now I don't want your sympathy }} lysander.

[gamemaker sloane ♕ kaяi ♕]

l y s a n d e r

"you are weak
but not foolish
you have learned
how to die."

Drugs.

Alcohol.

They had always been an escape. An escape from Hyram, an escape from every fucked up thing this family had to deal with, and sometimes if I was lucky even an escape from life. The two held me together, even though other people thought they were helping me fall apart. They were my crutch, my glue. They kept my pieces together, they held on as tight as they could, but eventually the burden became too much.

And I crumbled.

But the Capitol decide to rebuild me, to give me a second chance. A test if you will, one that I happened to pass. One that most would think of as lucky, but one that I thought of as a second chance. They found all my broken pieces and placed them back together. And finally with a crown atop my head I realized that liquor was no longer my glue. I was more than capable of holding myself together.

I was resilient.

I was strong.

However, everything comes with a price, even supposed happy endings. They did not plan on exploiting me like many of the other female victors, but instead I had an image to uphold. A drunken degenerate, one who was nothing lucky to have won. I laughed and there were threats, but I was naïve and still refused to listen. Then Caleb’s name rang throughout the town square and it felt like I had been punched in the gut and all the air inside me suddenly escaped. An innocent girl, my little sister’s best friend, and I was going to be the reason for her inevitable death.

It felt like I may never breathe again.

So, I began to put on a show, acting the part without actually embracing it. The wine replaced with grape juice, the vodka with water, and the whiskey with apple juice. If they wanted me to act a fool in public so be it, whatever to keep Bambi safe. For the first time in almost five years, I was clean, there was practically nothing that could steer me wrong.

Not until I began to hope.

In the beginning, I had accepted Caleb’s death, and the fact that I was responsible. Suddenly it was top twelve, then four, and finally the final two and she was still alive. I held my breath the entire finale and hoped that maybe, just maybe, my stubbornness wouldn’t be the reason for and innocent girl’s death. The moment I finally decided to breathe, she was gone. I ran back to my room in an unstoppable rage, chucking the vase of flowers and the lamp against the wall. They would probably make me pay for it, but I didn’t care. Sobs wracked my body and I collapsed onto the floor, surrounded by all the bottles the Capitol kept sending me as ‘gifts’. And tonight they were more tempting than they had ever been before.

I had managed to keep myself together on my own terms, but once again I was threatening to fall apart.

They should have left me alone, but the Capitolites were so intrigued by a drunkard that they could not simply push me to the side. Instead, they came up with another brilliant plan, the two most opposite victors, somehow madly in love. I laughed in their faces because somehow I did not learn my lesson the first time. Sutton, my own flesh and blood, a shining star from Day One, forced to die in a cruel and brutal way in a fight that was most likely designed to kill her. That night my fingers crept closer to the bottles that they not so subtle had displayed in my room, but somehow I still managed to refrain even as the tears fell silently as I slept.

But then hope found its way in again.

Castor wasn’t supposed to be there, but he was, and I thought maybe, just maybe he would somehow manage to make it out. That somehow I would be able to deliver at least one of District Five’s tributes home to their family.

The night he fell was the night I broke too.

One by one I emptied the bottles that neatly lined the decorative shelves in my room. Once I finished one, there was no stopping. Each new bottle took me to a place of peace, a place without any pain.

A place where there is no one to blame but myself.

If it wasn’t for Beck Hailsham I would have been left there to rot, or worse been reprimanded. He brushed my hair and helped me change my clothes, all while muttering soothing words. Then he took me by the hand and led me to the victor presentation bleary eyed and incoherent.

And I have been in a haze ever since.

Now I sit here, the night before the reaping, the third bottle of the day gripped tightly in my hand trying to forget about the horrors that tomorrow brings.

Broken.

Weak.

And wondering if I’ll ever be able to put back together.

Or if I am destined to continue to fall apart.

elegant