The Past & Pending [Quest/Flynn]

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

⭐

Half-past three and the kitten clock lets out a chirp.

My brother Ether bought the thing for me as a joke, a cat shaped wall clock whose eyes move in the opposite direction of its tail as the seconds tick back and forth. It’s kitsch and insane and perfectly out of place in a psychiatrist’s office.

He’d helped me decorate the spare bedroom just after he’d moved out to get it ready for my first set of clients. A warm, fresh coat of paint (something called estate eggshell which had cost too much but had been, in fact, the perfect shade); wooden blinds to match the mid-century coffee table and desk he’d bartered for at the good furniture store (with my money); and a couple of leather chairs that had practically bankrupted me.

One of which held the esteemed victor of the eighty-seventh hunger games, Flynn Garner. The thirteen-year-old who’d fired the shot heard round the world and gotten to come back to six with – well, his life.

If you could call it that.

I’d sent along a letter to Teddy, or someone in the gaggle that was shepherding him, I can’t remember at this point to say – this kid needs more than just trauma bonding to get through what he’s got coming to him.

And I don’t know if anyone had heard me or if Flynn had gotten my handwritten note, where I’d said from one survivor to another, if you want some free therapy, it’s what I’ve got to offer. Which is really a stupid thing to say considering the kid was now loaded, so I could’ve at least shaken him down for some cash.

You just know all the victors were going to pounce on him and do their best at giving him advice on how to live, and don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they have a point of view that could very well be valid.

But judging by the fact that most of their lives devolve into a fucking mess, I happen to think it might be best left to someone with an actual degree in mental health to treat someone that’s been through the equivalent of torture.

“Thanks for coming Flynn.” I say as I lean forward in my chair, elbows on my knees, hands together underneath my chin. He’d not much older than Shy was after the eightieth. He’s got the same dopey looking face with all the baby fat and eyes too big for his head. I’d have to trudge carefully, since teenage boys tended to be total morons.

Though I guess if he was sitting here and hadn’t come back to six in a casket there were at least two brain cells in his head. “Therapy was something that helped me get to where I am after the eightieth. Enough that I studied so I could bring the same sort of help to other people, too.”

Help that often involved a knock-down, drag out fight between a person and their soul. I happened to think I made a pretty good coach alongside the ring, cutting open the swollen eyelids and yelling to get back up when things had gotten too rough.

“I want you to think of this as a safe space to say as much or as little as you want. And what you do say stays between us.” I’d take whatever he’d said to his grave.

“Why don’t we start off easy. Care to tell me how you’re feeling?”

[d6a georgie cham 🍓🐢 frankel]

♕

Something like this was inevitable, likely a permanent feature to my now lifelong schedule that has been written by someone else. I have not had a say in this and neither has the Capitol, the Capitol only cares about fixing my physical health. They cannot have a broken and battered looking annual star on their televisions. Nah, this is all Teddy Ursa. I am just not sure this is a field of medicine I can get my head around. Haha my head because that is what this is all about. Trying to get my head around the so-called trauma that is not engraved into it. Its shit and its there, it is called scars.

I sit deep into the leather chair in Quest Hertz’s office. It is good to see the resurrected has done something with their life, not like that one who lives in Teddy’s house across the road. The cat clock is a bit of a distraction though, my eyes draw to it every time I scan across the room, trying to pick up on anything else that looks fancy. But no, just the ticking clock that makes a funny noise. It is something I would expect in a Capitolite’s house. Maybe someone like Sardonyx Crowe.

Is this going to be like an interview with Sardonyx Crowe? A quickfire of questions, trying to shoot out the agony, the pain and grief in my mind. Except there is no audience, no cameras, no bright lights to blind me. Just a dull beige room with a cat shaped clock. Quest Hertz in a leather seat, wearing something normal. Not a flower headdress that reaches the ceiling.

I guess this will be good practice before the victory tour. They cannot have me breaking down while delivering dozens of speeches. Fuck, I really have all those speeches to practice.

“Why don’t we start off easy. Care to tell me how you’re feeling?”

This is probably the hardest question I have been given since being scooped up by that helicopter. Both of my palm’s rest on the arms of the leather chair and my finger grip onto it tightly. Just the tips, I do not dig my fingernails into the cow’s skin. I do not have any nails left anyway. ”I don’t know how I am feeling. There is a lot to feel.” All my emotions have been thrown into a blender and whisked together. ”I am alive. That makes me feel great but how I got to be alive. All those dead. That is not a great feeling at all.” I release my fingers from the grip, my hands now flat on the seat’s arms. ”I wish it was like your games, I guess you don’t have those ghosts like I do.”

credit to Kiah

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

⭐

He’s more self-aware than I thought he would be. But that’s probably my age showing. I used to hate when people would assume that just because I was young, I couldn’t know how I was feeling. Or that I didn’t have two eyes in my head to have seen the world for what it was.

We spend a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that what’s horrible isn’t really all that bad, and I think a lot of it comes from our parents trying to shield the truth of things. I guess it would hurt a lot worse and suicide rates would probably sky-rocket if everyone walked around dragging their fists and saying that the whole world was hopeless.

“That’s okay. You don’t have to make up your mind right now,” I start, still turning over the words he’s said. Treating the other’s that’d been killed as ghosts, people to haunt him until his dying days. He’d go on reliving all of it, probably – it took Max out of this world, after all – if he was determined to let it.

“Being alive is probably preferable to being dead,” I smile a crooked little smile, “All things considered. I know first-hand that being dead isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, anyway.”

I don’t have any memories of what happened after Lex killed me. Feels a bit like a cop out, everything going dark and then disappearing. Though you do have a few seconds of bliss, right before you die. Your body shuts down and you’re not breathing anymore, but you’re still there. It might’ve been terrifying, or it should’ve been. But death just sort of washes over you. Patient. Ready for when you let go, that instead of falling off a great big cliff into nothing, you slip back into a warm bath, underneath a cover of darkness.

“When you talk about their ghosts… do you feel guilty for being alive, instead of them?” I’m quiet, brows furrowed, not quite on the edge of my seat. Three people died by his hands, I think, and how many others did he watch expire? Then the thought of being one of twenty-four, the only one that got to come back to a mother and father, a family. I eased back into my chair. “Take your time if you need to.”

I often wondered, if I’d not decided to sacrifice myself for Shy or Carmen, if I’d been selfish and gone after Lorenzo so I didn’t draw Lex and Denali on me, would I have been able to work through the pain?

But that was the pain of surviving, of falling into that trap of what could have been. It was easy to imagine a different world instead of living in the one you were a part of. And playing pretend helped to hide from the world that was, instead of what could’ve been.

[d6a georgie cham 🍓🐢 frankel]

♕

A whole week of fighting to keep a lifetime. To keep future that has not yet been explored. There are some chapters already written, not by me, by so many others. Even grandpa says he has plans for me, he will have to fight the Capitol to try and get whatever it is on the table. It is a whole lifetime that would have been a totally different path if for not the two words I volunteer. Those two words aimed me at two paths, the I for I am probably going to die and the volunteer for it is time to volunteer for the next interview. Life and death, they really do have their own battle.

But now I am here. Alive, not exactly whole but one little missing puzzle piece is not much to fret about. I am right here, while Nanette will be fresh under the ground. While Lorraine’s family will be welcoming their daughter back in a coffin. I am here in the flesh while all the others are now just memories.

I am here but at what cost?

“Being alive is probably preferable to being dead,”

I am here at the cost of twenty-three others. I prefer to be here. I prefer to be alive but not with the price I have paid. The price I set up for myself. One fact that keeps haunting me is that I decided it. I was not unlucky to be reaped, I literally threw myself into the impossibilities of life versus death. Now I am a thirteen-year-old boy with such a deep heavy burden to carry…for life. I am going to need the distractions. So many distractions. Therapy like this. Anything.

I rest both of my palms on the arms of the chair. My fingertips dig into the smooth leather skin, my hands do not stay still for a single moment as I am left with another question to answer. Do I wish it were me instead of them? ”No, I want to live.” I halt my hands finally, my fingers extended as I internally punish myself for probably smudging or creasing Quest’s nice leather chairs. ”I just wish we could all still be here. I just wish I did not have to fight to live with such a heavy cost but I guess… but I guess that is just life.”

That is just life. It is what my mum says when I whinge when something does not go my way. It is just a fact of life that I will not always be in control. ”Do you have anything to drink? Water?” I am not quite old enough for the hard liquor yet, not that I plan on throwing this second life of mine down the drain. Just I feel this session will get a little tense. I can question this mental medicine all I want but I need someone to pick at this big brain before it starts to wilt even more. I have a chance now to save myself before I go down the next path.

credit to Kiah

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

⭐

“Water? Sure.” It’s innocent almost, him asking for water and not anything else. I would’ve given him beer if he’d said so – even if that could be the first step on his long tumble down – but no, Flynn’s not got his mind there yet. He’s here, after all. I sit up from my chair and move to the kitchen to fill a cup with some ice and water from the tap. I hand it to him and make my way back to my seat. I sink back so I can get a good look at him.

“It’d be nice if we all lived, but even if they had, doesn’t mean they’d have stayed.” There’d been twenty-four of us to go into the eightieth, and after eight years, not as many left. One taken their own life, another, dead in some sort of accident (or was that just a rumor?). Even though we’d all come home, none of us had clung to what had been left behind. In death, a part of us fractured. Like the boy in two who’d been just a kid and gone from being so full of life to one who took fistful of pills.

Or the ones who’d found the glue and sat for the years piecing themselves back together. Getting married and starting a family they never had, like Fiona. I’d been lucky to have known her, to see someone so full of joy no matter how life had gone sideways. She’d done more than survive grief. There was lines of gold in all the glue she’d pieced herself together with, those that reflected back a great light at people who dared to look.

“Well, not everyone gets dealt such a bad hand. And some people get it worse.” I give a shrug. “But it’s your life, which means you get to live and grieve the way you want. And that’s okay. Sometimes it can feel heavy when you don’t think you should be here. I just don’t want it to consume you because you haven’t got someone or something to help you express it.”

I couldn’t have imagined saying the words seven years ago. I’d probably have told him that the world was shit and had better just have swallowed it down. Grow up was a favorite phrase to use. But there wasn’t any growing where grief’s weeds choked at the roots. No happiness when all you could think about was what you’d done felt as though it was at the expense of someone else.

“Have you ever thought about writing about how you feel? Not for anyone, but yourself. A journal, when you don’t have someone to talk to, or I might not be able to see you.” I tap at the moleskin on the table to my left, blue pen tucked underneath.