twin creatures — nico. & francis.

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

cold bones
that's my love
he hides away,
like a ghost.

There was an unbroken quietness in the museum’s air—forlorn and somber, like a swan song played in reverse, like a doleful eulogy repeated over and over.

Its walls hummed with a multitude of so many different pasts and were drenched with everything tributes went into the arena with: broken dreams, fear, dread and death. This was the Capitol’s cruel imitation of Death’s quiet kingdom, where lost souls slumbered, entrapped in colored wires and manmade machinery until a button was pushed. Even in death, they were restless.

     Even in death, they were mere playthings,

coming alive at the flick of a switch as if they were the figural, clockwork ornaments of a musical box, spinning around when the lid is opened and a tune is play.

The cruelty and the barbarism of it all was outrageous, but expected of the Capitol. Tributes were a good commodity, whether they crawled out of the arenas, ragged and dehumanized, as victors, or graciously sent back home in a garlanded casket, cold and broken. Those who returned in the caskets were revived in this place, as lifeless, programmable minds, mere ghosts conjured by advanced technology.

Familiar sounds rang, such as the wet squish of Ansgar’s eye as Hyacinth’s knife dug into it, the fire crackling from Pillar Fray’s sword that had slain Bolts, mangled screams and cries, avalanches and deadly butterflies, the tear-stained eyes belonging to the Lowe sisters before their demises. There were familiar sights too, such as dark caverns and pools brimmed with molten gold, upside-down houses and lakes with fog instead of water. Down to the very last drop of sweat on the nape of Justice Fray’s neck, the Capitol had reconstructed. It was a special photo album dedicated to the dead, a documentary of massacres and betrayals, children dying over and over again; this was purgatory on earth.

     Exhibited in museum’s wicked heart,
     were the recent games in all its glory.

Sunflowers drifted in an ethereal wind, and grass swayed to the motions of a breeze that wasn’t there. The sun shone serenely over a dried-up lake bed, and the circus tent stood alone against it, its sun-bleached flaps tattered and still.

     Nico Thorne pressed a button;

a stimulation came alive, beginning as a single ray of blue light that grew and grew until it made a boy's entire body, from the unkempt hair to the soft hands veined blue and green.

The boy had never thought of himself as beautiful—bodies were mere vessels that homeless faeries occupied for a short while, his mother had said once—but he was delicately put together, each feature on his face there to compliment the adjacent ones. He was a soft creature, interwoven with flowers and bones, beautiful and not belonging to this world. There was a faraway kingdom, mossed and draped in wild florae, made specifically for him to reign in.

His eyes, though, were cold, the light that once encircled the irises nowhere to be found.

“Nico Thorne, victor of the eighty-first hunger games,” He said rather curtly, with vocal chords that were only beginning to coalesce and twine themselves altogether. Cornflowers lined his loose shirt and piled around his bare feet were the sunflowers he so dearly loved, bright and vibrant. More flowers fell delicately around him, a floral rain of hyacinths, cornflowers, marigolds. There was a hint of the blow that sent him to the grave on his scalp, but the thick heap of brown hair hid most of its gruesomeness.

He stood in front of Nico, caramel eyes leveled with his gaze, a ghost from the boy’s past. The moment everything in the system clicked into their rightful places, the edges of Francis’ thin mouth rose into a lopsided grin, mirroring the one that had plastered his face countless times, the one that he’d given at Nico during every second they shared together.

     “You did it,” Francisco smiled,
     his words as gentle as fresh rain.

“You won.” Slowly, he paced around Nico, committing all of him back into memory, the scars and the severed parts, the eyes and the muscles. He was Francisco Bloom’s very own Nico, and even though he was more broken than Francis would wish him to be, he was alive, a corporeal being that wasn’t produced from ceaseless light reflections. All the wish-bones he’d broken had been for Nico Thorne all along, it seemed, because his wish came true.

Francis’ hands rose to take his, or at least tried to; his light form phased through the other’s flesh, like air. Disappointment flashed across his face, but was concealed quickly, and expertly.  

“I said once that we were pressed flowers, that death could never touch us,” he gazed at him for a few, quietly-mirthful seconds before inching closer to press his forehead against Nico’s, the heat and the feel of the other’s skin almost palpable. If he was actually here, he would reach out to kiss him – but a minuscule part of Francis is aware of the limitations of this spectral state.

     Francisco was not here,
     only his memories were.

In that moment, with their eyes interlocked, Francis’ eyes grazed upon a hint of sadness in Nico’s. He’d seen him saddened before—such as when Jessica was struck down—but not like this.

The sadness was like a deep-rooted malady, eating him from the inside, and the crown of stolen bones he was given to wear was weighing him down. Francis breathed out, shakily. “Don’t worry, Nico, I am not dead—just scattered into tiny, insubstantial pieces, drifting around like a salt-filled breeze on the sea,” he said, making a small hand gesture to caress an imaginary sea. “So don’t mourn me. You lived for me in the arena,” eyes whirled back onto the other, gentle yet filled with tacit pleas.

    “Now, you have start living for yourself.”

lyrics : syml — where's my love

words : 1000

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

consequence of
loving me can be cruel
you're gonna suffer now
whatever you do

Nico doesn't know why he comes here.

He doesn't want this, doesn't want to be surrounded by the faces of dead tributes, all the ones that he did not know and the ones that he loved all the same. He had only known that he couldn't be in the Training Center for a minute longer. He may not want to be here, at this horrible place, but in the Training Center, he feels absolutely lost.

He doesn't know what to say to Red or Cedar, only knows that he wants one of them to live far less than he wants the other, and that he's wracked with guilt knowing he probably won't be able to save either of them. He feels absolutely useless, adrift in a largely unfamiliar place with too many haunting memories. For all that he had fought the memories off, he couldn't help but remember every time he stepped in the elevator the way that he had bullied Exover. He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had not endured his loneliness with grace, that he had taken one look at Francis and made him his own, had wanted to protect him from the entire world, even from the kind-hearted boy from Ten who only wanted to love Francis himself.

It was terrible, the way Nico loved Francis, but it had been love all the same.

The worst part about it all, Nico thinks, is that even still today he does not know if he would apologize if given the chance. He doesn't know if he would do anything differently, doesn't know if he would be kinder. Why should he apologize for the things that he's done? For the cruelties that he's caused? He knows that the people who made him like this wouldn't apologize. He knows that the man who slipped a blade into his father's belly had no interest in apologizing, would probably use it to spit on Nico's pretty new shoes if he could. He knows that Snow would never apologize for making Nico a killer himself, would never apologize for giving him a boy to love and then watching on, probably with a smile, as a girl from two districts lower brought her weapon down on the back of his head. So why should Nico feel the things that he's done? When those that made him this way do not, what is there for him to do except sink to their level? It's this, he knows, that is the crux of all of his problems: this lack of responsibility clashing with the absolutely crushing weight of it.

He doesn't even really realize that this is the place he's wandering to until it's too late, and he's standing outside of the building's front door. Nico stares up at the daunting thing for what feels like a long time, looks to his side and takes in the sign for the building proclaiming it as the terrible thing that it has decided to be. The National Hunger Games Museum.

Nico cannot, for the life of him, understand why people would want to memorialize these moments.

Moments where children became murderers and murder victims within the span of a single week, in Nico's mind these were things that needed to be fought to forget, moments that he had to constantly remind himself and beg his mind to erase. It was like he didn't know how to live with them, these moments they have both made him who he is and the moments he is supposed to fight hardest to forget. Hadn't that been what Katelyn had told him he needed to do? Forgive? But he still doesn't know how to do that without forgetting, doesn't know how to live with what he's done, live with the memories of who he has killed and who he could not save.

Nico doesn't want to be here, but here he stands in all of his broken-hearted glory, with the strangest sense that he has to go inside. He's glad, instinctively, that he's not wearing anything ostentatious, that he's left home in only a clean pair of dark slacks and a coat with the hood pulled up. He's a quiet presence, almost ghostly as he stands in the darkness, but that changes the moment he steps over the threshold. All at once, he's surrounded by the stark white of the blank room. The other victors he had met had told him about the place, but it had been Jenas who explained how it all worked. He had been so excited, brimming over with the passion, and Nico had only been able to look on at him in horror as he explained that the dead lived on and anyone could go and watch memories be relived, or new ones created.

Then, in between one breath and the next, with the single press of a button, the place Nico has seen every night in his dreams is real and in front of him once again.

And Nico cannot fucking breathe.

Suddenly, he is standing among the sunflowers, and he feels like he's suffocating, like at any moment he is going to collapse and this will be another one of his nightmares. He can't feel the wind on his face, but the flowers sway in the breeze. Just the same, a halo of bright sunshine sings down from the sky, but Nico can't feel its warmth. He feels ripped open and hollow, unable to find anything but pain and ache in the sight of this horribly familiar place.

But then—Francis.

Except that for those first moments, it's not him. It's a hologram wearing his face, but it's all wrong. The boy that Nico had known and loved had been warm, warmer even than the sun, and this creation of blue light has no kindness in his eyes. The hair flops over his forehead in just the right way, but his eyes are blank, and Nico can feel his heart drop out of his chest. This, he thinks, is worse than the image of Francis dying, worse than Francis becoming one with the sunflowers. This isn't the memory he wants to be left with, and instinctively he takes a step backward and away from the hologram. This was a mistake, he thinks to himself, and knows it's true when the thing speaks.

But Nico can't look away.

It's too close, too almost-real, and Nico can't abandon Francis, not in a million years, not even this false version of him. Instead, he just looks on in a moment of horror and feels himself want to vomit. But then, the scene shifts, and he is no longer an automaton simply recognizing Nico, all at once its like the boy he loved is standing in front of him once again and Nico stands stock still in shock and terror. How is this real? How could he be here? "You did it," the boy with Francis's face and voice and smile says, walking around him in a small circle. "You won."

In their last life, Nico would have made a quip, would have smiled and said something kind, or maybe something cruel, but either way, it would have made Francis laugh, this much Nico knows, but he has no words. He lifts his right hand at the same moment the Francis does, and the sight of him passing through his prosthetic hand is almost too much and Nico worries that he really might be ill. This new part of him, this part of his body that Nico had to lose to finally be worthy of Francis's love... there's a poetry to that incompatibility that Nico wants to ignore but knows he'll never be able to. “I said once that we were pressed flowers, that death could never touch us,” Francis goes on, and Nico hears the first time that he said those words in all over again. He remembers pressing against the other, remembers running the palm of his hand over the other's jaw and through his auburn hair and tracing the curve of his hip, and there's a million things that Nico wants to say but no room in his throat for them to be said. But death did touch you, he could say. Or maybe he could ask him how he thought he could protect him like that and not break Nico's heart, how he could have thought Nico could live without him.

The other steps forward, and he's close enough for Nico to reach out and touch, but Nico knows better this time. “Don’t worry, Nico, I am not dead—just scattered into tiny, insubstantial pieces, drifting around like a salt-filled breeze on the sea,” Francis goes on, and it is so Francis that Nico almost feels at home here once again. “So don’t mourn me. You lived for me in the arena. Now, you have start living for yourself.” He wishes that he could feel the other, that the hologram would give off warmth, but there is still only that image of a breeze with no real motion, as though this is a moment that Nico doesn't belong to. He looks hard into Francis's eyes, and begs him to not see the ways in which losing him has ruined him.

Was all that death worth it?

How many times had he asked himself that question? Wondered about whether or not it was true and come out with the same answer every time? He had asked it every night in his dreams, dealt with the consequences of becoming a villain to be king every time he slept, and he had always known that fulfilling his promise to Francis had been worth anything.

That does not mean he wants Francis to see the broken thing it made him.

"I look for you in everything," he says finally, not know what else to say only knowing that he needs Francis to know he'll never be forgotten, that he'll be with him always. "Every time the sun shines." He goes on, almost cracks a smile with his next words. "Which, granted, doesn't actually happen that often in Twelve unless I go out way beyond the fence." He can't talk about his being dead, not directly, not yet, needs to build himself up to that. "But every time it touched my face, I think about you." He smiles, can't help the water pooling in his eyes. "I think the sun was the only thing that got me through my victory tour." Thinking about his victory tour makes his stomach roll once again, remembers every time he drank too much, remembers in Four when he let people surround him with lust in hopes that it might make him feel better, might make him feel less hollow, less alone.

It had only done the opposite.

"I know you're not gone, Francis," he says, stepping forward one small step, but it's almost painful to be this close and not be able to touch him. "I know that if there's anyone still living among the trees, that it's you, but—" he swallows thickly, runs both his hands over his face, a motion that's still unfamiliar and uncomfortable for him. "I'm trying," he says, but he knows it's a lie and he can't even finish the sentence. "How am I supposed to live for me?" he says after a moment. "You were the one who was supposed to win. I was fighting to hard to make sure you made it out, and then you just went and stepped in front of me." He knows that he's angry, knows that he's spent plenty of nights screaming at the stars in hopes Francis would hear him, but there's no fire in his voice. There's only exhaustion.

"Why'd you do that 'cisco?" he asks, using the name he'd called him that first night they had met, the name that he hadn't used since because he's been afraid of what it had meant, afraid of its affection, afraid of its realness. "Didn't you want to win?" No, that's not the right question, because Nico knows that there was no hunger for glory in Francis. "Didn't you want to live?"

But then, again, Nico wonders if that had been true either, wonders if Francis could have killed someone just to save his own skin, and thinks he finally understands.  

2,060.

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

hold your hands up to your chest
and tell me what you find
out of you, a sparrow comes
and sees without its eyes

A cluster of unspoken things churned within Francisco—unspoken promises, unspoken oaths, and unspoken confessions—and all of them entangled together, like a ball of yarn, until it was impossible for him to fray out the edges.

Old memories rose and warred against each other to be voiced, but he hadn’t the intelligence or the soul to separate the good from the bad anymore. He was the mere husk of a boy that had been made into a beautiful, flower-etched history.

The hollows of his gut were filled to their brims with rotten memories, sepia images that bled into one another. There was a perpetual montage playing in his head ever since his program was activated and all the faces and the moments were losing any meaning from being overplayed. Still, every time Nico’s face arose in the technicolor footage, his mechanical heart would jolt as if it were a real human’s. In the memories of the real Francisco, Nico shone the brightest, a warm enigma, a sharp constellation, a fissured star.

“I look for you in everything,” Nico said, making a small grin unfurl across Francis’ face.

   He had never feared death;

to Francis, it was just a mere rite of passage, a new chapter in his flower-covered storybook, a threshold things crossed to reach the other side.

Death was a gentle hand stroking you to sleep, its bone-chilling melody intended to lull. When it came to put Francisco Bloom down to a blissful slumber, he willingly rest his head on its cold lap, let its bone-white fingertips comb through his brown strands of hair. But, he did fear being forgotten, the act of dissipating into a colder nothingness where his name wasn’t whispered anymore, where his story wasn’t told. Stories such as Francisco Bloom’s demanded to be spoken and passed on over bonfires or flowerbeds, not kept in the crevices of one’s mouth like a heinous secret. But, he was remembered and he knew it from the way Nico spoke about him, the way Nico’s eyes bore into him. In the depths of the others’ irises and head, Francisco Bloom was immortalized, etched onto each nerve-ending and bone plate.

“Every time the sun shines which, granted, doesn’t actually happen that often in Twelve unless I go out way beyond the fence.” His words prompted Francis to recall sunlight, the way it felt on his skin and face, the way it made things bloom and flower.

He loved the sunlight when he was alive because everything beneath it was for growth.

“But, every time it touched my face, I think about you,” Nico said, and at that, Francis’ hand rose to caress the edge of the other’s face.

Nico Thorne was a broken, fragmented reflection of himself, a cracked mirror that had been ineptly assembled back together to a cohesive whole but with the cracks and the fracture lines showing through. Francis wished he could tuck a handful of lavender seeds in between the cracks so that even though he was broken, something could bloom from within him such as a sliver of hope, or a flicker of joy. “I think the sun was the only thing that got me through my victory tour,” he went on. “I can only guess what that must feel like, the weight you must have on your shoulders, to celebrate a victory that came from killing others,” Francis’ head lowered, bird-like. “But, I did ask you to do that.”

He remembered the exact words he said on the verge of that sunflower field.

   “And you have to kill them,” he’d said then.

Francis wondered if the words were a mistake, if he had whispered this hollowness inside Nico Thorne into existence. He wondered if perhaps Death would had been kinder to Nico than this. Before everything had begun, there used to be a glimmer to his eyes, traces of innocence that ensured Francis he was human, but he couldn’t glimpse any in his current, weeping eyes. There was only unending sadness: a stretch of sadness so long that feet would only grow tired if they attempted to follow it.

“This isn’t our guilt,” he drew closer, cupping the other’s hands with his holographic ones. “None of this is our fault—and that includes my death. We were just playthings of a cruel toddler who flung us around to see which twenty-three of us would break first, and you were the last one. You are strong, Nico.”

“How am I supposed to live for me?” Nico said after a moment. “You were the one who was supposed to win. I was fighting too hard to make sure you made it out, and then you just went and stepped in front of me.”

The muscles of Francis’ mouth loosely held up a smile before he spoke. “No, I wasn’t,” he said, circling the other once more, holographic flowers blooming wherever his feet touched, lavenders and sunflowers, hyacinths and jasmines. “I was never supposed to win—that’s the thing with flowers, they don’t want to win, they just want to bloom, they just want to soak in the sun, swim in the coolest waters, and be themselves.” Lights flickered, and so did Francis’ form. For a moment, he vanished as he walked into a blind spot, and then rematerialized a few feet away from Nico, head cocked towards an invisible blue sky, his cornflower-lined clothes billowing out in unfelt winds around him. “You were my sun, too, Nico. By my last day, I had lost and I had gained everything I ever wanted in this world and there simply wasn’t anything more for me to have.” He turned, a smile etched onto his face, catching a glimpse of the other’s cheekbone. “I danced in the most beautiful orchards back home that my mother and I tended to together.” His fingers swayed to a long-forgotten rhythm, wild and innocent. “I ate such wonderful meals, cooked by my own hands and others’. I loved the most perplexing boy when I was shipped off to Death’s kingdom. The world was a fruit and I had eaten it down to its seed of a heart. There was nothing more for me to live through other than the same things, over and over again. That though of a lonesome eternity scared me more than stepping in front of Diana’s weapon.”

He whirled around to look at Nico Thorne, wrecked but still standing, saddened but still brimmed with life. Then, Francisco Bloom knew he hadn’t made a mistake when he broke a wishbone for him to win—he wanted him to, because Nico had never known anything other than steel and bones, other than vengeance and fury. He was a boy when Francis met him on that star-lit rooftop, yes, but he was also something weaponized, crafted for war, wearing his own skin as he would an armor. He hadn’t known love or growth, only blood and how to make a strong, unbreakable fist. Francis wished him everything he stepped in front of him, and more.

   “You know I am not actually here, right?”

Hands rose again to take Nico’s cheeks in it. He let his fingers trace the sharp of his jaw, the hollow sockets beneath his eyes, the skin of his chest under which his heart hid, the parts that made him so human.

“These are just my memories, my thoughts, my essence,” he whispered, ajar lips so close to Nico’s that if he was here and if he was not a being spun out of light they would be kissing. “I am somewhere far away, where the wind speaks in rhymes and the flowers smell the sweetest, like molten candy.” A laugh resonated from his throat, a hearty sound, as if the flowers he’d mentioned were laughing with him.

“Your past doesn’t need you, Nico,” he hummed, “your future does.”

For a moment, the lights settled upon Francis’ air of a body perfectly, and he appeared real, as if he was here in flesh and bone, winding an arm around Nico’s waist to bring him closer. “You’re out of the arena,” Francis nodded his head delicately in emphasis, “so, stop fighting.”

don't forget who you are
even though you're in need
like a bird in the night,
your emotions deserves to be freed

lyrics : aurora — the river

words : 1350