how much can this ground raise? | [ mia & bill ]

[D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]]

It's a weird place to be, and it's cold here, too. Not only because of how we're expected to mix with other people—but because we're expected to make friends. As if, friends can even be forged under circumstances that are bathed in doom and gloom more so than glory. Friends are ultimately what fuel the stories the Capitol thrive on: the heartbreaks, the attachment and eventual severing of ties tied too strong, the sense of normalcy that comes with feeling comfortable around someone else, the normalcy that makes tributes seemingly forget the world is watching, the normalcy that turns to vulnerability because finally, there's someone listening who understands.

No, there's someone listening who knows. Because understanding isn't the same as knowing—just like how being in someone's shoes isn't the same as wearing the same shoes. I've seen the games and know how it goes; even enemies manage to put aside their nightmares to find a common ground to dream on. In that moment, I suppose all they have is each other, and even if each other isn't enough—it has to be.

And though some imaginations are wild and vibrant enough to conjure friends that are contained within the mind, I am certain that my mind would only create a monster for me to confide in. I know that everyone around me is going to turn into a monster too, but there's at least a moment for interference, for some sort of cycle to be stopped, or altered, to stop someone from fading to a true black.

It's been a few days and nobody has approached me, not that I blame them—I'm destined to be just another statistic to them. In their eyes, I'm an easy target because that is what history says about me. All the girls who have come before me have died, all the stories they ached to tell died with them, and the people that could've saved them danced in their darkness. I don't want to think of myself as a victim—but sometimes I think the brutality of the word is enough to knock some sharp edges into someone. It might just toughen them up a bit.

It might just toughen me up a bit. It might just turn me to a spiteful survivor. Because Teddy has already said that there are no happy endings for anyone—to be just a survivor would be too good to be true.

Some people here are probably already survivors. A different kind of survivor, not the literal, still alive kind, but rather still standing after being tried and tested. I think those are the people I'd like to associate myself with the most—not the career kids, not the ones who have it all handed to them on a plate, not the ones who learnt life's hardest lessons through someone else's tongue and not through their own trial and error. No weapon, no glory, no crown can fill a heart-shaped hole in someone.

I glance at the careers and think about how I'd probably give everyone at home a false sense of hope if I were to associate with them. Yes, my odds would probably get better, but nobody bets on someone with short odds anyway. The dark horses are always the ones who win the Capitol over, even if said horse becomes too dark for their own good. Forget the other tributes—I think that's the real battle.

So I search for someone who looks a little sorrier, like life slipped in through the back door and happened to them without them knowing. But I think the boy from Eight knows that life has happened to him, and I think we are similar in that way.

"Do you reckon it would suit me?" I shuffle in front of him, "the eyepatch, I mean. I like the mystery of it," and then I hold my breath for a moment, contemplating. Because I could ask for the story behind it, but I think that is too much too quickly. Because I'm cold, and we are not friends.

He could be cold too, but we are not friends. Not yet, anyway.

^{thank you celestials for the table!}

[cameron]

little bill cubs

He’s cold that morning, and, without his usual creature comforts of creeping into the fields early morning and cozying up with the newest lambs or a very pregnant ewe, he doesn’t know how to remedy that. For a fleeting moment he thinks of Absalom, of his hardened body and warm smile, but knows he would do nothing but bring the boy down, knows he can’t let the other get as attached as he desperately wants, as he already is. Little Bill is a bane, not a boon, and he is too painfully aware to allow his desires to outweigh his actions. Instead of seeking out solace in the boy from one, he heads to the training room, with its big steel walls and angry careers and lower district kids just as frightened and cold as he.

And he stands.

He’s spent enough time at the first aid station, sent enough needles through his fingertips and back; he’s looked at all the plants he can handle; he’s tried his hand at lifting weights and holding weapons, but can’t get past how it all feels so much bigger than him, despite his size and stature, despite his place there being just as solidified as everyone else’s. Try as he might, Little Bill cannot find a way he fits into this hellscape. A shiver runs down his spine, and he can’t tell if he’s cold from the temperature or the ever-close end of his life.

For a while he thinks of his sheep, of all the ones he’s driven a nail through, of how they felt just before never feeling again. He hopes they were warm, were loved in their last moments, hopes the efforts he put into easing the transition weren’t fruitless, because if they felt as cold as he did then he couldn’t live with himself - not that he’d have to for long regardless. But he loved his sheep, loves his sheep, and never wanted this for them.

He realizes then Ma would slit their throats and drain their blood without a second thought, and his death brings new pain he couldn’t control, pain he couldn’t administer himself, and before he can scream as loud as he wants a little blonde thing steps in front of him and asks about his eyepatch. Little Bill snatches it from his face and tosses it to her, empty eye socket exposed to her and everyone else in the room, and he’s never been colder in his life.

[D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]]

I stand in front of him expecting to be met with his voice, but instead there's silence. Silence and I have a strange relationship; it's like an addiction because it is just as bad, just as horrible as emptiness, yet somehow it is softer. There's solace in the unsaid, but an equal amount of chaos too.

He throws it over to me, revealing a hole in his face. Perhaps someone would flinch at this moment—because he's only got one eye, and that's a gruesome thing for some—but Six is full of people just like this and worse. The science behind the medicine back home would have him wearing an eyepatch painted with an eye that would fit his face. Prosthetics were only available to the upper class citizens, in fact, most of them get shipped off before anyone even gets a chance to improve their life a little.

In the grand scheme of things, the context of the Hunger Games, his wound is nothing at all. So it doesn't scare me, not like it should, not like he might want. The expression on his face reads uneasy; the bright lights of the training centre exposing every wrinkle, scar, line of his face—every second of shadow that dives into the hole in his head. There's a darkness within him, and if anything, that's the part that scares me more than the missing eye.

Careers would probably cast him off in an instant. I've never spoken to any of them, but surely their mentality favours the boldest and strongest. A disability is just that to them: a disability. But my experience of science in Six has opened my mind to the possibilities of the human body when it has been knocked down. I look him in the eye and see that he is differently abled, because I don't really think the strength that was in the lost eye really left his body at all. It became something else, somehow.

I feel the patch between my fingers for a moment or two and it feels like a fur. "What is this, hide?" I ask, because it's soft, a contrast to the darkness that lies just beneath. When I put it on, I see the darkness. The light is completely blocked out from one eye, my vision becoming tainted with a shadowy hue when I look around.

"Hmm," I spin on my heels and look out the training centre, glancing around the room and looking its inhabitants up and down before turning back to him. "What do you think? I'm not sure I like it, even if it adds some mystery," because it also adds an eery shadow to everything I look at, but I won't tell him that. Everything feels even colder—if that's even possible. I suppose when there isn't an eye to cover, that darkness doesn't exist. "You look nice without it, too, but here," I toss it back with a smile. Something that tells me he doesn't just want it, rather, he needs it. "I'm Mia."

^{thank you celestials for the table!}