wild as the flowers ; daphne&mackenzie

[eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris]

daphne.

“Could you draw me something beautiful?”

Her voice is soft, as gentle as her touch — and she’s smiling as she folds Mackenzie’s hand around the paintbrush in his grasp. His fingers still shake, phantom pain has made its home in his scarred palm; but his eyes are brighter than they’ve ever been, cheeks flushed and hair tousled in a way that no stylist could ever hope to copy. He’s not the broken man she met all those months ago, but he’s not the golden boy that graced the 79th Annual Hunger Games, either.

There is always a middle ground.

Learning who Mackenzie Pryce truly is — from the demons on his shoulders to the halo resting atop his dark curls — has been an honour that Daphne does not take for granted. He’s given her a break from the routine, breathed a new life into her profession. A sense of purpose that she had been missing for so long. She still has her shifts at the care center, five days of fresh faces and fresh problems, but the weekends are his. Familiar. This is a dance of veils, of the sunlight that shines through.

She wants the healing process to be more than a cold stare and empty words, something sharp held against something soft — she wants to see his smile, to watch the shadows fade from beneath his eyes. They like to play chess through the agony, through their laughter. “You can do this. Push through it. Don’t you want to take my king?” And he does, at times. In his own way. He has a way of stealing himself. When the hurt becomes too much, when the light is too bright.

And she has a way of bringing him out of the dark.

Painting, Daphne believes, is the perfect exercise for Mackenzie. The right amount of fun and stressful — blue fingertips and a creased brow, stained orange. A smudge of green across his cheek, a stroke of purple by his frown. It’s all about balance. The beauty and the terror. War and peace. “Small steps on a long journey,” she had told him once, a breath away. Too far. “That’s what it means to heal.”

The present calls her back.

“You could draw yourself, even.
I brought all your favorite colours.”

His fingertips meet hers, a warm embrace. “C’mon, won’t you walk with me? I know a hill up by the woods, right where the sun meets the horizon.” And she looks up, the sky reflected in her eyes. The stars are only hiding. “It’s the best place to paint, to just let everything go. We could make it ours.” She had laughed when all the other nurses cracked their jokes, when they said it would be dangerous being so close to Seven’s hero. To not get lost in his gaze. She laughs now, wind in her hair.

“Let’s go. We can skip all the poetry.”

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

mackenzie.

Recovery was rebirth.

The forests of Mackenzie Pryce had burned, and burned, and burned, until all that remained was ash and ruin. He had been complacent, accepting of the growing bitterness within him, paying no mind to the barren fields that were once sprawling with his life blood. Recovery was rebirth; Daphne was a single seed. She'd been asked to fix one thing, small as it might have been.

His hand still trembled when he tried clenching it into a fist: nerve pain, she called it. Phantoms and reminders and thank you, friend carved further than the flesh.

She'd been asked to fix one thing, but in order to do it, Mackenzie realized, there was so much more to be done before, and after. And he wasn't reborn quite yet— maybe he never would be— but it was the fact that he was still trying to let him sleep at night, even when he knew the faces of the dead would come to him. Even when the Elsu boy would demand retribution for his fallen sister, and he could feel Bella's last breath on his neck. Even when he reached for Faline and missed her every time, watched in horror as she was taken with the tide. Even as the buzzing overwhelmed even the sound of Wynter's cannon. He was trying. And he had Daphne to thank for that.

He walked with her in the coolness of early autumn, when the pines smelled the freshest, to a hill quite near his house. There was a willow there, right at the summit. He wondered if it would've left and gone some place if its roots weren't so tightly clung to the earth beneath it, if it was lone and weeping and tragic in its quietness, or if it was like Mackenzie. If it had a single seed of hope in which it clung to, brave enough to stand on its own.

"Could you draw me something beautiful?"

It always felt silly; Mackenzie's hands were not those of an artist. They were calloused from years of hard labor and coarse guitar strings. Everything he did was always a bit more deliberate than he meant it to be, all storm water and no gentle rain. But Daphne had insisted it was helpful to his recovery, and recovery was rebirth. It didn't matter if he'd never been good at it before. He could be good at it now.

He twirled the paint brush in his hand like a baton, curving it between fingers, touching the bristles against his thumb. He knew what he wanted to draw, if it was something beautiful she was asking for.

"It’s the best place to paint, to just let everything go. We could make it ours."

He stifled a grin, because she was here on business. Because he was paying her to say things like that, and he didn't know if it was the money or the heart that made her say them anymore.

"I wonder," he said as they reached the mouth of the hill, "how many have claimed it before us."

A single seed. He could see the willow up there, limbs swaying to the beat of the wind. He couldn't tell Daphne, but this was one of the places he went when he didn't want to be caught doing his own forms of therapy and rehabilitation. Eyes glazed, heartbeat warm and steady like the hum of a funeral march. He came here to escape, and it was meant to be his place. So, why wasn't he bothered that he was sharing it with her now?

"You know, I was thinking the other day, and I realized something. I was lucky, in a way. Right? I mean most people who make it out of the arena still alive are forced to leave some pieces behind. Not figuratively. A leg, an arm. I have pain in my hand. That's—" he couldn't stop the chuckle that escaped him, "That's pathetic."

[eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris]

daphne.

She wonders how many girls

have fallen in love under that tree.

That lovely willow on that lonely hill, with its branches dancing in the wind. Memories cling to it like a second layer of bark, like the very source of passion has seeped down into the soil and intertwined with its roots. It moves in rhythm with her heart, echoes with so much joy that she nearly stumbles from the sheer force of it. And if there are ghosts here, they are kind.

Or maybe she's just imagining it;

maybe what she feels

is due to so much more than a tree.

The air is cold and the ground is warm — the most ancient metaphor; the fresh corpse of something that has long decayed — and she steadies herself against Mackenzie as they make the climb. Closer and closer to the sun. "I wonder," he starts to say, and she smiles. For no reason at all; for more than she can count. "How many have claimed it before us?"

It's not a question she can answer — but then it's not meant to be a question, not really. They're just words; as powerful as they are frightening. The world is passing them by at an alarming rate, swallowing up their experiences. And one day, centuries from now, another pair will come to take their place. They will see the earth on that hill without footprints, and they will have the gall to claim it as their own.

They will wonder, for a moment;

and they will damn the consequences.

"It's ours now." She steps forward to make sure the station is ready for him, blowing a few leaves away from the canvas and opening the jars of paint. She looks over her shoulder, and she meets his gaze like there's nothing else to see. "When we're here, we're the only two people in the world. How's that sound?" And then she moves away, making a grand gesture and grinning with excitement.

"Your masterpiece is waiting for you." She goes to rest against the willow, allowing the breeze to run its hands through her hair. It kisses her cheeks until they're flushed. And she listens to Mackenzie as he speaks, as he focuses both on the project and his thoughts. He had always joked that he didn't have an artistic bone in his body, but Daphne believes he has the soul of one. She hears it in every syllable.

He has a way of finding the humour in his sadness, or at least a way of pretending that there's any to be found. It's not something that she can understand, and part of her wishes that she could. The other knows that he would never want that, that he would never wish for anyone to be familiar with the way his mind works. His chuckle is light, and her smile is weak. "That's not pathetic. Not to me."

Daphne stands, walking over so that she's right in front of him. She reaches across the easel, taking hold of his damaged hand. There's already paint on his knuckles, and it shakes in her grasp. "Not to a nurse. Not to someone who is trained to tell how much something really hurts." She brings it close to her lips, not thinking twice before she offers a gentle kiss. "Remember: you have to go at your own pace. You have all the time in the world. Don't waste today by living in the past."

Remember:

we are only temporary,

but I want this to be forever.