Supercut
Citadel Van Saber
Former District Two Citizen
Relation to Target: Romantic Partner
Second Diplomat For Relations With Eglia And Aglain
TW: Child abuse, suicidal thoughts, mentions of forced prostitution, and mentions of disordered eating
When Citadel is at some young, blurry age, her home goes up in a brilliant red blaze.
Mum and Dad are off fighting the bad guys- the Capitol, the four-year-old remembers- so they're not there when Citadel is stirred from sleep by her older brother. He's thirteen, and Cita's parents have always told her he's much smarter than her so when we're gone, Cita, you have to listen to your brother. And so she does, when he drags her out of her bed at a time that's too late for Citadel to ever be awake.
"What is it?" she mumbles. She doesn't resist, a stuffed giraffe gripped in one hand as her brother picks her up. Cita begins to drift off again, her head burrowed in her brother's shoulder. There's some sort of wailing that doesn't let her sleep, though, and then the earth is shaking too. But her brother keeps Citadel slung over his shoulder even as Cita's older sister screams, as their other brother emerges from the ground. The three year old joins them, and he seems calm, so Cita should be calm too, right?
Citadel, eyes blurred with sleep, doesn't question where their home goes as the world shakes and her brother sets her down on the ground gently to sleep.
She doesn't know what's happening as the voices echo around her, but her younger brother joins her on the rocky ground. Cita's sister is the last thing she sees, and her leg is broken and bloody as the oldest of them all helps her out of the rubble.
Then Cita feels free to rest, her brother next to her and the voices of her older siblings fading.
She doesn't realize that they're running away in her dreams either.
When Citadel is at some young, blurry age, Mae Van Saber and Tybalt Van Saber are gone, just two names amongst the hundreds of those who were never found after the bombings.
Her mother and father are gone too- probably still fighting against the villains who killed Cita's siblings. Or maybe they haven't.
She supposes she'll never know.
It's been two months since she lost everything, and they're keeping children like her in one of the old training academies. They're all refugees too afraid to flee, children too afraid to grow up in the shadow of war. Cita lives there for two weeks before the first letter arrives. Cita lives there for two weeks before the District evacuates all the children.
Like her home, Two goes up in red smoke. Like the Generational Divide, where her mother's father was hung in a retirement home. Cita remembers his hands, soft but still calloused from years of Peacekeeping.
She hugs her giraffe tighter.
(She doesn't worry about what will happen to her and her brother now that her parents are gone and her siblings are dead. She doesn't worry because looking back, at the end of the war she was only six or seven or eight and her parents always said that she won't have to worry about anything for a very long time.)
So she closes her eyes in the crowded center and sighs, a little kid already babysitting for a three year old brother.
When Citadel is at some young, blurry age, the war ends, and the Capitol has won.
Aren't they the villains? Aren't they just as bad as the masked figures who Citadel saw in the cinemas growing up? If so, why did they win? The villains never win in the movies, nor in the books. This is real life, and Cita doesn't understand why the rules don't apply in something much bigger. The villains never win, so the Capitol can't be the villains.
Six year old (or was she five- no, seven?) Cita's grandfather was killed by the rebels. If they killed someone so brutally, doesn't that make them the bad guys in this case?
How could the Capitol even do worse than that?
So, at six (maybe five) Cita decides that the Capitol won the war for a reason.
When Citadel is at some young, blurry age, both she and her brother are adopted. Cita remembers herself to be thirteen, and her brother is ten or so. He's bursting with energy every minute of the day, but Cita's seized by some sort of world-weariness that she can't control. She's too young to feel like she's running out of time, though. Isn't that what her parents always said? She's too young to feel like the world might collapse in on her. Well, she's a newly minted citizen of District Four and Citadel misses Two like there's a hole in her heart. Nobody lives in Two anymore- it's just a bunch of open land after the bombs went down and everything and everyone still there perished. Maybe it's the Games that makes Cita feel so hopeless, like she's lost her place in the world and might as well end it all now. They've started again, and when Niraine Thetis slits the throat of the entire Career pack while they sleep, her peers at the training center begin whispering of Victory, of ascending to the Capitol where they can't be reached. It's then when Cita realizes just how conniving her peers- her enemies- are.
Two days later, she puts her name down to start training.
Life under adoption isn't too terrible, Cita thinks. Admittedly, every other minute Citadel's scared she'll be tossed out, left to the wolves like Mae and Tybalt had done with them years before. She hugs her brother tightly each night, and tries to escape the words of someone who's supposed to be her new mother, better than the first. Try as she might, Cita can't help but let the woman's words get to her.
She's a Capitol supporter, and she's an adult, so she can't be wrong. So when Cita's new mother tells her she has to eat less, she complies in seconds. She doesn't mind feeling sick all the time if it pays off in the end. When Mother tells Cita to wake up at four in the morning and train so she's chosen for the Games, Cita does so. She doesn't mind bleary eyes and a few failed classes if it all pays off in the end.
Which it will. Won't it?
When Cita is at some young, blurry age, Mother- who she'd never dare to call Mum like she did with her birth mother, because that's too formal for her- asks her to kill someone. Cita is shocked at first, but then everything is explained and Citadel begins to understand.
It's just preparation for the kill tests in three months. She'll have an edge on those tests then, won't she? Much more experience than her peers, all of whom fantasize killing in a flashy fashion like Niraine Thetis or briskly like Tethys Telacua or in a calculated way like Angelo Marris. Cita can make use of the techniques she's learned in the academy, can learn her style of killing like her instructors have preached almost like they're teaching a sacred, aspiring religion.
Citadel can make use of the sickness she feels when she knocks the unnamed woman's head off her shoulders with one glance. She can learn how to repress it eventually, learn how to rid herself of any shame she feels while the severed head rolls to the attic floor.
The woman's eyes are wide open, and they stare straight at Citadel Van Saber.
Cita has a tradition of putting her brother to bed each night, no matter how old he gets. This time, though, he hugs her, almost as if he knows every terrible thing that's running through her mind and wants to extinguish it. He blocks his window too from Citadel's reach, because she might just throw herself out and break her neck now before anything else can reach her.
When Cita is at some young, blurry age, probably seventeen, Mother kicks them out of the house. Cita doesn't know what she does to push Mother over the edge, but her brother is crying and face is stained as he clutches his arm. The impassive blonde woman shoves them out of the house without a word, and Cita barely has enough time to grab the familiar, weathered giraffe that she shoves in her bag.
She thought she had aced her exams, thought she was good enough to pass Mother's judgment. When had anyone in the entirety of Panem and the Seven Seas been so naïve?
"What did he do?" she cries, but Mother won't answer. "What did we do?" she screams, and by now, Citadel is crying too, but she's so fucking angry that she doesn't bother to control it.
"Mother wants you to volunteer, Cita," Citadel's brother gasps. Lincoln, she remembers. "But… Touriane Nive was better. The eighteen-year-old. You didn't complete the kill test to their satisfaction."
Mother gives Cita a hard stare, and she raises her head to keep that stare. "Even after all that practice, you still failed, Cita," she whispers. Lincoln doesn't hear her. He doesn't hear the snake, doesn't hear her slimy voice as it slithers up Cita's spine and she shivers- no, shudders.
"You wasted everything in a vision of nothing, Citadel. You're too loveless to be loved too."
She doesn't know if those words come from her mother or from mind.
But Citadel had thought she aced everything. She thought that she had done better than she ever could've. Her knife had jutted into the criminal's soft skin four times- six times- eleven times until she was sure the oaf was dead. The tears hadn't escaped while she was there, but her horrified stumble from the corpse must've given it all away.
"Given what away, Cita?" Lincoln says, his voice soft but Citadel Van Saber can hear the tremor.
She meets her mother's eyes and in that moment, she bares her throat to the woman who will be glad to see her exploited after she wins next year- you just have to wait one more year, Cita, just fucking wait, it'll be okay. "I'll do better next time."
Mother doesn't break her glare. "You can start now."
They're allowed to stay.
When Citadel is at some older, clearer age, her brother is taken away from her. She's eighteen, and that much she can remember. She's competing against Quianna Rafferty for the right to volunteer that night, and Cita is looking around for her knee pads when she realizes that the house is too quiet. Citadel checks her brother's room, and everything is gone. There's not a spot on the bed her brother got lemonade on too many times, and the posters on the walls have been meticulously removed. It's… untouched. Too eerie.
Mother is at her desk, sorting through papers and Citadel recognizes the words on them. She's always enjoyed reading and writing, but right now, she wishes she was blind.
Because right in front of her she sees the word ADOPTION.
"Mother," she states the woman's name coldly, with more bravery than she's ever dared to use in her tone. "Mother, what- what the fuck did you do?"
Mother doesn't flinch at the curse word, turning in her chair to face Cita in one swift motion. "What needed to be done. Lincoln Van Saber's getting adopted by a nice family. He was a distraction to you and your training nonetheless. We'll be getting a Victor, and a fifteen year old boy will only stop you from pursuing that path." She says those words briskly, even though they're the very words that almost break Cita. She then checks her gold watch and gives Citadel an emotionless smile. "It's three in the afternoon. You should be over at the center preparing for the competition by now."
She almost loses it right there, but something tells her not to. She gives her new mother one stiff, obedient glance. Then Citadel Van Saber, who has always known how to obey, files out of the room and goes to training as if it was a regular Tuesday. As if her best friend of all time hadn't just been taken away from her.
An hour and a couple fights later, Citadel loses the victory match in two minutes and forty-three seconds. The golden girl who everyone loves, Quianna Rafferty, is congratulated by the masses, and nobody notices how broken Citadel is when they announce the chosen volunteer.
When Mother finds out, Citadel never sees her home again.
When Citadel is at a blurry age of her lifetime- twenty-six or so- she makes it to the Capitol and finally gets away from Mother. She isn't bright-eyed nor eager, too wisened by the world for that, but she's enamored by the bright lights that cast just enough light to hide the darkest parts of Panem.
She meets Orlaith Isolde at the church, but she'd be damned if she knew who she was meeting. Originally in the Capitol for an internship for the Secretary of State, when Citadel meets Orlaith, she's immediately enchanted. The light haired woman is eloquent with her words and smooths over the most difficult subjects with eyes like caramels there to help. She's an incredibly advanced intellectual too, and when diplomats from Eglia come, Isolde is more than willing to help boost Citadel's position with them.
She learns Orlaith's true identity two minutes and forty-three seconds after their lips meet for the first time. And that's not Orlaith- the president is simply filling the shoes of a role that New Panem needs. She's only been the president for three years after the previous president was assassinated, and Citadel learns that Orlaith Isolde is just a name.
She gets used to calling her love Isobel, which feels familiar but not too much so. Attachment is dangerous, especially when Orlaith could be poisoned in two seconds by some ursurper.
She's learned that, if nothing else, from Mother.
When Citadel is at some blurry age that she won't remember years from now, that she's finally reached beyond all odds, she gets used to waking up without Isobel. At least the stars on her lover's ceiling remind her of her room back home, but Cita isn't sure that's a good thing.
She's a Capitolite now, that's for sure, and she's higher than she could've imagined. Now she's in contact with two of the Six other Seas, and women rarely reach somewhere that high. It is rather ironic, especially with a female president. Citadel rubs elbows daily with those that even Victors can't interact with, and Quianna Rafferty is buried six feet under in fifth place. When she sees Touriane Nive on Wednesdays sometimes, the woman is broken a little more each visit.
By now, Cita's recovered and though it ached every bone in her body to do so, she doesn't push her plate away now. She's given up obsessively training by now too, because why should a Capitolite ever need to go into the Games?
There was one thing she hasn't given up on, though. It had been at least eight years since Citadel had been robbed of the best friend of her life, broken in every absolute way after he'd been pushed away from her.
Cita doesn't regret planting the false rebel documents on her loyalist mother and watching them burn their home and the bones of Mother. The red blaze looked the same as it did when Citadel's house went up in flames so many years ago, when she slept during bombings as if tomorrow was guaranteed.
But it wasn't.
And now that she had been exposed to so much of the world, Citadel could never depend on that guarantee again.
Supercut by Lorde
Yes, this was supposed to come on the 26th, but I couldn't resist shock-dropping it...
Hello and welcome to the first prologue of In The Asylum's Eye! Meet Citadel Van Saber, a character who's very dear to my heart and that of this entire fic. Also, a shoutout to my lovely beta and spoiler buddy Rune Whisperer. Thank you so much for listening to all of my brainrots and responding with some of your own, and for tackling this mess of a chapter before it was posted. Lysm!
This fic will be open until August 1st, and the info for submitting is on my profile. You've got a lot of time, so get those subs in! I'm really looking forward to what you all come up with. This will still be a selective SYOT, obviously, but please don't panic and send me 10k words. Only six to ten characters will be selected, though, so competition is pretty tough. The interest and subs list is also on the form doc, so check that out and sub wherever you want except to the closed slots (obviously). Again, I'm looking forward to seeing whatever y'all come up with! I'll see you all with the next prologue, but there may only be two prologues for this, so in that case, I'll see you all back here on August 1st.
Thank you for even bothering to read this prologue- drop in and leave a review with your thoughts on Citadel and Orlaith- and thank you so much for your support! Love you all!
-Tia