Hello!
This isn't the first story I've written for this fandom (God knows I love it), but it's the first I've ever published online. Ever.
(Strange things happen when I'm bored, but that's where this story came out of.)
I hope you guys like it~ please rate and review! (That's what most authors say, anyway... But seriously, rating and reviewing would be awesome.)
And also: I don't own anything of the Hunger Games; nah, it all belongs to Suzanne Collins. Shame.
Beetee wonders how he'll die.
He casts the question forward every night, and he contemplates each answer seriously; it is as close as he can come to amusement, because the answers are never the same. Death at gunpoint, knifepoint, poison in your soup. Illness, old age. Kidnapped and stuffed into a cannon, made to wait as the fuse is lit. Buried in ashes, handcuffed underwater, nailed to a cross or impaled on the forks of a trident.
They are presented matter-of-factly, and he knows that the sheer variety is not because of his own-superior, he likes to think-imagination, but because the people who stay with him, in him, at night never stop coming.
He hears them whisper in his dreams.
But every time, he hears Wire's voice breathe softly, almost wistfully, into his ear; Volts, Volts, Volts, she says, and he used to think she was calling his name but now he is not so sure.
He likes to think that he's never really sleeping; he likes to think that he's risen, somewhat, over oblivion, over death. And sometimes, when he closes his eyes and all he can see is black, when the dreams don't come and the emptiness threatens to suffocate him, to choke away his sanity, he sits at his desk and wraps the gold wire around his fingers and remembers.
There's something calming about looping the glinting strands, over and under and around, until he's fashioned something of a handcuff around his knuckles. He likes to imagine, sometimes, that he's tangling his fingers in Wire's hair; her beautiful long, golden hair.
He doesn't really need the gold, but they insist on giving it to him anyway, because he's Beetee, he's Volts, and he deserves nothing but the very best. So he takes it, and he remembers how he looped it around the tree, how he wore it on his wrist and let the blood on it stream through his fingers, but most of all he remembers how it felt to die as he watched it follow the arrow into the heart of the Cornucopia.
And he always dreams the same dream afterwards, that instead of the wire it is Wiress, impaled by the arrow onto the great golden horn, with her beautiful hair streaming and knotted onto the arrow holding her into place.
He hates it. He hates it and it's terrible and he wishes he could cast it away but it's beautiful, it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen and he finds himself trying to recreate it in pixels but he can never get it right.
He doesn't know if he prefers watching children die.
He remembers how the parachutes had soared through the air; for a moment, he'd done nothing but absorb the soft delicacy of the silver clouds floating through the sky. He remembers the greedy hands ripping the packages apart, eager for the promises of salvation, of help, of life in death-
He carries them with him, in him.
In a way, he thinks of them fondly, like a mother carrying her child; he shields them, keeps them warm and safe, but he doesn't know if he's waiting for himself to be ready or if he's waiting for them.
He killed them, so he could die.
His hands are never still; he works then furiously, until they crack and blister and bleed, and he considers each rough callous something of a gift, because they prove that he is present, that he is human, that he can still feel pain. He thinks, sometimes, that it must be because he's looking for life, but he isn't quite sure exactly what he's looking for.
He killed them, and he died. He doesn't like to wonder what it would take for life.
Sometimes, he presses his hands to the tips of Finnick's trident. He never told Annie that all they found of his body was the little metal button; he never told anyone that when he pressed it, the trident came flying back.
He watches the blood pool on his hands and drip down the metal prongs, snake along the handle and onto the floor. He never dwells on how he made weapons to kill, but never to save.
He goes to visit Katniss and Peeta when they have their first child; he pats its soft cheek and smiles, says all the right things, when what he really wants to do is increase the pressure in his hands and rip its tiny head straight off, because that would be more merciful than leaving it to grow at the hands of a broken mother and father who will never be capable of love.
He doesn't say anything, but they see it in his eyes. He wonders idly how the brains would feel in his hands.
And the children visit him in his dreams, they dance inside his eyelids and he watches, enchanted, as they disintegrate into nothing but flesh and blood sagging against tightly wound cords of beautiful golden wire, and still they dance until his brain becomes nothing but a brilliant swirl of red and gold, and all he can hear is Wiress breathing in his ear, 'Volts, Volts, Volts,' and he knows what he must do.
So when they finally go to investigate, they knock out his door and barge into his apartment, they find his scrawny body seated on a throne of gold wire, shaped into what might be a goat's horn. The strands coil thickly round his arms and legs, frame and cup his face tenderly, and they hum and tremble with the flow of electricity.
For a while, everyone in the room holds their breath as the man in the Cornucopia made entirely of fragile golden wires jerks and shudders, and none of them want to know why his eyes are wide open as he smiles.