A/N: I'm relocating this drabble series from Proioxis because it deserves its own little section. This one is the first of five 1000-word drabbles based off of Cam's Burning House, which is one of the prettiest songs I've ever heard. I'll add the other drabbles as time allows.


I've been sleepwalking, been wandering all night


The taste of blood lingers in the back of her mind, in her mouth, salty and warm with an undercoat of steel, of ice, but when he kisses her it changes.

She is supposed to be a mental presence as well as a physical one, the shadow that follows just a little too quickly, the sheen of the blade as it curves, teases over exposed flesh. They take her youth, her dark eyes and high voice, and twist her into a weapon.

He's already a weapon, muscle and bronze and eyes a little too cold, a little too fatal, and he captivates her, pins her to the ground as she writhes. He torments her, croons insults like they're lovers' purrs, and she falls in love with him.

They're all crazy in Two, vicious and cutting and far too like the Capitol, and the Capitol loves them for it. But she isn't crazy, not before, anyway. They tell her to be unhinged, insane, and blood floods her mouth, sprays from a boy's back as her knife embeds itself in his skin. He slashes at tributes scarcely more than children and laughs, and she remembers that he didn't need any sculpting to create his image. He's already crazy.

She becomes sadistic, monstrous, laughing as they race through nightmarish landscapes and taunt the others. And he's amused at her petty cruelty, pleased by her flashes of brutality. A gorgeous, nameless girl, a streak of gold beneath the moonlight tugs at his hand, grins up at him, and he sneers at the girl and shoves her away.

The girl dies just before daybreak and she grins at him, licks her lips as the dead girl's former partner shifts nervously from foot to foot. They're both crazy now, and the boy knows it, but he's bound to them as surely as if he's chained to them. They'll kill him before he can escape, and he isn't strong enough against the both of them. Perhaps he hopes they'll turn on each other first. His smile is false, brittle next to their triumphant ones.

That boy dies a few days later, after they'd split up beneath columns of smoke and ruin and shattered bones. She sees his face in the sky, patterned on the stars, and turns to her living companion. He is as remote and cold as the stars, but she tastes warmth and copper when she kisses him. He touches the nape of her neck with icy fingers and she gasps, curls into him as trumpets blare and it's absolution, it's freedom.

This is not a love story. Theirs is not a happy ending. They are not the heroes, and this is not their redemption. This is him with his hands tangled in her hair and hatred simmering beneath his skin, the delicacy of her bones so tantalizing he has to rip himself from her before he can snap her, can break her. This is her with the blood bitter in her mouth and her chest surging with each breath that rasps in her throat, rattles in her lungs, watching him like they're wolves about to rip the other to shreds, like he's Romeo about to kill himself over some fleeting fancy of love and she's too late to stop him. They are fire and ashes and destruction and death and he snarls, pulls her closer.

She is beautiful beneath the starlight, all coy shadows and gleaming teeth. A cut curls up from under her eye and tears its way across her face, just barely splitting her skin, and he runs a thumb across it and smirks when she inhales.

If they win- when they win- they'll have authority like no other Victor in over seven decades. They'll command attention in the Capitol, and who wouldn't want to align themselves with the vicious young couple? She imagines returning in splendor, living in luxury, the screams of the crowds as they parade through the streets. She tastes a honeyed sweetness beneath the copper in her mouth and this, this is what happiness is.

He gazes down at her like he's drowning and she's oxygen, like he's fixated on her, obsessed with her. He's obsessed with the other girl, the nuisance who's escaped death at their hands several times already, but it's the kind of mania born of hatred. His fascination with her is different in a way that makes her shudder. There's no gentle ardor in his eyes, just fervor, but he grins down at her and asks her who they'll kill first.

The next morning, he races off in one direction, tracking the redheaded girl who'd leaped out first, and she chases after the other girl until it all goes to hell.

A massive farmboy tosses her to the ground and she scuttles frantically backwards, anything to put as much space between the broken boy and herself as she can manage. Oh, the Games might have refined her partner's viciousness, enhanced her own innate instability, but they've ruined this boy. He was kind once, she thinks as he yanks her up, the kind of boy who'd work countless hours to be able to support himself and then throw it all away on the next poor victim of political corruption. Beneath the feral snarl on his face, there's a kind of peace, so warped and splintered her hands seize and her mind blanks until she remembers she has a voice.

She screams.

It seems to rile him, that scent of life and death and something horribly, painfully in between, and he slams her head with a rock and drops her body to the earth. The broken boy sprints away as she gasps for fleeting breath and another, just as broken, rushes over, but they both know it's too late for her. She breathes promises of glory as she dies, and he clings to her words, grips her hands as she shudders and lies still.

Blood sings in the back of his mind even as hers dims.