Disclaimer: Hunger Games is not mine. Title is adapted from Dark Side of Town by Theresa Haffner
we came home to where we used to live (and found we didn't live there anymore)
.x.
When she gets reaped she looks at him, expectant.
"So do you have any advice for me? Any at all?"
He just looks at her and stares.
.x.
Blight (n): any of numerous plant diseases resulting in sudden conspicuous wilting and dying of affected parts, especially young, growing tissue.
.x.
He gets reaped at fifteen. He's strong, fairly, can swing an ax with precision and is likeable enough, in a quiet way, and when he is reaped his mother holds his hand and says but you'll come back, you'll come back and she isn't precisely lying, no, not precisely.
(but what isn't lie is delusion and though he says i will, i will, he isn't placing any faith in lost miracles.)
When he wins it comes with muted surprise and a sigh of relief from the Capitol. It wasn't a very good Games that year.
(this is the year with the spiked maces and the taste of blood in everyone's mouth. nobody expects him to win, but swinging a mace isn't all the different from swinging an ax and in seven you learn how to make any tree fall.)
.x.
She is reaped when she is fifteen too.
Small and skinny with too wide eyes, when she curls up on that train, folded like a dying bird, a decomposing skeleton, he thinks she won't last a day.
(it's not that he's cruel, it's just that he doesn't place any faith in lost miracles.)
.x.
"I remember your Games," she tells him.
"Oh," he says. "Oh, not many people want to."
"You yelled timber at the end, you just kept yelling timber at the end, and I don't think anyone in the Capitol got it."
"Did you?" he asks, looking at her small wrists, thinking about brittle things, breakable things.
"Oh yes. I laughed."
And here she grins, teeth sharp and gleaming bright into the night.
(this is what he remembers when she wins.)
.x.
When he came back home after winning, his mother touched his face and began to yell but you promised you'd come back, but you promised you'd come back! hysterical and thrashing and someone else had to pull her off before she clawed his face away.
Later they will say that they tried to explain to her that he did come back, that look he's alive, but she wouldn't believe it and when two years later she dies, insane and broken, nobody is that surprised.
So he lives in the Victor's Village, empty except for his mentor Paul, who owns an old dog and whose Games were so long ago it's hard to find somebody who still remembers them, and the Capitol doesn't bother with them much, nobody bothers with them much.
(these are the victors who the capitol didn't need to break, the victors who were content to go mad by themselves.)
.x.
When she comes back home, her entire family is dead within a week.
.x.
"They're thinking about having a revolution, the other victors," she whispers conspiratorially to him one time.
He stares and stares at her, thinks of brittle things and breakable things and says, "Oh."
.x.
When the Quarter Quell is announced she crushes the glass in her hand, shards dripping to the floor and blood criss-crossing her palm.
There has been only one female victor from District Seven. She is a sure tribute.
When he is reaped for the Quarter Quell he doesn't crush anything. In fact, he is relieved in a way. The dog would have been lonely without Paul.
(he forgets that the dog has been dead for years.)
.x.
"Are you going to go to training?" she asks.
"No," he replies, folding himself into his chair, smaller and smaller.
"You're going to die, you know," she says and he thinks no that was you, no that was you, a dying bird, a decomposing skeleton.
.x.
But when he hits the force field, the taste of blood acrid in her mouth, she wildly wants to yell timber, timber.
(too bad there's nobody left who would've gotten it.)
A/N: This was posted on livejournal a while ago for the Girl on Fire ficathon, but I kept on forgetting to post it on here too until just now.