older than we are . aya . day 3

[cass]

m e r e d i t h .

Like the wind that cries
I can feel you in the night
A distant lullaby
Underneath the shattered sky

Cyro had been a mess, and she’d left Lysander spinning out, the withdrawal was leaving her unbearable. Arabella had been silent, and Meredith had searched for the right words to say to make it a little bit better, but none had come. She had needed time, a minute or two where her allies weren’t dying or breaking down around her. It was exhausting. She felt like she was too young to be the last remaining brain cell of this alliance, a weight too heavy for her shoulders.

So, Meredith found herself searching across the horizon until she noticed his figure sitting off in the direction she’d watched him go. It was a dangerous gamble, but some reckless part of her knew that today wasn’t going to be the day Will would kill her. When she pictured the future she did hope that her eventual demise came at his hands. It was poetic, and out of all the people Meredith had met she felt as though he would make her suffer the least.

She stepped loudly, kicking a gem here and there to alert him to her presence as she grew closer. “Thank you,” she said. He towered over her, a whole foot between them and she knew she’d have no chance in a fight against him.

“I honestly didn’t expect to run into you so early in the games. I was thinking more towards the end, epic showdown and all,” she mused, shaking her head as she peered up and into his eyes.

“Do you really think you’re a monster?” Meredith thought for a moment, gaze traveling up and down Will before she came to a decision, “I don’t see it, Will.”

Meredith had seen monsters, faced them every day of her life in the Strauss household, she knew the difference between broken and irreparable. Will wasn’t too far gone. It seemed they were all just a little bit broken, maybe she could help put just one broken piece back in place. Leave one mark on his soul and in his heart.

elegant

[aya]

W  I  L  L

When the rocks skitter together, his hand goes to the bone hilt of his fancy dagger. Keeping watch was more an excuse to step away from his thoughts for awhile than it was anything that felt like a necessity. He should've known, really, that Mer would swing by if she was in the vicinity. He can't decide if he ought to curse her persistence or thank her for the distraction.

With a grunt of acknowledgement, he shrugs off the thanks. It wasn't a small thing, that warning. Not killing her. Scaring the rest of 'em off before JJ's guilt or Terra's grief led to Will losing the rest of his company. It should be bare minimum to not kill someone, he thinks, but it isn't here. Not where cannons sound in the distance and the earth shrieks underfoot, and not when someone as incorporeal as Hellemine Cauchemar can be rendered mere flesh and bone in an instant.

She tries again, and if he knew himself better Will might thank her for that beguiling way she always manages to get catch him in conversation despite his unwillingness to engage. "Small arena, I guess." He could see all of it from the top of the spire in the clouds, few enough landmarks to count on one hand: the green-glinting gemstone field where they now stand, the blood red beach where they'd camped out that first night, the cornucopia's mausoleum smack in the center, and a pink blizzard beyond it. "Plus it's not like Two's one of those districts they're focusing on these days. If we were Four or One maybe."

He grins a little, finally drawing that fancy bone-hilted knife from his cloak and twirling it in his fingers. Lazy, unthreatening showmanship. "The rest of us gotta give 'em more of a narrative if we want to get a grudge match later on." Anyone with a brain and even Will Johnwayne knows that your treatment in the Games is dependent on how interested in putting you on the screen the Capitol is, and he's under no delusions that his sponsorship gifts have been rolling in because anyone's rooting for him. There's only one sort of edit they're giving him; he's known his whole life that a name like Johnwayne makes him easy to hate by default.

"Do you really think you're a monster?" He stashes his dagger again and finds himself shrugging a third time.

The fact is it doesn't matter what he thinks. Anywhere in the world — District Two: school, home, the quarry lake; the Capitol: the training center, the jumbotrons, the Gamemakers' HQ; the Arena: mausoleum, mountain, mine — he is beholden to what others perceive him to be. Fact or fiction does not matter because there's no objectivity in opinion. Odds are still better than fifty-fifty that Will Johnwayne will die somewhere within the Gamemakers' invisible walls and it will matter even less what he believes himself to be. He'll live on in the memories of people who barely know him for a time, and then in soundbites and edited footage for awhile after that, and whether or not he is a monster is not for him to decide, if it ever was.

"I don't see it, Will."

"I'm a lot of things, depending on who you ask. Doesn't matter much what I think I am," he says, incapable of articulating the way that his character is defined by other people. People take one look at Will and decide he's stupid, a brute, a monster. Took too many years of hearing it before he chose just to let 'em. Maybe he is all those things. Does it matter? "But if you don't see it then maybe I ain't."

[cass]

m e r e d i t h .

Like the wind that cries
I can feel you in the night
A distant lullaby
Underneath the shattered sky

She watched him, as he pulled the dagger out, twirling it around. Her heart doesn’t catch in her throat, instead she thinks that Victor or Killian would have been impressed with his skill. He wouldn’t have done well in the Strauss household, to think what had happened in his life to leave him so broken right now. Victor would have molded him into a monster, pushing every button he could until he felt nothing.

There was clearly something there, more than the anger that had raged around him as he had yelled at Cyro. Meredith wanted to push more, prod him to dive deeper into what it was that was hurting him. She was so used to everyone around her unleashing their anger with violence, never reaching the point of fulfillment and betterment because they’d lost their motive with blood. Hell, there were more times then she could where she had found herself punching a wall until her knuckles bleed. She’d slip to the concrete floor of her bedroom, sobbing into her sweat-stained shirt, refusing to actually acknowledge the pain in her heart.

Meredith was scared to die. It wasn’t a luxury of thought she wasted time worrying about, but the more knives cut into her flesh and reality demanded her to look it in the eye, well-

It terrified her.

What scared her more was the idea that the person or mutt that might end her could be a face she didn’t even know. Killed and instantly forgotten by the person, even as her death was branded into their soul. She knew that when she died she’d be forgotten, Victor would burn her name from the house, a ghost that never existed. She didn’t want to be forgotten in ten years’ time, her name a whisper, played across television screens on a recap where the words meant nothing. There was nothing to attach to the name Meredith, a wisp of smoke vanishing into the sky.

An unmarked grave in the back of the woods, that was wait awaited her casket when it was shipped back to two. Perhaps not even that, knowing how pissed off Victor would be maybe he'd just toss her body in the bin, lost to a dumpster, torn to pieces by wild animals. But, this was who she had decided to be. Every consequence was because of the person she had decided to be. As much as it scared her, at least she was responsible, and not at the mercy of Victor, Killian or Octavia.

“It matters, Will,” she reached a hesitant hand forwards, moving to place her pale fingers on his vambrace. “I can only tell you what I’ve seen, but you’re the only one who can make yourself into something.”

Meredith looked at the dirt by her feet, the gems glinting in the sunlight, reflecting her face right back at her. Wasn’t that one small part of the freedom before them? “There ain’t no one here who can belittle us or yell at us like they did back home.”

She saw the man sitting on the train, blood on his hands, on his clothes and she knew that he had suffered. Meredith could only imagine what he had been through and believe that they had shared some part of the same pain. She ached, wanting someone else to understand what she had been through and maybe she was wrong to try and see that in Will. She couldn’t stop herself, he was her connection to home and the first bridge she had built after exiling herself from her family had been beside him.

“Will, I gotta ask you a favour,” she bit her lip as she looked him in the eye. Her hand fell to her side and she clenched her fists, trying to hide the tremble. “If we run into each other again you just gotta promise not to make me suffer, kay?” She grinned at him, feeling the shake in her lip, but pushing past it, just like she had on a thousand other days.

She didn’t believe he’d let her suffer. And maybe, if she was lucky, he wouldn’t let her die alone.

elegant

[aya]

W  I  L  L

When Mer asserts that it matters — that he's the only one who can make himself into something, Will shrugs again because it's not worth explaining that it doesn't, pulling away when she touches at his armor. He doesn't care who he is. It's easier that way. There's never been anything good about an ego easy to bruise, and all the armor in the world can't make up for soft spots on the psyche.

His eyes follow hers, to the gemstones scattered in the dirt, rendered worthless by sheer quantity. "There ain’t no one here who can belittle us or yell at us like they did back home."

And of course that's where her mind goes first, the common thread of shitty parenting that they'd tied between them back on the train. Will knows he could make the same connection with half the tributes here if he'd bothered to try, but the stakes seem different outside of somewhere like District Two. Maybe they were still life or death, but in that quieter, bloodless way.

"Will, I gotta ask you a favour." She either really means it, or she's a really good actress, the way her lip trembles. He does her the dignity of eye contact. "If we run into each other again you just gotta promise not to make me suffer, 'kay?"

She grins like the other option is crying, and he puts his hand on the hilt of his knife again. He could do it right now, guaranteed quick and painless, through the eye socket and right into the brain like a battlefield lobotomy. It would be less suffering than letting her go to get chewed up and spit out by the arena again. Less than fighting her, throwing his knives from a distance where his aim is good but not immediately lethal. There's so little room for a good death in a place like this, and it's the Will Johnwayne types that make sure of it just as much as the Gamemakers do.

He drops his hand again. "Alright," he agrees. It's hard to make promises about precision and accuracy against a struggling target, but he can vouch for his intent. "Don't go getting yourself killed in the meantime then."