I own nothing
She used to be carefree, running after the wind. Her hair would tangle in tree branches and dirt would cake underneath her nails. The sounds of her laugh used to carry back to her house and make her brother smile before he went chasing after her. He was the only one who never dragged her home.
He used to be a dreamer, asking a hundred and one questions until people ran out of answers. He would wake his sister up in the middle of the night to look at the stars, and dream of one day maybe getting close to them. He would annoy anyone who would listen to him with his constant wondering. Only his sister never shut him up.
She didn't mind killing per se, not the action at least. She liked knowing that she was good at something, something other than ruining her hair and tearing her dresses. She hated watching the life drain out of her victims eyes, hated their futile screams for help. She hated stepping over mangled bodies on her way to her next kill, it all seemed too messy. Her mother would have laughed at that, she was never a neat child, but her mother had never stepped on a stray eyeball from a particularly gory bloodbath kill. She hated the messy parts of killing, not the bloodstains on her knife.
He hated it all. He hated how one flick of his wrist and some parent just lost their child. It was too easy, all of it. His ten in training should have made him realize how good he was, but it wasn't until a fellow career clapped him on the back, that he knew that he was a killer. He winced when he heard screams, prayed that his sister didn't think he was a monster. He never relished the kills, but he had promised her that he'd come back. And a promise was a promise. So he drove his knife through hearts and guts and skulls, he stepped over the bodies and left his wounded allies to die. It was too easy, too neat and tidy to be killing.
It was all too messy, too dirty, too wild and uncontrolled. The bloodstains on her hands that never disappears no matter how hard she scrubbed. The memories of other people's blood and guts underneath cracked nails, that never go away no matter how neatly she files them. The scars that mapped her skin that the doctors can take away all they want, but the pain and desperation remain. The screams that echo in her ears that the music just can't drown out. She scrubs at her skin and laces herself into pretty dresses and paints her body gold and silver, but she cannot manage to cover up the lives on her hands, the pain in her heart.
The world was too cut-and-dry. If you wore nice clothes and smiled and said what was expected, people would hail you as a hero. It was too easy to put on a suit and comb your hair, because then people wouldn't see the scars. If you pasted a smile on your face, people wouldn't see your regret. If you drank and danced and followedthefuckingrules then people would think your inside was just as pretty as your outside. He hated it. He wanted to tear his expensive clothes to shreds and rip apart the shiny new skin they gave him. He wanted to glower and spit in the faces of those who put him in this hell, and make them see the monster he was. Make them see the monster they'd turned him into.
The colours were too bright, the sounds too loud. The perfumes the rich blanketed their apartment clogged her senses and lingered on the jewels they gave her. Everything was too big, too much. Her hands curled into fists and she forced herself to straighten them out again. Her heart clenched painfully every time she showed up at an address, so she calmed her breathing and told herself that itdidn'tmatter itdidn'tmatter itdidn'matter. At the end of the day, week, month, there was an apartment in back in One where her brother was, where he would help her wash herself free of glitter and braid back her hair. It was neater, cleaner there, but the world was still too much of everything.
He didn't fit between their lines. He didn't want to sit and let himself be touched, didn't want to touch other people. He hated biting his tongue (don't say it don't say it.), hated smiling all the time (pretend you're happy, pretend you're fine), hated the feeling of being bought and sold (you have a price on your head, just like a piece of jewelry). He wanted to fall apart, wanted to smash and tear up their perfect little kingdom, wanted them to drag him away kicking and screaming (drag him to the place where they put down rabid animals). He let them though, let them shove him into boxes, let them dictate his entire life. When they were done for the day, there was a place where he could scream and cry and fuck up the world so he didn't take it out on the people who fucked him up. His sister was there, with a brave face who let him mess up the world. The world was made of lines and he didn't fit into them.
She was falling apart, so she sewed herself back together, tighter every time, the lies bit into her skin, but she survived off the pain.
Life was suffocating him, squeezing tighter and tighter until he couldn't breathe. He tore himself to shreds everyday, so he could breathe for a few moments before the walls closed in again.
Scars were erased, ideas extinguished.
Ideas were extinguished, scars erased.
Her hands were smooth, but she'd crushed diamonds under her fingers trying to destroy the messy, the unclean..
His hands were smooth but he had slivers of glass buried under the surface from trying to claw his way free of the bindings of being alive.
It killed them to cry to show human emotion. There they sat, brother and sister, twin tears running down twin cheeks. Hands bent and twisted from clenching and unclenching laced together, the only lifeline they had. They knew pain, and then they knew the others pain and the thought of one of them dying alone kept the other alive.
Sometimes she remembered how she used to run like the world was endless. If she tried to chase the wind again, she wondered, would she remember how?
Sometimes he looked at the stars, remembered how they used to seem so close. His dreams were dead now, as alive as the stars were close. They shine down on him, cold and blinking and unreachable.
She died with an axe in her chest and a final breath of air in her lungs. She died watching her brother slump to the ground knowing that if she survived, she wouldn't be living. She died hoping he hadn't died crying inside.
He died with an arrow in his neck and the dead body of another tribute beside him. He died because he killed someone, not because he wanted to, but because it was the only thing he knew how to do. He died seeing his sister in front of him and hoping that she would live just a bit longer.
They were lifted out of the arena in the same hovercraft, but buried in different graves.