flightless birds — vargen & nico.

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

Heartless.

That's what his mother had called him when he went to visit her that morning of the Reaping. On his way back to his house, he stopped in the Seam to say goodbye to her before he boarded the train, and she had been as cruel as ever, as spiteful, as angry. "I thought winning would make you strong," she'd screamed at him again. "But you can't even bring your own mother to live with you." Nico had swallowed, looked to the ceiling for the millionth time, and counted his breaths before saying his goodbyes.

Heartless.

He fucking wishes.

All he does is feel its anger, feel its emptiness and its terrible, horrible, fucking ache. It's all he thinks about if he allows himself to think, and it's why most nights he doesn't let himself, just drowns himself in the bottom of a bottle or a new body. It's all that he knows how to do to numb the anger anymore. Every time he closes his eyes at night, tries to lie down in his bed, he can hear Francs in his head, telling him to live, telling him to love, to function in the world of the living and not the one for the dead.

Heartless.

That'd make life easier.

Instead, as he lies on his back on the ground in the entrance hall of the training center, practically begging to be stepped on and put out of his misery—No, you're going to get up, he hears Francis scold him—he studies the rivets in the ceiling, so much further away than the one in his mother's home. "I'm sure you lot are supposed to stay in your rooms," he says when a silver-haired boy shows his face. "I remember just sneaking up to the roof was a feat," he says, not looking at him. "Though, what's the worst the Peacekeepers could do to you?"

He looks at the boy now.

"Kill you?"

And he grins.

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

there's blood on your lies
the scars open wide
there is nowhere for you to hide
the hunter's moon is shining

There’s a god in my throat, and it is screaming.

The air here is almost acetic, thick with chemicals and bleach. I longed desperately for the winds that brushed through the cypress trees and became pregnant with their scent. As clean as spring-water too, they were, drifting through the forests wildly, no border to define them, no walls to hold them inward. Here, the air was as still as stagnant water—and as pungent too.

I whirled through the dimly-lit halls, a specter in form and sound, trying my best to navigate through this labyrinth of steel and glass. Everything was an alien sight—the walls crowded with filigreed animals, the floor underneath my bare feet that was as cool, as silver, as dewdrops on grass.

As I turned a corner, I put a hand against the wall to steady and stop myself from drifting further. I had come out here for more than a breath of fresh air. When the Peacekeepers escorted me to the carriage, they had stripped of me any personal belonging I had, of the amulets my sister and I had spun in the warm dark of summer nights, of the moth-wings I couldn’t part from, of the herbs and the draughts.

Now, I was left with one blunt, nicked tooth of a wolf we’d found dead in the woods one autumn.

It was smooth against my grasp, the ivory surface sanded down by palms countless times. But, this tooth meant nothing. I needed to cleanse myself, and to offer my gods things in exchange for their divine protection. Gods always demanded a price for their endless divinity—and it was selfish, but if I were a God, I surely would do the same.

When asked, the lady in the banquet hall, with a crossed look on her face, handed me the animal liver.

It was iced over so finely that I couldn’t tell what beast this was harvested from, but it was enough. “May you join the faeries in the underworld,” I told her with a tiny smile and left her to her own rumination. The organ burned cold in my hands. There were no candles to light, no incense to burn, but I only needed the moonlight as my sacred torch.

The moonbeams were honed to fine shards in the entrance hall, each one sharper than the other. Everything glinted silver and chrome, including the man that laid there.

Nico Thorne was the only victor whose games were the ones I wasn’t completely in the dark about. Look, my sister once hurried me over to a silver screen, his name is Francisco Bloom. He was dying, I saw, blood crusting at his head. I marveled at the way the sunflowers twisted around his limbs, that clean throat, the way ivies crawled up his skin and thorns splintered it. What a beautiful end, I thought.

Horrible, and beautiful.

Nico Thorne’s grin was only horrible—sharpened and feral. He was a worn armor, mostly edged shadows, resignation in his posture. I almost scowled. “Nico Thorne,” a curt address, “You were Francisco Bloom’s partner, yes?” Sunflowers nodded pliantly in the back of my eyelids. I let my gaze towards him be pointed—let it cast his sins alight, let it become skin-deep, let it be a cruel blade, let it be as cold as the liver I held in my palms. “He had so much magic,” I say, and do not add the words ‘you have none.’

But, it was uttered in my tone and shone in my eyes.

i'm running with the wolves tonight
i'm running with the wolves
i'm running with the wolves tonight
i'm running with the wolves


lyrics: aurora — running with the wolves

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

The boy doesn't indulge me in my cruelty, and for that, I think I almost respect him.

Almost.

I had watched the highlights reel from the reapings, watched as he stepped forward for a boy who looked like me and named himself a tribute instead. Once upon a time, I remember my own plan to do the same. I volunteer as tribute. I still taste the words on my tongue now, years and lives later, a boy completely changed. I remember standing in that tiny fucking house in the Seam, sitting on my straw mattress on the floor, feeling the cold of the earth seeping through the thin material, whispering the words to myself. I remember telling my mother my plan, the look of pride and joy in her eyes, and I remember telling Ten. I remember Reggie punching me in the jaw after I told him, bring flesh to flesh and I remember thinking that I didn't deserve it.

Now, looking at this ghost of a boy in front of me, all silver hair and silver heart, I want to do the same.

And I think he would deserve it.

He says my name and I already know that I am going to want to cut his throat, that I am going to want to bury myself in him and forget exactly who I am, make him forget who I am. Does that make me a bad person? Make me someone horrible? Or does it make me someone lost? I'm not sure that I know the answer anymore, know where the line is. I've crossed it time and time again, left it in the distance behind me and always tried to come crawling back to it.

Maybe I am as silver as he is, crowned in bones and blood as I am. Perhaps we were both Death's children long before we were ever our parents.

But then Francis's name is in his mouth, and I want to rip it out, replace is with something else, anything. "He didn't just have magic," I say, jaw tight. "He was magic. Pure and simple." I push up from the ground until I am standing in front of this strange boy with a sky in his eyes and the stars in his hair, destined for the blood already on his hands. I look down, casual, brush my two hands off on my thighs. After, I look back up, making sure his blue eyes meet my hazel. "Not that you could understand."

My smile doesn't come, though I wish that it would. I want to be all wolf, to bear my canines and be a monster, but there is Francis's name in this boy's mouth and all I want is to taste it again without it hurting.

"After all, what do you know about magic, dead-boy?"

And I find, perhaps, that I truly want to know.

And that's worse.