08 - BLACK
Indigo sits inside the Control Center breathing heavily, hugging herself to keep herself calm. She's chosen the comfiest clothes possible to keep her steady, a fuzzy black cardigan and jet black sweats. They were the softest things she could find inside her closet inside the Tribute Hotel, and she knows they're still madly expensive due to the designer emblems sewn into them in silver thread. She traces the confusingly shaped logo stitched on her hip, trying to distract herself by guessing at what the symbol could mean, but it doesn't work. She reaches for her mug and takes a large gulp before setting it back down, the taste of pure black coffee making her freeze for a moment. Then she stares at the massive floor-to-ceiling screen in front of her, waiting for it to turn on and meditating on its stillness, trying to get herself to stop fidgeting. Still, her foot taps quietly against the tile floor, and she keeps rubbing her arms so much she's sure she's irritating Greason. However, the first Victor of Six says nothing, instead reaching over and taking one of Indigo's hands in his own and squeezing it tightly.
"It's going to be okay, Indie," he tells her gently, keeping her hand in his. "It's okay to be nervous. It's your first time Mentoring. It's always frightening."
Indigo just nods without a word, her eyes turning back to the screen in front of her as it turns on. A small smile works its way onto her face as her tribute, Melody, is shown suiting up in the catacombs with her stylist. The girl was crying that morning when Indigo hugged her goodbye in their flat, but now she seems to have calmed herself enough to put on the black pants, shirt, and shoes as well as the charcoal windbreaker that make up the arena uniform. Indigo can still see the girl quivering a little bit as she climbs into the clear glass tube that will lift her up to the arena, and Indigo understands her fear, remembering how she shook in her own tube as well just a year ago. The thought of rising up on her pedestal and feeling the humid jungle air on her skin makes Indigo flinch, and she quickly takes another sip of her black coffee to distract herself as the tube slides shut around Melody.
Mercedes walks over from the break room with a small pastry in her hand, placing the other hand on Indigo's shoulder as she hands the sweet to her. "It's going to be okay," Mercedes murmurs, talking softer than Indigo's ever heard her, and it scares her more than it comforts her really. She's never seen Mercedes so pensive, so...selfless, the way she stares at the screens as Melody and Buster rise up into the arena on the two screens in front of them. It's almost as if she's willing Six's tributes to survive with every fiber in her being, and it scares Indigo, it really does.
Indigo is terrified immediately once she sees the arena. Every tribute stands on a tall spire of rock flattened at the top, and twenty four rope bridges connect the spires serving as pedestals to a large central spire. There, the Cornucopia and a massive mound of supplies sits, the most supplies Indigo has ever seen in the Games. There's handholds carved into the sides of the spires to climb down, but the ground is covered with mist and it's impossible to tell what lurks in the murky depths below. Indigo starts to shake once the silvery 60 pops up above the Cornucopia and begins to blink down. With the rope bridges and nowhere else to go, Indigo knows these opening minutes are going to be a slaughter for anyone that goes to the Horn. With fear beating in her, Indigo remembers her advice to Melody: go in and grab some supplies on the outer ring of the Cornucopia field and then run as fast as possible. Well, the closest supplies are across a rickety rope bridge on a imposing tower of rock, and she knows Melody is going to run in, and she is most likely going to die. The girl isn't very bright and is so, so trusting, the kind of trusting you are when you've never been betrayed before in your life. Indigo pities her blinding innocence, and she wants to save her so badly, to preserve the one little girl in all of Panem that still believes in others. She wants to claw at the massive screen in front of her as if it would allow her to crawl into the arena and force Melody to run away. It's too late now, much too late, and Indigo is already weeping pitifully as the gong sounds and the 42nd Annual Hunger Games officially begin.
Melody runs across her creaking rope bridge while many of the other Outliers, including Buster, don't even attempt to go to the Horn. Melody doesn't even seem to notice her error, sprinting as quickly as she can towards a lime green pack bursting with supplies not five steps from the end of her rope bridge. The moment her hand closes around one of the straps, though, Principality from 1 is next to her, his spear a flashing silver streak in his hands. Mercedes wraps her arms around Indigo before the spearhead even sinks into Melody's supple throat.
The floor-to-ceiling screen in front of her shuts off to black once Melody is dead, and Indigo screams until her throat is hoarse as Mercedes drags her from the Control Center, but it doesn't matter. Melody is still dead, and Indigo told her to do what killed her. She told her to run in, and it killed her. Indigo screams and screams and screams until her vocal cords give up, and then she curls up on the floor of her room in the Tribute Hotel and takes out a glass vial of morphling to wash all the pain away. As she fills up the needle with the cloudy substance, the only thing she can see is the screen shutting off to black once the Career boy killed Melody. All she sees is the absolute abyss of black in front of her face, so deep and dark and endless and painful. She jabs the needle into her arm to make it go away, to let a different, lighter type of blackness swallow her whole instead.
She doesn't remember the next two days, not a moment of them, but the entire Capitol does. The gossip magazines are full of pictures of it: Indigo passed out on pulsating club floors, downing shot after shot of gleaming whiskey, shooting so many vials of morphling into her bloodstream it's a miracle she doesn't die. The nation has been rather enamored with Indigo since her whirlwind Victory, with her five kills that even some Careers never get, with the way she surprised them all and pulled the rug from beneath their feet. This destroys her fame though, this destroys it all, as they're reminded she's a broken girl from the Districts who killed to survive and can barely manage to stay alive. There's nothing desirable or patriotic about that, and many Capitolites begin to wrinkle their nose at the name "Indigo Arnett" after that year.
Indigo doesn't remember any of that time, when she was so high for two days that the world was just black in the best of ways. Still, she swears it was the best time of her life, even though she regrets it a hundred times over when she can't find sponsors for her starving little girls and people cross the street to avoid walking past her. It was the best time of her life, because she simply didn't exist for forty eight hours. She was simply a black, black abyss. She doesn't know why that's the best time of her life, but she's certain it is. She knows then that there's nothing as freeing as being absolutely nothing, and until the third Quarter Quell brings her back to life for a few crisp days, she stops fearing death entirely.
Mercedes stares at the black screen in front of her with a trembling lip. Indigo told her not to cry when it happened, told her big sister to keep it all inside and put it into the rebellion instead. Mercedes can't do it though, she can't, as she stares at the black screen she's seen so many times over the years. The only time it never went black was when Indigo came home, and now she's gone too, and there is no one left that Mercedes has saved. All that is left of her legacy as a Mentor for forty-something years is a black screen and the tears slowly dripping down her face.
"She did the right thing," Greason murmurs, reaching out and rubbing Mercedes's hand as gently as he can. The tears are streaming down his face too, thick and heavy. Indigo was his daughter after all, but he knows how hard it is for Mercedes to lose her only Victor, to lose her only sister. "She did what she had to do."
Mercedes wants to scream and wail until the entire world hears her grief. She wants to run down to the console at the end of the room where Haymitch Abernathy is glancing at them with pain in his face, knowing that the only reason his boy is still alive is because Indigo gave herself up for him. Mercedes wants to run at Haymitch and slam him into the wall so hard his skull cracks. She wants to tell him that Indigo chose to give herself up in the rebellion but Mercedes didn't, she never did, so she can slit his throat all she wants because he took away her only sister. She's never wanted it before, but she wants the bow back in her hands that she wielded in her Games, the bow that took eight lives on those tropical islands, the bow that turned eight screens midnight-black in this very room. Mercedes wants to kill Haymitch a dozen odd times until he understands the sunken hole throbbing, empty and sore, in her hollow chest.
The thing that makes her stay in her seat is the fact that Indigo died for this cycle to cease. She died for all of this to end, the violence and the hatred and the bloodshed. Indigo died for the loverboy from Twelve, hoping against hope that it would save the people of Panem from themselves. That was Indigo's choice to make, and it's not Haymitch's fault, just like it isn't Mercedes's own. To bury the rage threatening to rip her apart, the first female Victor of Six just listens to Greason's calming voice and feels the way his fingers gently rub her hand. She lets herself be calmed enough to simply cry without fury heating her tears with its reckless vengeance.
"I'm going to miss her," Mercedes croaks as the tears drip warm and salty down her cheeks, not caring that she sounds like a child as she whines for her little sister. "I want her back, Greasy."
"We'll see her soon," Greason promises in between sniffles, pulling Mercedes to his chest. The last two Victors of District Six weep together over the last two children they will ever lose to the Games, huddled together and letting their tears mix as they drip to the ground. They stay like that for at least an hour as the 75th Hunger Games rages on half a world away, two old Victors sobbing for the family they've lost. Two towering black screens stand behind them, so big, so mournful, just simply an abyss and nothing more. Just black, black, black, black, nothing at all, nothing at all.
A/N: This was a very emotional chapter for me to write, because I've grown so attached to Indigo, and it was hard to write about the breakup of the little family of Victors from Six. However, I hope you all liked this, and I'm sorry if this was too heavy or dark. We only have six more chapters to go, and I've already written some of the last ones and I cannot wait to show them to all of you. I hope you enjoyed, and please leave a review to let me know how you felt it would mean a lot :)