disbelief {part three || d11 mentors day eight reactions}

[Arrows]

You were made to make it hurt,
Disappear into the dirt,
Carry me to heaven's arms,
Light the way and let me go.

The glass splinters, a spider's web spins across its surface as it shatters. Kirito stares at the shards and the dripping water, a microcosm of the madness in the man who caused the chaos. It isn't the first mess of the morning. It isn't the first time hands of avoxes come cluttering around to clean away the aftermath of his accident. He wants to help, to grab a broom and hide it all away. But pandora's box is open, and he cannot close what he has already exposed. Oasis arrives in only a few hours full of growing life and bathed in a glow of warmth. The ultimate opposite to his growing pain and veil of ice. Today he must further shatter silence.

Exhaustion of internal warfare and external duties brings Kirito slumping into the living area's couch. Amid the mayhem of his mind, he's had to preserve a single shard of light. Hope, for a district deprived of a Victor for over a decade. There has been no time for recommended sleep or breaks long enough to lurch himself over the edge of a porcelain throne. Sickness has had to play second fiddle to the two shining stars of Eleven's belief in revival. There's no time for Kirito to die when they're in need of saving.

He must have drifted off to sleep since the next thing Kirito knows Katelyn and Harb are both in the room as well. A light hue of embarrassment illuminates the curvature of Kirito's cheeks as he sits himself up straighter. He never naps, he's always been his most vulnerable when lost in the realm of his mind. He almost laughs, what could that mean for the state of his life now? His eyes float over the figures of his friends, ones he hasn't even shared it with. He can't keep hiding in darkness, he has to believe that he really does deserve hands to hold him up.

His hands find a bottle and place it on the small center table in front of the couch, a bottle pills and truth, each equally hard to swallow.

"I have to tell you both something."

It's cliche, but he doesn't know how else to start. How to sit before the two people closest to him aside from Oasis and just change their lives. To say something he can never take back, no matter how much he wishes that it's just fantasy. So yeah, it's a bit cliche, but it's a beginning.

"I have a tumor, in my head."

Kirito can hear pandora's laughter, but he doesn't let it drown out his greatest truth.

"And I'm scared."

He waits for the world to warp around him, but it does so in an unexpected way. It moves to half the hope of their district. It comes in the excited tone of Flickermen's voice. It comes as a horror repeated for a second year in a row. Kirito's head falls into his hands, but there aren't tears. He lives in the moment of his terrible timing.

"Fuck."

Dear Agony,
Just let go of me,
Suffer slowly,
Is this the way its got to be?

Lyrics : Dear Agony by Breaking Benjamin

[charade]

She knows what’s coming. It was inevitable. The Capitol lives for finales like the sixty-seventh. Two careers at the top of their field battling to come out on top. They cannot chance a one hundred percent chance of eleven taking the crown. Not when their other alternatives are eight and twelve. She thinks that someone will be losing their job as game-maker if Nell Cyprus does not come home. They cannot let Nico Thorne become the next Katelyn Persimmon. And they cannot let her district have hope again when it has been all but stamped out.

Flickerman is on the edge of his seat, his ponytail flopping back and forth as he wildly gesticulates. The fight feels like an eternity, but it takes only a moment. Kassandra is not fighting for Killian’s lofty ideals. Jacob is no longer afraid. They are fighting to kill. They are fighting to live. A brilliant beam of light lances its way into Jacob’s chest and he hits the ground. A cannon fires. It is an old sound. A familiar sound. A sound that has haunted her dreams since the moment Quartz Caplin dashed Velocity Rush’s skull on the ice. She knows this one will haunt her too.

It’s been years since eleven has come this far. For Jacob to fall here, at the hands of Kassandra? It is almost too much. The knowledge that one of her tributes had made the finale is bitter in her stomach. Ashes on her tongue. It is a high price to pay, and there is only a fifty percent chance that Kass will make it home.

But Jacob’s death, and the promise she was unable to keep to his mother are hard to grasp. They dance in the background of her mind, enveloped by the words she didn’t hear her brother say. Because they can’t be true. He was joking. It’s not right. These are the things she hears about happening to other people and then she offers them her sympathy. Condolences. It’s not supposed to be the other way around.

It’s not supposed to be her family that suffers tragedy after tragedy.

And yet, somehow it always is.

She tears her face away from the screen to look at the bottle of painkillers on the table. To the face that is hid by trembling hands. She heard him of course. She had to have. But she didn’t hear him. Just like she didn’t see the signs. Because she didn’t want to. Because it was unfathomable. Because if there was really something going on, he would have told her beforehand. When she could have done something. Not for the first time, she wonders just how much harm her absence has really caused. Do they still consider her a sister? Why wouldn’t he have told her?

Her hand finds the back of a chair and she sits down hard. She hasn’t even had time to process the death of one of her charges. There is no time to now. Not when her brother is hurting. When he’s been suffering in silence. There are tears pricking the back of her eyes but she leaves the tears unshed. She is the strong one. She’s always had to be. The hits never stop coming; she’s made her peace with that. She covers her mouth with her other hand and stares at the bottle in accusation.

“How— how long? Is it, is it treatable?”

The question is blunt. Point blank. Katelyn Persimmon has wasted enough of her life on mincing words for the cameras to care about sugar coating things now. Now is the time for answers. Soon it will be time to pick up the pieces as best she can.

It's what she was born to do.

[Noah Vau - D2 (Cato)]

Harbinger Rhodes District Eleven

It's the final four, and for the first time in years district eleven has a chance to making it out of this alive. I don't mean the same odds as everyone else, but both of them are close to the end. They're getting there. They're almost out of here, and I can't help but feel guilt as excitement bubbles inside. I've only watched tributes die year after year. I've never brought someone home alive, and it's an odd feeling, and I don't know how to react to it. I just know I can't get hopeful too soon because the games aren't finished yet.

Jacob and Kass are closing in on one another, and the only thing I can think of is last year when Rex killed Arianna before falling to a mutt shortly after. I'm wanting to scream to tell them to run away from one another, but they're so far away, and they can't hear me. This is not the moment I'm here for though. Kirito has been ill, and Kate hasn't been back very long. Life has been an adventure, and it keeps tumbling down around me. I can't help but wonder if today is any different. Jacob is dead. Killed by the hands of Kassandra. I don't blame her though. I can't blame her. She wants to live just as we all did.

I look away from the screen just long enough to try to wrap my mind around everything that's happening, and I watch Kirito place a bottle of medicine on the table in the middle of the room, and I'm looking around, eyes switching between Kate and Kirito. What is going on? Why does he have these? Before anything can come into the air, he's speaking, and he says he has something to tell us. My heart drops into the pit of my stomach, and every hair stands on end. It terrifies me wondering what's wrong with a brother, a friend, someone that's family despite having an entirely different bloodline. He has a tumor in his head, and he's scared, and I'm scared for him.

Kate speaks first asking how long and if it's treatable. His head is in his hands, and I don't know what else to do. I just want him to be okay. To have a good life. We've all been through so much, and now I'm unsure of what else to do. It's one thing after another after another, and the world is already a cruel place anyway. Why him? What did they do to him? Why is in having to deal with this? Nothing makes sense anymore, and all I want is for everything to go back to how it was. My heart is racing, and my hands are shaking at my side, and I don't know what to say, but I manage to speak the first words that come to my mind. "What can I do to help?"

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