❨ dakota lambert ➳ district nine ➳ 1st games / fin. ❩

[d7f amber bosch 🌿 tris]

dakota lambert. eighteen. district nine. rebel.

[d7f amber bosch 🌿 tris]

" I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I’m a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny that I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand. " ― catherynne m. valente

[d7f amber bosch 🌿 tris]

i'm waiting for the snow
i'm waiting for vision
so i can feel brighter
i can feel lighter

I pulled the trigger,

— on my mother's life.

Before I knew what it meant to hold a gun in my hands, before I craved that cold touch of steel against my fingertips. I was only skin, and bone, and blood, and that was enough. To be lethal. It didn't matter how, and it didn't matter why, it only mattered that suddenly I was there and she was gone. That kind of death clung to a child, a heavy scent in the air. Like berries rotting in the sun.

And then my father had nothing left, nothing but his daughter and a house on the verge of collapse, and yet I only remember his smile. The way he'd brush my hair from my face, the smudge of gunpowder he'd leave on my cheek. "I love you, Lamb." I never doubted that. It wasn't the kind of thing you could question. Even when he finally told me the truth, even when he fell apart in my embrace.

My father loved me,
and he never blamed me.

But that was the sharp edge of remembering; realizing just how much time had passed. Memories were blades, and they were merciless — but they were there, always, when the thing you longed to see had disappeared from view. Loving would become loved, and living would become lived. It was the natural order of things. But it still cut, and it still stung, and there was nothing that could freeze a moment.

Bombs would fall, and gunfire would echo in the distance — and war would come, taking fathers with it. And I followed mine to the frontlines, disobeying his wishes and holding his pale face in my grasp. Now there was a smudge of gunpowder on his cheek. "We do this together. We always do it together." No man wanted to watch his daughter suffer, to watch her die, but no one wanted to see death.

That didn't stop it from revealing itself.

I worked with the guns, repairing them and loading them — and never firing, never taking a life out of choice. Until I pulled the trigger; on a Capitol boy, with the brownest eyes. And I knew that our enemy wasted no children in its armies, that the body bleeding out at my feet belonged to a man who raided our camp with the intent to destroy. But I was quicker than him, and somehow just as ruthless.

He wouldn't have flinched,
and neither had I.

Becoming a soldier uprooted my father's stability, sent him spiralling into the realisation that this was real — that the piles outside our boundaries were made of bodies with names and stories, not faceless creatures. Someone's child, someone's father. The soil was red all the same. But I held my ground, and I held that gun, and I did not yield. I never knew my mother, but she lived in me. Lived.

"You are so much like her.
And that breaks my heart."

We fought together, but there was distance. It stretched between inches and miles and years — before I ever understood that I had lost my childhood, that I was still young enough to braid flowers into my hair and laugh in the sun. But I hadn't seen it in weeks, hidden behind a black cloud of smoke. This was normal to me, this desperate fight for survival; and I was terrified. Familiar things made my skin crawl the most.

I was so willing to fight that I never stopped to consider what I was willing to lose; and I kept pulling the trigger, kept watching my innocence fall to the ground and pick itself back up again. I was numb, and then I ached — and for all my desperation to do good, to make a difference, I realized that what I was trying to do was survive. With my father, together.

And I couldn't shield my eyes from the truth, from the blood dripping from a comrade's mouth — from a girl screaming over a burnt space, the ashes that remained — from the people like myself, dying all around me. Falling, shattering, but never standing back up. I didn't want to find herself lying on the dirt, unable to find my footing again. Paranoia crept in slowly, but it ruined me in moments.

In the seconds it took me to drop my gun, to remove my finger from that trigger — in the minutes it took to dry my tears, in the hours I travelled to a Capitol base. And I fell to my knees, hands in the air, only because I knew that was the only way I'd be allowed to stand without fear. Soldiers were pawns, tiny things that went unnoticed; but the unknown were the wisest, the most dangerous.

And I knew things.

Enough information to pardon me from my war crimes, to lead to the deaths of former companions and strangers alike — to change the tide of the war, to crush the rebels beneath the heel of justice. And I stood on that scale like I had a right to, like I wasn't one of them. I wasn't. I was a horrible mix of the two, a traitor in the simplest sense. And I did not belong anywhere, not in the Capitol and not in Nine and not in the arms of my father.

He looked me in the eyes, outreached a stained hand — but he didn't close the distance. He walked away. And I watched, and I broke, and I fell; and I stayed there until the night gave way to morning, until the smoke cleared and the sun was shining again. But I was not smiling, and all the flowers were dead and burnt. I was not a hero, someone who was honoured. The people of the district did not bow their heads for me.

And when the peacekeepers came, in rows of white and silver — no one screamed, and no one fought against them; not when they grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me away. I sold my soul, and I was allowed to live. But that was a difficult thing to do on stolen time, on breaths that have ceased and memories that have long since faded away. I chose myself above everyone else. I chose to live. I chose the Capitol.

The Capitol chose death.

The Capitol chose me.

But I was standing as I walked away,
so I did not allow myself to cry.

I lost the right to break.

i used to make mountains
but then they grew bigger than me
i thought that i'd climb my way up high
but what if i tumble?



lyrics : of monsters and men
— waiting for the snow

^{[ DARS ]}

[d7f amber bosch 🌿 tris]

finished ♥ / L△LIA

[L△LIA]

Urgh, stunning writing as always. It's just like you to even go poetic with your concept — a girl backstabbed by her own backstabbing. Characters who can't let go of their own self-interest are always some of my very favorites and I can't wait to read your posts.

ACCEPTED!