A/N: Thank you all so much for the feedback! I am admittedly a bit of a whore for attention so reviews always light up my day lmao. Anyways, I really wanted to thank everyone for the constructive critiques; those mean a lot to me and I'm always looking to improve, and thank you guys for sticking with me despite my flaws.

I tried to touch on some of those issues in this intro; I'm highly aware of my tendency for run-on sentences, bursts of prose poetry, and lack of legitimate plot content, so hopefully this chapter hits a bit better, fingers crossed.

Cyrix Foxconn, 16

August 30, Year 116 ADD

Content Warning: abuse of drugs, addiction

She leans her head back against the dirty brick wall with a heavy sigh and a hacking cough, wisps of silky grey smoke billowing from between her lips even as the hit of Blitz seeps into the walls of her lungs, racing through her bloodstream. The drug hits her brain with a euphoric fuzz, the high forcing harsh chuckles out of her as static buzzes through the recesses of her mind, drowning out the never-ending chorus of vixen vixen vixen vixen vixen that drums through her aching head day after day after day until she can't think or rest, just keeps moving numbly, presses her face deep into the pillow at night to try and make it stop but even the loud music she blasts in the workshop can't deafen her to the noises inside her own head.

Blitz is the only thing she's found that helps, and she craves the different kind of numbness it offers with a voracious hunger; she needs the drug like she needs air, can't stand the emptiness that sits heavy and deep in her gut when she's clear, always driven to get the hell away from herself and reality and this is her escape. She closes her lips around the end of the pen, depresses the trigger, huffs up more of the sickeningly sweet inhalant. It coats her throat thickly like the cough syrup she used to drink months ago and floats up into her dizzy white-blonde head, more laughter bubbling up from within her, bent legs almost vibrating from the jittery effect of the drug.

She opens her eyes and watches the stars spin above her, no longer quite sure which way is down because she thinks she might be floating, might be part of the heavy industrial smog that drifts upward into the ozone; she's drifting too, after all, on the gently rocking sea of the Blitz she keeps huffing in deep, gulping inhales. The late-summer desert heat is buzzing along with her and the vertigo is aching behind her eyes and forehead but she doesn't care because the euphoria is just so fucking pure and she needs it she can't let it ebb away because she knows she'll be so fucking tired if she comes down from this high.

She giggles when worn brown boots clump across her field of view, realizing she's not sitting upright anymore, hysterical at the idea that she's just laying on the ground in front of Vixen's house and whoopsie, Vixen doesn't live here anymore but somebody does and he's yelling at her to scram so she does, staggers unsteadily to her feet, spins a few times, for good measure, picks a direction and starts walking - if you can even be generous enough to call it that.

It's not at all clear to her how she gets there, but a couple of drifting, lightheaded blinks later she's standing in the workshop, giddy and hazy and not quite sure if she's dreaming because everything is a little bit like cotton candy in a vague, intangible way. But maybe that has less to do with being high as a fucking kite and more to do with the fact that every time her lungs beg for oxygen she fills them up with Blitz instead but, to be completely honest, who the hell gives a flying fuck?

Cyrix is giggling again because it's just so obvious; she doesn't need to breathe, silly, she needs Vixen. She doesn't just want Vixen, she needs her and it's some sort of primal hunger for Vixen that has her throwing things now, because there's too much silence and she just needed to hear something fucking break.

All at once there's too much in the workshop and also not enough and it's just so suffocatingly wrong and the space Vixen used to occupy is threatening to swallow her whole so she flies into rage and chaos and all the pain she's never learned to express properly. She sweeps everything off of work benches and to the floor, pulls things off of the walls and the ceiling, yanks at everything until it comes apart because everything should be coming apart because Vixen is gone and the universe should fucking break open at the seams in protest because it isn't fucking fair.

Cyrix doesn't remember passing out but she must have at some point because all of a sudden she's waking up. Her eyes feel crusty and the ache in her head is beating a vicious rhythm and her hands are stinging for some reason. She forces her eyes open with a soft groan and looks around, pushing herself gingerly off of the floor, confused because she didn't even think they had tornadoes in this part of Panem but clearly something tore through the workshop.

When she sees how busted to hell her own hands are, it all comes flooding back, the weight of what she's done almost knocking her flat onto her back again. Her eyes are roving over the destruction she's wrought, a detached sort of horror tugging at her, but then she sees him.

He's in the corner, ripped to scraps, torn into littler and littler pieces, shredded bits of metal and wire and one little eyeball still boinging softly at the end of a spring. Something tears its way up out of her throat, something that's choked and ugly and more than a sob but not quite a scream, and then she's leaned over his body, retching, her own foul-smelling vomit mixing with his burnt circuit board and the remains of his legs.

The horror and guilt and remorse are no longer what anyone could possibly describe as detached or distant, they are clenching tight around her chest and sending spasms through her gut as she spits up bile because she just killed Keebone but more than that she just ravaged all she had left of Vixen and it feels like the last cord connecting the two girls just snapped under her own scraped-up hands. It's devastating, how quickly she can ruin everything she's ever built. It leaves her sobbing, heaving, bracing herself with shaky arms over a pool of her own vomit and she can't slow down long enough to breathe.

She needs to calm down because she knows she's hyperventilating and fuck she hurts, she feels like an open wound inside and out. Her right hand, scrabbling against the concrete floor for purchase and stability, clasps around the Blitz pen and she lifts it to her lips automatically, shakily wiping away the vomit on her chin with a single flannel sleeve.

She takes a couple of long, deep, drags from it before she can stop the gasping, sobbing way she's breathing. She hiccups through the transition from hangover back to high, willing the headache to dissipate, willing the drug to push away the cavernous pain that's opened up beneath her sternum, willing time to slip backwards because she doesn't know how to undo this.

Cyrix stands on coltish legs, stumbles to the doorway, resting her pounding head against the cool sheet metal of the wall. She greedily drinks in the sweet nighttime breeze between inhales of Blitz. She punctures the lid of another bottle of the drug, loading it into the pen's cartridge, noting vaguely that her stash is running low; she doesn't know how much she's gone through this evening already, she just knows she needs it to steady her nerves right now. She'll do anything to keep the grief at bay.

Her pupils are dilated, blown wide; she doesn't notice when her eyes glaze over entirely. She doesn't notice when her arm goes limp at her side, the Blitz pen dropping to the ground. She doesn't notice when her eyes roll all the way back in her head, every muscle tensing, her body falling back, stiff as a board. She doesn't notice as her limbs jerk with convulsions, her body arching from the concrete floor, seizing, choking, frothing. She doesn't notice when the desert sun rises and nobody comes to find her limp, ragdoll body yet.

She doesn't notice anything. Not for three more months. When she finally wakes up, she's sure whatever came back is no longer whole.

A/N: Cyrix Foxconn, ladies and gentlemen! Many thanks to the lovely dirtwolf for this bad bitch, she's amazing. In case it wasn't completely clear, this intro did take place about two years prior to the events of the story; the Cyrix we're going to see again in the pre-games will have changed somewhat.

That said, thoughts? Feelings? I tried to take the critiques I received on D1 and run with them, but please feel free to let me know if those issues aren't improving; I took some liberties with clarity in favor of drug-induced haze, but I still tried to keep it from waxing too poetic.

See you all soon with the pair from District Four!

Much love,

Mae xo