mince a battlecry into a massacre.

I shouldn't blame her. I should forgive her.

I need to take away the lines that divide and not enforce them: she is human, I am human. We have both lived very different lives with different loves, with different losses. But in my heart, there are no rules from my head to cast her aside and ridicule her for competing under the circumstances. We play the same game but are different players, but we fight for the same heaven, against the same hell.

Lex's voice comes through the air like smoke. Her words plume towards me and threaten to suffocate me with her tone, and she is across from me with eyes that burn like fire. As much as I want to disappear in this moment, I realise this a valuable encounter. A reality check that has probably been sent by my father to try and knock some sense into me—or to try and prepare me for what is yet to come.

"No, sorry, it isn't like that," I tell her in a rush. Last year, my heart was aching with the same sense of longing and of lack. When you are faced with fight or flight, it becomes far too easy to slip into the backseat and become friends with the familiar. This time, I had no distractions and no questions, and I have no regrets. My heart was the leader I had always thought of it to be and I do not want to be punished for that. Nobody should be punished for a feeling. "Love made me do it."

She settles like her fires have burned out. She's right about Mackenzie—if I'm to make it out of this alive, I'm going to have to rely on him, not her. When she says that she doesn't know, that it "depends on the heart, I guess", my eyes perk up. It is like a calling that reminds me of my destiny because all I want to do is something good, to remind people what it is like to feel good. My heart is full; it has enough love from now until whenever. If it is a case of having the right heart, I certainly do not have a wrong one.

"Okay, good." I nod simply. "Now—how do you feel?" I ask carefully, looking up to her with wide eyes. She lived and died—but to me, she feels the most alive.

[aya]

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i know you were right
i can't be fixed

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"Now how do you feel?" How do you feel, Lex? She shakes her head. Angry, she thinks — that's an easy feeling to place, but it isn't quite right. Her heart still hammers against her ribs; not even an hour ago she'd been convinced she was about to ship off to her death again, for real this time. Or maybe she'd really win — she's built her strength back up, built a rapport with Mackenzie, built a series of intricate traps in her back yard with nothing but wire and nails, sticks and rocks — but the price to pay would be astronomical.

How does she feel? How is she supposed to feel, staring down a girl who insists she's only put her name forward because of love felt for a stranger? How's she supposed to feel after not receiving the same when it was her name read off the slip, when it was her face peering over the crowd?

Lex shakes her head. "This isn't about me. You want to talk about feelings, try..." Try who, Mackenzie? Ha. "Try de Costa. He's got too many, I'm sure he'll share." How does she feel? Frustrated. But even if she'd come here with selfish intent, she meant it: this isn't about her. She'll vent her vexations later, to someone who doesn't have the Hunger Games ahead of her. Priorities.

"Hearts are bastards — remember that the next time yours tries to murder you. You'll follow it right into an ambush and right into your grave." That's where her own stupid heart had led her, anyway. "You're going to need to ditch the idealism the second you set foot in the arena or you'll get torn to pieces. Practice hating people, that helps. Start with me if you want. I don't care."

even julien baker
table template lalia

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[D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]]

There's a wall. It's written all over her face, it's etched into her frown and smile lines with little care. How she feels clearly isn't how she felt before; it must hurt, it must do, to have died a death and then live again. Euphoria in the face of misery is completely odd. Her words are still fuelled by a fire, her head shaking because she clearly does not want to talk about herself.

I think she would feel better if she did. I imagine there is a lot on her mind, a heavy weight on her chest.

"He's too in love with cigarettes." I say plainly. Smoke form his breath like how a dragon breathes fire — except there is no bite. He only harms himself, still clearly a volunteer with a death wish, because he continues to give up, lose his patience, and wish for something to numb the pain. "I don't want to be like that." Although, perhaps simply listening to Angel for a few moments might alleviate some of the pain in a better way.

An ear is what I'll offer, but heart is what I'll give.

But Lex says that hearts are bastards. She says they are bastards, as if they can only be trusted as far as they can be thrown. I stare emptily because it can't be the case. Heart does not guide a person to their grave. A heart, love, is the perfect compass. When love is north, the only way is up. Hating people would only be a hindrance, not a help, to my cause. If I was set on doing my worst, I'd have not lied awake at night thinking of the damage my father has done and is yet to do. Hate is a sign of failure, of reduction.

It cannot be the cure the world needs, not when hate is what drives us day by day already. "I couldn't hate you, Lex," I shake my head. I couldn't and I wouldn't. "There is only room in my heart for love. It's all there has to be. Maybe you doubt it's power, but nobody in these Games has ever given it a chance." They lose touch, they lose sight of what it means to love when they hold a weapon and start acting out of desperation. "People wear their heart on their sleeve where it is easy to lose." Mine remains firmly within the cage of my chest, the place it functions best.

"Not me," I say. "I want to show you how heart goes far beyond any grave."