The Last Goodbye [Ex & Saturn Day 4]

[Deleted]

Saturn Rhodon

*

[Writer's note: this thread takes place after "The Worst of Me"]

He watches the last drops of alcohol drip out his canteen onto the earth below. The drink has fooled him more than once that night – thinking that in one moment he could feel better, separate from the feelings that lurked underneath. All the moments where darkness crept through his hands and up into his chest could be doused like the fire it was with just a few more sips of alcohol. Another drink, and he could remember the flush of comfort, or numb – better than to feel all that bubbled up from the depths beneath.

Except he’s always known that alcohol was never his friend. But when had he ever had friends that mattered? At least it gave him a few moment’s peace, even before he was betrayed by all the same pains in his chest, or heaviness that pumped through his heart. Alcohol was no worse than anyone else. He couldn’t blame it for making such a mess of things; all of that came from his own body, his mixed-up mind thinking that anything he did would ever correct for what had come before.

Saturn wobbles on his feet near the fire. He sways forward and backward, fighting sleep, fighting consciousness.

Why was he so malicious to Damaris? Why did he feel as though he should’ve died long ago, even before his name was drawn from the reaping bowl?

He never deserved her love. That much was true. He’d failed in as much as he’d ever tried at anything: being a career, a brother, or a son. His friendship was to walk across broken glass, she was better for never having to do it at all, and now – she’d be left with scars that meant nothing. Just a memory that would die with her, without him. And he hopes that she can forget him, his whole existence.

He was a joke, wasn’t he? Ha ha. He can feel the laugh come out from his lips, deep down from his throat, the sort of laugh that he knew he gave all those that watched. Wasn’t he funny, wasn’t what he did so-fucking-god-damn-funny, he could imagine the men and women of the capitol saying before they turned their attention to the love stories blooming on another screen. That’s all he ever was, a punchline. Well – jokes had to have some sort of end, didn’t they?

A spare lasso by the fire catches his eye and it doesn’t take more than a moment for him to figure out what has to be done. He’s already said his goodbyes to Damaris – she would wake tomorrow and she could go on, and know that the burden she’d been carrying was lifted. She would float, he thought, because a girl like Damaris deserved so much better. Better than him.

It’s the first time of the night that feels something akin to happiness. A bubbly, light feeling as he coils the rope over his shoulder. Saturn kneels into the dirt, almost falling, his hands tangled in the lasso’s fibers. And he can’t stop the tears that come out then, but he’s not sad, because he’s finally going to do something for himself. He’s finally going to stop hurting, and settle the notion that he ever needed to put up a fight. He’s never going to be fixed. There was only so many times that he could be stitched back together before it all came undone.

He wipes away the tears and laughs, and falls backwards onto his butt. Unsteady but more clear than he’s been in a long time, and happy. At least he had his answer, the one that he’d always been afraid of (and still was, but his courage outgrew his fear, stunted by his head and drunk, too). He presses a fist into the grass and manages to stand. He doesn’t recognize the faces around him anymore, in as much that he never knew them in the first place. He’s already a ghost among the living.

“Ex,” He says, to himself, and at the sight of the blind boy on a hay bale not a few steps away. He wonders if he should feel sorry that they hadn’t had more time, but Saturn knows that the boy shouldn’t think anything of him. He wants to say goodbye, to close the loop that would linger if he didn’t. Except they had never been much of anything to begin with – but Saturn can’t shake the feeling, and so he moves forward, his steps unsteady but certain.

“Ex, can I…” He starts, and then – he pulls the baseball cap from his head. The same one he’d always had, since before he’d broken the mirror. Before he’d turned into this. “I got a gift for you,” he says, one hand on the boy’s back, the other thrusting the hat into his chest.

[cameron]

He’d never drank before, but he found himself hopping from hay bale to hay bale collecting as many jugs of fire as he could. There was no denying the stuff was absolutely vile, but he absolutely loved it. The leftover burn after downing, the stars that blinked across his horizons, the loose muscles and limbs like linguini. Tension slipped away with every gulp until a robe of nerves lay around his ankles, and he wobbled in his bare self for a few moments, warm but not angry, pained but in a new way. A way that didn’t claw at his head until there was nothing but shreds of him left, but what definitely seemed like the whole him.

The whole him swayed in the breeze, and it hit him all too fast that he was dizzy and exposed and by all accounts drunk. An attempt to bend down and gather his clothes succeeded up to the bending part, where he toppled over and rolled onto his back. He coughed, rougher than usual, a rasp that stung his throat deep in its pits. Being drunk sucked. Exover laid in the grass. He was naked. He was silent. He had one foot, no eyes, and even less coordination. And he started to laugh.

A few moments of startlingly loud laughter later, he sat up on his elbows and smiled out over the plains, taking in a deep breath through his nose. The alcohol seemed to have eased his nasal passages open, or at least more open than before, and for the first time in two days he smelled the whole world. Not just a few flowers in his hand. Not just the smoke wafting in his face. He smelled it all, the grass beneath his butt and the hay ten yards away where some girl sat alone and the strings someone further held down to make music and the horses, he smelled the horses, and damn he wished he had a horse, how come Ronan had a horse when he didn’t, and why the hell was he being so whiny? The stars burst in his head and he fell back to the ground, flat and spinning in his stillness, and he coughed a big, rough cough and spewed lava like his mouth was a volcano, and he turned his head fast to the side to vomit away from his body, and his chest ached like an earthquake cracked through his streets and swallowed his citizens whole, and fuck his whole him was still out and his clothes were behind him and his innards covered the ground around him and what the fuck.

“Sorry, Bev,” he whispered to the rat clinging to his helmet. Then he pushed himself up to his foot, suddenly much less dizzy without the jugs of moonshine sinking his city. Clothes in hand, he hopped over to the nearest bale of hay and sat. Placing the pile of dirty clothes in his lap, he reached down beside his seat and fingered for a glass jug, a sigh of relief when cold met his touch and he brought the drink to his body and took two enormous gulps. His other hand was open on his knee, where Beverly ran in circles. In hindsight, she was most definitely scolding him for his reckless behavior, but in the moment he found it playful and light and endearing. With her spinning in his palm, Ex thought how badly he wanted to thank Mr. Todd for his kindness. And whoever else, for the other stuff. The balloons and the helmet and the arm guard and the hammock. He wanted to thank them for believing in him before he believed in himself. Part of him thought the blind victor was amongst his sponsors. Someone who would understand his plight, understand what it was like to be placed in a pitch black maze where every step was the wrong step. Someone who saw him as a viable human being.

Because he was.

He was real and he was raw and he couldn’t help it, and he didn’t want to, and he took two more big gulps of moonshine and wondered what the cold, wet feeling was on his leg. Was this how everyone felt? He was numb, a tingling throughout his body, but his head was okay, and he was great, and he took another sip, and he belched.

“Thanks!” Ex yelled, hoping his sponsors got the message. “You’re… s-sooo good!”

He burped again, and sat there with a big, goofy grin on his face, a pile of clothes on his crotch, and a rat giving up its noble crusade and curling up on his helmet. The night before he’d peeled away petal after petal of two of Francis’s sunflowers for each of his fallen allies, and afterwards he cried, and he cried until he slept, and he slept like there were nails beneath him. There, on the bale, he thought about the last sunflower and the nails pressed into him again. It would either be plucked for the Sheriff or buried with his corpse. He told himself he hoped for the ladder, but a flicker of differing passed through his mind like a meteor, and he missed seeing the sky. If he won, would they fix him? Would he see again? He hadn’t considered that, but as he downed another gulp of his drink he wondered if he was even reparable.

Either way, Finley deserved to go home to her sisters, to go home to the ocean that she loved and bragged about, that she sang stories of, go back and move forward with being the best damn sheriff and the best damn person that panem had ever seen.

Words sat in the back of his throat like bile, ready to erupt and flood out, but he held them down with another swig. He coughed again and spat out his drink and wiped his slobbering mouth on the back of his arm. Ex wanted to admit it to himself, but didn’t all the same, didn’t want to change his mission to save his friend and get her home, didn’t want to own up to his own lust for life that found its way weaseled into the trunks of his tree, couldn’t say the words “I want to live” without muddying up the entire plan, his entire purpose, but fuck it, he thought, one hand tight around the last sunflower, one hand clamped onto his thigh, nails bearing into sweating skin, blood pooling in the creases. He wanted to live. He wanted to live. He wanted to see the world around him and know where he was walking and see what his friends looked like. See Saturn’s abs and tulip boy’s hair and Finley’s family photos. Ex opened his mouth and yelled because the poor boy was drunk and his best was never enough. And it never would be.

He waited there as the hours ticked by like sand, counting the sways of the tall grass and the rustles of others underfoot. When footsteps started his way, his first thought was Finley, of the girl coming to lead him to their hammock and help him not die of alcohol poisoning, but quickly he realized the person headed his way was much larger, more commanding, and smelled like an old bath towel, soaked and sticky and rotten. Saturn.

The boy called his name and placed a hand on his back. Lifted arm cleared a path for the sweltering, wet moss of One's underarms to leak out like old milk, but he wasn't used to luxury. In fact, old milk was a staple in his life, where freshness was overlooked for ‘what can be eaten without dying.’ Sweet, stinking scent crept up his bruised sinuses and tickled his brain before Saturn thrust something into Ex's chest, and he dropped the jug of moonshine to grab it. His hat? Fingers edged the rim, certain of what it was, but uncertain why he held on. He lifted his head skyward, up to the boy that sent him daily letters and pictures of himself even though he could never fully appreciate the beauty captured on film. A hand stuck out and rested on Saturn's abs, before dropping it to his thigh. When he opened his mouth to talk, he belched like a barking dog, and his fingers curled into the boy's leg meat. “I'm think,” he said, using the other's leg to pull up and stand. “I'm think you… a lot.” And he fell forward, into the muscles and sweat, his head in the crook of Saturn's neck, and he took in a big, deep, awful breath. “M-makes me happy.”

[Deleted]

Saturn Rhodon

*

Exover leans into him, his hands trailing up his stomach. Saturn hunches forward and lets him feel, Ex’s hands searching along each muscle, further down until he’s gripping his legs. Saturn hisses at the tightening grasp, and feels the heat pulse up and down his skin. He wants to let the boy explore every inch, to know that he’d worked and become a specimen to be adored – it’s all he ever wanted, to be wanted so badly by someone else. The boy pulls upward and slurs out a few words, crashing haphazardly to the surface, head nestled at Saturn’s neck. M-makes me happy, the words hit him square across the face, and Saturn moves to wrap both arms around Exover’s back to cradle him.

He can smell the alcohol fetid between them, their bodies succumbing to all the power and pleasure of it. Exover comes into shape and out of the shadows then, a boy with no eyes, part of his leg missing, scared and patched all over. Saturn sees nothing that cannot be loved. He sees a boy from ten that traveled four days to be here, in this moment, pressed against his neck. They are two becoming one, if he lets it. And he begs himself to let this be the case, that they could go on forever this way – two souls at night, locked in an embrace at the edge of a fire. Shadows squat behind them, not needing to look at one another to know that they are from the same heart.

They are not princes – not born into a legacy they never earned; nor star crossed lovers, forbid from one another. They are boys whose hearts are not yet full grown. Tempestuous and chafing at the thought their bodies could smash together, erupt, and be covered in hopes, in happiness. Not jaded by a world that has forced them to believe love is reserved for the lucky, or powerful.

He presses back into Ex’s neck and breathes in the smell of smoke and moonshine. He traces a hand along his trapezius, further still, along to the small of Ex’s back. He imagines that there were hours spent on a farm tending livestock or lifting something that filled out the boy from ten. It’s amazing how much he could tell of another’s story from the touch, and taste.

When the fire flickers, he catches sight of the boy’s head lolling to and fro, the smell of his breath more than just moonshine.

There is a moment where he wants to kiss him, to find an embrace to trap him into. He could take him away from the fire, down by the river, and dive into his body like the night before the games had started –

But Saturn feels his stomach turn, to know that this is not Exover. This is a shadow of a boy that may not so much as remember him the next morning; he cannot know what he wants, or where he is. He is not in love with Saturn, no matter what slurred set of sentences he might string together. He is a boy whose mind is clouded, and hidden. And Saturn laughs, pulling the boy further up, and shifting his body. He moves both arms underneath Exover and cradles him, carrying him off through a set of thick grasses, out and away from the sounds of music and chatter.

Stars come into view overhead, scattered and endless, false. He gets another hundred yards before he kneels carefully, and lays out Exover on the soft grass underneath.

And then he lies next to him, on his side, facing the boy just so that he can look at him, to sear the image into his brain for the rest of his life.

“I think about you every day,” He whispers, but he doesn’t have the strength to say more.

“I want you to know, I’m sorry that you ever had to think about me,” Saturn says at last, voice breaking. He feels the pressure pushing down on his chest, as though he could sink right into the earth if it let him. He is lower than low, he believes, for ever having made this boy come into his life, for what he’d given to him, for all the pointless back and forth. For the selfishness and the carnal, “But you won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

He places a hand on the boy’s chest, and holds it there to feel Ex’s heartbeat. He can feel his lip start to shake and he closes his eyes, his head pressed in close to Ex’s neck as though he can borrow some strength, but he finds none.

He gives a kiss on the cheek, all the strength he had gone, extinguished.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, standing, and leaving the blind boy quite alone.

[does some TM stuff for Ex]

[Saturn has left this thread]