In Motion [Vasco/Nekane]

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

v a s c o

I can't open my mouth and forget how to talk
'Cause even if I could
Wouldn't know where to start
Wouldn't know when to stop

I lit a candle the night she died.

The same prayers that drifted from my lips through the kitchen collected in the air, heavy with grief, weighed down by blackened sorrow. Pieces of her were here, little as they were – she had a half of our name – the same light, same traces of luck, and loss. Much like the other candles burning, hers came all too soon, gentle yellow wax pooling overtop the carved piece of wood that’d be scraped from the tiled floor at sunrise.

I search stanzas for faith and wrap one finger over another bead until it’s too hard to speak. There’s nothing but stars and silence but I can’t give another word to an unnamed god. Not when they’d carried off another, sold a soul to that great unending mandala, as though she didn’t belong sitting across the table from me.

They’d murdered more of our children than there were of us. Taken a whole generation of men and women up by their roots and salted the earth. Left us to grow old and expire, huddled together as we struggled to see each sunrise come up over the hills. If it’d taken just my life to bring all of them back, I’d have laid it down yesterday. Life couldn’t be that easy, could it? Offering the lieutenant that stalked our fields and rifled through my office my very life if it meant not another single Izar would enter the games, it’d be something out of a twisted fairy tale.

Somehow, I imagined that the capitol would be happy to get rid of Vasco Izar. Not from vanity, but that there’d be no more footnotes to write. No man that dared to say it was better for all of us to love one another than to hate or that we could give to one another without owing something in return. That a crown and scepter said nothing of a person’s heart. And that a title could be given but that trust was our better selves realized in the eyes of another.

Elias would have to bury her.

I hadn’t taken to drinking since before Raquel had died, but the thought was enough to have me reach for gin.

Alfer stopped by close to the witching hours. He said he’d seen the light through the kitchen window, but I imagine he hadn’t wanted to sit in the house his father had built. He’d always been paler than the rest of us, but that morning he’d never looked like a whiter shade of alabaster.

So, I offered him a glass of gin, a seat at the table, and a whole heart to speak to.

He’d obliged by wrapping a joint and pontificating about how his generation would be the ones to change the world.

‘… no offense tío, you’ve all had a chance and if it’s not happening now it won’t happen for a while. I know – you talk about how we need to take our time – and you’ve done some things for all of us. But don’t you ever just want to fucking do something no one else would expect?'

Teenagers hadn’t the weight of memory to hold their shoulders down closer to the earth.

Still, I’d taken the joint from between his fingers into my own, and taken a long drag. Something unexpected.

It wasn’t exactly a call to action or a riot. Or even something that meant much to anyone other than me.

Alfer had dared me to find a different part of myself. Not the same stolid, stable old man who would let grief shatter through him again. Someone that could still laugh, still feel a dull, winding rage course through him without letting it burn out of control.

I’d tucked my head into the sink while he started on the bleach, painting the greys and browns of my hair and promising any burning I felt was only temporary. He’d done this at least a half dozen times – to which I’d remembered Elias cursing at least a few, I think.

Mostly, it’d felt like a dream. One where I could see myself in the tired little kitchen and feel the gentle hands against my scalp, that I wouldn’t look anything like I ever had before. We’d laughed when it’d come time to wash and dry, and then some more when he’d taken me over to one of the mirrors hanging in the living room. I saw a man who wasn’t anyone I’d recognized, not one day in my whole life.

I awoke stretched out across the hanging bench out on the porch. Maybe sometime after the sun had risen, but before Yani or Emma had stirred. I licked at my cotton mouth and could already feel the pressure in my sinuses that signaled an impending hangover. I sat up and leaned back against the bench. I blinked away the sleep in my eyes.

“N… Nekane?” I whispered out over the edge of the railing and leaned forward. The chains jostled and I stared at the figure out in the garden. I did my best to button up my shirt and smooth back my hair. “Nekane, that you?”

elegant

[Cait]

n e k a n e

may my name disappear
among everyone else’s
I ask forgiveness
for the mistakes I made

I’m probably a bad Izar.

I stopped lighting candles and hanging black cloth from the windows long ago. My tiny hut of a home couldn’t withstand the weight of their symbolism, of all the ghosts they stood for. It’s too noisy with them; it’s too quiet without them. It probably makes me a bad Izar for choosing the silence over their bittersweet symphony, but I’m starting to realise that maybe I don’t even know what our last name stands for.

I thought I had it figured out. A curation of family rules – a playbook for survival.

You’re not a real Izar if your name is only halfway.
You’re not a real Izar if you volunteer for the Games.
You’re not a real Izar if you make it out alive.

Only the ink is white, and the pages are blank.

When I watched Estelle fall, I waited for the flood to come crashing through my front door; for the saltwater emotions to drown me all over again.

I heard the cannon; I waited.
I saw her body, broken; I waited.
I turned off the television; I waited.
I crawled up the stairs, into a cold bed; I waited.

For nothing.

I’ve gone numb.

I thought I’d be grateful for that – for the day that I could watch our name get cut down and not feel a damn thing about it. Heaven knows I’ve waited long enough. I thought I reached it, that point of no return, an empty black heart with no room for half names and fake cousins.

But the absence of a tsunami in my living room hurts just as much as my scorching tears of the past. If not more.

Am I broken? Or am I finally free?

Would the pain have managed to creep back into the walls if her last name wasn’t a double-barreled death sentence?

I’m trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, figure out what type of person it makes me that I thought I had the right to decide who got to belong to our family. I’m a girl with a savior complex, but only halfway. I want to save the world, but only the ones deemed worthy.

I watch the end credits on Estelle’s life roll alongside the gospel of an imaginary rulebook and the final words I spoke to her:

“You’re not an Izar.”

Like she’d never belong.
Like she wasn’t worth my sadness.
Like she never had a chance anywhere.

Something clicks, falls into place, telling me this has been a protection mechanism all along. There’s too many of us to count, and not enough room in my body to hold everyone. 206 bones, and just as many names looking for perch. I’m filling up; I’m falling apart, collapsing under the weight, wildly putting rules in place like walls to keep as many of them at arm’s length.

Something in that makes me feel like a bad Izar.

I want to be good.

And so I find myself awake too early for my liking with a small bag of fruits and a buttery loaf of bread as gifts for penance. Back to square one.

Vasco’s house is always open. Guess it kinda has to be, and he’s too good – as good as they come – to ever turn his back on someone in need.

I feel my frown lines harden at that, only to immediately soften as my eyes fall on the hunched, sleeping figure of a man cocooned in a swinging chair. I start towards him, crossing the distance of the front yard, but his eyes capture me before I can make it to his side.

If it wasn’t for his voice – cracked and hoarse, nails on a chalkboard and yet laced with something still familiar – I might not have even recognised him. There, sitting proudly on top of his skull is a bed of blonde hair, with roots hastily coloured and fly-away strands of hair tickling his face like dandelion fluff.

There’s nothing familiar in his appearance. He looks so much younger like this – like the hair dye has stolen his wrinkles and crow’s feet, and for a heart shattering moment I see us as younger, teens or twenty-something year olds, when I didn’t have cousin numbers pushing 50 and everything felt so much fucking simpler.

Laughter bubbles up inside me and spills across the lawn before I have the sense to stop myself.

Laughter, at the ridiculous vision in front of me that brings back the world gone begging.

Laughter, to stop from crying.

Laughter – a crazed sound, scratchy in the throat from muscles protesting the force of resurrection after lying dormant for years. Laughter – that burns your ears, ‘cause it sounds wrong to hear something you thought you’d forgotten how to do.

It is wrong.

I push it back down before it takes me over altogether.

“I was wondering when your mid-life crisis was going to hit.” I return to familiar footing in a quipped voice and dull eyes. Guarded, jaded, but not cruel. Something in Vasco brings out the softness I thought was long lost. “Or are you trying out a new campaign look?” It’s still a year away, and he’s been Mayor for so long there’s no need to even stage elections anymore, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen him working behind the scenes – head down, voice hushed. Always one step ahead of everyone, like he’s always had aces hidden up his sleeves and has just been waiting for the right moment to play his cards. Waiting for a worthy opponent to take the floor.

But this doesn’t feel like a part of that storyline. This Vasco feels like one reckless decision brought to life by one of the littles, hands thrown to the air with a thought of “Why not? What more have I got to lose?” A mid-life crisis indeed. I ignore the countdown ticking in the background, reminding me of my own body clock and offering a glimpse into a future not unlike Vasco’s present. I fumble with the cords of my hessian bag, reaching in to retrieve a small flask of water. An arm extends to a ginger Vasco as I come to sit on the top stair of the front porch.

All things are temporary – hangovers and boxed hair dye included – and maybe we have to live with the consequences of our past for a day, a week, a little longer than is comfortable. We get by, most of the time. Except when we don’t.

If only all of our problems were like that – short-lived and fleeting, as fickle as the fading blonde roots of another night spent with misery.

elegant

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

v a s c o

I can't open my mouth and forget how to talk
'Cause even if I could
Wouldn't know where to start
Wouldn't know when to stop

Her voice cut across the honeycombed dirt on the lawn, me, hands gripping tight on the bannister of the porch. I couldn’t shake the years rumbling around in my brain as I stared back at Nekane. Time had become too much of a thief here in Eleven, too ready to take what we held most dear in an instant. Or worse, to drag out the slow, almost unnoticeable passage of time – of wrinkles across the brow, graying hair at the temples, and a voice that doesn’t quite bellow as it might’ve, shrinking now in the sun – that one day becomes us, suddenly far from who or what we’d been.

We’re so much older now.

And what had time brought Nekane? I puzzled over when the last time I’d heard much of the particulars.

There’d always been the quiet sort of talk shared at a barbecue or passing one another in the market (how many times had I smiled and waved my way along?). I had no excuses for the times I’d seen her in the garden, working away. Or thought of her behind my desk in the Mayor’s office, and said well now, I ought to go and see how she’s doing. Just as easy as the thought had come I’d left it waiting, or to wither. Because, as I’d told myself, there’d been work to do across the district. And Emmanuel had his baby and Sofia was still working on her shop. Birdie Hope was getting married. Katelyn had taken a beau. Emma was made a magistrate. And on, and on, little moments that pulled me this way and that until I could forget.

And I wanted to blame myself for all those hours passed between the thought and this moment, escaped now into some distant void, except I forgave myself instead. I was too tired not to.

Whose fault was it for wanting a closeness that hadn’t quite set?

She approached with the same gentle prodding she’d done years before, to help me through my own grief. And true to form, she didn’t give an inch, remarking on the shock of blond on my head as ridiculous as it were. I imagined I could count the laughter lines on my face as I smiled. To know that there was still space for humor; that the two of us were not lost to the cracked earth and dust in the air, trapped in an empty and dying district. Her soul had always been capable of finding the joke in all of this. I hoped that Yani would grow into the same spirit. Restless but confident in her own skin. Resilient to the passage of time. And willing to know the time to be serious against when to revel in the ridiculous.

“I needed a change,” I found my voice hiding at the back of my throat, behind my teeth and dried out from the night. But it came forward well enough, through the smile and back to her, “You like it? I happen to think it might be the start to something new. Makes me feel a little bolder."

I shifted on my feet and started down the stairs of the porch to the lawn.

“Besides, who said anything about running again?” I winked, half-serious. Staring down another five years at the helm felt akin to pushing that boulder up a hill. I didn’t know how many more times I’d be able to before I’d slip and get crushed entirely.

“I’m guessing you heard about Estelle?” I put fixed my hands half in the pockets of my jeans. “I’d been praying for her last night, too.”

elegant

[Cait]

n e k a n e

may my name disappear
among everyone else’s
I ask forgiveness
for the mistakes I made

Vasco sits next to me, hunched over slightly, causing the tips of his fresh dye job to fall across his eyes, just. He feels out of place – like he’s woken up in the wrong realm. There’s something to be said about parallel universes, existing into infinity. All the variables of the world colliding with each other only to spit out some version of reality, where we find ourselves on this particular front porch on this particular morning to mourn the loss of one particular girl – another Izar soul we’ve somehow outlived.

More and more lately I’ve been finding myself wondering why. About everything, about nothing. I should have learned my lesson by now, that none of my questions have answers, and yet there’s something so haunting about the fact I’m almost forty years old, that I’ll probably live for another forty, and that most of my time will be spent mourning the deaths of children who only grow further and further away from me.

I just want to know why I’m the one who survived. I look to the sun, to the stars, invisible for now. Pleadingly, I long for them to look back down at us, but of course, they have nothing to say to me.

It’s just Vasco and I. No stars. No Estelle.

“I needed a change.” His words come out slightly raspy, but he tries to hide the evidence of last night’s shenanigans. I want to tell him he doesn’t have to hide from me – that I’m more of a monster than he’ll ever be.

But I don’t. And I won’t ask anything of him he’s not willing to admit. Instead, I thrust the flask of water into his hands, insistent this time.

“Drink. Your voice will thank me later.”

I watch closely, waiting for him to follow through. Finally, he concedes, placing the bottle back down on the step once he’s taken a gulp. I watch as he thoughtfully runs a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes.

“I happen to think it might be the start of something new.”

Something new. Well, that’s definitely one way of putting it. It’s a welcome change, though. It almost feels like rebellion, laughing in the face of expectation, like we’re ready to write our own futures instead of letting fate run its course.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just seeing too much into it, forcing meaning into places where it doesn’t exist. A chair is simply a chair – except for when it’s not. Except when it’s a metaphor for occupying the empty space left by a scared girl who died too soon. Or something like hope, waiting for someone to walk through the door and sit down with the road map to happiness. Vasco’s hair feels something like that. Bigger than us. Like the beginning of something.

There must be more.

I think we both feel it.

I hope he feels it the way I do.

I let myself believe that he does.

Until:

“Who said anything about running again?”

But it starts with you, I want to say. Nobody knows Eleven like Vasco; nobody’s going to command a change better than him. But I know he’s tired – I see it when he looks at me, dark circles in all their glory. I know what resignation sounds like. His words leave me standing exactly where I started: all alone.

Somewhere, Sampson is watching, laughing, telling himself he was right all along – that the world needs to burn for rebirth, and that nobody’s going to do it for us.

“Well, I hope you do,” I murmur softly. “I hope you run again. Nobody else could do the job better. I can’t imagine Eleven without you in charge of it.”

It’s the truth. Through the good and the bad he’s been a constant, a steady presence to keep me grounded. Someone I could always turn to and see him standing exactly where I expected him to be. He’s done so much for me – more than he probably knows, considering the handful of fleeting encounters we’ve had. But they’re enough for me. I know I get suffocated too easily by other people. He won’t give himself the credit he deserves, and that’s probably my fault. I’ve never been good at expressing myself or giving gratitude where it’s owed, choosing instead to let unspoken words hang in the air. But it’s not fair to just hope they land in the right places.

What I mean to say – what I should say: I don’t want a world where you aren’t Mayor. I’m too afraid of that type of uncertainty.

“I’m guessing you heard about Estelle?”

And, oh. Here it is. A question that isn’t really a question. I’m expecting it. It doesn’t mean I’m still not hurt by the reminder. I have to brace myself against the stair railing for fear of falling through the floorboards. I look at my white-knuckle grip, close my eyes, watch from behind my lids as the tsunami I was looking for last night grows out at sea, building higher and higher, inching closer to the shoreline.

“Yeah. I heard.” I don’t tell him that I watched on the first day as she moved through the Arena on her own, or on the second day as she fought a mutt alone. I don’t tell him how my first thought wasn’t that she must be so scared, but that it’s better to be alone, because nobody can let you down that way. I don’t tell him that I barely slept out of fear that if I closed my eyes for too long, the universe would punish me for not caring more. I don’t tell him that I still haven’t cried for her even though my heart stopped beating the exact moment hers did.

No. I don’t say any of this. It wouldn’t make a difference, wouldn’t change a damn thing.

“I saw her before she left.” I feel myself shiver slightly as the memory of that day comes back to me. “I wasn’t nice. I was awful, Vasco. I should have said more, been hopeful, fuck, I don’t even–” I’m out of breath, gasping, take two long breaths to fill my lungs back up with the air that’s been stolen.

It’s a while before I feel ready to speak again, and when I do, my voice is barely a whisper.

“I feel like I killed her.”

And here is my confession – the thing that brought me out of bed this morning and searching for forgiveness.

Here is the tsunami I knew would drown me.

Imagine: a girl so insistent on fighting fate without even having all her weapons.

Imagine: placing human worth on half a name, and only feeling remorse once it’s far too late.

Imagine: a world where remorse never had to exist – the world exactly how it’s supposed to be.

There must be more.

elegant

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

v a s c o

I can't open my mouth and forget how to talk
'Cause even if I could
Wouldn't know where to start
Wouldn't know when to stop

I took a long, cold drink out of the flask and washed away the cotton mouth. Nekane wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t a kid anymore, ready to swallow down bottom shelf liquor or stay out all night without the bill coming due next morning. I closed my eyes and felt a pulse flicker behind them. Alfer likely would roll out of his bed without a scratch, but I’d already felt the creep of a headache from the base of my neck up through my forehead. I rubbed my thumb and index finger at the bridge of my nose and fight back the pressure building.

Still, I didn’t regret having done it. The drinking, the laughing, the giving into an impulse. My life had been measured for some time now – nine long years of best behavior – and Alfer had offered some respite from that. A temporary reprieve from sunrises that reminded me how much there was unfinished. Some men fought that with their own darkness, with liquor or women. Or something that could at least cast a shadow. I’d have to ask Elias if he preferred sunrise or sunset. Though I imagined he’d just tell me it was a stupid question.

“Well, that’s kind of you to say, Nekane.” I replied with my hands pulling back from the railing. I wondered if what she said was true – if there wasn’t someone who could have done the job better. I hadn’t paid much mind to those that’d said otherwise, aside from trying to hear what they thought I was doing wrong. Prop O’Malley and the O’Malley clan sprung to mind, but then, that was a matter of pain I couldn’t address on my own. And I didn’t feel like a failure, even as the end of my second term came into view. “I haven’t ruled it out. There’s a few things left I want to do; I just have to decide if I have the strength to see them through.”

Only Katelyn had a hint of what I’d thought about and even then, not the whole of it. Pierre could’ve guessed, but he wasn’t the type to spread gossip. No – not even Emma had heard of the dreams I’d been chasing. I couldn’t worry her or anyone else. They trusted me to keep the till running smooth, to plow ahead and do as much as I could with what I’d been given. And I’d always been grateful for that, that so many had so much trust in what I could do. As though I wasn’t just a man trying to make sense of senseless violence and cruelty.

I’d grown quiet enough in the last year that they’d stopped sending the peacekeeper to follow me.

Nekane shifted against the railing and tightened her grip. I wondered as she spoke if the Izar curse was just that we carried the guilt so freely. That our lives measured against grief to find balance.

“I’m sorry,” I said all soft to dull the ache, “You don’t have to tell me why you feel that way, but I’m here, if you need to.” I’d several lifetimes of experience blaming myself for what I’d said to tributes. For all the false hope that might’ve stirred. There’d been more caskets than coronations while I’d been mayor.

I took another slow drag of water out of the flask and wiped a hand across my face.

“I used to want to save everyone, as impossible as that sounds. To figure out a way that even if they didn’t come home, things would be taken care of.” I leaned back against the edge of the porch. It’s been near on ninety years since Uxue, and more since the war.

“Now I wonder what I can do so they don’t get sent there in the first place.”

elegant