critical mass — nico.

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

I find out in the city square.

Maybe it's what I deserve, or maybe worse still, it's what the Capitol thinks that it deserves. Maybe they think that they deserve this last piece of my soul, this last thing that I had thought might still be mine. Perhaps even my grief couldn't be mine and mine alone.

The chill settles in my blood, so cold that I can almost feel it sear my bones. Prismarine had been a blow that I wasn't prepared for, spread a kind of sickness through my veins that I had no idea how to deal with. I felt suffocated by the relief of her death, by the fact that I could throw all of my energy into saving Reggie instead of trying to save a girl that I had never met, a girl that was just another girl. I wanted to choke on that thought the first time that I had it, couldn't believe I was so desensitized to death that I was almost glad to not have to fight for her any longer.

I downed a bottle after that, and opened another, drank until I couldn't see my hands in front of me and then drank some more.

I don't remember that night.

I wish that I did.

I wish that I could feel it, that I could feel the anger and the shame and the visceral self-hatred that I know I should feel, but there's none of it, only a fierce and desperate need to protect a boy that I have spent a lifetime taking advantage of. I wish that I were a better man, maybe, but I don't really think that I want to be one.

I think that in another life, I could have been someone kinder, someone softer, that under all the right circumstances I might not be the man that I am today. I would hate myself for wanting Prismarine Cobble dead, for being glad that, as much as I liked her, I didn't actually care she was dead. I would hate myself for being willing to do anything to make Reggie come out alive, but that would mean that I don't do everything in my power to save him, that I am a good man but a failure for a savior, and I can bear the burden of being a terrible man if it means I get to see Reggie one more time.

I've spent a long time thinking about death, about killing and taking lives in your hands, about being responsible for other people, thinking about Jayne Ashbrook-Laws and how it felt when I stabbed my pitchfork through her skull. I remember digging it in, and in my dreams, I make it even quicker, make sure that not even her last words are heard. Fuck you, Nico Thorne, I remember, but in my dreams, it never comes to pass, and if I had to do it all over again, I would still kill her.

I would still not cry about it after.

And this, watching Reggie die—I would slaughter an arena of children if it meant I could undo it.

Does that make me a bad person? Does that make me a good person? I don't know. I don't have an answer. All I know is that one moment I'm trying to rush home so that I can watch this fight from the Twelve suite, and then next moment I am on my knees, watching as Reggie's allies fail him.

Is that my fault, too?

Probably.

But no matter the answer, no matter whether I am a good person or a bad one, I watch as Ridley Le Roux buried her scythe in the boy I have never been able to protect.

"Does it matter?" He'd asked her when she asked what he was trying to go home to. "There's no coming back from this."

There will be no hiding me this time.

They took away my pain that first time, cut the broadcast the second I screamed out at Reggie’s reaping. I watched it back the day after, saw them cut away from me and my agony. I remember screaming, blinded by pain and anger, with Peacekeepers clawing at me the same way that they did the day of my very own reaping. I remember begging for them to take me instead, begging to be put back in the arena so that Reggie—my kind-hearted Reggie, my Reggie who deserved so much more than the world ever gave him, so much more than I could ever give him—wouldn’t have to endure the agony of knowing what it feels like to die and feel death at your fingertips.

Here, in the middle of the fucking Capitol, surrounded on all sides by eyes who love to look at me and think that they know me, I crumble once again, scream at the top of my lungs so loudly every face in the square turns to look at me.

I heard you.

I can still hear his voice in my head. I can hear him that morning, running up my steps and pounding on my door even though he had only just seen me a few hours before. I can see him telling me to meet him at our spot beyond the woods, the clearing that's ours and ours alone. I can see words on his tongue, the way that he needed to see me, to talk to me, to let me know that he saw me, that he understood me.

The way, through it all, he was my family.

I see myself, over and over and over again, failing him. I see myself telling him that I was going to volunteer, that I was going to give up the life we had created together so that I could go to the Capitol and kill the man that had killed my father. I see myself betraying every moment of kindness he had ever showed me. I see myself screaming at the reaping, watching him walk up onto the stage and begging the Peacekeepers to take me instead. I know that moment never made it to the broadcasts, know that they cut away before the nation could see their victor screaming and on his knees again. I see myself kissing him, and him kissing me back, or maybe it was the other way around and even that moment I have taken for myself, been selfish with him and his feelings. I see myself walking away from him, spitting blood from yet another time when he brought his fist to my face.

It was always, always deserved.

I see him putting knives in my chest with words, barbed wire wrapped around my neck and around my shiny new hands, tying me to my past. Painful to leave and impossible to remove. It's too late for a lot of things, I remember, more barbed wire words, leftover cruelties from an abandoned lifetime.

You were right, Reg, I hear in my head, drowned out by the sound of my agony. A Peacekeeper jogs into the square and I lash out, ran my elbow into his face and hear a crack. Another follows, grabs my prosthetic arm, but the joke is on the Capitol because they remade me stronger than I was before the ruined me, and I yank it out of their grasp easily, use my fist to lash out again and again until I can't see through the blur of what must surely be my tears and the anger that I will never be able to escape. I failed you, I think, or maybe I say it out loud. More Peacekeepers run out into the square, and I attack and attack and attack, refuse to hear what any of them are saying, don't care that they have their guns pointed at me, charge one and think that maybe they lodge a bullet into my waist.

Somewhere in the chaos, a Peacekeeper cracks into my skull from behind, and all I can see are grey eyes crinkling at the corners from a smile I stopped deserving years ago.

It's too late for a lot of things, I hear again.

( takes place day 6 of the 83rd hunger games )