how not to drown {patricia/avriel} .:victory tour:.

[rook]

PATRICIA

Avriel Baptiste is a survivor. You could paint any Victor with that brush, but the reality of it is that a lot of the self-absorbed, hot-headed kids of today that waltz out of the Games with a crown on their heads and a smile on their faces just got lucky. A coin toss in their favour - a throwing axe missed, a sword in their chest avoided their heart, a slight hesitation on their opponents part.

They’re just scared children who won a game of averages. Mathematical certainties - the result of twenty-three failures on their behalves.

No, not with this kid. He was born to win.

I see it in the eyes, a passive hunger that wildly comes and goes. There’s no restraint, no mercy. This wasn’t someone who wanted to win, this was someone who couldn’t afford to die. A survivor in every sense of the word.

He did have compassion too, especially when it mattered. By the lake with Aspen, when the sun finally rose and coated them in golden light, he held her close as she died. He held her like I held Galaxy in that pitch-black cave.

I guess they were both beautiful moments that you could draw parallels from, but ultimately we both murdered our fellow finalists in cold blood. Our hands were red and our souls torn forever. Two survivors doing what they had to, whatever the cost.

The dark made monsters of both of us.

They’re bringing him over to Victor’s Village shortly. Having given his speech at the Justice Building, this is customary. I’m assuming Lethe was the only one to have made the effort to go down and watch the kids speech - Lysander is likely asleep at this hour and I’ve not gone to one in years. I much prefer meeting these kids away from the cameras.

It’s frankly scary how young they all look to me now. I remember when newly crowned victors were the kinds of people I’d have grown up and gone to school with, and now they’re young enough to be my kids. The one thing I can’t fight is getting older.

Twenty years now. From the 68th to the 88th. I’ve been a Victor for more of my life than I haven’t now, and I’m about to meet the kid who has won two whole decades after myself. Now that’s hardcore shit.

I lean against the wooden frame of my garden pergola, fingers twiddling the leaves of the ivy that creeps up one of it’s four legs. The lavender has spread across and under the kitchen windowsill over the summer, and needs trimming back to make room for some fall plants. There’ll be time for that after this week - first I’ve got Victor shit to do.

Glancing up at a blanket of dark clouds rolling in from the hills I slip inside my porch and grab a waterproof overcoat to pull down over my white dungarees.

By the time the Peacekeeper escort shows up with Avriel, it’s already raining.

[gamemaker kelsier]

a v r i e l .

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

"It's already raining."

Avriel blinks up at the grey skies, only half aware of the stylist team scrambling for their umbrellas. Gloria, his escort, pulls a clear hood up and holds it in place, a look of annoyance on her face.

"What, they not got weather in the Capitol?" he asks.

"Not if you don't want it," says Gloria.

Avriel doesn't answer that, it doesn't make any sense to him. He's come up against that issue a few times on this tour, people keep telling him things like he should know everything but he doesn't. He's still just the same old Avriel, just with a few more scratches and blood on his hands.

"Pull your hood up, you'll ruin your hair," she snaps at him.

Avriel does as he's told, even though Robbie doesn't seem to care about it himself. Perhaps he just knows by now that as soon as Av is out of sight, the hood will come down again.

He's taken to the rain.

He used to hate it back home but maybe that's just because in the winter, it'd get so cold and he'd come home soaked to the bone to a big empty house he couldn't afford to heat.

Now it doesn't matter, now he never has to look at a hydro bill again.

As they approach Five's Victor Village, Avriel starts to slow down. It doesn't matter how many districts they bring him to, how many Victors he meets, he's never been ready to meet any of them. He's been told over and over that these are the people who are supposed to understand him but with each one he meets, he only feels more separate.

None of them could know how it feels to drift alone in the middle of a lake in complete darkness. They can't know how it feels to lay there with an axe in your skin, staring at a tribute just as scared of him as he is of them through the eyeholes of a mask.

And he hates the way that they look at him, he hates the way it feels to stand in front of them and be told that they know what he's going through because they don't, Avriel doesn't even know what he's going through.

The wort part is how nice they are to him, though it's still better than the ones who hate him for living. That's been hard for him to work out, with twenty-three tributes destined to die, even holding out hope that your tributes will come back seems like a fool's game to him.

But how is Avriel supposed to know the way that feels? He's never had to watch two kids in a position he's been in before disappear up those tunnels into the Bloodbath. He doesn't have that pain to relate to yet so he can't understand.

He will, but not yet.

This is his year and he's spent the last five minutes of it standing on the street, staring up at–

"This is Victor Patricia Valfierno's home," Gloria says, "She won th-."

"The 68th," Avriel interrupts, "Twenty years before mine, fought in the dark, I wasn't even born yet."

Gloria still doesn't know him that well though she pretends to. He's seen her at all the events, watched as she's spoken about him like he's little more than a product.

"Yes, well then," Gloria sounds annoyed with him but Avriel doesn't care enough about her to be sorry. "We'll leave you to it, as always you have as long or as little as you please."

Gloria and the stylists leave him at Patricia's front door but the Peacekeeper escort stays. Avriel watches silently as they walk back towards the District Centre, umbrellas bobbing above their heads.

They look kind of stupid all walking together like that.

The large chest pocket on the jumpsuit Robbie put him in moves suddenly and then Scout appears slowly and blinks twice before looking up at Av.

"I know," he tells it, "I'm gonna knock I just needa sec."

He's never been good with meeting people but he's learned over time how to survive the process out of necessity.

He shuts his eyes for a moment.

"le monde peut te haïr, souviens-toi juste que je ne le fais pas."*

He's three years old and his mother's hand is brushing the hair off his forehead to kiss the scratch there.

Avriel knocks.

*the world can hate you, just remember I don't

[rook]

PATRICIA

The skies have turned dark and cruel, a brooding grey-black that sits over District Nine, staring down with eminence. I find it oddly calming when the weather is this fierce, it reminds that there is something more powerful than any of us. I feel small and powerless, insignificant almost - there's a luxury in that.

Rain hammers the polycarbonate roofing, the pitter patter of droplets above my head rings in my ears. I shiver a little as I sit on the foot stool and pull my hiking boots up over my thick red socks, making sure to tie the laces as tightly as possible to keep them waterproof. A cap would probably be a good idea too to keep the rain out of my eyes - I scan the kitchen for one I left around earlier before a knock at the door interrupts my process.

That'll be them. The weather hasn't put them off after all. I stand up and walk to the front door, opening it promptly and staring eye-to-eye with the shaggy black-haired dripping wet murderer in front of me. Either side of the slender dark figure are two colossal white knights, brandishing their Peacekeeper batons at their sides.

I eye them up, holding the door ajar, trying to stare through their opaque helmet visors and see the human beings underneath.

"Are those for him, or for me?" I nod at the guns at their hips.

"They're for your protection"

"Yeah, yeah." Robots, fucking robots, "We're just going for a walk through the woods."

My move my gaze to the boy in front of me, standing dripping in the rain, all his sins running down his face.

"Hi."

[gamemaker kelsier]

a v r i e l .

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

Patricia is smaller in real life.

Every time he sees her on the television, the angle they use make her seem taller or something. Maybe it's just that personality, still shining through after years of being a victor.

He blinks at her, nearly eye-to-eye, and a droplet of water runs down a strand of hair onto his cheek. The rain has picked up quickly, enough so that Avriel actually does pull his hood up despite that stubborn streak that tells him to leave it alone.

If he got sick enough, would they end this stupid tour early? He makes a mental note to ask.

Avriel watches Patricia talk to the two peacekeepers and something within him starts to bend. She doesn't seem the least bit scared of them. Avriel lived through the District Nine riots though, he knows those guns are more than just props, seen bodies laying in the streets full of holes, and he knows just how easily the white suits pull the trigger.

He can't tell if the District Five victor is brave, stupid or just smarter than everyone else in the room.

"Hi," he says back.

Social anxiety doesn't allow for much small talk.

In all of Patricia's propaganda, she's this young girl who survived the dark for a week but here, standing in front of her, he sees crows feet and a tired expression. It's got to be pretty repetitive meeting new victors.

The rain seems to get louder but Avriel doesn't ask her if she still wants to go, not when she's already just said that they're going for a walk. He turns around on her porch and goes back down the walk, figuring she'll be right behind him.

"You're not scared?" he asks and hooks a thumb over his shoulder at the peacekeepers following them a little ways back, "The way they watch me, I dunno if being a victor'll save me if I mess up."

[rook]

PATRICIA

Being a Victor almost definitely will save him if he messes up. The tag alone grants you immortality, but it comes at a cost. It's not you that gets hurt, it's everyone you care about. That's how they keep you in line. Everyone's got someone they value more than themselves, and so there are fates far worse than death.

I don't tell him this, instead clasping my hands behind my back as we trudge through the nearby woods on the path towards the reservoir. There'd be no point in overwhelming the kid any more than he probably already is.

"You're too valuable to them now for it to matter." I try to explain, without really elaborating further. I'll leave it with him to figure out all that entails.

"And no, I'm not scared." I sigh, placing my feet carefully to avoid slippery overground roots and rabbit holes, "They need us all alive - even cynical middle-aged relics like me."

I can't tell Avriel about the weekly sexual abuse, the death threats to my sister, and how Phelix was being tailed by several hitmen for weeks, and how I couldn't make it stop - until, until I told them I was going to end it all and they panicked, and showed me their hand. They made it all go back to normal because they needed me alive more than they needed to manipulate me. The sweet sweet irony of it was that in trying to control me, they freed me.

They needed me because without me, they would lose District Five overnight, and that gave me power. The same way it gives Avriel power over Nine.

I don't know if he's ready to digest that concept just yet.

"The lake's just up ahead - well, I say lake, it's the hydroelectric dam's reservoir, but it's the closest thing to a lake in ten miles." I grin, proudly.

As a kid I had no connection to my District heritage at all. Not in the way I do now. I've met so many hard working people over the last two decades, good people who are just enduring day to day, who rely on the industry of Five to survive.

As a teenager I would have scoffed at anyone working to make a living whilst I was on the streets stealing from businesses and conning big-suits with my sister. I'm proud to represent the little man now - no one else is gonna speak up for them.

"Come, there's a nice bench near the water where we can sit and you can tell me all about the twenty-three dead children sitting on your conscience."

[gamemaker kelsier]

a v r i e l .

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

Talking to Patricia is simple, as if this isn't their first conversation and they've been going on walks like this for years.

He keeps pace with her as they walk but not because he tries to, they just fall into a rhythm easily. She doesn't look at him very hard, doesn't lay a thousand weights on him with every word and that's new for him. It feels as if everyone has had a new burden for him to carry this tour.

"You're too valuable to them now for it to matter," she tells him. Her words should be reassuring but Avriel is smarter than he looks and he knows that there are other ways to keep people in line.

If the gangs in Nine can think to hold the safety of his siblings over his head, there's no way that the Capitol won't go there too.

He shivers a little bit and tries to tell himself that it's just the cold but that isn't entirely true. It's not the first time he's thought this during his tour but that nagging feeling is coming back, that one in the back of his mind that likes to tell him that Billie and Duke would be better off without him.

"Right, yeah," he mutters in the pause between those words and the next. Then she tells him of a hydro dam and Avriel can't help but be excited. He's read about Dams and how they work but he's never seen one in person. "I built a model one once in year six," he tells her, mouth running with the non-story before he can stop it, "It'll be cool to see a real one."

Five's a little greener then he expected and Avriel finds himself distracted by the mossy forest floor. It makes him think of that day in the hiking trail, when he'd left the girls for a little bit and found a stream to clean himself in. The forest had seemed beautiful for a moment then, when his friends had still been alive and the only pain he'd felt had been the scratches in his legs.

Av doesn't realize he's stopped walking until the other victor speaks again.

He starts a little, "Yeah, sorry," and follows her to a new looking bench on the bank of the reservoir. The water is dark under the grey skies, the rain falling makes hundreds of little ripples and something within him settles. A part of him was nervous that this lake would be too much like the one in the arena.

Patricia speaks simply, so bold and round that there are no corners to get lost in but it also doesn't leave much room for hiding from the topic.

She doesn't seem in a rush for his answer either and Avriel sits in silence, eyes shut, face turned up to catch raindrops to kill time.

"I learned all their names on the train ride in," he says finally, "Just so that when I was killed, I'd know who I was dying to but then I didn't die and I have all their names anyway. I remember each anthem, each face and each stat attached to them. Half of me wants to forget all of it and the other half can't bear to."

He scoops a few rocks up off the ground beside the bench and tosses them into the lake one by one, making a game of getting the next one in before the ripples of the stone before it can properly end.

"I wish I could regret their deaths but I can't because the only reason I'm here is because all of them died. That's fucked right?"

That makes me a monster, right?

[rook]

PATRICIA

Avriel’s story about remembering the names of every Tribute bruises me unexpectedly. He did it so he knew who had killed him, but instead it worked against him, the name of every kill burning in his mind as they took their last breaths before his eyes. That must have been awful.

Of course, I don’t know if it’s any better or worse than scrambling around in a pitch black cave, not knowing who’s neck you just plunged your sword into until you’ve been forced to watch it back on video highlights in front of thousands of applauding fans.

There’s no right or wrong way to process killing other people, and when the kid starts talking about regret, and starts blaming himself - like all of us did at this stage of our journeys, he looks to me for an answer.

They always want answers. I don’t have them. All I have is my own experiences, which have almost exclusively been bad, and what I’ve learned the hard way from them.

“You think any of them wouldn’t be sat here asking the same thing?” I sit lax on the bench, like it’s not pouring down torrential rain above us. Droplets of rain drip from my waterproof hood.

“You want the truth?” I ask, not waiting for an answer, “They were all dead the minute that gong sounded.”

I let that hang in the misty air between us as I stare out beyond the water’s surface. Huge great mountains border the woods, stabbing upwards into the clouds. On a dry day the water here is so clear you can see each pebble sitting at the lakebed, but here their image is distorted and hidden by the ripples upon ripples.

“I don’t mean they never have a chance, it could have been someone else sat next to me. Chance has it that it’s you - because you’re a survivor.”

Like me. Like any of us - we all have different stories, but there are always similarities. When it comes the Games, no one ever makes it out alive, not even the Victor. You’re not the same anymore, and you never will be again. It’s who you choose to be from that point that defines you. I learned that twenty years too late.

“Don’t forget it, don’t regret it. It happened. You can’t change any of that now. It wasn’t really you that killed them anyway.”

Avriel is just the gun in the hand of the real murderer.

[gamemaker kelsier]

a v r i e l .

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

"You want the truth?"

He's not certain that he does. Avriel hoards responsibility easy, always has. It feels good to carry various burdens because at the end of the day when he crawls into bed, he knows why he's so tired all of the time.

“They were all dead the minute that gong sounded.”

Avriel pauses, the next rock held tight in a closed fist as he stares at the lake. He still remembers that sound of course, it's likely that he always will. It marked the beginning of the end for all of them, for him too. He remembers that Avriel, that boy who stared across the green lawn and knew that his end awaited him in the arena but went running in anyway like the rest of them.

There'd been no other choice.

Patricia goes quiet for a moment but Avriel has nothing to fill the silence with. He throws another rock, fingers rolling off the side of it as he flicks his wrist perfectly. It skips twice before sinking.

Maybe it would have been better to die in there. Maybe it should have been him guiding Areto's hands over his stomach, knife gripped tightly.

That moment in the dark is still unfathomable, he can't look at all of it at once.

"You're a survivor," Patricia says.

Avriel can't help but ask, "Is that what you tell yourself to make it alright?" He knows that she's had twenty years to think about it, and it's almost odd sitting here with the woman who won two decades before him after meeting Stella, who was ten years after.

They're in three different stages of erosion.

"I did kill them," he says, hands in his lap, full of rocks. Water drips down the back of his neck and each new drop of water is icier than the last, but Avriel barely registers it anymore. "I can't just shift the blame like that. I felt my knife, I felt the give when Areto's body stopped fighting it. She died on my shoulder, I did that."

He drops the rocks then and they fall beneath him, bouncing and scattering on the cement platform the bench sits on.

"I know I can't change things," he says, "I wouldn't, but I don't want to excuse what I've done to get here, I can't."

[rook]

PATRICIA

"Is that what you tell yourself to make it alright?"

It's the only thing I tell myself.

Twenty years is a long time to carry that weight. At some stage you have to make peace with what you did, else it'll eat away at you from the inside, like a cancer.

I killed those kids - but who called their names? Who called mine?

I'm not a survivor. I'm the survivor. Of a sick twisted game where twenty-three were always always going to die. I'm not proud of what I did, but if I didn't do it then someone else would have, and it'd be Galaxy Rose-Clements or Crusader Rhodes sat having the exact same talk with Avriel.

Ducks bobble on the water's rippling surface, drifting in on the wind's harsh pull. If you listen closely under the rain you can hear the soft humming of the hydroelectric turbines powering the generators at the dam, whirring away hour after hour to keep powering the millions of dazzling lights in the Capitol - whilst down in Five the kids are filling in their tesserae forms by candlelight.

"I don't want to excuse what I've done to get here, I can't."

My intentions weren't to invalidate how he is feeling about his Games, and what happened, and what he went through. It's too soon for him to move on. It'll hurt, and it'll devour him, for a long time - maybe decades.

And then one day he'll wake up and make breakfast, listen to the birds outside, plant some lavender in the garden before maybe prepping some vegetables for a stew. He'll then clean up, read a book, and go to bed at a reasonable hour just after dark.

All that, before waking up sweating in the middle of the night, horrified in the realisation that he's gone a whole day without thinking about what he did. And that's when he'll know he's moved on.

That's when I did.

Judging by the inward guilt compressed on his face I'd say he's a long way off that yet. I'm not the best when it comes to sympathising - I can empathise, but I find it very difficult to show it in a supportive manner.

"Then don't. No one can tell you how to digest all of this, the best they can do is share how they got through it. Really it's something you've gotta figure out on your own - in your own way."

I wipe raindrops from my brow and nose, licking my lower lip as I stare out at the heavy grey clouds rolling over the horizon. This weather isn't letting up anytime soon.

"Have they been looking after you on the Victory Tour?" I ask him, trying to quickly shift the direction of the conversation onto his welfare.

[gamemaker kelsier]

a v r i e l .

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

She's kind.

Patricia doesn't have to be, but she is and that's comforting somehow. It'd be annoying from anyone else but all that pain, all that turmoil beneath his skin, maybe that can settle into kindness too if hers did. He stares down at his hands as she speaks, at the scars, already gone pale pink that run up into the sleeves of his jacket.

They're still so fresh, he remembers where they came from vividly. When Avriel shuts his eyes, the soft pattering of the rain on the lake transports him and he's half here, sitting on the bench with Pat, half back in the arena. Maybe that's how it will always be, the memory of that place held so tightly that he won't ever be able to fully let it go.

The older victor speaks again and Avriel listens, not quite looking for permission but getting it anyway. "Then don't," she says and he likes that. The way she speaks to him is straight forward, he doesn't have to guess her meaning. 

Avriel looks up after some time, at the rain falling on the lake and the dam across the water, holding the floods back. Ducks roam in little flocks across the surface, dipping down below the water every now and then to make a catch and Patricia sits beside him.

It's a quiet moment but it's comfortable and for a few minutes, Avriel isn't entirely homesick. It's nice, this tiny pocket of time spent away from his entourage and their heavy gazes. 

"It's fine," he says eventually in answer to her question, "Except I think my escort actually hates me. Capitolites are just fuckin' weird though."

It isn't fine really. Somehow sleeping on the train has made his dreams worse. They've changed up, it's like the motion and the sound have brought all these memories of that first journey back to him. He dreams of the District Nine car, of Fleur gazing out the window and the world falling into black around them.

And there it is, the question that's been biding its time in the back of his head nearly ready to come out. If there's anyone who can understand, it has to be Patricia.

"The dark," he starts, "It- I don't... I'm afraid I'm gonna wake up and it's going to be there again." The perpetual darkness is always the main feature of his nightmares, he's gotten used to sleeping with the lights on because of it. "But then," he says, "Sometimes I miss it."

He places his palms down flat on the bench and looks over at Patricia. "You know?"