the rest is still unwritten [Jack dp]

[Lyn𝛿is]

There's an inertia that keeps his eyes fixed on the girl when Jack's shaking legs finally give out from under him, the world spinning around and around her loose hair and war-weathered face as he collapses across the blood-soaked sand. The midday sun beats down across both of them, harsh and blinding, a burst of light peeking out from behind the girl's form that expands outwards until it fills his vision.

"Shut up," Jack snaps at Julio without looking up from the workbench when the man comes up behind him, humming the first few bars of a new lullaby for his niece Marisol. "I gotta finish these first."

He doesn't notice the way his words come off harsher than he'd meant them, or the way Julio winces and makes an unidentifiable noise in his throat. But the hand that comes down gently yet firmly across his shoulder is unmistakeable.

"Look, kid," says Julio. The sound of conversation filters back into the storeroom from behind the open doorway. "You haven't moved from that spot for the past four hours. Take a break. Commander's orders."

"Four... wha?" Jack opens his mouth to argue, but Julio steps forward again, placing himself in front of the workbench. "I was just gonna--"

"You're more than the things you assemble for us," the older man mutters. "Don't lose yourself."

Don't...

The echo of Julio's words floats across the edges of his mind as Jack drifts in and out of consciousness, the arena spiraling and collapsing inward until one moment he could feel Uxue's presence beside him, and the next he was standing over the body of a young girl in her pajamas, and the next there was no one left, not even corpses, nothing but an endless desert of sand and floorboards and blood.

... lose...

In the decades to come, people will retell the final moments of these games a dozen ways with a dozen agendas, a dozen frames for their listeners to pass judgment on who was worthy or unworthy. They will be stripped down layer by layer, analyzed and reimagined until they fit into familiar archetypes, reduced to more symbol than person.

yourself...

As Time slipped out of this world, Jack sees all at once every memory and every decision, a flurry of blurred faces and interlocking pieces converging into one last, singular moment.

"What brings you here?" Commander Edwyle's voice is deeper and more imposing than ever, the half-circle of men standing behind him lending it an unmistakable air of authority.

"Um," Jack stammers, floundering for a response as all eyes turn to stare at him, "I'm good at fixing all sorts of stuff, and my teachers say I learn real qu--"

"I don't mean what you bring," the commander interrupts. "We'll get to that part later. What brings you?"

It takes him a good half-minute of tracing and retracing the patterns across the commander's shirt in his mind before the answer comes to him all of a sudden, as clear and obvious as it ought to have been all along.

"Because everybody will tell you that bullies are bad but nobody likes you to do anything about them," he blurts out. "And the Capitol are the biggest ones of them all."

"I... chose," Jack whispers. The words feel tiny, like a meaningless sort of triumph in the face of a failed rebellion and a chaotic bloodbath and his own, inevitable death. Maybe none of his choices would matter in the long run, not in comparison with the overwhelming weight of all the choices he didn't get to make.

It still mattered, he decides in the end, that he'd made them.

[Lyn𝛿is]

the measure of a man
stands or falls with what he leaves behind
gather on the sand
let your voices carry to the sky
rise in light
let the gods look down on this and wonder

Jack's story ends here. As for his compatriots -

Shortly after the 1st Hunger Games, Commander Edwyle Wolfe was beheaded in the town square. His head, along with those of several other prominent commanders of the rebellion, were briefly displayed in front of the Justice Building until the mayor returned from the Capitol and demanded that the heads be taken down to mitigate the potential for any remaining rebels to view them as martyrs.

Andrés Cortés died in prison after extensive torture. His brother Julio managed to escape; after learning that his sister and nieces had disappeared from the district, he set off beyond the district walls, vowing to find out where they had been taken. In his weakened state, he collapsed about two days' distance from District Eight, but a passing wanderer - who gave only a bird-call when asked for their name - saved his life and smuggled him onto a District Four-bound train to get him help. Complications from his injuries left him bedridden for most of his life, and he died in Four, never realizing that the rest of his family had been shipped off and resettled across the country from him, in District Eleven.

The Capitol offered Linden Wren a plea bargain in exchange for information on further hidden treasonous activity. They refused, and spent a decade in jail before a liberal mayor commuted the rest of their sentence as part of a sweeping series of prison reforms. Afterwards, they pursued a career in criminal justice, and today is perhaps most well known for their successful prosecution of the District Eight v. Moon Outfitters LLC. fraud case.

Franklin Atlas spent several years on and off the streets, until a shelter he'd snuck into for the night gave him a job and helped him quit the drug addictions he'd developed after his release. He never quite stopped being outspoken against the Capitol, even well into his old age; the government officials who stopped by his food cart outside the town square would remark that although they might disagree with his political views, they could never disagree with his hash browns.

Though Rotem Markova's schoolgirl crush on Jack quickly faded, she refused to forget him or the friends that the Capitol had separated from her. After a brief and ill-fated engagement with Joram Raidan, she eventually married a much more open-minded man and gave birth to two daughters, naming the older one Jacinth in his memory.

Five months after the Games, Jack's mother gave birth to a pair of healthy twins...

lyrics - measure of a man, heather dale
shoutouts to charade , shrimp , kap , WT , and marguerite harvard d2a (zori) for family connections <333