Author's Note: This was written for We Are the Rebels Forum's July prompt, "candlelight." Enjoy.
…..
It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.
Cinna knows this. He has always been fascinated by flames, and by the embers, cinders, ashes that come after. It's nice to light a girl on fire and watch her glow, but Panem doesn't need more glow. Panem needs to be changed. And if that involves burning things to the ground, so be it!
Cinna knows he's mad. But then again, nearly everyone is. Be it the average Capitol citizen's amoral naïvete, the presidents' obsession with power and control, or his own pyromaniac tendencies, no one can claim sanity. No one leaves the Hunger Games without being burnt.
Cinna created six costumes for Katniss Everdeen: fire, flames, candlelight, embers, ashes, and charcoal. But his favorite, by far, is the one that gets him killed in the end.
Because, with a single spark, Cinna burned the Capitol. He showed he was deadly, dark, unforgiving, all while being completely normal.
…..
She knows that her neighbors think she's strange, and somewhere, deep inside, she knows that she is. But it's a good kind of strange, a perceptive kind of strange. While Cinna calls for the smoldering of the Capitol, she calls for the warm radiance of remembrance. What good is death and destruction and change when no one even can recall what they're fighting for?
It's an unfair analysis of her partner, whom she knows works so hard for the rebellion and is dedicated to the betterment of the world far more than she is. But she can't help but think it.
Every year, after the victors have gone home to their districts and everyone in the Capitol is settling down into their tedious, daily lives, Portia opens up her cupboard and pulls out twenty-four candles and a small match.
She has an endless supply of candles, and is probably the only reason why the candle store is still in business. She, like Cinna, is obsessed with fire—but not the transformation, as Cinna is, but with the steady beacon of light. A light in the wilderness.
Every year, Portia lights twenty-four candles, arranged in a circle around her kitchen table. She writes out the full name of each tribute that year and feeds each slip into each candle, watching the flicker of a flame engulf the name and glow brighter in memory. The ashes come later; she gives those to Cinna.
On the evening the Quarter Quell is announced, she comes home from the styling center to see her apartment in flames, papers curling and flying everywhere.
It's a sick sort of revenge, and she knows in her heart that Cinna's right about burning.
…..
They beat them until they're bloody wrecks and then drag them into a cell and leave them there to die. Of course they're going to die. But it's not like either of them thought they were going to survive this war, anyways.
Cinna manages to muster one last glance at Portia, determination and obsession still flaring in his eyes. We are still here. We're still smoldering.
Portia gets the hint, and somehow the guards managed to ignore the match in her coat pocket. She throws it at a wooden post, and soon the world catches.
Cinna burns quickly, and laughs as he and everything else are reduced to ashes.
Portia watches the blaze and is pulled out of there, extinguished, and brought out on live television to be shot in the head along with the rest of her prep team, who did nothing wrong.
Cinna's last thought: It was a pleasure to burn.
Portia's last thought: Let someone light a candle for me...
…..
"What is there about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it? … It's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out." – Fahrenheit 451