the right side of rock bottom // saffron.

[✨ zozo.]

She shouldn't have told her son to come home.

Or maybe she should have. This could be good for him, as miserable as he is - maybe this is Enzo's post-mortem limbo, as was Saffron's staring at the ceiling and Paige's staring at the wall. It's hard to convince herself that, though, when muffled hatred forces itself through the walls of her home and regret sneaks up her spine - an old friend.

She shouldn't have told her son to call Beck back.

Or maybe she should have.

"What do you want me to say? You said it yourself, I don't owe you a fuckin' explanation!"

There's words she might have spit back at her son had she not already done enough damage. Saffron had tried to do the right thing, tried to make Enzo do the same. You can take the boy out of Ten but you can never let the Ten leave him - manners maketh man, all the stubborn kid had to do was pick up the phone and all she had to do was leave him alone.

Mace was always the talker, and she had spent years not saying a thing. She'd thought Beck might be able to talk some sense into him - Luke Hailsham falling and Piper Shaye screaming. But Enzo just yells and yells, his anger rising to the top floors of the house, and Saffron sits with her back against her front door and thanks the lord Quinn is at school for another four hours.

"I can't hold your life together and mine Beck, not halfway across goddamn Panem!"

I raised you better than that, she wants to snap - but she doesn't. Because she didn't raise her son. Her daughter, yes, but her son became hers aged eighteen. Inheriting an adult, all child - letting him fly the nest mere moments after she'd let him call it his home.

You never stop being that child once you come out of an arena. Not really. So she lets him yell down the phone, saying all the words she might have said to Mace all those years ago were she half the person Enzo Emberstatt was. If she had half the strength to tell people how she felt, rather than suffocating underneath a comforting weight of silence - it's why she speaks her mind now. Years wasted without words, she raised her children not to be afraid of their own voices.

This isn't exactly what she was trying to teach him. 

"I have my own life outside of you!" 

Selfish. Like mother, like son. She might laugh at the memory of Lysander Mae dining in an empty nest, empty chairs filled with ghosts instead of children, were the house not filled up with Enzo's grief.

This is what she had wanted, right? Selfish girl, the consequences of her actions lie in Kahinta Jones and Piper Shaye's graves and her son is the one paying the price. Years stopped meaning something to her a long time ago, until they just became years - and then her daughter was born and they turned into something else. Enzo came home, something else, he turned nineteen, something else again. Her daughter is twelve next year, another thing entirely, but they stopped being the years in which her cousins passes away a long time ago. 

Selfishly, they never were the years since Kahinta Jones or Piper Shaye died. Just time filled before Enzo would decide to come home. Selfishly, she hadn't realised years meant something to Enzo - entirely different, entirely the same.

"Just tell me you fuckin' hate me, get it over with!" 

She could of said the same thing to Clementa. Instead Saffron just let her punch her in the face. The bruise faded a decade ago but there's frown lines in its place, carved into her forehead and the corners of her eyes and they all have names, today's are Enzo and Beck. Creases in her palms, in her chest, this is a generational cycle and she's had enough.

"That's enough," she tells herself quietly, wishes she could tell her son the same thing.

The door shuts violently on her way out.

She hopes Enzo can hear it. She hopes Beck can, halfway across goddamn Panem.