Five of Cups | Kass One Shot

[sbeeg]

It's a sunny afternoon in the Capitol. Showers had plagued the morning but by noon the rgay skies had parted and all the puddles dried up. Kass looked out the window of her room at the other towering jewel colored buildings. Like a town made of sugar glass. They looked easy to topple but they were more than glass. They were stone and steel.

Nothing would be as easy as she thought.

She didn't want to be around the others, she didn't want to meet Harbingers eye.

Two more dead. There would not be another golden age of District Eleven winners like there was before. Only grief, only carnage.

No one had come to force her into her press outfit in a few days. Her arm was left on her dresser, the weight of it too much on her neck and shoulder right now.

Is the heaviness in her chest felt by all the victors? Is this how they felt when Kass came home and their tributes didn't? Or do they care anymore.

She left the window and went to her beside, pulling out her worn deck of cards. It was missing quite a few cards now, but she didn't dare consult another deck.

She felt weight of it in her hand before placing it on the nightstand. She had learned how to shuffle cards with one hand before the Games as a trick to earn a coin on the street, but that had been with her right hand. Her left hand was clumsy and still adjusting to suddenly being made her dominant hand. She clumsy shuffled them like how the young ones at the big white house used to do it- slipping cards in and out randomly.

She placed her palm on top, the fading purple backing staring up at her.

Would they all be like this?

She flipped over the top card. A figure in a dark purple robe faced away from her, head bowed. Five goblets littered the ground, spilled wine soaking into the dirt. Kass left the card facing up an curled up on the bed. Across the street Capitolites dressed in neon green danced on a rooftop, swinging from champagne glasses.

She was going to have to get used to it.

table by griffin