this is the last time // { arbor | day 7 }
Aug 11, 2019 20:04:26 GMT -5
Post by aya on Aug 11, 2019 20:04:26 GMT -5
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oh, when i lift you up you feel
like a hundred times yourself
i wish everybody knew
what's so great about you
like a hundred times yourself
i wish everybody knew
what's so great about you
At least Arbor Halt had the good sense to pack up his son's things immediately after the end of the bloodbath. It had been one of the hardest things he'd ever done in his life. He knew it would only ever get harder with each passing moment.
Seven days, he's barely slept.
Barely ate.
Barely drank. Not water, not whiskey, not gin.
It's been bad before — Brendan. Anani. — but never like this.
Not even his first year mentoring was like —
At no point was the 82nd Games ever a mad, desperate scramble. It's been slow. Excruciating. Sitting... and waiting... and barely remembering even to breathe. Elbows on his knees and head clutched between his hands, constantly in crash position bracing for the worst. Never daring to hope for anything better because better in a place like that is a quick end, and even his callous pragmatism could never be enough to make him wish death upon his son.
Aranica will take the beta fish. Arbor Halt isn't fit to look after living beings.
The seasoned mentor had thought he'd figured it all out by now.
As it turns out, while there's still anything left to be taken from you, there are still more lessons to be learned. For example, this year he discovered for the first time that there's exactly one place on one couch that he can sit on to see the television without the dark void of the doorway to the tributes' rooms staring back at him. It just wasn't important before. Maybe it won't be next year. If he makes it here next year. If he makes it to next year.
He shouldn't be thinking like that, probably, but at least he's still thinking. Still learning. On the plus side, he knows one thing for certain: just because everything is rocky doesn't mean he's hit the bottom. He's been in freefall since they put the crown on his head. There is no bottom.
His stomach craters as his son packs up his belongings and crawls away from the girl who's saved his life thrice. Eight tributes left, he knows it's that time — lest the Gamemakers turn Red's blade on Cedar. They liked to do that when they could. Con the kids who care for one another into choosing to kill the last vestiges of compassion they could keep through that carefully constructed hell, just for the drama of it.
That close to the end, splitting up is safer. He barely remembers how it went down with the girls. Did he shake Zinnia's hand before trudging off in the opposite direction? Had he wished Ailia luck over his shoulder? Or are those just revisions added on by his imagination? Assigning himself humanity in hopeful hindsight? Nearly three decades later, desperately wishing he could be anything but the villain of his own narrative.
It's harder to watch Cedar receive his message than it had been to record it yesterday. He doesn't remember what he said, but on the screen it's been stripped down to almost nil. Incisive or incoherent, he's relieved that the important things remained: It's okay. It's okay, I love you. Relieved — not glad, not grateful — that he was permitted to send one last message of love to the son who was taken from him on a whim and set adrift in the gravity-forsaken void of hell. When unrepentantly awful is the standard for normal life, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that these small kindnesses are no acts of mercy when they're heaped upon an avoidable, unnecessary, manufactured tragedy.
Goddamn.
Cedar sleeps while he doesn't, like it's possible for the old victor to take a shift keeping watch from this distance. Well, maybe. If the Gamemakers hadn't locked down sponsorship so tightly these games... could he send the boy an alarm clock in a pinch? A siren? Maybe nothing explicitly practical, but honestly, anything carried in on the backs of one of those clumsy delivery robots might do the trick. When the other tributes close in on the garden, dots on the livemap signifying certain death, Arbor stands to go see what sort of price-gouged sponsorship order he can convince them to send into the arena. Frisbees and pencil toppers and decoder rings that cost more than his brothers make in the mines in a year. Cedar hears them; Arbor doesn't allow himself to exhale the breath he's been holding until the boy is clear of the flowers.
His dot approaches the stationary one labeled District 8, and despite the way Arbor wills them to pass each other, he knows the Gamemakers will not allow it. Flail in hand, this girl has smashed skulls and sundered sternums, and Cedar's only just gotten to the point where he doesn't immediately drop his laser blaster upon drawing it. If two career boys had gone down that easily, it's all too easy to imagine what might...
But she's caged, and maybe, maybe —
it would be so easy —
Cedar, forever unabashedly Cedar, lets her out.
He has to believe that it's possible for two kids to share moments of respite, to decide they aren't enemies and that they don't need to spend every moment scrapping for their own self preservation. That they don't need to kill one another the second they have a spare moment. He swallows, but the knot in his throat remains.
Not for the first time this week, his thoughts go to Archer Fields. To the boy who'd befriended him and helped him, whom he repaid with calculated betrayal. He hasn't wondered if he'd needed to in decades: he won, he lived, and that end justified each terrible thing he'd done. Right? Did it matter if it was Arbor holding the knife? Did it matter if it was the third day and not the seventh? He died. No one is in the Hunger Games to make friends.
Except maybe the son that he raised.
Cedar is a good kid, a good person, and Arbor loves him, but he's seen thousands of tributes live and die and he knows better than to think there's anything actually special about his son in that regard. That if Cedar can aim his weapon guaranteed to kill at a girl he barely knows and decide — with his life and everything else to gain, with nothing at all to lose but his humanity — he doesn't want to, that anyone is capable of doing the same. He's a good kid. Not a martyr, not a saint. Just a boy with his heart in the right place.
He won't wish that it wasn't. Arbor Halt has been utterly unable to wish for anything for weeks.
Sinking into the couch cushions, he allows himself a moment or two to breathe. He's seen enough Games, he knows the truce won't last forever — the Gamemakers will see to it, provided that the District Eight girl doesn't get any boneheaded ideas first. They like their even numbers, and the rest of the arena is all paired up in combat. Then there's his son: once again, repurposing his murder weapon into a veritable piece for peace. The commentators may call him out for his naïveté, but no one could ever call Cedar Halt stupid. He's just got other talents.
Though they're not as prized as stabbing people and making threats, some of them are even on showcase here: Blending tea. Getting stoned off of whatever's on-hand. Finding a friend in anyone. Believing in the best, even when —
He isn't on the platform.
He isn't on the platform.
He —
Compelling television is always there for Arbor Halt when he needs it the least and he blinks, hard, like that will be enough force to restart the heart that has stopped beating dead in his chest, panic-gripped, unprepared, unprepared, not able to hear the cannon, blood-rushing head-swimming dread-deafened, and there's the replay: smoking, smoking gun, smoking gunshot wound. And — fuck — just like that — sorry! — Cedar spills forward. Boot catching metal he dangles upside down, acrobat, trapeze swinger, fucking traitor Gamemaker-Victor Cricket goddamn Antoinette, pitching into the abyss he hurtles downward and is gone forever.
He can't sit up so he stands, the lamp cord catching his ankle, tumbling off the end table, shards against the ground. He blinks and the suite door slams behind him. Flying down the stairs before he's given any thought to where he's going, he doesn't notice he's not wearing shoes, vanilla and nutmeg he doesn't notice descending past district eleven, whole daycare he can't hear the giggles and squeals on the tenth floor, nine, eight. Unfocused, he fixates: the lodestone in his mind is the feeling of a face beneath his furled fist. He's going to — he's going to —
Silk socks slip and down he tumbles, collapsed in a heap on a landing well above the second floor. The weight in his chest is too much to move, so instead he lays there, curled into himself, wrecked, weeping, lost.
Seven days, he's barely slept.
Barely ate.
Barely drank. Not water, not whiskey, not gin.
It's been bad before — Brendan. Anani. — but never like this.
Not even his first year mentoring was like —
At no point was the 82nd Games ever a mad, desperate scramble. It's been slow. Excruciating. Sitting... and waiting... and barely remembering even to breathe. Elbows on his knees and head clutched between his hands, constantly in crash position bracing for the worst. Never daring to hope for anything better because better in a place like that is a quick end, and even his callous pragmatism could never be enough to make him wish death upon his son.
Aranica will take the beta fish. Arbor Halt isn't fit to look after living beings.
The seasoned mentor had thought he'd figured it all out by now.
As it turns out, while there's still anything left to be taken from you, there are still more lessons to be learned. For example, this year he discovered for the first time that there's exactly one place on one couch that he can sit on to see the television without the dark void of the doorway to the tributes' rooms staring back at him. It just wasn't important before. Maybe it won't be next year. If he makes it here next year. If he makes it to next year.
He shouldn't be thinking like that, probably, but at least he's still thinking. Still learning. On the plus side, he knows one thing for certain: just because everything is rocky doesn't mean he's hit the bottom. He's been in freefall since they put the crown on his head. There is no bottom.
His stomach craters as his son packs up his belongings and crawls away from the girl who's saved his life thrice. Eight tributes left, he knows it's that time — lest the Gamemakers turn Red's blade on Cedar. They liked to do that when they could. Con the kids who care for one another into choosing to kill the last vestiges of compassion they could keep through that carefully constructed hell, just for the drama of it.
That close to the end, splitting up is safer. He barely remembers how it went down with the girls. Did he shake Zinnia's hand before trudging off in the opposite direction? Had he wished Ailia luck over his shoulder? Or are those just revisions added on by his imagination? Assigning himself humanity in hopeful hindsight? Nearly three decades later, desperately wishing he could be anything but the villain of his own narrative.
It's harder to watch Cedar receive his message than it had been to record it yesterday. He doesn't remember what he said, but on the screen it's been stripped down to almost nil. Incisive or incoherent, he's relieved that the important things remained: It's okay. It's okay, I love you. Relieved — not glad, not grateful — that he was permitted to send one last message of love to the son who was taken from him on a whim and set adrift in the gravity-forsaken void of hell. When unrepentantly awful is the standard for normal life, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that these small kindnesses are no acts of mercy when they're heaped upon an avoidable, unnecessary, manufactured tragedy.
Goddamn.
Cedar sleeps while he doesn't, like it's possible for the old victor to take a shift keeping watch from this distance. Well, maybe. If the Gamemakers hadn't locked down sponsorship so tightly these games... could he send the boy an alarm clock in a pinch? A siren? Maybe nothing explicitly practical, but honestly, anything carried in on the backs of one of those clumsy delivery robots might do the trick. When the other tributes close in on the garden, dots on the livemap signifying certain death, Arbor stands to go see what sort of price-gouged sponsorship order he can convince them to send into the arena. Frisbees and pencil toppers and decoder rings that cost more than his brothers make in the mines in a year. Cedar hears them; Arbor doesn't allow himself to exhale the breath he's been holding until the boy is clear of the flowers.
His dot approaches the stationary one labeled District 8, and despite the way Arbor wills them to pass each other, he knows the Gamemakers will not allow it. Flail in hand, this girl has smashed skulls and sundered sternums, and Cedar's only just gotten to the point where he doesn't immediately drop his laser blaster upon drawing it. If two career boys had gone down that easily, it's all too easy to imagine what might...
But she's caged, and maybe, maybe —
it would be so easy —
Cedar, forever unabashedly Cedar, lets her out.
He has to believe that it's possible for two kids to share moments of respite, to decide they aren't enemies and that they don't need to spend every moment scrapping for their own self preservation. That they don't need to kill one another the second they have a spare moment. He swallows, but the knot in his throat remains.
Not for the first time this week, his thoughts go to Archer Fields. To the boy who'd befriended him and helped him, whom he repaid with calculated betrayal. He hasn't wondered if he'd needed to in decades: he won, he lived, and that end justified each terrible thing he'd done. Right? Did it matter if it was Arbor holding the knife? Did it matter if it was the third day and not the seventh? He died. No one is in the Hunger Games to make friends.
Except maybe the son that he raised.
Cedar is a good kid, a good person, and Arbor loves him, but he's seen thousands of tributes live and die and he knows better than to think there's anything actually special about his son in that regard. That if Cedar can aim his weapon guaranteed to kill at a girl he barely knows and decide — with his life and everything else to gain, with nothing at all to lose but his humanity — he doesn't want to, that anyone is capable of doing the same. He's a good kid. Not a martyr, not a saint. Just a boy with his heart in the right place.
He won't wish that it wasn't. Arbor Halt has been utterly unable to wish for anything for weeks.
Sinking into the couch cushions, he allows himself a moment or two to breathe. He's seen enough Games, he knows the truce won't last forever — the Gamemakers will see to it, provided that the District Eight girl doesn't get any boneheaded ideas first. They like their even numbers, and the rest of the arena is all paired up in combat. Then there's his son: once again, repurposing his murder weapon into a veritable piece for peace. The commentators may call him out for his naïveté, but no one could ever call Cedar Halt stupid. He's just got other talents.
Though they're not as prized as stabbing people and making threats, some of them are even on showcase here: Blending tea. Getting stoned off of whatever's on-hand. Finding a friend in anyone. Believing in the best, even when —
He isn't on the platform.
He isn't on the platform.
He —
Compelling television is always there for Arbor Halt when he needs it the least and he blinks, hard, like that will be enough force to restart the heart that has stopped beating dead in his chest, panic-gripped, unprepared, unprepared, not able to hear the cannon, blood-rushing head-swimming dread-deafened, and there's the replay: smoking, smoking gun, smoking gunshot wound. And — fuck — just like that — sorry! — Cedar spills forward. Boot catching metal he dangles upside down, acrobat, trapeze swinger, fucking traitor Gamemaker-Victor Cricket goddamn Antoinette, pitching into the abyss he hurtles downward and is gone forever.
He can't sit up so he stands, the lamp cord catching his ankle, tumbling off the end table, shards against the ground. He blinks and the suite door slams behind him. Flying down the stairs before he's given any thought to where he's going, he doesn't notice he's not wearing shoes, vanilla and nutmeg he doesn't notice descending past district eleven, whole daycare he can't hear the giggles and squeals on the tenth floor, nine, eight. Unfocused, he fixates: the lodestone in his mind is the feeling of a face beneath his furled fist. He's going to — he's going to —
Silk socks slip and down he tumbles, collapsed in a heap on a landing well above the second floor. The weight in his chest is too much to move, so instead he lays there, curled into himself, wrecked, weeping, lost.
we were so under the brine
we were so vacant and kind
we were so vacant and kind
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