so far, so fast // { katelyn + arbor }
May 20, 2019 22:36:12 GMT -5
Post by aya on May 20, 2019 22:36:12 GMT -5
we have friends in good houses
we have kids in the trees
now i have nothing but sleepless nights
about everything
He hates himself for it just a little bit, but the five years he'd holed up and refused go to the Capitol had been the best of his life. They planted a garden behind the house every spring. Cedar strung lights up on the rosemary bushes and all across the other shrubs in the yard. In the summer, he'd sit outside at night and watch the fireflies, making up stories to himself about kids named things like Asunder and Charas and Erik and Hyacinth and what they might've done when they grew up. He started playing music again. He went to his dad's house for dinner every Sunday and most Thursdays his brothers came over to play cards. He drank less. And sometimes, when he wasn't thinking about anything in particular, he even felt something like happy.
After so many years, the long-suffering mentor felt like he'd earned the right to a little selfishness. And year after year, it got harder to resist the temptation to stay out of it — out of the Games, out of the Capitol, out of the public eye at all. Clearly they didn't need him; Stella coming home had nothing to do with him. He told himself he'd start trying again soon, that it was all for Cedar's benefit while the boy was still reaping age, but it always felt like a lie. He never intended to go back to the Capitol.
The twist of the 80th Games called his bluff in the worst way. The day that Hellion Mo and Carter Laws got off the train, very much alive indeed, he paced a path through the patch of rainbow dahlias that Cedar had planted. He tugged a bald patch out of his beard. He had a glass of gin to clear his head, then he finished off the bottle. And finally, at three in the morning, he found himself in Aranica's kitchen, nursing a cup of tea, trying to explain out loud to himself why this was the thing to trip his panic switch. Trying to apologize for his extended sabbatical.
"I don't trust this, Ara," he'd mumbled. It couldn't be mercy as advertised. Not from people who repeatedly prove they don't know the meaning of the word. No, they must — someone who didn't know mercy was bound to show some on accident every once in awhile. But no one performs two dozen resurrections on accident. Everything the Capitol ever did was layered with unsubtle messages, particularly where the Games were concerned.
Demanding volunteers was a boast — You'll do what we say because you fear the consequences. Pulling names regardless of district was a threat — Measure up. Pull your weight. Give us a show. Taking the youngest was a glob of spit hocked directly into the eyeball — You think you've seen the worst the Hunger Games has to offer? Think again. Even the average Reaping was filled with tells about exactly what the Capitol thought about each district, each victor, each past tribute from recent memory.
So what could it mean when they brought everyone back, when they sent them all home? On the surface, it seemed like a good thing... but figures like Arbor Halt don't survive as long as he has still believing in anything good.Where was Katelyn Persimmon?It only made the whole thing more unnerving.
"Are they bait?" he'd wondered at some point, voice hushed to the point where he wasn't sure the words had left his mouth at all. "If you're the Capitol, you don't send someone like Carmen 'Snow Sux' Stirling home with a pulse. Right? Capable, charismatic, clearly a dissident... you don't send someone like that home unless you're watching her. Where she goes, who she meets, what she says. Tell me I'm wrong."
He left around sunrise, dark circles under his eyes and dark clouds on his brow. And one year later, he left in the late afternoon on the train bound for the Capitol he'd hoped never to board again.
Old habits are harder to kill than scrappy Seam kids, and — despite the way the prodigal mentor's singular fixation on learning the minutia of the 80th twist left no time for his tributes — they'd be returning to Twelve with yet another charge in tow. He ought to be pleased or proud or relieved, but Arbor Halt is too selfish to feel anything but dread. It's horrible the way his heart's stayed sunk since it looked like Nico had a fighting chance at the crown. He knows it is. Already standing on anxious toes and mistrusting his precarious footing in the Capitol, Twelve's boon feels like Arbor's bane.
They've already lived the lessons named Anani Petros and Brendon Halt, vicariously learned the dozen named Rhodes and Miristioma and Krigel and Fray. To say nothing of Katelyn Persimmon.
He still remembers — vividly, he still remembers — the warning he'd given her the first time they met. The solemn smile he couldn't drop, not even after she'd called him out for not trying. "Have you realized it yet?" he'd asked. Had it really been a decade since he'd cautioned her against helping Harbinger home? "The Capitol plays a far more dangerous game outside of the Arena."
She's back this year too, or so he'd heard. It's his last day in the Capitol and he still hasn't gone to see her — like there's been some invisible force keeping him from descending the single flight of stairs that separates their suites. Is it in his chest? Is it in his spine? He's in his head. It's not like he's going to open with an I told you so. Maybe it's the way that he built it up in his mind — the last time Katelyn had been in the Capitol, Arbor Halt had actually been trying. Hyacinth Mortuus made it all the way to the finale, and he knew District Eleven's prodigy mentor needed a break from the crosshairs, and he thought... Ripred. He thought it would help.
And the next year — no Katelyn — he'd laid into Mace with about as much vitriol as he'd slung since they'd handed him a hunting knife and stuck him in the snow. Really over-the-line stuff. He ought to apologize for it at some point — even though he meant every word he'd said, meant the flush of anger in his cheeks, meant the table-pounding and chest thumping. I could've taken the heat, he'd insisted. Let them remember how much they hate me for a moment, and make them forget how much they hate her. That was before it had all blown up. By the abrupt end of that dinner, he'd told the seasoned District Ten victor to apologize to Kieran on his behalf when the Capitol saw fit to take it out on the boy. Told him to follow Lethe Turner around and take notes that Games, because that's the future he was looking at.
It hadn't mattered. The Emberstatt boy's name never left the glass spheres each subsequent Reaping. Maybe none of it had mattered. Arbor went home and stayed there and District Twelve brought home the crown again anyway. He doesn't ask himself when things got so futile because he knows that's the way this world has always been.
Instead, he tricks himself onto the first stair. The others come easily after that. And then he's knocking gently on the door to the District Eleven suite before he can change his mind.
When the door cracks open to reveal Katelyn Persimmon — for real, in the flesh — he exhales a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding, breaths out a fear he didn't realize had clenched his throat shut. He smiles in greeting — grim, grateful. "Katelyn," he greets, voice flooded with warm relief at seeing the proof in front of him that tributes aren't the only ones capable of coming back from the dead. His fists remove themselves from his pockets, tugging at the short hairs on back of his head, unsure if handshakes or hugs are gestures too familiar for someone he hadn't seen in six years — someone he'd respected and liked and saw himself in.
"It's —" Measuring time in Hunger Games passed, six years feels like nothing. "It's so good to see you." It could've just as easily been two years as it was six and Arbor wouldn't be able to tell the difference. "Are you..." He doesn't know where he's going with that. "How are you doing?"
