Burning
He wasn't dead. Not really. Not in the way he wished. They weren't that merciful.
They came every other day, beat him, made him beg for an end, brought him every time closer to the abyss he feared and longed for so desperately. But they always stopped, leaving him more dead than alive, yes, but it was never enough.
Oh, how he had cried and screamed and fought. But nobody came, nothing helped, nothing changed. It wasn't the pain that drove him insane, not the fear of the countless days of torture to come. It was the silence and the darkness and the loneliness. He always had his imagination. The feather-like touch of the sun, the fresh smell of cut grass, the low whisper of the wind; everything turned into images inside of his head, into stories of heroes and undying love, into pictures of pure beauty, into shapes his hands and mind could form into every possible and impossible thing.
But here – his thoughts had died, his eyes saw nothing but the dark filling the space around him and inside his head. His memories were broken pieces of a life he couldn't remember, with edges so sharp he cut himself whenever he tried to see something beyond this abyss.
The silence was too perfect to be natural. His sobs and cries were stopped by an invisible force, absorbed by the cold stone walls, too low to even be heard by his own ears. The air he breathed with burning lungs was filled with desperation and hopelessness, building tight knots around his heart, making every beat an impossible burden, but still it didn't stop. Sometimes he woke, still shivering from the darkness that never left him, his arms outstretched, trying to get hold of whatever shadows waited there to take his soul, his heart beating so fast he hoped it would shatter.
He never answered them, whatever it was they wanted to know. Some day they stopped asking. Still they came to make it unable to forget where he was, what he lost, who he used to be. Sometimes they lifted the invisible layer of silence around his cell and he heard others cry in the agony he knew so well himself. And it broke his heart and somehow gave him new strength at the same time. He wasn't alone. Still all of them were lost. Lost to die down here, die a death of slow cruelty only those can inflict on others who never had to live with regret for what they do. They're only tools of a greater mind. As all of their prisoners had been tools once.
Whenever he heard those voices he asked himself if he'd known the man behind the cries, the women behind those breathless sobs. He wondered if their war was lost, if their hopes and dreams of a brighter future had finally been destroyed. And he found that he didn't care. He still breathed and his heart still beat but inside his mind he had accepted long ago that he'd never get out of this prison.
One day they came, a new, dangerous glint in their eyes, and in their hands they didn't carry a whip like dozens of times before but a big basket and – his heart stopped for an endless moment – his old sewing box. They laughed and said it was time for him to say goodbye and to do one last time what he could best. His fingers trembled as he reached out for this piece of a life long lost. He remembered the touch of the fine carved wood and his hands found the little lock so easy that, for one wonderful moment, everything seemed like a nightmare, the darkness, the pain, the fear. But the warmth building in his mind was wiped out immediately when his eyes found what laid inside.
"You're her stylist. Make her look good when her own flames will consume her."
He should make a burial gown for the girl he robed in fire, for the child they had used as a symbol for their war and that they had obviously let down when she fulfilled her task of bringing the spark of revolution to the districts.
When they left he faced a new kind of horror. He closed his eyes to block out the beautiful cloths in front of him, but his head created designs and his hands moved without him being able to keep them from it. And while he made the most breathtaking dress he could imagine, he finally broke beyond repair, ending himself what the Capitol couldn't do completely. He used only white and red, her innocence and blood that they had sacrificed. He made a mask that would show her eyes, full of fear and darkness where once strength and love had been. He even put a brooch right there where her heart would be in her last minutes, so the mockingbird they turned her into would fall with her.
And all this time he had one picture in his head: how the flames would consume that piece of art he was creating with his scarred hands, how that little girl he came to like so much would die as someone she never wanted to become. His heart shattered and in the moment he finished his work it finally stopped beating. And while he drew his last breath the red of the flames weren't their downfall anymore, not their death, not the end of their hopes. He turned her into the girl on fire. He would still bet on her.